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The Twitter Files

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Re: The Twitter Files

#221

Post by shitlord »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #192
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…

What if enough of us could join the Libertarian party but “moderate” the Libertarian platform to make it more mainstream and … moderate. Really we probably need to fix all censorship issues first somehow.

At that point, we are just hijacking the libertarian party and turning it into something it isn't, which its adherents today would oppose.

Most of the disenchanted voters from the Democratic/Republican parties can agree on policies that the libertarians abhor. For example, many of us would support foreign aid to Ukraine, but the LP takes an isolationist stance.

Re: The Twitter Files

#222

Post by andrew_ »

anoonmoose wrote: post #163
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a blatant first amendment violation. Twitter are acting as agents to state to silence individuals. The federal government cannot pick and choose who gets to speak.

Do you understand that if it is a First Amendment violation (which I don't think it is), the party with standing to sue over it would be Twitter, who has not claimed they were coerced/forced by the government and has not sued or announced intention to?

Agreed, but that would require acting parties within Twitter to claim they were coerced or forced to act. Knowing who the acting parties were, that's highly unlikely. So I don't think the counter-argument holds much water.

Re: The Twitter Files

#223

Post by Terretta »

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…

> but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely

So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney, his forbidding of speech in schools, etc.? He's not passing literal anti press and anti speech laws to piss off the MAGA base.

It's remarkable to me he so badly wanted props for punishing Disney for exercising free speech he forgot he's supposed to be pro business and anti big government regulation.

Suppression of speech has to push you away from far left and far right, so that should cancel out. Then, if you're really prefering all the other policies as you say, you could vote center left ...

Or -- vote Forward:

"Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system."

"The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters."

-- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-former-republican...

Re: The Twitter Files

#225

Post by avemg »

copenja wrote: post #214
avemg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should please you to hear that the Biden team was not the government at the time.

Was he not a US Senator?

He left the Senate in 2009 when he became vice president. He left the VP office in 2016 after Obama's second term ended. He was private citizen when this was happening. Powerful person? Sure. An agent of the government? No.

Re: The Twitter Files

#227

Post by paulgb »

Dig1t wrote: post #110
paulgb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This one is pretty bad in my opinion: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 The government is not supposed to be censoring people's speech, however they are effectively doing just that using a layer of indirection.

Joe Biden wasn’t “the government” yet, look at the date. I wish we knew what these tweets actually were. If it was suppressing a news story, that’s bad. If it’s asking for death threats to be removed, that’s not bad.

(Matt himself acknowledges that both parties had tweets taken down, his evidence for bias is apparently that Twitter employees donated more to democrats https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&...)

Surely Twitter still has the data in an archive somewhere, but it’s not clear from the thread that Matt knows what the content of these tweets was.

Re: The Twitter Files

#229

Post by mikkergp »

lapcat wrote: post #189

The worst part of this censorship was the pure stupidity of trying to censor links to a website that was always available independently of Twitter and Facebook. If someone wanted to read the story, they could always go to the original source, the NY Post. It's just impossible to keep it a secret, and that's why the censorship attempt was an utter failure, predictably so. Failure was inevitable in this case. Twitter c…

But your point is the point as to why it’s not hubris! they weren’t trying to censor anything, they were just trying to follow their own moderation policies. This I think is why the censorship story is such a non issue, because Twitter is not an exclusive source of this information.

Re: The Twitter Files

#230

Post by Dem_Boys »

anoonmoose wrote: post #218
Dem_Boys wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest Question: If the white house contacts Twitter and asks for a tweet to be removed, is that a first amendment violation?

No! And if it was, the party with standing to sue would be Twitter themselves, who has not said they're doing this.

Interesting point!

The white house in this case was the Trump white house so it could have been received positively by the media that twitter is standing up to Trump by suing.

Could you elaborate on why you dont think it would be a free speech violation? Is internet communication not considered speech?

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