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The Twitter Files

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Re: The Twitter Files

#501

Post by rhaksw »

churnedgodotdev wrote: post #468

Elon 1st Amendment comment: Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598853708443357185

IANAL but neither is Elon. His "free speech is not free reach" comment is nonsensical, for example, because limiting reach doesn't align with free speech principles. This could be another uninformed or poorly worded claim.

> acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is

One way of interpreting that might be that Elon thinks former Twitter execs were guilty of collusion. Yet, unless there is some really nefarious smoking gun where both parties were grinning about screwing over the public, I believe the most likely guilty party, if such events are found to have occurred, would be the government, not former Twitter employees.

I'm not sure if that's what Elon meant to imply though.

Re: The Twitter Files

#502

Post by pyinstallwoes »

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…

It shows collusion with politicians to coordinate censorship.

Re: The Twitter Files

#504

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Twitter Files

#507

Post by ajross »

chrismcb wrote: post #485
ajross wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the same page. Frankly I was actually wiling to buy the argument that Twitter suppressed the story on direct orders from Biden himself, or whatever, and that such a level of coordination continued once he took office. It's... not unreasonable. Certainly Musk sold that as what the story was about. But it's not there! All Taibbi has is some bland emails pointing out that the Biden administration requested Twitte…

The smoking gun is "the Biden administration requested Twitter look at a handful of tweets." I don't think that is something the government, outside of maybe a court order through the judicial branch should be doing. Ever. It doesn't matter what is in the tweets it whether or not they were taken down.

> The smoking gun is "the Biden administration requested Twitter look at a handful of tweets."

What Biden administration? What government? This was in the summer of 2020.

I repeat: if that happened, it would be bad. The government, indeed, shouldn't be doing that. But Taibbi doesn't have the story! The evidence doesn't exist. He pushed this thing out, with Musk's backing, implying strongly (strongly enough to fool you) that he had evidence for this. But he doesn't.

You get that, right? It really feels like we're being played. They have Twitter emails from two years back but nothing incriminating from a month ago? That argues strongly that they don't have it.

Re: The Twitter Files

#508

Post by tayo42 »

stefan_ wrote: post #343
voldacar wrote: post #261

Do we get to read the actual files? Or do we only get them mediated to us by Matt Taibbi's summary + some redacted screenshots?

Oh, it's even better than that. Taibbi shows you emails of some DNC person reporting tweets, but neglects to show you the actual tweets in question: Chinese Spam Bots and revenge porn. Truly the smoking gun. The irony is the misdirection worked, people in this thread are frothing at their mouths unable to tell who even was in government in 2020.

how do you find what the removed tweets are?

Re: The Twitter Files

#509

Post by nikitaga »

jacooper wrote: post #385
nikitaga wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think it's the Twitter's moderation team who's responsible for "to control and influence the conversation itself" on Twitter, I got bad news for you. Political conversation on twitter is driven by: 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum 2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain 3) bots amplifying all of the above Regular people, the majority of them with bl…

> 1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue. > Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that Yet they consume that content, that's why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party.

> One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue.

Moderation bias is only a minor issue in practice, compared to the real issues that I mentioned. Twitter is still a cesspool of both left wing and right wing propaganda despite your claim that one side "controls the entire conversation".

> why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party

So...

1) You have an unbiased party in mind, and this party is unbiased because it's magically incorruptible in principle, not because it currently holds no power worth corrupting.

or

2) You claim that no party should control twitter at all (aka free speech absolutism), and have a magical solution to ward off extremism and deliberate attacks and bots.

Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.

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