11/19/2019 / By News Editors
UPDATE: Sleeping Giants are threatening The Gateway Pundit with litigation for running this story.
(Article by NickMon1112 republished from NickMonroe.blog)
Here’s OFFICIAL dealings between Sleeping Giants and Twitter.
I figure this additional evidence would help. In this exchange, we have the Sleeping Giants talking with Twitter’s (then) Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland.
It looks pretty official to me. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Original Story Follows:
When someone by the name of Mike Harlow got banned from Twitter under the same shady circumstances I did, I decided to give the fight for my Twitter account another look.
This is the result.
Dear Jack Dorsey: my account @nickmon1112 was suspended six months ago under suspicious circumstances. I had @nickmon1112 for three and a half years, and I’m falsely accused of “making multiple accounts for abusive purposes. ” I most certainly did not. I’d like it back. Your appeals system is useless. So much so in fact, that I started digging around Twitter staff accounts in order to find some kind of answer as to what I needed to do in order to get back on the platform.
One even offered advice. “PSA: If you write support folks with a condescending tone of voice, or act entitled to a certain outcome, you will make it 100% more difficult for yourself because nobody wants to help an asshat. So just don’t be an asshat.”
I came across several instances where Twitter employees were able to personally escalate support tickets. This introduces an element of favoritism on it’s own, gaming the system in favor of friends of the company.
In that regard, the topic of favoritism, we need to have a word about a larger dilemma. I’m coming forward with this because I don’t have a Twitter account. Again, I’d like my account back. But in my current position I can point out problems with Twitter as a company without having to worry about backlash.
Even so, please don’t take anything I’m about to say the wrong way.
This is from Kelly Huffman. Sr. Manager Business Development & Growth Marketing, Self-Serve Ads. Twitter. “Great catching a chair with you yesterday. Keep up the good fight!”
Which fight is he talking about, Jack? The Sleeping Giants campaign against Breitbart, the one against Alex Jones, or the one against Fox News and Tucker Carlson? From the sound of that tweet, your company is well aware of what’s going on with the platform when it comes to this.
That being, the guy who deals with Twitter partnerships for ads, is fully aware and allows a group like the Sleeping Giants to manipulate the ads market.
You can see the long history of Sleeping Giants vs. Breitbart in the tweets. The Sleeping Giants have scared anywhere from 4100 to 4300 advertisers away from Breitbart. That’s the group’s tactic. They apply it to Breitbart or wherever they politically see fit.
Given Facebook’s inclusion of Breitbart into their news program, and the public backlash against the move, it’s relevant to assess how Twitter’s treatment of Breitbart fares.
Not great, Jack.
Twitter employees engaged in Sleeping Giants campaigns. When Global Agency Development Lead Travis Freeman was with Twitter, for example, he helped hassle Amazon. A (now former) Twitter Android Engineer also reached out to Amazon for that purpose. It was right at the end of Twitter Engineer Matt Massicotte’s time with your company that he did the exact same. While working for Twitter, Nora Carroll tried to hassle Google into blacklisting Breitbart outright, saying it’s “just one (hate) site.”
David Yun has been with Twitter for five years now. He’s there currently. Here he is helping Sleeping Giants attack Breitbart.
Rahul Sharodi has worked in Twitter’s research division for almost seven years now. As someone in tune with market insights and analytics, he should be well aware of the implications of propping up the Sleeping Giants.
David Marwick is currently serving as Twitter’s “Sr. Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure.” Been at the company since May 2012. But last year he found the time to use his position at the company to oust Huel’s advertisements from Breitbart.
But it wasn’t just Breitbart. When we turn our attention to the Sleeping Giants campaign to get rid of Alex Jones, we have more examples of Twitter staff joining in the fray. Elizabeth Primm’s Twitter bio says “former tweep” but her Linkedin says she has been Twitter’s “Industry Director, Automotive” since April 2017.
In this particular case, the distinction isn’t a problem. This is because in the replies we have another Twitter employee joining in the fray to oust Alex Jones. Her name is Jessica P. According to Linkedin, she has been with Twitter since April 2015. Her specialty being brand partnerships. That, alongside a statement made a week later, clearly puts Jess in the “helping the Sleeping Giants” camp.
In that August 8th tweet, it looks like Jess is helping commit mutiny against Twitter’s Trust & Safety staff. If I recall correctly, how you responded to the Alex Jones controversy differed greatly from the sentiments of your employees and peers.
Finally let us throw in a Fox News example. In the case of Miguel Ríos-Berríos we have someone, who up until October 2019, worked as the Head of Data Science at Twitter.
I’m going to let a former Twitter employee’s tweet speak for itself when it comes to the implications of all this.
“News is hard to monetize, even though BuzzFeed claims News gets 200 million pageviews every month. Many advertisers steer clear of news because it’s often messy and controversial and they consider it “unsafe” for their brands.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I have demonstrated that Twitter staff are directly responsible for changing the advertising landscape, Jack. Not in a positive way either. This practice of “Cancel Culture” is made explicit on Twitter’s doorstep.
I have to appreciate the fact that, allegedly, BuzzFeed maintains their editorial independence in light of their partnership with Twitter. I like that. I was worried that’d be a problem, I’m glad it’s supposedly not. I did not know that Twitter was in a partnership with BuzzFeed when I criticized the outlet last year. I now question as to whether or not this played a role in my Twitter ban.
But that doesn’t mean Twitter is off the hook here. Not at all. Twitter is in a partnership with BuzzFeed and therefore liable in responsibilities. BuzzFeed runs a program called “AM to DM” (@AM2DM) that’s livestreamed on Twitter.
I single out BuzzFeed because it acts as a polar opposite to Breitbart. Don’t take my word for it though. Hear it from Twitter employees. They think Breitbart is fake news and that BuzzFeed is real news.
In May 2017, the Twitter & BuzzFeed long-term partnership first hit the public. I say “long-term” to rule out the previous one-offs they teamed up for. Although, Twitter and BuzzFeed did partner up for coverage of the 2016 election. If anything, this serves as a jumping off point for the political leanings of the company.
6.8 million viewers watched BuzzFeed’s Election Night livestream. Advertisers were impressed with that. With that in mind, the way forward for the company was pretty straightforward.
Twitter’s goal from the outset certainly isn’t nefarious. “We want to be the first place that anyone hears of anything going on that matters to them,” you said. “That’s our focus.”
I can buy that. Facebook Live alone wasn’t a perfect alternative option for BuzzFeed either. Let’s fast forward to August 2017. Wendy’s, Toyota and Bank of America all backed this AM2DM venture. To take this a step further, I did my homework and found the money amounts being tossed around. For $250,000 people get clips from AM2DM cut by Twitter themselves and served to audiences with preroll ads on them. If advertising firms wanted to step it up a notch, there’s the $500,000 package that nets advertisers full-fledged “sponsorship of editorial content.” Which in Wendy’s case it meant integrating the Giant Junior Bacon Cheeseburger into a segment about highlighting stories that got little media attention.
Let’s jump to today. 2019. AM2DM is still going strong and making a profit for BuzzFeed. Now let’s add how evolved Twitter’s advertisement partnerships with other companies has become. “Partnerships continue to grow and we fully expect to have more than 950 by the end of the year,” your people at Twitter say.
“Twitter is an amazing partner. They’re one of the best partners we work with,” remarked BuzzFeed’s former CRO Lee Brown.
I like how this one guy put it, so I’ll quote him.
Twitter employees contributing to the Sleeping Giants advertisement boycott campaign against Breitbart likely led to the toxic environment for the whole market when it comes to social media news. If we were talking about just Twitter employees pressuring the likes of Amazon, or just Kelly Huffman giving a pat-on-the-back to the Sleeping Giants? It could be written off as coincidence. But it’s both. Current Twitter staff are engaging in it, and current Twitter staff are looking the other way.
Sleeping Giants has cornered the market in a way that silences conservative media. Sleeping Giants has gone after Fox News and Breitbart alike. Alex Jones aside, it doesn’t bode well for the Daily Wire or PragerU folks if Twitter allows this kind of coordinated attack.
It helps explain why nobody saw Breitbart or Fox at Twitter’s #SXSW panel this year. CNN was there though. BuzzFeed was there too.
Let me make this clear: Twitter is not obligated to enter a partnership with conservative media outlets. But I’m very certain that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Twitter is running afoul when they allow the Sleeping Giants free reign to sabotage the media market potential of conservative outlets on the platform.
I have more examples of people that once worked for Twitter who ended up joining the Sleeping Giants boycott campaign. These people did not make their tweets while working at the Twitter company. All the other ones beforehand did. I’m mentioning them now as it should help serve as a marker to the extent Twitter as a platform damaged Breitbart and conservative media. Sharon Wong over at Google. Buster Benson did a stint at Patreon before going self-employed. Rafi Jacoby over at Braintree. Andrew Seigner at Buoyant, Inc. Vaibhav Mallya is over at Lyft now. Brian Lavery got a job over at AccuWeather after leaving Twitter.
People say Silicon Valley has a liberal bias, and this Sleeping Giants angle serves to prove that point. But let me come at this from a more direct angle.
I have to ask what kind of company you’re running, Dorsey. Here’s a tweet from one of your employees. Rebecca Stern. 7 years and 3 months at Twitter, working right now as a senior executive assistant. By observation, this is the President of the United States visiting your offices back in July 2017, if not sooner than that. Your employee decided to share this video of that, and included a disparaging remark against President Trump. I double checked to make sure she really hates Trump. She does.
For posterity sake. Rebecca posted the video in reply to a tweet from Twitter’s global partnership solutions lead, Lara Cohen. It read: “I never use the clap emoji thing but: ? Our ? President ? is ? a ? GROSS ? sexist ? lecherous ? PIG ???”.
Lara Cohen helps us verify this video taken by Rebecca Stern is authentic in her reply to it. “what exactly did he say here? did he cat call you BC THAT WOULD MAKE ME VERY MAD.”
Thanks for the help, ladies.
I guess this explains the company culture issue that boiled over a few months later. November 2017, Twitter announced this:
“Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”
I want to hit this home with you, Jack. I want to make sure the point gets across that your company has a political bias problem. Thank god for “@euprax1a,” out at Twitter’s Seattle office. From here on out, I’m calling them Alex instead. They’re a transgender employee and as far as I can tell “Alex” is not their dead name. So we’re good.
As you can see by Alex’s Twitter bio, they self-describe themselves as “Antifa.” The left-wing extremist group that was responsible for the attack on Andy Ngo this past summer. The label in itself is nebulous enough that it’d otherwise not be worth mentioning. But Alex has confessed that “one of my friends got pepper sprayed by the Nazi-sympathizing police/state,” in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville. This is cause for concern that a employee of your company is affiliated with the “worst” of the Antifa bunch.
Alex has described what I’m about to show you as being from their work account. Please keep that in mind.
Alex works as an engineer. They have absolutely no place anywhere in Twitter Support, yet they seem to have access to escalated privileges and advantages that allow them to censor as they see fit. They also hate the company. Is this type of employee behavior a standard, Jack?
I’m going to repeat something mentioned in the list. “so what do I tell my queer friends whose accounts are locked? i hate having to use my internal escalation privileges for this.”
I found two cases in which Alex targeted individuals. For years people have been afraid that personal vendettas from Twitter staff could silence points of view they disagree with.
In this first example, I’ll let you read this tirade that your employee went on in June 2017. Let’s put the merits of whether or not this pursuit of Alex’s was justified. For the moment let’s look at the decorum of how Alex is representing Twitter as a company.
For context, Alex targeted this account for at least three months.
Let’s take a moment to examine the motive behind Alex’s crusade. They make it explicit themselves in their tweets. They label themselves as an internet troll. Someone who was tech savvy in the days before the dawn of 4chan. Alex confesses to spreading hate speech online in the past, spending years trying to unlearn these habits. They ran an entire troll IRC platform. Naturally this entails an intertwining with “shock content,” such as spreading Stormfront propaganda or conspiracy theories related to 9/11. Alex regretted it eventually, and shut it down with little notice to anyone.
I’m glad that Twitter found room for forgiveness and hired a former troll who spread hate speech to work at the company. I hope Twitter can find it in their heart to allow me to come back on their platform, with the account I used for three and a half years, that was taken down for “ban evasion” because of something from the 2014 “GamerGate” era.
We’ll get to that later. For the time being, Alex’s past as a racist IRC troll is what motivated them to go gung-ho on policing Twitter. They just happen to also believe that the US government is going to genocide trans people and put them in concentration camps.
In this second example, they accused @apurposefulwife of being a white supremacist.
Given the circumstances of both of these cases, people have reason to severely doubt Twitter’s system, Jack. You claim to not police ideology, but behavior. The case of euprax1a is of a Twitter employee attempting to police ideology.
You want to promote a healthy conversation on your platform. This is not it. “ann coulter and milo y should be barred from speaking on principle because nothing they have to say is worth hearing and wastes vital air,” tweeted one of your employees. “#seeEverySide permitting fascism into the discourse is like permitting poison into your veins.” This is not it.
At your earliest convenience, Jack Dorsey, I’d like to come back to Twitter. I consider it the better choice given the potential of what I do with my free time otherwise.
I’m going to go over my situation one last time. Mr. Dorsey if you look on my Instagram you’ll see that I have been at odds with Twitter’s appeal system for the past 23 days. They humored me for a while, but gave me the same shtick as I initially got in May/June 2019.
How long does Twitter’s memory last, Mr. Dorsey? How far back are we going? If we’re going all the way back, the first time I got suspended was back during GamerGate. In late November 2014, Randi Harper had posted her work address to Twitter, and I pointed out that was a stupid mistake to make.
I made enough back-up accounts at that point to last me a long while. This was before Twitter had really set in stone a system of rules surrounding this sort of thing.
Twitter was confused about it. I was confused about it. But they gave me an ultimatum. I wanted my original account that got in trouble to be restored. Twitter said no.
But they made me an offer, that as far as I know, is still valid, to this day.
“You may select a different account for restoration; the rest will remain suspended. The account you choose will need to comply fully with our rules, as additional violations may result in permanent suspension.”
Twitter never fulfilled the promise it gave me in Case# 09302740. As far as I understand, restoring @nickmon1112 would be allowed here.
TL;DR, Twitter banned me in November 2014, and I started over in December 2015. I reinvented myself and learned how to become a productive member of society.
My Twitter account’s main purpose was for the sake of journalism. I set it up in December 2015 in the first place for exactly that reason. I started working for a video games media outlet called The Escapist Magazine. I did game reviews. They began teaching me the ropes of how to do news. There was a round of layoffs in March 2016, and I was one of the people impacted by budget cuts. Ian Miles Cheong was gracious enough to rescue me out of that and get me a job at Gameranx. This gave me an opportunity to do daily gaming news for the next six or so months. I broke my arm falling off a roof just in time for the 2016 elections. As everyone knows, that was a topsy-turvy time in recent US history, so I took that opportunity to strike it out on my own and go independent. I started up this website here. The one we’re on. It was initially meant to just catalog my Escapist and Gameranx work history, but I grew fond of following my own stories and adventures in the blog section.
I still want to come back. I lost the ability to reach out and make meaningful connections to people all around the world. I was good at it. It made me happy. I find it bonkers that my account with almost 50,000 followers was in a “ban evasion” position. I had the account for three-and-a-half years. I didn’t need any other account. The one I had was working just fine. Around the time of my ban I was criticizing people that fell for fake news from one Ian Bremmer. I didn’t have any particular grudge against anyone, whatsoever. I hold no animosity towards anyone personally.
Earlier this year, my Twitter account was reprimanded for covering the New Zealand Christchurch shooting. I covered the issue at length in this article. I don’t need to repeat myself. Bottom line is this: it was newsworthy. Twitter made a judgement call to clamp down on the event after the fact. I had no way of knowing that.
So, with that in mind, jumping ahead to today, by October 2019 I found myself explaining to A+E Originals why I couldn’t contact a source they needed to speak to for a documentary they were putting together. You’re probably familiar with the story of Bianca Devins. The girl who was murdered by a jealous friend of hers. The gruesome scene was uploaded by the perpetrator to Instagram and Discord. In the days following her death, I managed to get a few interviews with Bianca’s Discord friends.
You’ll probably notice the interviews take place after May 2019. That’s because I came back to Twitter through an alternate account. @newschute. Again, not a dubiously intended account. It was thanks to the folks over at Bitchute that I got a chance to continue my work.
But again Twitter banned me. Under the nebulous “ban evasion” umbrella.
If it’s easier to do it this way, Dorsey, I just want to come back to Twitter with a clean slate. Here’s a list of my case files: 0115640842, 0116251414, 0129294054, 0129803577, 0130188195, 0130748988, and most importantly, 09302740, where all this ruckus started.
I just want to get back to work.
Bring me back, Jack. Free Mike Harlow too while you’re at it. He’s a good kid. He inspired me to try and reach out one last time. I gave up on bothering until he came along. Seeing what happened to me happened to someone else? Made me mad all over again.
Read more at: NickMonroe.blog and Biased.news.
Tagged Under: Alex Jones, bias, Breitbart, campaign, Censorship, Liberty, mainstream media, manipulate, Sleeping Giants, Social media, Twitter
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