(Congress Report) – The plot continues to thicken concerning the hoopla surrounding Twitter’s role in censoring conservative accounts, tweets, and critical news stories leading up to the 2020 presidential election. We now know that the FBI was applying substantial amounts of pressure to the social media company in order to get them to suppress the Hunter Biden news story and other damaging tweets drawing attention to the fiasco just days prior to the election.
The Daily Caller’s Laurel Duggan is saying that a now defunct nonprofit organization that was funded by radical leftist George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, known as First Draft News, played a huge role in preparing Twitter to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story, as revealed by a group of internal documents from the social media company that have been published by author and journalist Michael Shellenberger as part of the “Twitter Files” being released by company owner Elon Musk.
“The Aspen Institute hosted a September 2020 training exercise for members of the media and social media leaders regarding the handling of hypothetical data leaks which were similar to the Hunter Biden laptop report that broke in October, according to Shellenberger. Claire Wardle, former executive director and co-founder of First Draft News, appeared to be an attendee of the exercise, according to an email published by Shellenberger,” Duggan wrote.
She continued, “The address that apparently belonged to Wardle was one of multiple recipients in an email to top national security reporters, Facebook’s head of security policy and others, according to Shellenberger. The Open Society Foundations, which left-wing mega donor Soros chairs, once funded First Draft News. The organization shut down in June.”
31. The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the fmr CEO of NPR, fmr head of news at Twitter; fmr Gen. mgr of NY Times; fmr Chief Digital Officer of NBC News
Attendees included Meta/FB's head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes @wapo and others pic.twitter.com/3yO5ZIc2Jy
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
“Today we are announcing that First Draft is closing its doors to make way for the next chapter — its mission will continue at the newly launched Information Futures Lab, an initiative from Brown’s School of Public Health,” an announcement from Wardle goes on to say.
The Aspen Institute training exercise, which is called, “The Burisma Leak,” involved a series of hypothetical leaks back during October 2020, just a month before the presidential election, showing that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, made a lot more money during his role at Burisma than was previously disclosed and had been in communication with his dad about the work he was doing there, Shellenberger stated in his report. The purpose of the exercise was to shape how the media would be covering the eventual leak of the Hunter Biden laptop story and how social media platforms would carry it.
“The Aspen Institute, a left-leaning think tank funded by massive philanthropic organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, runs the Commission on Information Disorder, an anti-disinformation project that’s drawn ire from conservatives for its alleged far-left partisanship. The commission has urged social media platforms to censor accounts it considers misinformation “superspreaders” through demonetization, the removal of what it considers inaccurate posts and penalties for offending users,” Duggan expounded.
The story published by the New York Post seemingly revealed that Hunter Biden had introduced his father, who was serving as the vice president in the Obama administration, to a top executive who worked for the Ukrainian energy firm known as Burisma. Less than a year later, Vice President Biden reportedly applied significant pressure to the Ukrainian government to hand a pink slip to a prosecutor who was investigating the firm. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like a conflict of interest, right?
The vast majority of mainstream media outlets refused to pick up the story before the election. Both Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story to keep it from being shared on their platforms.
Duggan concluded, “The Twitter Files have revealed widespread censorship at Twitter favoring left-wing talking points, sometimes in cooperation with the FBI. The FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for its employees fulfilling its requests, and former FBI employees had their own private slack channel at Twitter.” Shellenberger noted.
46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.
“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. pic.twitter.com/prVhPGohOC
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
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