Jim Jordan Weaponizes The Subcommittee On The Weaponization Of The Gov’t To Intimidate Researchers & Chill Speech
from the where-are-the-jordan-files? dept
As soon as it was announced, we warned that the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” (which Kevin McCarthy agreed to support to convince some Republicans to support his speakership bid) was going to be not just a clown show, but one that would, itself, be weaponized to suppress speech (the very thing it claimed it would be “investigating.”)
To date, the subcommittee, led by Jim Jordan, has lived down to its expectations, hosting nonsense hearings in which Republicans on the subcommittee accidentally destroy their own talking points and reveal themselves to be laughably clueless.
Anyway, it’s now gone up a notch beyond just performative beclowing to active maliciousness.
This week, Jordan sent information requests to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund, demanding they reveal a bunch of internal information, that serves no purpose other than to intimidate and suppress speech. You know, the very thing that Jim Jordan pretends his committee is “investigating.”
House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions’ contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”
As we were just discussing, the subcommittee seems taken in by Matt Taibbi’s analysis of what he’s seen in the Twitter files, despite nearly every one of his “reports” on them containing glaring, ridiculous factual errors that a high school newspaper reporter would likely catch. I mean, here he claims that the “Disinformation Governance Board” (an operation we mocked for the abject failure of the administration in how it rolled out an idea it never adequately explained) was somehow “replaced” by Stanford University’s Election Integrity Project.
Except the Disinformation Governance Board was announced, and then disbanded, in April and May of 2022. The Election Integrity Partnership was very, very publicly announced in July of 2020. Now, I might not be as decorated a journalist as Matt Taibbi, but I can count on my fingers to realize that 2022 comes after 2020.
Look, I know that time has no meaning since the pandemic began. And that journalists sometimes make mistakes (we all do!), but time is, you know, not that complicated. Unless you’re so bought into the story you want to tell you just misunderstand basically every last detail.
The problem, though, goes beyond just getting simple facts wrong (and the list of simple facts that Taibbi gets wrong is incredibly long). It’s that he gets the less simple, more nuanced facts, even more wrong. Taibbi still can’t seem to wrap his head around the idea that this is how free speech and the marketplace of ideas actually works. Private companies get to decide the rules for how anyone gets to use their platform. Other people get to express their opinions on how those rules are written and enforced.
As we keep noting, the big revelations so far (if you read the actual documents in the Twitter Files, and not Taibbi’s bizarrely disconnected-from-what-he’s-commenting-on commentary), is that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team was… surprisingly (almost boringly) competent. I expected way more awful things to come out in the Twitter Files. I expected dirt. Awful dirt. Embarrassing dirt. Because every company of any significant size has that. They do stupid things for stupid fucking reasons, and bend over backwards to please certain constituents.
But… outside of a few tiny dumb decisions, Twitter’s team has seemed… remarkably competent. They put in place rules. If people bent the rules, they debated how to handle it. They sometimes made mistakes, but seemed to have careful, logical debates over how to handle those things. They did hear from outside parties, including academic researchers, NGOs, and government folks, but they seemed quite likely to mock/ignore those who were full of shit (in a manner that pretty much any internal group would do). It’s shockingly normal.
I’ve spent years talking to insiders working on trust and safety teams at big, medium, and small companies. And, nothing that’s come out is even remotely surprising, except maybe how utterly non-controversial Twitter’s handling of these things was. There’s literally less to comment on then I expected. Nearly every other company would have a lot more dirt.
Still, Jordan and friends seem driven by the same motivation as Taibbi, and they’re willing to do exactly the things that they claim they’re trying to stop: using the power of the government to send threatening intimidation letters that are clearly designed to chill academic inquiry into the flow of information across the internet.
By demanding that these academic institutions turn over all sorts of documents and private communications, Jordan must know that he’s effectively chilling the speech of not just them, but any academic institution or civil society organization that wants to study how false information (sometimes deliberately pushed by political allies of Jim Jordan) flow across the internet.
It’s almost (almost!) as if Jordan wants to use the power of his position as the head of this subcommittee… to create a stifling, speech-suppressing, chilling effect on academic researchers engaged in a well-established field of study.
Can’t wait to read Matt Taibbi’s report on this sort of chilling abuse by the federal government. It’ll be a real banger, I’m sure. I just hope he uses some of the new Substack revenue he’s made from an increase in subscribers to hire a fact checker who knows how linear time works.
Filed Under: academic research, chilling effects, congress, intimidation, jim jordan, matt taibbi, nonsense peddlers, research, twitter files, weaponization subcommittee
Companies: clemson university, german marshall fund, stanford, twitter, university of washington
Comments on “Jim Jordan Weaponizes The Subcommittee On The Weaponization Of The Gov’t To Intimidate Researchers & Chill Speech”
Herd mentality is a hell of a drug.
Hey, maths are hard for these people, especially when they think:
1 + 0 = Trump one the election.
it’s funmy: republicans set a good precedent in ignoring congressional requests and subpoenas that nobody is following.
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Republicans are trying to destroy democracy. Degrading the authority of congress serves that goal. Those who want to maintain or improve the current form of democracy in the US have an interest in preserving the congress as an institution. Ignoring subpeonas does not serve that interest.
What! That would be getting somebody from the conspiracy he is fighting to try and sabotage his work,
mistakes
“But… outside of a few tiny dumb decisions, Twitter’s team…”
well, in fairness then, what were these dumb decisons made by the Twitter team?
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180
I remember back when techdirt was a proponent of FOIA stuff. Ahh man, those were the days!
If publicly funded organizations feel their speech is being chilled by their own communication being rebroadcast, then it’s probably something they shouldn’t be talking about in the first place. Accurate disclosure is only viewed as an unconscionable weapon by those who need cover.
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Add something else that you are completely clueless about.
THIS IS NOT A FOIA REQUEST.
A FOIA request is made from a private citizen requesting public documents from the government.
This is the gov’t demanding documents from non governmental entities. This is clearly an intimidation tactic in order to chill the free speech of these organizations.
How do you fucking suck so badly at this?
Just like you think Facebook can use §230 to dismiss a lawsuit against its own speech.
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We still are proponents of FOIA. FOIA allows transparency into what the government is doing, which is necessary for an open government. It is not about the government snooping on private organizations.
This is not FOIA.
Meanwhile, if we are talking about FOIA, I’ll note that Congress is exempt from FOIA. Why do you think that is?
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Several states require publicly funded organizations to be subject to many types of FOIA requests. Especially considering the large amount of federal money that universities receive, government can’t outsource their dirty work. Let’s face it- they’re not private institutions.
Mostly because they’re afraid of getting caught. Arguably, they’re overseeing classified documents, but 99.9% of the time I don’t buy it.
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In reality, it’s no better than the fossil-funded frauds trying to push “climategate” as more than a nothingburger.
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Apparently not
Yes, it is. Certainly “FOIA-stuff” (it’s a principal, not a single law) This is about what government agencies paid private organizations to do. If this were solely private orgs involved there wouldn’t be anything for congress to investigate and while people might disagree no one would be outraged the way most people are, quite reasonably.
Cute, but irrelevant.
Here’s the fact: You’re all for transparency except for when it might prove you wrong or hurt “your side”.
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No it ISN’T you fucktard.
FOIA is a check on the government by its citizenry.
Not the other way around.
How many times were you dropped on your head as a child?
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How shocking that Matty doesn’t understand the basics of, well, anything.
Transparency of government operations is transparency and what is owed to the public. Government surveillance of private organizations is the opposite. Amazing that you support the latter, rather than the former. But telling.
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Translation: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Which is disproven by the fact that bathrooms have doors.
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Cute, I actually like what you did there, but NO, it fucking doesn’t apply to orgs taking public grants, what they did with that money, and their communication with the government on that. Not even fucking a little bit.
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If the government does not already have those communications, the government has a problem, and the records office could ask nicely for copies. It is not the job of the subcommittee to demand government records from a private company.
You didn’t have to be Nostratechdirt to see this coming.
That aside, we really need to educate the public that an expert might be an expert, but if 99% of other experts are questioning his expertise, or disagreeing, well, he might be right, it happens, it’s just not the way to bet.
Dude … that’s a LOT of fingers!
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Masnick hating real investigative journalist exposing govt corruption
Masnick- I like NewsGuard, Bidens 1984 disinfo governance board and the censorship industrial complex and I hate anyone investigating it. Especially a Republican like Jim Jordan when they get damning testimony exposing Biden’s corruption from real journalist Matt Tiabi. So I’ll smear them in my article because I don’t want to make time to do real journalism and interview either of them. And because I dye my hair blue.
Me to Masnick- Hey, Masnick! Go fuck yourself! Flips the bird.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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Love when a comment is so full of references to random grievances and clichés (“blue hair”, really?) — almost to the point of incoherency — that you can’t tell if someone is being sincere or doing a piss poor attempt at satire.
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I suppose Mike also hates Karl Bode, reporter for Motherboard and the guy who actually knows what investigative journalism is?
I mean, Mike clearly hates investigative journalism so much he has a reporter from an organization that does just that on staff…
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Really not sure Karl Bode knows what inmvestigative journalism is either, he’s possibly a worse partisan hack than Masnick is. But the real answer is Masnick like’s reporters who agree with him.
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Really not sure Matthew M Bennett knows what spell a checker is.
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“Really not sure Matthew M Bennett knows what spell a checker is.”
Muphry’s law in action 🙂
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That mistake requires a grammar checker to find, as the spelling is fine, just a wandering ‘a’ found its way into the response.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
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Masnick hating real investigative journalist exposing govt corruption
Masnick- I like NewsGuard, Bidens 1984 disinfo governance board and the censorship industrial complex and I hate anyone investigating it. Especially a Republican like Jim Jordan when they receive testimony exposing Biden’s corruption from real journalist Matt Tiabi. So I’ll smear them in my article because I don’t want to make time to do real journalism and interview either of them. And because I dye my hair blue.
And now a message about the letter "A"
And when are you due?
[Laugh track, sarcasm tags, the works, whatever is required for everyone’s edification]
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Except no one else thinks that.
Everyone else seems to be agreed that the information revealed was quite devastating. Even actual democrat politicians and operatives are mostly focused on ad hominem attacks on Taibbi and Co., pretending the evidence is cherry picked, as if there’s any “context” that could excuse this stuff (there is not). No one seems to be taking the Masnick stance of just fucking pretending the screenshotted evidence does not say what it clearly does.
I already thought you told on yourself pretty well with that “Judge Says White House Can’t Get Out Of Lawsuit”, as I explained there, but damn, How are you a bigger partisan hack than actual politicians and DNC operatives?!?
OOOoooohh, you caught Taibbi in a typo over years. You sure got ’em!!!
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
No, a committee to investigate rather fucking obvious censorship by proxy is not itself censorship, even when you devote an entire sprawling blog post to pretending it is.
No, subpoenaing some of the orgs involved is not an attempt at intimidation. It is at the very least an attempt to establish how and on what the public’s money was spent. If you fucked up and became part of a federal censorship scheme, that sure could be intimidating, but then so is the FBI giving you a list of foreign agents they want you to ban, half of whom you know full well are US citizens. Regardless it’s not an excuse to prevent congress from getting to the bottom of this.
You’re mislabeling “Censorship teams”. Franz Joseph Gall spent years working on phrenology. Ibraham X Kendi is still working on CRT. So? So fucking what? Just because you worked on something does not mean your ideas are valuable. Sometimes your ideas are awful and you’re just making them more awful over time.
So:
Just….what is this shit? I don’t even want to refute you line by line anymore, it’s just completely made up.
Poor Gym. He has a mountain of shit and wrongdoing the size of Mt Everest to cover up, and it doesn’t help that he’s producing so much of it himself.
He’s gonna wear his little self out spinning this garbage, hoping, like Rapunzel, to turn it into gold.
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If twitter was “competent” then why was Alex Berenson banned after pressure from the White House? He was only reinstated months later after filing a lawsuit where Twitter admitted that Berenson had not violated any rules.
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That’s not what happened at all. The WH complained and Twitter refused to ban him. Until he broke the rules, and then they banned him. That’s another example of Twitter not bowing to outside pressure, and only taking action once the rules were actually broken.
That is not at all what happened either. You seem taken in by false narratives.
Nearly every bit of Berenson’s case was tossed out. Everything having to do with free speech. The only part that survived was a tiny piece around a Twitter exec making a vague promise that he’d give Berenson a heads up if anything changed. But that opened up Twitter to expensive discovery and so it cut a settlement deal knowing the next round of the case was more of a nuisance than it was worth.
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“Nearly every bit of Berenson’s case was tossed out.”
No that’s not true. The judge rejected Twitter’s plea to have the case dismissed.
The case was settled out of court but Twitter acknowledged that Berenson should not have been suspended. This was all before the Musk takeover.
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It’s very true. There were eight claims in the original lawsuit:
Violation of the First Amendment
Federal False Advertising and Unfair Competition
Violation of California Common Carrier Law
Violation of California Unfair Competition Law
Breach of Contract
Promissory Estoppel
Violation of the California Constitution
Unjust Enrichment
The judge threw out nearly all of them, only leaving breach of contract & promissory estoppel based on the exec’s promises.
That’s it.
As I said.
This is getting ridiculous
I have now repeatedly learnt the hard way that U.S. readers have a comprehension problem regarding satire, needing a laugh track or sarcasm tags to get the point.
But it seems like the obvious joke of “The Subcommittee On The Weaponization Of The Government” headed by [fanfare] Jim Jordan is just not getting the deserved credit.
And you cannot even claim that Jordan is doing his act straight-faced. The best you can call it is “tongue-in-cheek”, and we are not talking his own cheeks here.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
These days there is (almost?) no view that is not sincerely held by someone, no matter how facially ridiculous. So unless you are familiar with the writer, it’s impossible to tell for sure absent any explicit indications.
Time
” but time is, you know, not that complicated.”
Tell that to the NTP people….
😀
Surprisingly honest for that lot
Ahhh, I see now, the whole thing has been one huge misunderstanding. It’s called the ‘Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ not because they see that as a problem to study and address but because that’s what they plan to use it for.
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Well, subtlety has not exactly been popular in the Republican party of recent years.
The only thing more depressing than the stupidity of elected officials like Jordan is the fact that people voted for them…and more than ONCE, at that.
What would the rhetoric be right now if the rioters had run into Mike Pence in the hallway on January 6th? Would these asshats be defending the murderers who lynched him? And what if they had all brought their GUNS? They will NEXT time…
Republicans are the new NAZI
Yes, I realize that is now cliché. But, it is true. They are bent upon destroying the US from within and inserting an authoritarian government based upon their maniacal interpretations of their religion. They’ve seen “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a guide book. Their leaders don’t even believe, but use religious memes to engender support from ignorant supporters.
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actually liberals are the totalitarians. We’re trying to save you.
And yeah, you’re a fucking cliche.
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…projected nobody mentally competent, ever.