Invisible Rulers

62 Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “The ‘independent analysts’ citied by Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity were behind censoring the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020”, Twitter, November 2, 2022, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20221102194354/https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status /1587836232582692871.

63 Renée DiResta, “The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity,” The Atlantic, December 15, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/twitter-files-content-moderation-transparency/672468.

64 Devin Coldewey, “Deconstructing ‘The Twitter Files,’” TechCrunch, January 13, 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/13/deconstructing-the-twitter-files.

65 Novelist Michael Crichton coined a phrase to describe the phenomenon of trusting a source in one area while forgetting its unreliability in another: Gell-Mann Amnesia. “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” Michael Crichton, “Why Speculate?” (speech, International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, California, April 26, 2002), Michael Crichton, Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-whyspeculate.html.

66 Robert Collier, “Venezuelan Politics Suit Bay Area Activists’ Talents / Locals Help Build Chavez’s Image, Provide Polling Data,” SFGATE, August 21, 2004, https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Venezuelan-politics-suit-Bay-Area-activists-2700433.php.

67 Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger), “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,” Twitter, December 19, 2022, 10:36 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230916181050/https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1604908670063906817.

68 Oliver Darcy, “Elon Musk Claims the FBI Paid Twitter to ‘Censor Info from the Public.’ Here’s What the Twitter Files Actually Show,” CNN, December 20, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/media/elon-musk-fbi-twitter-reliable-sources/index.html.

69 Steve Nelson, “House GOP Wants FBI’s Twitter Censorship, Reimbursement Records,” House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, December 23, 2022, https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/house-gop-wants-fbis-twitter-censorship-reimbursement-records.

70 D’Angelo Gore, “FBI Reimbursed Twitter for Providing User Information,” FactCheck.org, February 6, 2023, https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/fbi-reimbursed-twitter-for-providing-user-information.

71 Renée DiResta, “Fiction vs Reality: My Texts with Michael Shellenberger,” Renee’s Substack, March 31, 2023, https://reneediresta.substack.com/p/fiction-vs-reality-my-texts-with; Sam Harris, “Social Media & Public Trust: A Conversation with Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Renée DiResta,” video posted to YouTube by Sam Harris, February 1, 2023, 1:08:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVeL5HX4uDY.

72 Bari Weiss (@bariweiss), “THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS,” Twitter, December 28, 2022, 4:15 p.m., https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600.

73 “Libs of TikTok,” Wikipedia, last modified September 25, 2023, 4:56 p.m., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok.

74 See notes 46–48 in Chapter 5 for a collection of research discussing conservative content performance on social media.

75 “Terms of Service,” InfoWars, accessed December 19, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20231205213951/https://www.infowars.com/terms-of-service.

76 Trash Discourse (@ThaWoodChipper), “Breaking: FBI releases Cyber Plan w/ @kyleseraphin @americamission_,” Twitter Spaces, March 2, 2023, 8:59 a.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230324011816/https://twitter.com/ThaWoodChipper/status/1631338520697802752?s=20. Create audio archive.

77 “Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” 118th Congress, US House of Representatives Committee Repository, March 9, 2023, https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=115442.

78 Andrea Bernstein, “Republican Rep. Jim Jordan Issues Sweeping Information Requests to Universities Researching Disinformation,” ProPublica, March 22, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/jim-jordan-disinformation-subpoena-universities.