821–830 of 965 posts
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Literally one comment ago you said "the problem was that it was entirely one way."
Individuals accounts cannot always be categorized in one of two ways. There was a consistent attempt to counter any ideas that ran counter to a certain narrative.
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It’s Matt Taibbi. Unhinged framing designed to inflame populist rage is something he’s been doing since the 2008 financial crisis when he made his career on it. He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
Fascism is when you're critical of federal agencies having a privileged relationship with the media to the point of weekly meetings to influence moderation policy? What?
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
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I agree with the spirit of this, but the point is this neither extrajudicial nor monkeyshines, nor out of the ordinary, which means this entire discussion has been bamboozled by business as usual, while more interesting controversies have been neglected.
For the past couple of years, the defense of Twitter’s aggressive moderation has been that Twitter is a private company and that the First Amendment only stops the government from censoring speech. Now we know that Twitter was doing this, in part, at the behest of a government agency. If this isn’t “out of the ordinary” it’s only because of the FBI’s well-established reputation for doing far worse things.
In this milieu, I find all of this alarmism to be misplaced, and thus worth calling out.
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Referring to a trans person by the wrong gender repeatedly is a good example of hate speech. It reminds of an old joke: Conservative: "I keep getting banned for my views" Rando: "Oh, small government?" C: "No, not that one" R: "Oh, so fiscal responsibility?" C: "Not that either" R: "So which ones?" C: "Oh, uh... You know."
No it’s not. Referring to a trans person by the wrong pronouns repeatedly is just rude. It isn’t hate speech That’s just watering down what hate speech is.
A) Harm the target, who has gone out of their way to avoid that harm already (by transitioning/changing pronouns)
B) Dehumanize the target in the eyes of others (this person doesn't matter, their wishes are to be entirely disrespected)
seems like a reasonable candidate for hate speech to me.
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> The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. Have you considered the real consequences of this? If the FBI for example finds accounts linked to child exploitation, drug trafficking, or terrorism; should they not ask Twitter to take down those accounts? If they find accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian farms who are using it to amplify certain messages in order to try to destabilize…
Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation. It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts. The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have. It is not the governments job to protect people's rights. The gov't violates…
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
And as shady or problematic as their relationship with Twitter is, is borne out of legal precedence:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Not to mention, in the last decade, by the process of jawboning:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
So really, your complaints go up further than you think. This is something that has been happening for decades based on judicial decisions, you just weren’t aware of it.
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Joking about political figures isn't hate speech.
Who said it was?
It's the tweet that got the Bee suspended from twitter because they refused to delete it.
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Wait till folks realize how much contact government agencies have with nearly every company (leaking stories, spin, etc.). It's weird that it's turned into some sort of naive left vs right issue. I'd be asking what the goal is, but apparently it's that. Point fingers, suggest no solutions beyond vote for us.
It would be foolish to see this as a left v. right issue. This is an authoritarian vs. libertarian battle. This sort of activity is what the government 100% shouldn't be involved in. Having a department of What is Allowed To Be Said is one of those ideas that gets tried regularly and has a terrible track record that - inevitably - ranges between a source of mild shame in hindsight to a nightmare influence on society.…
There's a fundamental contradiction in the narrative presented in the Twitter Files, apparently we're supposed to believe that Twitter is this overwhelmingly liberal place where employees were highly biased against conservatives in their content moderation and also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution, coerced Twitter in a highly biased way to get them to silence conservative narratives. If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion. If Twitter was being forced, it remains to be shown exactly how. And to the extent that Twitter is institutionally biased towards liberals, then it's those that sit on the opposite political spectrum that are most suspicious. After all, if Twitter was going out of their way to help the Democrats, why would they need to be coerced in that same direction?
There's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians including the sitting President threatened Twitter and other social media companies in order to influence their moderation policies. Where's the outrage among the "FBI asking Twitter nicely is a First Amendment issue" crowd?
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>Imagine if you had the Trump admin suggesting whose accounts to review? They did, for 4 years. I'd certainly be curious to see those emails, but they don't really fit the narrative of these "twitter files" threads.
What dep't made what kinds of requests to Twitter that were carried out?
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In this case reporting two dozen small fry accounts to moderator teams is very weak as far as censorship goes. They’re doing the same thing as everyone else who hits report on Twitter does, except cutting in line. But you can bet there are tens of thousands of businesses, especially Twitter’s advertisers, who have the same if not closer relations with Twitter and, if made displeased, could cause Twitter to censor you…
I don't see anything about being a "small fry" mattering when it comes to the law. It's pretty cut and dried. What the FBI is doing is unconstitutional and illegal. Why are you minimizing it? That they are doing it all is extremely alarming. It's like saying "the concentration camp only has 5 people, what's the big deal?" And why are you comparing them to private companies? Private companies are not covered by the sa…
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The problem is not the rights of Twitter employees, it's the right of the people banned...
What? They have no “rights” to use Twitter. This is also not even remotely controversial. Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech. Note however the government is free to ask Twitter to carry people’s speech, as Trump did almost daily for 4+ years whining about so and so getting banned or de-boosted etc.
> Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
You're making a straw man that's not what I said...
The government can't ask or suggest or apply undue pressure to Twitter to ban content. Social media has been sued for this successfully to get people unbanned.
The Twitter files are not even about Twitter being coerced to put things on their site. What are you even talking about?