Legal question: in tweet #28, Twitter's new leadership gives up a "[privileged]" email between Twitter and Twitter legal counsel. How much of Twitter's legal comms lose privilege, should there be litigation?
The Twitter Files
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: The Twitter Files
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not a big deal. You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't". Friend-Enemy is all it is.
What did the Biden campaign do that the Trump White House did not? "In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored." The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
The difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.
Re: The Twitter Files
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shows collusion with politicians to coordinate censorship.
Does it though? I don't think a campaign staff pointing out tweets that might violate the TOS counts as collusion. That's just a campaign interfacing with Twitter the same way everyone else does. If it was collusion, then every white house press briefing in history would be too. Which, sure, might be Chomsky's point of view, but I don't think anarchists need to be convinced that Joe Biden is bad.
Why aren't Taliban tweets removed that violate the TOS?
Re: The Twitter Files
#574I am fully prepared for folks on the left to pretend this is a non-issue / not important. The probability that they consider this an abuse of power is zero.
I would say I consider it both an abuse of power and not important. Musk is also abusing his power as dear leader of Twitter and I also consider that not important. All the drama about Twitter is a just a gossipy sideshow.
Re: The Twitter Files
#575I'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…
> So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney
It's amazing how things change. In the past the left would have been happy to see the removal of subsidies to mega corporations.
Re: The Twitter Files
#576Just a couple weeks ago I had a comment downvoted and flagged for saying what this confirms. The political bias in tech circles is unreal sometimes.
Nobody on the left cares about protecting Hunter Biden. IF he broke any laws, then he should be in jail. AFAIK, there's no current legal case against him.
What you're seeing here is the "left" learning to not take everything the right screams about at face value. They watched Hillary get dragged through the mud with Benghazi over absolutely nothing of substance, including months of Congressional hearings. Thus this new "Hunter Biden Laptop" story smells like the same exact ratfucking playbook.
Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition.
Re: The Twitter Files
#577I’m surprised by the outrage here. The proliferation of information is always subject to tampering - from news outlets picking headlines to social feeds oriented around engagement. Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties, from the beginning to the end. (If you had told me that powerful people/organizations could not get tweets removed, I would have been surprised; based on my e…
> Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties
Honest question: would you be similarly dismissive if it turned out that it’s secretly mostly the right who “shapes the flow of information” in order to influence public’s opinion and has already used that power during the past election cycles?
Remember - we’re not talking about some minor news outlet here. We are talking about social media platforms that are so pervasive basically every single person knows about them and is in one way or another exposed to the information that’s presented on them. To have the power to shape the flow of information on these kind of platforms is to have power to shape whole societies.
Re: The Twitter Files
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
What "government comms" were exposed here, specifically? The specific claims seem to be about comms with private, albeit political, entities.
I found the Ro Khanna one interesting, https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598838041371516929 "Exposed" is your word, not mine. Also, Biden's been a lifelong politician. I guess we disagree that his team's comms during candidacy were not "governmental" in nature.
I re-read your comment and I agree that these communications are interesting. But Khanna's message is clearly not a government official demanding that Twitter censor something (indeed, he's suggesting the opposite).
> I guess we disagree that his team's comms during candidacy were not "governmental" in nature.
This isn't like a disagreeing on a judgment call sort of thing; it is factually not the case that the Biden campaign was governmental in nature. It was, in an objective legal sense, a private entity, and not a government entity. The US Constitution simply does not apply to a private entity that is not part of the US government.
Re: The Twitter Files
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech. Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government . I mean, why is government control such a big deal when pri…
It's weirder to use the false equivalence to equate Biden with a typical private citizen. The typical private citizen does not have the same power to suppress stories on Twitter.
Re: The Twitter Files
#580It 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 is not a big deal. You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't". Friend-Enemy is all it is.
So much pent up anger that your response to a calmly worded good-faith question is a title-cased bad-faith accusation. Get some sleep and drink some water, maybe.