This lie identifies as true. Last week, as storm clouds gathered, authoritarian media personalities, state propagandists, and radical ideologues looked up at the sky and screamed. It was their dreaded Day Zero — the billionaire shitposting god of tech had finally taken Twitter private. At the time, I made a few predictions, one of which almost immediately came true: within hours of taking control of the company, every abusive comment on the platform abruptly became the property of Elon Musk, Twitter’s new commander-in-chief, who single-handedly invented racism sometime late last week. In this regard, deranged commentary from the media was, and remains, no idle bit of mud-slinging, but rather an integral piece of a roughly coherent strategy to starve Twitter of advertising revenue.

With the influence of our authoritarian ruling class so publicly challenged, even if only in this single space, even if only in theory, authoritarians have naturally escalated the information war. If they can’t control the platform, they will do everything they can to destroy it. And the one thing uniquely within the scope of their talents? A widespread dissemination of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal had only been fired a couple hours when Ben Collins, NBC’s chief “misinformation expert,” retweeted a thinly-veiled charge from popular activist Alejandra Caraballo:

The point was obvious, if left just slightly ambiguous to evade accountability: racial abuse, ran the thrust of the sentiment, was now allowed on Twitter. The charge was not true. The charge is still not true. But truth has never been the interest of self-identified “misinformation experts,” who have only ever been agents in what amounts to a classically-presenting struggle for power.

Allies were quick to pick up the meme.

Anil Dash, a popular left-wing activist amplified to fame by reporters looking for quotes from an ‘insider’ tech guy who hates tech guys, provided one of the more viral tweets supporting the conspiracy theory that Elon greenlit the use of racial slurs on Twitter. Anil’s tweet was amplified by Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the Washington Post, a once-respected press outlet that has since descended into a perpetual state of embarrassing clown car shit. Thirsty for a taste of the fresh beat, Taylor covered the fake story with what was clearly an argument terms of service were in some significant sense altered.

Following a summary of racial slurs discovered on Twitter after Elon’s assumption of command, and moving on to the topic of reversing bans, the Post’s intention was finally made clear with the phrase “Some Twitter rules, however, still appeared to apply.” The implication was unambiguous: the rules had changed. Elon was actively sowing racial hatred on his platform.

As the story of Elon’s racism bubbled up, gathering millions of impressions for many of the most influential accounts in the pro-censorship space, Elon addressed the issue publicly:

Then, on Saturday, the plot thickened.

In a long thread from Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, the company reported not only were terms of service unchanged, and the targeted racial slurs removed, but the targeted slurs almost all came from a handful of inauthentic accounts. In other words, the company uncovered what appears to be an information operation designed to give the impression of a radical change to content moderation under Elon’s leadership.

Information operations of this kind — small handfuls of accounts trending or seeding fabricated stories — are common across our social media platforms, where entire teams are dedicated to policing an unruly, unrelenting national security threat. In fact, these are precisely the kinds of stories “misinformation experts” tend to characterize as endemic, one of their few charges with real merit. But it’s unclear why the Russians or the Chinese, the usual suspects behind such operations, would target Twitter for altering its terms of service.

Presumably, a freer platform would be easier to manipulate, which could arguably benefit our adversaries abroad. Even I — a great proponent of a more relaxed terms of service — am willing to admit freedom comes with added risk. But who benefited from the prior system of censorship, and might have motive to undertake this kind of operation?

We’ll circle back to that one.

In a now deleted viral tweet of Molly Jong Fast’s, which was quickly amplified by Ben Collins, Twitter’s advertisers were tagged into the fray. Did they not care about the targeted, organic hate speech that wasn’t actually happening? In the original bit of F.U.D. cited at the topic of this piece, also amplified by Ben Collins, Alejandra quote tweeted herself with similar questions concerning Twitter’s advertisers. The Washington Post piece that amplified the entire fake story did the same.

The advertising community has been listening. Earlier today, Morning Brew reported:

IPG is recommending its clients pause advertisement on Twitter.

Regardless of the months-long F.U.D. campaign, Nick Cicero notes engagements are actually up more than 10% for brand accounts since Elon began his dance with the company. But with posts down, engagement up, and a well-known bot problem? It’s unclear what to make of this.

There’s a reason Elon’s first public address was to platform advertisers. There’s a reason he was in New York this week speaking with his advertisers. There’s a reason his enemies are obsessed with this story. The censorship squad understands fickle advertising revenue is a weakness of the platform, and perhaps the last useful weapon against a company no longer interested in censoring true information concerning a presidential candidate’s improbably well-connected drug addict son directly preceding a major election. Hypothetically speaking. Let’s say. For example.

With Twitter in the crosshairs for its future crimes against authority, it’s worth reflecting back on what authoritarians want. What does Ben Collins want? Forget the untrustworthy voices Ben wants silenced. What is the platform he is lamenting the fall of? Who are the trusted voices he wants amplified?

At the dawn of Elon’s takeover, right in the thick of internet chaos, Reuters set up a livefeed outside Twitter HQ, where an army of journalists waited with cameras to interview employees. Presumably, the expectation was the real world would map in some way to the fantasy internet world we all spend the majority of our days inside (myself regrettably included). Blue-haired HR executives would be crying, there would be hysterical, chanting protests, agents of Elon would be outside throwing eggs, rotten vegetables, and calling the police, who would in turn attack a mob of they/them anime fairies with hoses and dogs and God I mean who knows.

Anyway, as will come as a surprise to nobody living in San Francisco, the streets of SOMA were for the most part quiet. Some garbage fluttered through the air, and a few drug addicts hobbled along. Then, after a couple embarrassing hours, it happened: two data engineers appeared with cardboard boxes in their hands. They were, it was widely reported, sad.

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson explained to the cameras they were distraught after having just been fired. Rahul expressed concern he wouldn’t be able to afford his Tesla payments. “I love all that stuff,” he said, “electric cars, global warming.” He lifted a Michelle Obama biography out of his little box, and waved it through the air. Daniel, his colleague, somberly explained the day’s events before expressing his regret that it was time for him to leave. He had to get home to his “husband and wife.”

These were not Twitter employees. I mean, no shit. But there it is officially. After the story of Twitter’s data engineering purge was covered as fact, with no verification, and seen by millions of people, it was retracted. But that retraction would come almost three days after it became clear nobody named Rahul Ligma or Daniel Johnson (these are dick jokes, by the way) worked at Twitter. It was just an epic troll, executed by a couple of A-Tier shitposters.

But do we have to care about this? I mean it’s funny, so this brand of media malfeasance, which we see all the time — which we have seen especially since COVID-19 — really matter? It’s not as if the worst of our state propaganda or information suppression is coordinated by an arm of our own government. Right?

On the heels of CNBC’s Ligma apology, the Intercept’s Lee Fang broke an absolutely insane story chronicling the Department of Homeland Security’s relationship with platform censors.

Here, we have agents of the FBI persuading (coercing?) technology workers to suppress a story critical of the now sitting President of the United States. We have tools originally intended to mitigate the impact of disinformation created by hostile foreign governments turned on American citizens. We have Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s chief censor (just fired by Elon), actually requesting the DHS take a more authoritative role in shaping the information ecosystem. We have the agent responsible for the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco continuing on in a role with the DHS. We have the absolutely dystopian introduction of the term “malinformation” into our censorship lexicon, which is defined as true information used in a manner our censors don’t like. This all, for me, is a hard pass.

As the OG paranoid android Edward Snowden correctly notes:

This is the system of speech control the loudest voices in the Elon hate brigade want back: the technology industry’s close collaboration not only with “trusted” fact checkers in the mainstream press, but the Department of Homeland security, monitoring U.S. citizens for speech violations on topics including everything from the withdrawal of Afghanistan to our financial institutions, and the origins of COVID-19.

We were looking for an organized party with the motive, will, and competence required of an information operation to destroy trust in Twitter’s advertisers. As someone who does not believe in conspiracy theories, I will absolutely not be speculating about our own government’s potential role here. I will rather simply point out if Elon fails to keep Twitter alive, a system of censorship loosely coordinated between our largest tech platforms, the DHS, and the most authoritarian elements of our press will take over every major speech platform on the internet, and will ultimately evolve into a real system of censorship from which we will never escape.

To my friends from the All-In Pod: no pressure.

-SOLANA