Mike Masnick writes:

Sigh.

Look. I want to stop writing about Twitter. I want to write about lots of other stuff. I have a huge list of other stories that I’m trying to get through, but then Elon Musk does something dumb again, and people run wild with it, and (for reasons that perplex me) much of the media either run with what Musk said, or just ignore it completely. But Musk is either deliberately lying about stuff or too ignorant to understand what he’s talking about, and I don’t know which is worse, though neither is a good look.

Today, his argument is that “the FBI has been paying Twitter to censor,” and he suggests this is a big scandal.

Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public https://t.co/eSEwcZlGjt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2022

This would be a big scandal if true. But, it’s not. It’s just flat out wrong.

As with pretty much every one of these misleading statements regarding the very Twitter that he runs, where people (I guess maybe just former people) could explain to him why he’s wrong, it takes way more time and details to explain why he’s wrong than for him to push out these misleading lines that will now be taken as fact.

But, since at least some of us still believe in facts and truth, let’s walk through this.

First up, we already did a huge, long debunker on the idea that the FBI (or any government entity) was in any way involved in the Twitter decision to block links to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Most of the people who believed that have either ignored that there was no evidence to support it, or have simply moved on to this new lie, suggesting that “the FBI” was “sending lists” to Twitter of people to censor. [Continue reading…]