Yet another “whistleblower” means yet more censorship

Kit Knightly

A new Twitter “whistleblower” has come forward. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, allegedly a former hacker and Twitter’s ex-head of security, testified in front of congress today, with dire warnings about the business practices of the social media giant.

Did he talk about the company’s egregious attacks on their users’ free speech under the guise of “protecting” the public?

Did he mention the suppression of alternative and independent journalism through practices such as “shadow-banning” and discretely removing followers?

Perhaps he told them about how, like all major social media platforms, it is so cross-pollinated with intelligence assets it may as well be considered just another branch of the Deep State.

No, none of that. His main concern is that Twitter’s security is too lax, and that the platform’s “cyber-security failures” leave it potentially open to “exploitation” that can “cause real harm to real people”.

NOW – Former Twitter security chief says the platform's leadership "is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators, and even its own board of directors." pic.twitter.com/rk5EulVid5

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 13, 2022

According to the write-up of his testimony in The Guardian, “Zatko said Twitter runs out-of-date and vulnerable software on more than half of its data center servers and that in “multiple episodes” the platform was breached by foreign intelligence agencies.”

Adding, “Zatko has also accused Twitter of doing little to combat problems with spam bots – an allegation that bolsters Elon Musk’s case for backing out of his Twitter acquisition.”

Do you see how this works? It’s gearing up the machinery to label anyone who dissents as either a “spy” or a “bot” (and perhaps reveals something of the purpose behind Elon Musk’s “revelation” about the number of “fake accounts” on twitter).

If this all sounds eerily familiar, don’t worry you’re not experiencing deja vu, you’re just remembering Frances Haugen, the facebook “whistleblower” from last year. She said very similar things in a very similar way.

We’ve seen this dance before, we know the steps. As I wrote only last year:

Like so many other testimonies before congress in the past, the entire event looks fake and probably is. A stage-managed exercise involving some “expert witness” telling a bunch of politicians exactly what they want to hear, so they can go ahead push the legislation they were going to push anyway. It’s all leading up to loud bipartisan calls for “regulation”, and that’s not a good thing.

They wheel out some person – who may or may not be real, and may or may not have an axe to grind – prop them up in a nice suit in front of some po-faced senators and have them reel off a few thousand serious sounding words.

Their pay-off is a few minutes of fame, a ghost-written book deal and being called “brave” by moist-eyed liberal pundits, their hands white-knuckling around their pearls.

While they prattle on at length about the supposed “problem”, the “solution” is already planned and ready to roll out. Such is the crushingly predictable nature of the Hegelian dialectic.

And, just in case any of you hadn’t already figured out what that was, The Guardian is more than clear [emphasis added]:

In his testimony, Zatko said there had not been enough government enforcement when it comes to the operations of big tech, and that the federal trade commission (FTC) is “in over its head” when going up against huge tech firms.

More “government enforcement”.

It’s all so tiresome.