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The Twitter Files

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Re: The Twitter Files

#711

Post by chrisbaker98 »

anonu wrote: post #155
Waterluvian wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a country with five viable parties: this picking sides thing, or even being a “moderate” is just weird and kind of horrifying how normal the populace thinks it is. It’s not normal. People should be FREAKING OUT that their governmental system is in such bad shape. They’re too busy cheering for whichever tribe they’re in. All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.

A two party system works. I'm from a country with a 20+ party system and it's dysfunctional. In addition, you can't lump Democrats or Republicans in the USA in their respective boats. There's a hundred shades of grey within each party. But rallying behind one candidate versus a hundred in a primary makes for a better setup than anything else I've seen in other countries.

> A two party system works.

It's not working in the US at present.

Re: The Twitter Files

#712

Post by paganel »

cm2187 wrote: post #665
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…

These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.…

> I agree, nothing we didn't know

Some of us did know, that's true, but we were labeled as conspiracy theorists and the like. And when the truth came out in the open those calling us conspiracy theorists of course that embraced the "that has always been a known fact! What are you on about?". Rinse and repeat.

Re: The Twitter Files

#713

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Twitter Files

#714

Post by impossiblefork »

It'll be interesting to see whether they publish anything about the removal of links to Craig Murray's blog during the Assange extradition hearings in the UK.

Murray has claimed[1] that traffic from Twitter and Facebook to his blog had dropped to 1.5%, and that posts including links to it could be seen as having been posted by the poster, but could be verified to be invisible to others.

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

Re: The Twitter Files

#715

Post by rpmisms »

justsomeadvice0 wrote: post #702
rpmisms wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TBH I would be happy to see an argument for this. As always I am left disappointed. It is (was) reality. Have you met average big-tech non-coder?

Here are the parts of the statement I am disappointed with, to clarify, emphasis mine: > *This system wasn't balanced.* It was based on contacts. ... there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. I can certainly agree with the fact that 90+% of Big Tech employees vote Democrat (I'm not sure what "non-coder" has to do with it). 100% true. I have worked at large cor…

> I'm not sure what "non-coder" has to do with it

In my experience, engineers are more likely to be pragmatic people, which is more of a right-wing/libertarian trait. This is not a constant.

> Within 24 hours, the decision is overridden and it is made clear who the real agenda-setters are at most Big Tech.

It is overridden quietly, with no apology or acknowledgement of the harm they did. If this was something anyone in leadership actually cared about, we'd see the typical PR response. Instead, crickets.

Re: The Twitter Files

#716

Post by chrisbaker98 »

avemg wrote: post #131
Dig1t wrote: post #118

Earlier 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.

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

Trump's running for president again. If something comes out in October 2024 that looks bad for Trump, and Elon's Twitter censors the story at the request of Trump's team, will it please you to hear that Trump isn't (yet) in government?

Re: The Twitter Files

#717

Post by dan-robertson »

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…

I think a story one could tell about more recent events is that Twitter banning various extreme right wing views was good for the Republican Party because they could make arguments about free speech or whatever and not need to deal with those extreme views being associated with the Republican Party. If such views aren’t hidden, maybe it will force Republicans to work harder to separate themselves from such views, similarly to the way that Democrats expend much effort trying to show that they aren’t secretly communists or whatever.

Re: The Twitter Files

#718

Post by chrisbaker98 »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #459
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…

> but there's no evidence that this was the cause. “Prove our massive illegal censorship campaign was effective!” You can not in good faith argue that this was acceptable. This is obvious because your only argument at this point is that sure it was wrong, but it didn’t work . That’s not going to save everyone on these email lists from prison.

Prison? I think Twitter was wrong to censor this story, but what crimes were committed?

Re: The Twitter Files

#719

Post by Dudelander »

chrisbaker98 wrote: post #705
cm2187 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.…

> citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied Here's a better example: the Canadian trucker protests. GiveSendGo was hacked, and the names of people who had donated to the protests were made public - and Twitter had no problem with those "hacked materials" being shared on its platform. I'd think that if there was ever a reason to block the publication of hacked materials, it would be to preven…

While I agree that Twitter should have taken down the tweets about non-public figures, they're not against the rules: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

Names are explicitly listed as exceptions to the ban in sharing personal information.

Re: The Twitter Files

#720

Post by chrisbaker98 »

chroma wrote: post #172
dekhn wrote: post #66

It's still kind of odd to think that you can be an in-favor executive at a company, then somebody else can buy your company, fire you, and go back and read all your work emails (many of which would be extremely sensitive) and share it with journalists who then screenshot it and share it with the world on the same platform that employed you! This was always a possibility (and a probability- my friend was a lawyer who…

Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time. So if you're going to blame anyone for this, blame the government. Also the owners of Twitter knew that Musk would have access to these messages. That was priced into the deal. Executives and managers at publicly traded companies are very aware of information retention pol…

> Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time.

I've heard it phrased this way: never send an email that you wouldn't be happy to read out in court.

But I'm curious, how can this policy be enforced? If I delete some of my work emails, how can a court prove that the emails ever existed and that I deleted them?

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