Twitter the Enemy
At the beginning of this year, I decided to try my hand at Twitter.
I had been avoiding it for some time, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and, being retired, I have plenty of time on my hands. Being a professor of media studies, I became most interested in the Twitter feeds for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, The Washington Post, The Economist, Foreign Affairs (the primary publication of the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR]), and every other major English language newspaper in the world.
To my pleasant surprise, I found that Twitter was a wonderful way to write "letters to the editor" about inappropriate headlines or content, and the responses and followers I quickly began to gain because of my little tweets was very gratifying. Apparently, I had found something that I was very good at and people from all "sides" took great interest in my daily media critiques.
Perhaps my newfound power went to my head, or perhaps I was merely exploring the extent of this Twitter system, but before too long I noticed that some of these publications actually began changing their headlines immediately after I had pointed out their blatant bias.
At first this was very sneaky, as by changing their headline after I had commented on it, it was made to look like my comments made no sense at all. Further examination proved that it is common practice on all these feeds to repost stories that they feel the need to "POV push," but with different headlines, sometimes different lead pictures, and naturally no old comments.
But the story was identical. After I started cataloging these propagandist practices, I once counted 15 different reposts of the same story on CFR with 15 different headlines. Was our media really lacking ideas to such an extent that they needed to repost so frequently, or were these repostings always the subject matter that their organization desired pushed to the public the most? Wouldn't any respectable media organization only write one story and let it speak for itself?
As flattering as it was that headlines were daily being changed based solely on one old man's editorial opinion, things proceeded to get weirder. Drunk with my newfound power I decided to seek out the "most powerful people on earth" on Twitter and see what I had now come to see as their propaganda. I began with the Council on Foreign Relations, but moved on to people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Even on their own Twitter page, CFR maintains a list of their ally corporations and it's hard to deny that their consistent policy against green energy comes from the fact that all their allies are gas, oil, and nuclear companies.
Well, I still don't know what happened, but apparently these people fight back and fight back hard against what I now assume they view as "information warfare," because tweets of mine kept disappearing and many of my followers began complaining that they were not able to see my tweets at all, or replies to tweets.
The very rapid rate of follower accumulation slowed to a trickle. A little bit of research informed me there is an open secret on Twitter known as "shadowbanning," the fairly common practice of some (yet unidentified) power to censor and edit any Twitter "troublemakers."
Once shadowbanned, it is nearly impossible to get your rights and freedom back. I was very proud of the editorial work I had done and many others were as well. I had not used profanity, trolling, or any partisanship whatsoever. I simply like to speak truth to power, but apparently power does not like that at all.
Completely at a loss, a young techie friend taught me how to download the complete archive of my work on Twitter and, once accomplished, I was very much relieved to see all my hard work still documented in my private archive. I still have this archive, backed up in multiple locations (though the copy I kept on my person on USB was stolen from my bag as I slept), but what came next causes me to be very careful about how exactly I should use this data.
Because my account had become "compromised" by forces unknown, and Twitter support was unable or unwilling to do anything about it, I contacted a younger colleague (Jake) who is more of a techie than I am and charged him with focusing on CFR to see if they were the main aggressors. For their mistakes, half-truths, biases, and outright lies are incredibly easy to see through. Jake began his experiment and, in no time at all, he also was shandowbanned. I had no idea that censorship was so alive and well in the 21st century.
But Jake had worse news for me.
While investigating my home network, he discovered that every router hop after my ISP was obfuscated immediately after being passed to my ISP and, when attempting to SSH to a reliable shell, we received the warning that a "man-in-the-middle" attack was taking place. A further clue was a visit to The Pirate Bay which suddenly had zero leachers and zero seeders. Patently impossible, unless our "man-in-the-middle" was blocking peer-to-peer.
Soon enough, Jake's laptop was spectacularly hacked, bricking it, by inserting a virus into the RAM as far as we can tell. When he tried to download a new distribution image of Ubuntu Linux, the download would not complete. When he tried to download a distribution of Kali Linux, the download completed but the GPG keys did not match. Clearly someone very advanced was fussing with us, and not above giving us a pre-rootkit install distro of Kali.
Without getting into too much detail, things continued to escalate until he was approached, on multiple occasions, by actual humans - some threatening, some complimentary, all of them strangers and all of them very ominous. I stayed at my remote farm, but the interrogations I received from anonymous Twitter users escalated drastically and were nothing less than professional: one even directly threatened the life of a young grandniece of mine and threatened me with "police torture."
Some innocent, "protected by the First Amendment" activities on Twitter had devolved in three months to secret censorship, illegal computer security breaches, and human operatives. At a total loss, we contacted first the FBI and later filed a complete report with the DOJ's IC3 computer crimes division, including screenshots of the various traceroute which proved our data was being consistently manipulated in very strange ways. None of these to date has had any meaningful effect. Neither did trying to work with my ISP. After three different "engineers," none of whom could perform a basic traceroute command or explain why they were routing all of our data to servers with obfuscated IP addresses (though they could not deny that this was exactly what was occurring), the final "engineer" got very belligerent with us for even mentioning the National Security Agency. "You can't just say 'NSA!!'" He sputtered indignantly.
What did I learn from all this?
A hypothesis I call "meme control." I have come to view World War Three as largely a battle of information and memes. A battle for control of minds.
Those with the power to censor Twitter (identically with those who use the same power to censor Wikipedia) are doing so because they know that the meme is one of the most powerful information viruses known to humankind.
And someone is in the business of creating and maintaining "approved" memes for the public. "Dangerous" memes are investigated and neutralized. Imagine if just one Twitter user was able to easily unite different viewpoints and elucidate clearly the program of propaganda and mind control that is so clearly in use in our mass media. Imagine he got a billion followers.
Now imagine he is an "anarchist." This situation is simply untenable to those in power, and they have my sympathy for this position, but the fact that this "shadowbanning" is secret is a very real problem. And that forces are willing to send out paid human operatives to investigate, intimidate, and dissuade simple Twitter users is an even bigger problem.
I am incredibly proud of the work I did on Twitter, yet a glance at my profile today shows almost nothing.
Everything good has been completely erased, and several tweets added that I certainly never submitted. The vast majority of my Internet accounts were hacked and passwords changed, including the account I used to submit my first article which appeared in 2600 entitled "Hack(ed) The Earth."
I had no idea when I wrote that how very prophetic it was.