Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.
It’s been a week since the election ended and Joe Biden is still the president elect. The DNC’s fortunate son managed to win by a large number of electoral votes despite the corporate news/social media protection racket that managed to keep the corruption laden emails and IM’s and DM’s of his crack fiend son Hunters laptop off the airwaves and the internet’s series of tubes for a few weeks.
During those few weeks, social media monopoly Twitter locked down the NY Post’s account from posting other Hunter Biden story URL’s and every other story URL’s and after their principal owner @Jack testilied during a congressional hearing on their selective censorship of the NY POST which led to a big Texas verbal ass whuppin’ by Senator Ted Cruz, Twitter acquitted the NY Post and they resumed their legitimate reports on the Biden’s diplomacy grift on the platform after being extorted to remove them. Twitter’s sudden 180 re-legitimized the nation’s oldest newspapers credibility and made them more popular, getting the NY Post thousands of more followers. Suffice to say, what Twitter did when they reinstated the paper’s account was the biggest self-own of all time and maybe for eternity.
But it’s not all good news for the free press. Even though the NY Post is back, Twitter is still censoring and extorting smaller fry news sources like the solid and strictly independent news blog Progress New York. Although not the blog but a public services app they developed called C’est Vrai. And just like with the Post, @Jack and his posse of needledick mods and stringent algorithms are banishing on a petty technicality.
The Twitter social media giant has censored the C’est Vrai app, an action that suspends the ability of the Web application from delivering programmable tweets over the Twitter service. The action by Twitter followed its demand to control the content of tweets delivered by the C’est Vrai app.
The C’est Vrai app is a multi-faceted, computer-assisted tool that provides research and information services to Progress New York. The dispute focused on recent content that the C’est Vrai app has been delivering, namely, the location of certain utility outages taking place at the apartment complexes of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. Twitter’s restriction prevents the C’est Vrai app from continuing to deliver such content, which was being served in the public interest.
Twitter had objected to the inclusion of the Twitter handles of public officials, in whose districts the apartment complexes were located, respectively. In response, Progress New York described that officials were only tagged for outages in their district and noted that several public officials had acknowledged the C’est Vrai tweets in some form without complaint, including, but not limited to, Borough President James Oddo (R-Staten Island) and New York City Councilmembers Steven Matteo (R-Staten Island), Carlos Menchaca (D-Brooklyn), and Helen Rosenthal (D-Manhattan).
The restriction by Twitter began on 23 September, when the last programmable tweet was published by the C’est Vrai app. Despite arguments submitted by Progress New York in explanation for how the C’est Vrai app programs tweets, Twitter summarily objected to the use of public officials’ tags, writing, “We can only consider a request to reactivate your app after you agree to stop this behavior.” Because Progress New York interpreted Twitter’s response as extortious, Progress New York would not respond to a criminal threat that was intent on undermining Progress New York’s constitutional right to operate a free press. As a result, Progress New York replied, in relevant part, to Twitter, “Progress New York is a news organisation. Regrettably, this is not the first time we have faced extortion or attempts at extortion. We don’t respond to extortion or attempts at extortion.”
Yet again as with their pathetic suppression of the NY Post’s Biden scoops, @Jack’s and Twitter cited an arbitrary (and inherently baseless) excuse citing security concerns to freeze C’est Vrai even though the people that Twitter deemed were threatened somehow by getting @’d, those people willingly responded to those tweets and sure didn’t seem harmed at all going by their professional responses.
But apparently, this needling against C’Est by Twitter extended beyond just tagging elected officials and went after them just for disseminating info on public housing’s locations were services were lacking or non-existent.
Prior to the current example of prior restraint on Progress New York, Twitter had restricted the ability of the C’est Vrai app from publishing tweets about certain utility outages at NYCHA apartment complexes in July, when Twitter improbably complained that the location of certain utility outages was private information (“You may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.”), even though such information has been being published by NYCHA on its own Web site.
The suppression induced on Progress New York and C’est Vrai by a multi-billion dollar tech corporation can be described equally as incredible and irrational. Why would Twitter find it necessary to punch down on a small local news site just trying to make low income earning residents lives easier while living in public housing buildings that continue to be bereft of essential services like heat and perpetual hazardous environmental conditions? It’s suspect enough to make conspiracy theories opinionated deductions about how Twitter runs their business and what their inherent interests are behind their policies.
Having said that and since Twitter’s recent actions and punitive decisions against the NY Post and still against Progress/C’est are inherently based on deductions themselves, the connections behind them and how they are tied to NYCHA in this opinionated deduction here is just as merited…
Twitter’s Manhattan offices are in Chelsea on 17th Street between 7th Ave. and 8th Ave. Walk down one block west on 17 and the first thing you see on the west corner of 9th Ave. are NYCHA’s Fulton Houses.
Fulton Houses is currently under the crosshairs of the federal’s Housing and Urban Development department which is about to implement the RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration) program which is designed to provide more funding to pay for way overdue renovations of the buildings utilities and infrastructure and to also improve services to the buildings.
In order to activate that funding and all those improvements, two actual affordable public housing buildings have to be demolished and replaced with one mixed used building with market rate apartments. This insane on the face of it proposal has caused much consternation and strife with the long time tenants of Fulton who are reasonably worried and mighty pissed off about being displaced from their homes and their community they’ve known for their own lives.
Down the block on 10th Ave. by the luxury elevated promenade the Highline is a dense row of luxury tower buildings under development but nearly complete, casting an ominous high end market rate shadow over Fulton Houses. Even though the tenants are still valiantly fighting the city from the RAD proposal, these lux buildings seem to projected to be completed in concurrence with the NYCHA buildings planned for destruction.
What does this have to do with Twitter? Maybe their new employees will be able to occupy the new NYCHA mixed used building as the middle tier workers making low six figures can look to occupy the market rate units. While the top tier workers check out the new apartment buildings by the High Line. Instant new community. As for how it will mesh with the community of Fulton’s residents of retired elderly, working class and disabled people, that’s pretty much a mystery, but going by the resistance against the RAD proposal, they are more distrustful of, agitated and dead set against it than they are curious of it. But what’s distinctive about the Fulton Houses is that it’s the only NYCHA project to have entire buildings destroyed. How would anyone else react if these officials told you the only way you’ll see conditional improvements and a better quality of living is we blow up your home first?
It should be noted that RAD is here now because of decades of funding re-allocated to the Pentagon and tax cuts for the wealthiest and of criminal negligence by those hired to keep NYCHA functioning and habitable plus the environmental hazards and collapse of services that quickly exacerbated while under the auspice of the lying Mayor de Blasio and the last lying president of NYCHA Shoya Olotoye, the RAD program is being induced on every public housing building in every building. And that’s what brings this to Twitter’s sleight of hand complicity in this, because it’s truly off-putting how a tech company cum news publisher and editor that was so seemingly hell bent on helping Democrat Joe Biden win the election by suppressing the conservative leaning NY Post would want to suppress tweet bulletins about public housing services from a leftist leaning blog’s service app while NYCHA’s uninhabitable conditions still exist and their buildings services and infrastructure continue to break down with daily frequency. And shut down those tweets with seeming precision.
One mo’ time, Progress New York:
Though Mr. Dorsey denied U.S. Senator Cruz’s accusation, social media giants have, indeed, become so powerful that they now have the power and discretion to censor news outlets, a dangerous social condition, since a major function of a robust and independent journalism industry is to serve as a check on power, particularly the Government and big businesses, including social media corporations. Now, social media corporations are demanding a say in the content produced and shared by news outlets.
For example, Twitter’s questionable use of its “policies” led last month to the suspension of one function of the C’est Vrai app, namely, the ability of the Web application to deliver programmable tweets over the Twitter service. The action by Twitter followed its demand to control the content of tweets delivered by the C’est Vrai app. Twitter objected to the use by the C’est Vrai app of Twitter handles of public officials in the content of tweets, a demand that Progress New York found unacceptable, because Government officials, once elected or appointed to office, become wholly unresponsive to public demands for relief. Progress New York was founded on the principle that Government officials need to be held to account for their failures, particularly those that result in the suffering of average people. It’s unknown if the irony was lost on Twitter that the tweet content it was objecting to being programmatically shared by the C’est Vrai app focused on the non-stop water and heat outages taking place at public housing developments, but it wouldn’t have mattered to Twitter, because Twitter appears to be determined to thwart the independent functions of journalism.
The C’est Vrai app is a multi-faceted, computer-assisted tool that provides research and information services to Progress New York. Progress New York is a fledgling journalism platform that depends on the C’est Vrai app for its plan to expand, its roots in fact-based reporting, and its ability to shine a line of the failure of leadership in Government and in business.
Since Twitter crippled C’est Vrai’s account, the Astoria Houses went without gas for a month and tenants had tremendous difficulty getting in touch with NYCHA to get it restored. The only responses they got for the horrendous delay of services was from a food charity group that set up buffet tables of hot food for the residents and Status Coup reporter Jordan Charlton, who did a live stream interviewing residents and activists. Maybe if C’est was working, a tweet would have got to the district councilperson and maybe the residents would have been able to use their oven instead of the shitty single hot plates that were sent to them (is NYCHA aware that two burner plates exist?) and be able to have hot water to shower or even to wash their hands sooner. Especially with a fucking pandemic going on.
Whatever is going on with @Jack’s Twitter, keeping C’est Vrai in social media confinement is unconscionable given what the apps purpose is, to improve the quality of life of and the quality of services for public housing tenants that are living in squalor the government made for them (and continues to). More unconscionable is that because the app is not familiar to the masses and that it’s only poor people, @Jack and the Twitter army assumes that no one will notice or care
Locking down C’est should be hyuge news but it’s not because well Twitter practically owns the news being that people get their news on social media first. Even after the self-own from their NY Post lockdown debacle, it looks likeTwitter and their algorithms will still remain stubborn needling bully assholes, buttressed by a sizeable populace who condones their regressive, passive aggressive and robotic censorship tactics that conjure up centuries of mob persecution mentalities from Christ’s persecutors to the with hunters of Salem. But nicer and with skateboards.
Free C’est Vrai.
Impunity City 