An interview with Estela Aranha, who forced Michael Shellenberger to apologize after exposing his manipulation of data to build a false narrative about “totalitarian” Brazil
By Brian Mier
On April 3, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives dubbed, “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brasil’s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Bolsonaro and his supporters. A week later, Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo District Attorney’s Office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues. Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote, “I regret my my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”
American satirist and playwright C.J. Hopkins has been sent a “punishment order” and a choice: 60 days or 3,600 Euros.
What is his crime? Essentially, his “crime” is insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response.
Cleared by Congress, legislation later signed by US President Joe Biden in March ordered the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to declassify information regarding the potential origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The measure forced the DNI to declassify its report within 90 days.
Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called Public said the three scientists developed COVID-19 in November 2019. That was prior to the outbreak becoming public when a cluster of cases at the end of December 2019 surfaced in people linked to a Wuhan marketplace. Public’s report was quickly embraced by a camp that argues COVID-19 came from a virus stored, and possibly manipulated, at WIV, rather than from infected animal hosts, perhaps being sold at the Wuhan market. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, fueled the flames even more. Social media and other publications spread the charges—and the scientists’ names.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.
Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, is the delegate from the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Congress. Last month, when independent writers Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, she described them as “so-called journalists” and sought to undermine their testimony about government pressure to restrict speech on Twitter.
Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist who was given access to the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, reportedly had his official Twitter account “shadow banned” by the mogul after he refused to permanently decamp from his lucrative Substack subscription newsletter site.
So when the Intercept’s Lee Fang kicked off the 8th installment of the Twitter files, I was not expecting much at all. After all, Fang was one of the authors of the very recent garbage Intercept story that totally misunderstood the role of CISA in the government and (falsely) argued that the government demanded Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The fact that the evidence from the Twitter files totally disproved his earlier story should at least result in Fang questioning his understanding of these things.
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LibsOfTikTok was ‘whitelisted’.
Thus, it’s not at all surprising that Twitter clearly has a similar whitelist feature. This was actually somewhat revealed in an earlier Twitter File when Bari Weiss, thinking she was revealing unfair treatment of the @LibsOfTikTok account, actually revealed it was on a similar Xcheck style whitelist that clearly showed a flag on the account saying DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING an executive team.
Twitter’s most recent transparency report, published in July, shows that it took action on 4.3 million accounts in the second half of 2021 and removed 5.1 million pieces of content. You could cherry-pick a few of those decisions to fit almost any ideological narrative. Right-wing commentators aren’t the only people complaining about platforms’ actions. Some Black and LGBTQ social-media users have also objected that they’re being unfairly moderated, as automated tools take down posts containing words and phrases deemed offensive. Distrust of Big Tech’s power is universal.
There’s been ample insinuation that these agencies were politically motivated. But all of this was happening at a time when President Donald Trump was in power and his people were running DHS and the FBI. Rather than agencies intent on swaying the 2020 election for Biden, their actions seem like run-of-the-mill paranoia and attempts at control.
This brings us back to the money the FBI gave Twitter for “time spent processing requests.” In the last installment of the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi reported on some of those requests, many of which were related to potential election misinformation. Twitter looked into the flagged tweets and accounts, sometimes complying with the FBI and sometimes not.
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Twitter’s “Guidelines for law enforcement” does state under a section titled “Cost reimbursement” that “Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706).” But the fact that this garnered millions from the FBI was not, as far as I can tell, known until now.
But this is a misreading/misunderstanding of how things work. This had nothing to do with any “influence campaign.” The law already says that if the FBI is legally requesting information for an investigation under a number of different legal authorities, the companies receiving those requests can be reimbursed for fulfilling them.
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I do think it remains a scandal the way that 2703(d) orders work, and the inability of users to push back on them. But that is the law. And it has literally nothing whatsoever to do with “censorship” requests. It is entirely about investigations by the FBI into Twitter users based on evidence of a crime. If you want, you can read the DOJ’s own guidelines regarding what they can request under 2703(d).
Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, law enforcement must obtain a court order under 18 U.S.C. §2703(d) (2703(d) order) to compel a provider to disclose more detailed records about a customer’s or subscriber’s use of services, such as the following
But President Joe Biden promised on February 7 to prevent Nord Stream 2 from becoming operational if Russia invaded Ukraine. “If Russia invades,” said Biden, “then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
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And [Radek] Sikorski is no Putin apologist. In a May debate with Univeristy of Chicago political scientist, John Mearsheimer, Sikorski accused Russia of being in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. Following the debate, the Chairman of the Russian State, Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, said “Sikorski is causing a nuclear conflict in the center of Europe. He does not think about the future of Ukraine or that of Poland. If his suggestions are fulfilled, these countries will cease to exist, as will Europe.” Sikorski is also married to Anne Applebaum, a journalist known for her hawkish views toward Russia.
The extent of the damage means the Nord Stream pipelines are unlikely to be able to carry any gas to Europe this winter even if there was political will to bring them online, analysts at the Eurasia Group said. Russia has halted flows on the 760-mile Nord Stream 1 pipeline during the war, while Germany prevented them from ever starting in the parallel Nord Stream 2.
Warning or covering their a$$es?! I suspect the latter, considering the warning was from “unnamed sources”.
On the night of September 26, a sharp drop in pressure was recorded in line A of the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline due to a hole in the pipe. In the evening of the same day, the Nord Stream control center recorded a pressure drop in both lines of the gas pipeline, the press service of the Nord Stream operator company reported.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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