{"id":1456334,"date":"2022-04-28T07:47:25","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T11:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1456334"},"modified":"2022-04-28T07:47:36","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T11:47:36","slug":"this-insane-2020-time-magazine-article-explains-exactly-why-the-left-fears-losing-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/this-insane-2020-time-magazine-article-explains-exactly-why-the-left-fears-losing-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"This Insane 2020 Time Magazine Article Explains Exactly Why The Left Fears Losing Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthis-insane-2020-time-magazine-article-explains-exactly-why-the-left-fears-losing-twitter%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1456334&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/51839631208_1152291928_k.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk\u2019s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber\u2019s was easily the most revealing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don\u2019t have to explain yourself,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/i\/status\/1518783714167304199\">he gravely intoned during his show<\/a> Monday evening. \u201cYou don\u2019t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party\u2019s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it \u2018til after the election.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You don\u2019t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5936036\/secret-2020-election-campaign\/\">\u201cThe Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America\u2019s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,\u201d wrote reporter Molly Ball. \u201cTheir work touched every aspect of the election.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, \u201ceven though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream \u2014 a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Their aim, they insisted, wasn\u2019t to rig the election but to \u201cfortify\u201d it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTheir work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop threatened to derail his father\u2019s candidacy and undo the organized left\u2019s hard work.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/10\/14\/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad\/\">The New York Post\u2019s exclusive story<\/a> dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing \u201csmoking-gun emails\u201d showing that the younger Biden introduced his father \u201cto a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store\u2019s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually \u201chacked materials\u201d and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/10\/14\/facebook-twitter-block-the-post-from-posting\/\">Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post\u2019s account<\/a> and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter\u2019s, and the younger Biden\u2019s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post\u2019s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.<\/p>\n<p>It didn\u2019t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials \u201cRussian disinformation,\u201d it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/media\/times-post-hunter-biden-laptop-reckoning\">both The New York Times and Washington Post<\/a> confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsbusters.org\/blogs\/nb\/rich-noyes\/2020\/11\/24\/special-report-stealing-presidency-2020\">16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes<\/a> had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump.<\/p>\n<p>This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on \u201cfortifying\u201d democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center\u2019s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it.<\/p>\n<p>And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTrump\u2019s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,\u201d Ball reported. \u201cLaura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly \u201ctoxic content\u201d or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so \u201cthe solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on \u201cdisinformation\u201d that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to \u201csave democracy\u201d and defeat the \u201cautocratic\u201d Trump, it was censored.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDemocracy won in the end,\u201d Ball concluded. \u201cThe will of the people prevailed. But it\u2019s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This reveals the real threat of Musk\u2019s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Dan O\u2019Donnell is a talk show host with News\/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk\u2019s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber\u2019s was easily the most revealing. \u201cIf you own all of Twitter or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":727,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1456334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/727"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1456334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1456334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1456334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1456334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}