Twitter Veers Towards Groupthink: Plans To Label Posts 'Deceptive', And Give 'Blue Checkmark' Elites Power To Gag Posts

P. Gardner Goldsmith | February 24, 2020

Groupthink: the term coined by George Orwell in his dark dystopian novel “1984” to describe the inexorable decline of individual thought at the hands of imposed collectivist so-called “truth”.

It appears Twitter hipster-head Jack Dorsey and his fellow Twits are eager to impose it.

As Reason’s Scott Shackford reports, Twitter recently acknowledged that a satirical video released by former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg likely would be targeted by Twitter’s yet-to-be-released “Labeling Plan”.

And this opens the door to a coming new dimension of Twit data manipulation and editorial clampdowns.

The Bloomy video in question appeared in his 10:30 AM, Feb 20, Tweet showing a satirical vid in which Bloomberg’s team cut together a shot of the former mayor asking if it was “fair” for him to say he was the only one on the Democrat debate stage who had ever started a business.

The question is followed by 20 seconds of overlaid cricket chirping and shots of the other candidates looking uncomfortable, fumbling with papers, a shot of Liz Warren raising her hand while offering a tiny intake of Native American air, and one of Bernie Sanders expelling a lungful of Bernie-Breath frustration. The clips are clearly not contemporaneous to or in response to Bloomy’s question, and one would have to be a Climate Cult member to think otherwise.

But this didn’t stop leftie hand-wringers caressing the keys to alert us dumb schlubs that Bloomberg’s video…

WASN’T REAL!

Writes Reason’s Shackford:

Ben Rhodes (“Pod Save The World” and MSNBC) is calling the ad "pure disinformation." Politifact took the time to inform us that there weren't really 20 seconds of silence, in part because its editors saw people screaming "deepfake" on Twitter. Huffington Post writer Jesselyn Cook asked Twitter if Bloomberg's ad would fall under the new policy, and they told her it was "likely" that this video would be labeled as misleading.

Yeah, you got it. The “New Policy” coming from Twitter likely would see the video labeled as “misleading”.

Thanks, goodness. I, for one, am glad Twitter’ll decide for me. I’d hate to have even one independent thought in my head to take up space for the Twit Club’s much more valuable propagandistic Groupthink.

But this mention of “Labeling” is just the beginning – and the least of the troubles.

Take it for what it’s worth, given this network’s not-so-stellar record of sketchy journalism and profound bias, but on Feb 20, NBC published a piece by Ben Collins in which Collins revealed the larger scope of Twitter’s plans.

According to Collins and what he presented as leaks from people at Twitter, the social media corporation is testing numerous ways to not just “label” posts as “misleading”, but to reduce their visibility from those who might have followed a user in order to SEE that user’s posts.

In this version, disinformation or misleading information posted by public figures would be corrected directly beneath a tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform and possibly by other users who would participate in a new ‘community reports’ feature, which the demo claims is ‘like Wikipedia.’

Hey, Twitter, take it from a guy who discovered in 2015 that someone at Wikipedia had purged the page folks had created about his TV scripts, radio work, and novels… You do not want to be like Wikipedia.

The demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that are deemed "harmfully misleading" in nearly the same size as the tweet itself displayed prominently directly below the tweet that contains the harmful misinformation.

Collins even displayed screenshots of sample Tweets, from folks like Bernie Sanders (he was mistaken about a firearm stat), a clearly doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (always-reliable NBC labeled her the House Majority Leader when they first published the piece), and a post by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) about whistleblowers that Twitter called false, but seems a lot truer than Twitter claims.

On his Twitter feed, Collins also posted this:

The ‘harmfully misleading’ tag wouldn't just be for politicians. It'd be for climate change denial and health misinformation, too, at least according to this test.

His sample of “climate change denial” being labeled “harmfully misleading”? A post by Climate News quoting environmentalist Patrick Moore, who had been listed by Google as one of the founders of Greenpeace until he sounded the alarm about manipulation of data by supporters of Climate Change theory. The Twitter “label” called Moore’s skepticism “harmfully misleading”, yet all he said was:

The whole Climate Crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no 'climate crisis', there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact, carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.

And, of course, given the numerous instances in which people attached to promoting the Anthropogenic Climate Change theory have been caught using slippery data and how many of their theories have not come to pass, one wonders why Twitter called Mr. Moore’s claim “misleading”, let alone the more strident “harmfully misleading”.

All of which ought to be an indication of something. Collins appears to approve of this “Scarlet Lettering” scheme. And why not? Why debate or have faith in individuals making up their own minds when one can pull the classic Aristotelean fallacy of the “appeal to authority” – in this case, faceless authorities at Twitter?

And it gets worse, because one of the alternative methods of idea suppression Twitter is considering would see select members of their infamous “Blue Check” elites (those whom Twitter has deemed worthy of being called “Verified” and somehow special) given the power to label and suppress the Tweets they found “misleading” or disagreeable.

That would include such consistently reliable media figures as: Jim Acosta, Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Oliver Darcy, Van Jones, Don Lemon, Jim Sciutto, Michael Smerconish, Brian Stelter, Jake Tapper, Mika Brzezinski, Chris Hayes, Rich Lui, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchel, Lawrence O’Donnell, Joy Reid, Stephanie Ruhle, Joe Scarborough, George Stephanopoulos, Katy Tur, Nichole Wallace, Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, virtually every desperately perfidious politician in America, and even the infamous John Brennan, James Clapper,  James Comey, and the laughing stock of Boston writers, former “journalist” Mike Barnicle.

So is it surprising to find that a left-leaning NBC reporter should gush about this system and that many of his leftist followers on Twitter should also praise it, in whatever form the social media corporation eventually decides the monster should appear?

How about recognizing that we already HAVE the power to think for ourselves and to offer alternative information to posts we find disastrously incorrect or disturbing?

And how about this?

We already have the capacity to follow or not follow people on their platform.

Why does the Twitter gang seem to believe we’re too stupid to think for ourselves, and only preselected “checkmarks” are wise enough to show us the path to Nirvana?

Why is it that more and more people are leaving Twitter and turning to free speech alternatives?

If only we had some pre-selected cadre of elite minds to tell us…

Perhaps, someday, Twitter will take care of that, and we’ll all be comfy in our world of managed and massaged information.

Thank you, Groupthinkers. Thank you.