Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

Sources say the real reason for the removal was a faux C-SPAN ticker line that ran across the bottom of the screen during the skit reading "people who should be shot" and listed the Sandlers.

Obviously, recommending that somebody kill two living people could get the network into legal hot water.

"Upon review, we caught certain elements in the sketch that didn't meet our standards," an NBC statement said. "We took it down and made some minor changes and it will be back online soon."

While we certainly wouldn't advocate for assassination, this is the second time recently that NBC has bowed to pressure and censored one of its late-night comedy shows. Have the feathers of the peacock network been so ruffled that they can no longer distinguish parody from reality? Enjoy your Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin sketches while they last, America — escalating protest could force a defanged Fey to present a William Ayers slideshow worthy of Elisabeth Hasselbeck's seal of approval.

• NBC to restore SNL bailout skit — slightly edited [THR]

Naturally, Knowles capitulated — he did break the Lucas/Warner Bros. review embargo, we guess — but his insight into a true travesty of imagination has resurfaced elsewhere. And for sheer bile (excerpted after the jump), we've got to say we're really quite proud of the plus-size pushover's efforts:

(T)hey introduced Baby Jabba aka Rotta the Huttlet aka Stinky. ... (But) wait ... Little Stinky the Hutt isn’t the worst character in the history of STAR WARS… because Stinky got introduced earlier in the film. As much as I hated lil Stinky… I was weathering Stinky. I seriously was. But later there was a character of such immense **** – offensively bad. The character was so bad, so incredibly awful – that it was a slap to the face. It woke me out of my ****-accepting stupor and made me angry. SUDDENLY my “inner fanboy rage” was awoken. ...

I watched this terrifyingly awful character named Ziro the Hutt. A seemingly female Hutt – with tattoos and make-up that sounds like a racist take on a Black New Orleans Crack-Dealing Whore. Because this Hutt speaks ENGLISH – and it is many times worse than I’m actually describing. This character was actually too much for me. So bad that every flaw I was looking past, was now a road sign to inadequacy and mediocrity. ... I hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story.

I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.

More like this, Harry, seriously. And: If we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times: A jailed George Lucas is a harmless George Lucas. Send in the SWAT team.

UPDATE: Good news! AICN is now emphasizing that Warner Bros. enforced the review embargo, not Lucasfilm or George Lucas himself. We knew the man responsible for Stinky the Hutt and Indiana Jones 4 could never lash out at his fans so indecorously.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• “Harry Knowles Hated The Clone Wars” Review [Hollywood Newsroom]

Inside Edition was quick to get Field's post-show thoughts on being a victim of Fox's ultrasensitive network censors, who appears satisfied that it was more the comment's goddamn-iness than its antiwar-iness that led to one of the evening's conspicuous disco-ball cutaways. Edition also managed to poll Oscar-winning Hollywood shadow president Al Gore about Field's speech, who "agreed with the sentiment," but refrained from accusing conservative Fox overlord Rupert Murdoch of personally pressing a dump-button that simultaneously silenced the actress's outrage and triggered the deployment of 10,000 additional News Corp-funded mercenaries to Baghdad to assist in a surge.

• Inside Edition
• Previously: Fox Saves America From Silent Dirty Words, Blasphemy, And Fornication Talk At The Emmys [Defamer]

As today's THR notes, it was a Fox censor's itchy dump-button finger that triggered the jarring cuts, an attempt to avoid the post-Nipplegate wrath of the FCC for airing Romano's joke that "Frasier's screwing my wife," Heigl's silent mouthing of the word "shit" to express surprise that she'd actually won, and Field's taking of the Lord's name in vain ("goddamn"). We applaud the network's efforts to expunge these adulterous, scatological, and blasphemous references from the show, sparing millions of TV viewers—even the lip-readers!—from a potentially ugly controversy like the Jesus Can Suck It Incident that marred the Creative Arts Emmys earlier in the week.

• Fox steer clear of utter disaster [THR]

'Entertainment Weekly' Declines Hollywood Humor Campaign [Adrants]