House hearings this past week merged yet more explosive Twitter file revelations with testimony by independent journalists, further exposing illegal government censorship of American citizens.

Two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, testified in front of the House Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee on 9 March.

The journalists were questioned concerning information they obtained and have been issuing reportage on, concerning information held by the Twitter social media company.

Elon Musk, who bought the company in 2022, tasked a group of journalists to examine and report on inside company information that has established corrupt and illegal government censorship of American citizens, using that platform and other mechanisms.

Speaking before the committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Shellenberger described the concerted, wide-scale censorship as totalitarian:

“Seeing this censorship industry go from, well, we’re just fighting ISIS to well, we’re just fighting Russian disinformation bots to well, now we need to fight domestic misinformation, which is just saying we need to fight against people who are saying things we disagree with online, that’s all that means. And I mean, it’s not a slippery slope. It’s an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that I–we only see in totalitarian societies, of attempting to gain control over what the social media platforms are allowing.”

Shallenberger told the committee that between October 2019 and February 2021, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million as compensation for coordinating with U.S. intelligence on censorship efforts.

Though the government has claimed those efforts are lawful, because they sought to target “foreign actors” spreading supposed misinformation, and not American citizens, those claims are contradicted by volumes of evidence demonstrating otherwise.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who also spoke at the hearing, detailed yet more examples of censorship of Americans, not foreign actors, and provable facts and truth, not misinformation, in a new Twitter Files release that coincided with the hearing.

Taibbi, a former New York Times reporter, tagged the wide-scale joint government, corporate and institutional censorship apparatus as “the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

In a Twitter files release posted on 9 March, Taibbi examined and presented documentation concerning how authorities worked with an array of organizations, including institutional hubs like Stanford, to crush factual information and unwanted narratives and questions concerning government policies and activities.

A few highlights from the extensive thread named groups, some of which have already been exposed for their government connections and co-ordinations.

Another section of the latest Twitter Files release detailed how Stanford worked under government direction, sifting and suppressing factual information of people suffering from COVID vaccine side effects, and much more: 

4.  Emails from the FBI, DHS, and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.

5.  Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election. 

But other official “disinfo” reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors”…

11.  Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020.

The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key…

31.  After the 2020 election, when EIP was renamed the Virality Project, the Stanford lab was on-boarded to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure – with a capability of taking in an incredible 50 million tweets a day.

32.  In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise.

33.  This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does.

Government-Suppressed COVID Lab Leak Discussion, Political Sparring of A President, and More 

For anyone who contends the 2020 election wasn’t maliciously compromised by a nexus of government and oligarchic manipulation, the facts showing otherwise continue to pile up:

● 500 Million dollars worth of Democracy subverting “zuckerbucks” spent by Meta (parent company of Facebook) mega-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to influence and change voting and election laws for the 2020 election cycle

● U.S. Intelligence coordinated efforts to suppress and discredit a known by authorities to be authentic Hunter Biden laptop, containing damaging info on then-candidate Joe Biden and his son

● Wide-scale government censorship of damaging information surrounding the likely origin of the COVID-19 virus from a Wuhan China biolab that was shown to have received funding from American government agencies under the authority of COVID policy czar Dr. Anthony Fauci

● Dystopian government infiltration and incitement, railroading, smear campaigns, and withholding of exculpatory evidence of Americans who gathered at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 to protest election irregularities, manipulation, and fraud

The latest House hearing added some salient new details to the sordid ongoing story of the U.S. government’s breathtaking lawless slide to totalitarianism.

There was a revelation that the office of Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California pressured Twitter to censor a post mocking Joe Biden, after then-President Donald Trump retweeted it, The Daily Caller reported.

Committee Chair Jordan focused on how government officials enlisted Twitter to censor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent environmental activist and opponent of mandated vaccines, for his opposition to controversial government policies coercing people to get COVID injections. 

The hearing also spent time examining how the State Department directed Twitter to censor posts that discussed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.  

Documents concerning American funding of the lab, and dangerous “gain-of-function” experiments being conducted there (which were barred by U.S. laws at the time of funding), were known about going back to 2020 and early 2021, though mainstream and social media suppressed any discussion of the evidence.

What the government long tried to cast as “disinformation” has now become a storm of controversy for government officials, since several government agencies now are on record admitting the COVID Lab was the likely source of the virus outbreak.