The British government is reportedly planning on issuing guidance to schools that would prohibit supposedly transgender students from joining contact sports teams of the opposite sex as well as requiring teachers to inform parents if their child begins displaying signs of transgenderism.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent declaration that 100 per cent of women do not have penises may have some real-world applications in the coming months, with the government reportedly preparing new guidance on gender for schools across the country.
According to a report from The Times of London, the proposed guidance would require schools to inform parents if their child began expressing signs of transgenderism, such as saying they would like to change their gender, begin wearing uniforms of the opposite sex, or demanding to be called a name associated with the other gender.
The change could have widespread ramifications, given that a recent survey from the Policy Exchange think tank found that four in ten secondary schools in England are currently allowing children to change their gender without consulting parents.
The document, which is currently being drafted by the Department for Education, would also tell schools that children who claim to identify as the other gender should not be permitted into changing rooms or showers of the opposite sex. However, other facilities could be provided as is already the case for disabled students.
Sports at schools would also covered under the guidanance, with the government reportedly set to ban biologically male students from joining girls’ teams — and vice versa — for contact and competitive sports such as rugby. Yet, there will apparently be less stringent rules surrounding sports that do not involve physical contact.
The report comes after British Prime Minsiter Rishi Sunak declared this week that ‘100 per cent’ of women do not have a penis.
Sunak, who has is in the past struggled to provide a definition of what exactly constitutes a woman, has seemingly firmed up his position on the hot-button political issue of gender.
Speaking to the Conservative Home website this week, the prime minister was pressed on whether he believed that 100 per cent of women do not have male genitalia, to which the prime minister responded“yeah, of course”.
The stance comes in contrast with that laid out by the head of the opposition in the parliament, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has claimed that only 99.9 per cent of women do not have penises.
Explaining his stance, Prime Minister Sunak said that he had a “slightly different point of view” from Sir Keir, adding: “We should always have compassion and understanding and tolerance for those who are thinking about changing their gender.
“But when it comes to these issues of protecting women’s rights and women’s spaces, I think the issue of biological sex is fundamentally important.”
An actual scientist. Biologist Defends JK Rowling: ‘Only Two Sexes’
Richard Dawkins, a prominent British evolutionary biologist, defended author J.K. Rowling on Monday amid backlash for her feminist critique of the transgender movement.
Joining “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on TalkTV, Dawkins accused leftists of bullying Rowling, who created Harry Potter, and lesbian philosopher Kathleen Stock for speaking out about gender.
“It’s bullying,” Dawkins said. “We’ve seen the way J.K. Rowling has been bullied, Kathleen Stock has been bullied. They’ve stood up to it, but it’s very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse to talk errant nonsense.”
Dawkins, a notable atheist activist, also said he was uninterested in talks about an undetermined number of genders.
“As a biologist, there are two sexes, and that’s all there is to it,” he said, while acknowledging that a debate can still be had about sex and gender being different concepts.
Dawkins later commented on the state of Western universities and colleges, saying that “they have bought into the idea that if you don’t like what you think you’re going to hear from someone, you should shut them up.”
“They want to feel safe, and university is the one place you should not feel safe,” Dawkins said. “You want to be physically safe, but intellectually, you should be challenged.”
Dawkins’ comments came amid ongoing public backlash to Rowling, Stock, and other similar feminists who have been skeptical of the LGBTQ movement’s intrusion into women’s spaces.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives,” Rowling tweeted in 2020. “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
No more advertising the woke crowd. Please.(Photo by Mark LoMoglio/NHLI via Getty Images)
Winning. The Minnesota Wild admitted on Wednesday that it decided as a team not to wear their gay pride jerseys for its warmup period during Tuesday’s gay pride night game.
It also appears that the auction to benefit the LGBTQIA+ community was deleted from the team’s website.
The team has worn pride-themed jerseys in the past. However, the last time was in March of last year, Fox added.
This instance of refusing to wear a gay pride jersey is only the latest in a mounting number of teams worldwide that are turning away from wearing gay pride-themed paraphernalia.
In Jan., Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov skipped warmups because he refused to wear the gay pride jersey the team sponsored for its gay pride night game. Provorov said that bowing to the gay agenda violated his religious freedom and First Amendment rights.
That same month members of the New York Rangers team celebrated Pride Night on Friday but did not wear pride-themed jerseys or use rainbow tape during the event.
In 2022 several members of a rugby team in Sydney, Australia, refused to participate during the team’s gay pride pandering.
About seven members of the Sea Eagles refused to wear the gay pride jersey during the team’s game in July last year. Players added that the team planned its gay pride night without consulting them.
Fixing Education. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (James Gilbert/Getty Images)
This article can be found at the WP. WHAT A BUNCH OF CRY BABIES
Florida legislators have proposed a spate of new laws that would reshape K-12 and higher education in the state, from requiring teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth to establishing a universal school choice voucher program.
The half-dozen bills, filed by a cast of GOP state representatives and senators, come shortly before the launch of Florida’s legislative session Tuesday. Other proposals in the mix include eliminating college majors in gender studies, nixing diversity efforts at universities and job protections for tenured faculty, strengthening parents’ ability to veto K-12 class materials and extending a ban on teaching about gender and sexuality — from third grade up to eighth grade.
The legislation has already drawn protest from Democratic politicians, education associations, free speech groups and LGBTQ advocates, who say the bills will restrict educators’ ability to instruct children honestly, harm transgender and nonbinary students and strip funding from public schools.
It shall be the policy of every public K-12 educational institution … that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait.
— Florida House Bill 1223
“It really is further and further isolating LGBTQ students,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director for LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. “It’s making it hard for them to receive the full support that schools should be giving every child.”
Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, warned that the legislation — especially the bill that would prevent students from majoring in certain topics — threatens to undermine academic freedom.
“The state telling you what you can and cannot learn, that is inconsistent with democracy,” Mulvey said. “It silences debate, stifles ideas and limits the autonomy of educational institutions which … made American higher education the envy of the world.”
Sen. Clay Yarborough (R), who introduced one of the 2023 education bills — Senate Bill 1320, which forbids requiring school staff and students to use “pronouns that do not correspond with [a] person’s sex” and delays education on sexual orientation and gender identity until after eighth grade — said in a statement that his law would enshrine the “God-given” responsibility of parents to raise the children.
“The decision about when and if certain topics should be introduced to young children belongs to parents,” Yarborough said in the statement. “The bill also protects students and teachers from being forced to use language that would violate their personal convictions.”
The proposed laws have a high likelihood of passing in the State House, where GOP legislators make up a supermajority. Even before the landslide victory by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in November, very few Republicans pushed back against his policy proposals, instead crafting and passing bills that align with the governor’s mission to remake education in Florida from kindergarten through college.
Florida teen worries for LGBTQ students after ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill becomes law
4:45
Teen LGBTQ rights activist Will Larkins spoke to The Post about fighting this controversial bill less than a month after it was signed into law. (Video: Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post)
This year’s crop of proposed education bills accelerates those efforts, expanding on controversial ideas from the past two years and adding a few more. Tina Descovich, co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty and a Florida resident, said her group backs the DeSantis education agenda “100 percent” — and that she thinks his policies are catching on outside the state.
“You see governors picking up education as a top issue, and you even see presidential candidates now putting education as a top issue,” she said. “I think Gov. DeSantis has set the path for that.”
Students at New College of Florida stage a walkout to protest far-reaching legislation that would ban gender studies majors and diversity programs at Florida universities. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
Rick Hess, director of education policy studies for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, predicted the education laws will play well with voters both in Florida and nationwide, boosting DeSantis’s chances at the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“The direction of this policy is sensible policy,” Hess said, referring especially to laws limiting young children’s learning on sex and gender. “It is both attractive to the DeSantis base but also has been shown to poll quite well with the center right, the center and even with parts of the center left.”
A May 2022 Fox News poll found that 55 percent of parents favor state laws that bar teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with students before fourth grade. An October 2022 University of Southern California survey, meanwhile, found a partisan split: More than 80 percent of Democrats said high school students should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, compared to roughly a third of Republicans. Just 7 percent of adults in both political camps supported assigning reading that depicts sex between people of the same sex to elementary-schoolers, per the survey.
The bills in Florida come as at least 25 states have passed 64 laws in the last three academic years reshaping what children can learn and do at school, according to a Washington Post tally. Many of these laws circumscribe education on race, gender and sexual identity, boost parental oversight of school libraries and curriculums or restrict the rights of transgender children in classrooms and on the playing field.
Florida already passed several such laws, including the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits certain ways of teaching about race. (A judge blocked some aspects of the law in November.) Another is the “Parental Rights in Education” law, dubbed “don’t say gay” by critics, which forbids teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation during grades K-3 and requires that education on those subjects be age-appropriate in older grades.
One of the bills put forward in the 2023 legislative session builds directly on the parental rights law: House Bill 1223 would expand the ban on gender and sexuality education to extend through eighth grade. That bill also says school staffers, contractors and students cannot be required to use pronouns that do not match the sex a person was assigned at birth.
“It shall be the policy of every public K-12 educational institution,” the bill states, “that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.”
Jon Harris Maurer, public policy director for LGBTQ rights group Equality Florida, said the bill will compound damage already wrought by the “Parental Rights in Education” act.
House Rep. Adam Anderson (R-District 57), who sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment.
Florida legislators have introduced two other pieces of similar legislation: the near-identical Senate bill filed by Yarborough and House Bill 1069, brought by Rep. Stan McClain (R-District 27). The latter bill requires that students in grades 6-12 be taught that “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth.” It also grants parents greater power to read over and object to school instructional materials, as well as limit their child’s ability to explore the school library.
McClain did respond to a request for comment.
Another bill on the table is House Bill 999, targeted to higher education and introduced by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-District 2), who did not respond to a request for comment. The bill outlaws spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, says a professor’s tenure can come under review at any time and gives boards of trustees — typically appointed by the governor or Board of Governors — control of faculty hiring and curriculum review.
It also eliminates college majors and minors in “Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality.” It says colleges should offer general education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents” including the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.
The bill has a companion in the Senate, proposed by Sen. Erin Grall (R), who did not respond to a request for comment. Andrade previously told the Tampa Bay Times that his bill would ensure that institutions of higher education remain focused on legitimate fields of inquiry rather than disciplines “not based in fact.”
“It’s a complete takeover of higher education,” said Kenneth Nunn, who stepped down earlier this year from his role as professor of law at the University of Florida — in part because of the politics in the state. The “attacks” on higher education “reduce the reputation and perhaps the accreditation of the state institutions,” Nunn said.
Organizations focused on civil liberties are also objecting. PEN America, which advocates for free speech, said the bill would impose “perhaps the most draconian and censorious restrictions on public colleges and universities in the country.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said the bill is “laden with unconstitutional provisions hostile to freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, said there are a few easily fixed constitutional problems with the wording but praised the bill for holding “universities accountable in a few ways to the will of the people.” He added that post-tenure review is important because someone who earns that laurel at 28 may “become a dead weight” 30 years later. He said an ideological review would be inappropriate, but that if a professor has turned from intellectual pursuits to activism and is no longer producing scholarship, then that faculty member — regardless of viewpoint — merits scrutiny.
Andrade’s bill mirrors steps already taken by the DeSantis administration. In early January, the governor’s budget office mandated that all universities report the amount of money they are expending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Later that month, DeSantis announced a slate of reforms to higher education, including prohibitions on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
A sixth education-related bill, House Bill 1, introduced by Reps. Kaylee Tuck (R-District 83) and Susan Plasencia (R-District 37), renders all parents eligible to receive state funds to send their children to private school, stripping away a previous low-income requirement, although low-income families would still be prioritized. It comes as the school choice movement is surging nationally, with Republican-led states passing laws that grant state funds to parents who can spend the money on religious and private schools. Tuck and Plasencia did not respond to requests for comment.
Pat Barber, president of the Manatee Education Association, said this bill is the one that hurts most.
“We’re not very well funded in public education in Florida to start with,” she said. “And their answer to that is to funnel money away from public education?”
The laws are moving through committee as DeSantis continues an ongoing feud with the College Board over a new AP African American studies course, which Florida has rejected as being too “woke.” DeSantis recently said the legislature “is going to look to reevaluate” whether the state should offer any AP courses at all, or the SAT exam.
Battles over state education have also spilled into other arenas. A dispute over the Parental Rights bill lasts year ended with DeSantis pushing for a state takeover of a half-century-old special taxing district for Walt Disney World. DeSantis began excoriating Disney after the company’s former CEO criticized the “Parental Rights in Education” law.
An earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Rep. Rene “Coach P” Plasencia (R-District 50) as a co-sponsor of House Bill 1. Rep. Susan Plasencia (R-District 37) is the co-sponsor of the bill. This article has been corrected.
Lori Rozsa is a reporter based in Florida who covers the state for The Washington Post. She is a former correspondent for People magazine and a former reporter and bureau chief for the Miami Herald.
Dozens of fast-food workers from around the state, including Yolanda Meneses of San Diego, gathered outside the office of state Sen. Dave Mins, D-Irvine on Wednesday, July 27, 2022, asking for his support of AB 257. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Back in 1911, concerned that the Legislature was bowing to the special interests of the powerful railroad lobby, California voters heeded their governor’s call to take “the first step in our design to preserve and perpetuate popular government.”
They then took the historic act of enacting their right to bypass the Legislature by adopting the People’s right to enact legislation (the right to initiative), to approve statutes before they can take effect (the right to referendum), and to recall elected officers.
On Friday, a California court is expected to decide whether a state agency can nonetheless implement a law that is subject to a referendum before the voters have had an opportunity to approve it.
The law in question – Assembly Bill 257 – establishes a 10-member “Fast Food Council” which would have the authority to establish higher standards for wages, working hours, and working conditions for a select group of fast food restaurant workers. Most significantly, the council could increase by 42% the minimum wage for certain fast food workers from the State’s current minimum wage of $15.50 per hour to $22 per hour in 2023, with further increases in subsequent years.
Such significant increases in minimum wages will necessarily raise the cost of fast food at many fast food restaurants to the detriment of all Californians solely to benefit the pocket books of some Californians. And putting aside the Orwellian terminology of designating as a “minimum wage” a wage that far exceeds the minimum, a higher minimum wage for only some workers in the same community subject to the same cost of living as other workers constitutes political favoritism, not a solution. Even the Governor’s own Department of Finance warned that the bill “could lead to a fragmented regulatory and legal environment for employers and raise long-term costs.”
In response to the new law, a coalition of restaurants timely collected over one million signatures in a referendum petition to suspend the law until Californians could vote on it. That is over 60% more signatures than the amount necessary to trigger the right to a referendum.
Nonetheless, the director of the California Department of Industrial Relations, which will oversee the new council, said her department would implement the new law commencing January 1 while county election officials continue to verify the genuineness of the thousands of signatures on the referendum petition.
The director’s position conflicts with the very purpose of the People’s referendum power: to require that a law be approved by the voters before it takes effect.
Moreover, her position, if upheld, sets a dangerous precedent for the People’s right to hold a referendum on the hundreds of bills enacted at the end of each two-year legislative session on August 31 since signatures on a referendum petition are unlikely to be verified before the bills take effect on the following January 1. That is because the governor has until September 30 to sign bills; referendum proponents then have 90 days to collect the required signatures (or as late as December 29); and those hundreds of thousands of signatures could never be verified as genuine by January 1.
Fortunately, neither the California Constitution nor its Elections Code requires the suspension of a statute to await the counties’ verification of the signatures, as argued by the director. Under the California Constitution, the presentation of a referendum petition “certified” to be signed by the required number of voters suspends the statute. And the Constitution delegates to the Legislature “the manner in which a [referendum] petition shall be circulated, presented, and certified.”
The Legislature has specifically provided that the circulator of the referendum petition shall “certify” that “each signature is the genuine signature of the person whose name it purports to be,” and that the “Petitions so verified shall be prima facie evidence that the signatures are genuine and that the persons are qualified voters.”
In other words, once the California Secretary of State determined on December 9, 2022, that the referendum petition here had significantly more than the required number of signatures, it was presumed to contain the genuine signatures of qualified voters until demonstrated to the contrary, thereby suspending the legislation.
The director’s position fails to honor the People’s right to approve legislation before it becomes effective, and weakens their right to reject special-interest legislation. If the director won’t change her position, the courts should stand up for popular democracy and require her to do so.
Daniel M. Kolkey, an attorney and a retired California judge, has advised four different state governors and chairs Pacific Research Institute’s California reform committee
It’s a start. Dell to Phase Out All Computer Chips Produced in China. No they’re not coming to the USA, but they’re pulling out of China by 2024. So it’s a start. As you know, China is the Progressives favorite, replacing Russia. We see that HP has also announced that they will be leaving China.
Nikkei Asia reports that Dell has told its suppliers to significantly reduce the number of components in its products that are “made in China” in an effort to diversify its supply chain as concerns over tensions between the US and China grow in the tech community. According to sources, the company has also informed its suppliers that it aims to stop using chips made in China by 2024. Dell reportedly plans to manufacture all chips used in its products in plants outside of China by 2024.
Apple reportedly plans to start making its MacBook notebooks in Vietnam by mid-2023, which means the company will have some alternative non-China production bases for all of its major product lines.
Virginia Tech Soccer Player Benched For Refusing to Follow Coach’s Woke Orders Reaches $ Six Figure Settlement.
A former Virginia Tech soccer player who accused her coach of benching her for expressing political views at a game will receive $100,000 from a settlement of her lawsuit.
The money will go to Kiersten Hening as part of an agreement to dismiss a federal lawsuit in which she claimed she was punished for exercising her First Amendment rights, according to her attorney, Cameron Norris of Arlington.
Norris said the terms of the settlement included no admission of wrongdoing by either his client or Charles “Chugger” Adair, head coach of the women’s soccer team.
Adam Mortara, an attorney representing Hening, demolished Chugger’s alternate reality tweeting, “If by clarity you mean you are paying my client six figures in a settlement then you’re right that’s pretty clear. Honestly, Coach, read the Court’s opinion. You are paying. Defendants don’t pay in cases that have no standing.”
For those who haven’t been following, a compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With links and notes on key revelations
It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.
Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.
Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER
A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.
Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.
Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 – January 6th, 2021
First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.
This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.
Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.
As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.
Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”
Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.
Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”
The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.
Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”
The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.
HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN
Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.
Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.
Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:
The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.
Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”
David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”
Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.
and
Twitter Files Parts 11and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023
HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN
and
TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”
These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”
The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.
GLOSSARY OF “TWITTER FILES” TERMS
Government Agencies and NGOs
CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces
ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI
“OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA
GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department
USIC: United States intelligence community
HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts
EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter
DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council
IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin
Twitter or Industry-specific terms
PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”
JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided
PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”
SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings
SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review
CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity
SRT: Strategic Response Team
GET: Global Escalation Team
VF: Visibility Filtering
GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account
VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.
GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence
BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically
BME: Bulk Media Exploitation
EP Abuse: Episodic abuse
PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception
FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts
IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.
My sources tell me that Twitter may have started something by bringing back President Trump.
Facebook owner Meta Inc is preparing to announce whether it will allow former U.S. President Donald Trump back on to Facebook and Instagram, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
The social media giant had previously said it will decide by Jan 7 whether to allow the former president to return. However, that decision is now expected to be announced later in the month, the newspaper said, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Reuters first ran with this story. I believe January 7th is the big day.
This does my heart good to see that there are states who are willing to protect the border. Governor Abbott has so far lived up to his promise to keep us safe and secure.
Migrant crossings have plummeted in a mile-long stretch of Downtown El Paso where the Texas Army National Guard has set up concertina wire and portable fencing along the Rio Grande.
The guard began setting up the barrier last week at a gap in the border wall west of the Paso del Norte port of entry. In the space of eight days, the barbed wire has nearly reached a second port of entry and chain-link fence anchored by sandbags extends even farther. The result is that asylum seekers can no longer walk across ankle-deep water in the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to waiting Border Patrol agents in that area.
“The difference is vast,” said 1st Sgt. Suzanne Ringle. “The 19th, the 20th and the 21st we had large groups of families and individuals who were wanting to come across. Now, it’s almost a ghost town out there.”
She attributed that to the “visual deterrent” of the barbwire, parked Humvees and soldiers patrolling the area with their semi-automatic rifles. As of Tuesday, 600 guard members were in El Paso on border security duty associated with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
We have this from the Governor.
Migrant crossings “plummet” in El Paso as Texas National Guard expands barbwire fence.
We will continue to deploy the National Guard, razor wire, large container boxes and building the wall to do all we can to deter illegal immigration caused by Biden.
