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The Twitter Files

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Re: The Twitter Files

#111

Post by lilactown »

taolegal wrote: post #54
encryptluks2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political bias from either party is unreal most of the times. It isn't exclusive to the left or right.

Except every important cultural institution and practically every tech space is left-biased.

Twitter's now owned by Elon, who is making friends with right wing reactionaries in public.

Fox News is the most watched news channel on the continent.

All tech companies at the very least are pro-capitalist, it's often a choice of whether they're outwardly more pro-market or more technocratic, which has nothing to do with political lefts and rights.

Re: The Twitter Files

#112

Post by starkd »

nkozyra wrote: post #88
mikkergp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why. I don’t think he does, I think he can literally see engagement falling in the days after a stunt and he’s trying to keep it up. Matt seemed to imply there would be another thread following this one so buckle up

This does seem to be the play. There is a story here! Politicians having direct access to social networks to suppress narratives they don't like is interesting. But 1) I don't think it's surprising and 2) it appears it was not politically motivated at least in a bipartisan sense. A story but one delivered with the kind of panache to drive traffic.

That's flat out false. He clearly claimed in the thread there was clear evidenceof political motivation. For one, he cited the political donations are heavily slanted. Secondly, he mentioned the mass confusion that reigned as they tried to fit it into the hacked material case, even though it was clearly was not. It was a NY Post story about a lost/abandoned laptop. Read the thread.

A lone company acting on its own to suppress a story may not be surprising to you, but collaboration between government and a corporation to suppress speech definitely should be. It's where fascism begins.

Re: The Twitter Files

#114

Post by andrew_ »

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…

T̵w̵i̵t̵t̵e̵r̵ ̵p̵u̵b̵l̵i̵c̵l̵y̵ ̵j̵u̵s̵t̵i̵f̵i̵e̵d̵

Twitter publicly attempted to justify

I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.

Re: The Twitter Files

#115

Post by jeffreyrogers »

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…

The part where they removed tweets because they were asked to or banned accounts because they were asked to is a pretty big deal. And even though everyone knew they did that it wasn't in writing. It's kind of like the Snowden leaks, everyone who thought about the issues involved had a basic idea of what was going on but until it was out in the open people could just deny it.

Re: The Twitter Files

#116

Post by ecommerceguy »

paulgb wrote: post #95
Dig1t wrote: post #16

I'm a moderate, not a Democrat and not a Republican. I think people on the left have a blind spot here, that the more suppression they use, the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the right grow to resent them. I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely. At this p…

Is there a smoking gun here that points the blame to any officials representing the party, as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias? I find the tweetstorm format to be not particularly coherent, and I haven’t followed the story closely enough to know who the actors are, but Ro Khanna (a Democrat) is one of the names I recognize and he seems to be against the censoring.

Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives, the executives specifically mentioned the "Biden Team", Ro Khanna wasn't necessarily against censoring the story she was upset that Twitter shut down the Trump admin's press secretary account for dm'ing the NY Post Story and that Republicans on the Hill were rightfully so making a big deal out of that.

Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.

More than one smoking gun here and yes this is a huge story. I doubt we'll hear much out of it on CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC oligopolists.

Re: The Twitter Files

#117

Post by savryn »

putting prose to the social dread of the past few years, where everyones been shown a liar and you're not allowed to care about it...

this bit from the latest Cormac McCarthy seems fitting:

"The horrors of the past lose their edge and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.

It’s sure to be interesting.

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.

It should be quite a spectacle. However brief."

Re: The Twitter Files

#118

Post by Dig1t »

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.

Re: The Twitter Files

#119

Post by starkd »

warning26 wrote: post #62

It's kind of interesting in the sense that reading internal emails is always kind of interesting...but otherwise, nothing here seems particularly shocking or groundbreaking. The only real revelation here seems to be that there existed some internal debate whether or not blocking the story was a good idea, which seems...kind of obvious? I'd be more surprised if there wasn't internal debate.

The story is in how anxious they were to fit it into a hacked material case. Because there was no other existing mechanism in which to do it. (They claimed it in the emails Taibbi referenced.) They admit it was not tenable, because first amendment issues were specifically raised by Rep. Mo Khanna.

Re: The Twitter Files

#120

Post by mikkergp »

ilyt wrote: post #105
mikkergp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s the thing thought. So far the emails show a team making a mistake, and being thoughtful about it. Trying to look to their moderation principals and disagreeing about the path forward. Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals th…

> Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake. Sound more like "we're sorry we got caught"

I didn’t read details about their apology, what makes you say that?
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