The Twitter Files • Hacker News Board

Re: The Twitter Files

#511

Post by dusing » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

code_witch_sam wrote: post #493

Dem_Boys wrote: post #127

Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. It's so wild to have the slimy-ness of our American political system be revealed in yet another way. So in America you cannot say negative things about political l…

i also have a direct line to twitter to get posts removed. it's called the report button. i wouldn't be surprised if many individual twitter superusers have removed more content than the white house

Does the executive team reply to you in under an hour and Handle it?

Re: The Twitter Files

#512

Post by woooooo » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

archagon wrote: post #498

woooooo wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tiny part of the internet by volume. Dwarfed by breaking bad reruns. It's the whole internet in terms of journalist and politician communications.

No...? When the Hunter Biden thing was happening, I could hardly find a social media corner where people weren't obnoxiously talking about it.

But all of the media people and politicians were on Twitter, and not on Bob's auto parts forum.

Re: The Twitter Files

#513

Post by chris222 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:14 AM UTC

Dig1t wrote: post #118

andreyk wrote: post #108

It does not seem like this really exposed any new information - Twitter publicly justified its actions as being about its hacked data policy back when this all happened ( https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-cites-hacked-mat... ). All this shows is some internal disagreement as to whether that was the right call. By the way, Facebook also suppressed the news story citing its misinformation policy ( https://www…

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.

What are those links? Is it bad stuff that should have been taken down to to terms of service? This is lazy reporting and seems like a nothing burger.

Re: The Twitter Files

#514

Post by calgarymicro » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

Akronymus wrote: post #482

lapcat wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They succeeded in their goal of preventing the story from harming their candidate a few days before the election. Did they? Of course Joe Biden was elected, but there's no evidence that this was the cause. I said "I haven't heard a good argument of why Hunter Biden should have been a crucial factor in deciding how to vote in 2020, when there were a ton of other vastly more important issues." And I still haven't hea…

https://nypost.com/2022/08/26/2020-election-outcome-would-di... A very quick search led me to that.

Oooh, this garbage poll. Will just copy/paste what I found out about it months ago.

>I will say that it's very odd that the polling firm apparently decided to republish a story from The Epoch Times of all outlets to analyze their poll. I generally don't think of TIPP as being overly biased, but uncritically regurgitating The Epoch Times is a bit much for me.

>Edit: Never mind. Went to the home page of their site and found Fox News on steroids, wow. I guess I'll only look at the IBD/TIPP polls from now on.

>Edit 2: It was an online poll, conducted among people 'following' the story? Gee, I'm shocked.

>Edit 3: I dug up the original poll (which you can only get by subscribing to their spammy newsletter) and it looks like they polled 1335 people and threw out everyone but the 437 people who said they were following the story. Literally, after the 'how closely are you following it' question, there's no data for the other 898 people. Needless to say, the headline '79%' figure is in no way representative of the general population, and appears to consist of people who already viewed the laptop as a dealbreaker. Also, just a weird thing I noticed, the races listed in crosstabs [0] are white and Hispanic, there are no black or Asian people listed at all.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/wlI68GT

Re: The Twitter Files

#515

Post by whateveracct » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

newZWhoDis wrote: post #432

sroussey wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has a constitutional right to post on Twitter

Quoted post unavailable.

Right to speech doesn't mean write to publish that speech on any platform or outlet. Twitter, like a newspaper, also has freedom of speech to counterbalance your own.

Re: The Twitter Files

#516

Post by halpmeh » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

rhaksw wrote: post #325

zzzeek wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny story, Biden was not "in the government" at that time. You're thinking of Trump. That's who was president in 2020. Does it still rub you the wrong way that Trump was "the government" telling Twitter to remove speech?

I like all of these comments because they each contain a grain of truth. Biden wasn't in office at the time of communications, yet was clearly a figure of influence in government. "Handle" is an okay word to describe the scenario via an internet comment, yet also not a literal quote. I wish we could get back to trusted parties coming to reasonable conclusions while citing sources. It seems we're stuck in a cycle of g…

It's actually quite easy to analyze a story with minimal bias. People simply aren't interested in doing it, however.

Re: The Twitter Files

#517

Post by chrisjc » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

remarkEon wrote: post #275

mdasen wrote: post #259

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus... It seems like this is basically coming from Elon Musk through someone he chose. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter Is Elon Musk now "sources at Twitter"? There might be some interesting bits in here, but I think it's important to note that this is Musk…

Not every story is about Elon Musk's ego. This story is about political operatives influencing what social media companies allow on their platform.

> This story is about political operatives influencing what social media companies allow on their platform.

Totally agree...

> Not every story is about Elon Musk's ego.

BUT! I can't help thinking about how Elon might have a grudge against Biden and $44B might be FU money.

The multiple and obvious snubs from the Biden administration against Tesla might certainly be enough to tick him off enough to do something this crazy. While it has been rumored that the reason that Tesla was repeatedly left out of the mix (despite their clear lead in EVs and being an American car company) was due to Tesla not being unionized. Today's events related to the railworkers leave me doubtful.

Re: The Twitter Files

#518

Post by whateveracct » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

Dem_Boys wrote: post #127

Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. It's so wild to have the slimy-ness of our American political system be revealed in yet another way. So in America you cannot say negative things about political l…

You can say negative things all you want about Joe Biden. Get a joe-biden-idiot.com domain, make shit up, call him dumb. You'll be fine.

Re: The Twitter Files

#519

Post by renonn » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:17 AM UTC

andreyk wrote: post #108

It does not seem like this really exposed any new information - Twitter publicly justified its actions as being about its hacked data policy back when this all happened ( https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-cites-hacked-mat... ). All this shows is some internal disagreement as to whether that was the right call. By the way, Facebook also suppressed the news story citing its misinformation policy ( https://www…

“So... doesn't seem like a big deal”

not an argument

Re: The Twitter Files

#520

Post by mbreese » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 5:19 AM UTC

beebmam wrote: post #470

mbreese wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is having a direct line to Twitter the most disconcerting thing for you? Of course they have a direct line. I expect that all major political parties, the white house, various legislative committees, etc... would all have a direct line to communicate with Twitter. It's explicitly said that both major parties had these lines of communication, so it's hard to see a problem with the existence of back-channel methods…

Why shouldn't privately owned companies have the right to determine which speech they want to publish?

Who said anything about restricting speech?

Many people (at least on Twitter currently) are conflating a "request" with a "demand". Just because some tweets were flagged doesn't mean they were removed. If they were removed, they might have been against the Twitter ToS and this back channel operated as a batch "report tweet" button.

I "request" Twitter to remove Tweets all the time. Normally it's a spam message... sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't.

My point is that as an informal mechanism, there is no way to know what was happening. We have no idea how many requests were made, and of those, how many were approved/denied/etc...

That is an issue, but the request itself isn't...

(Now, if any of these parties had unrestricted, automatic "veto" power over tweets they didn't like, then that would be a major issue. But thus far, I haven't seen that... but I'm still reading)