The Twitter Files • Hacker News Board

Re: The Twitter Files

#851

Post by tootie » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

Lol to your last question. Absolutely ridiculous thing to even ask. Have you seen the internet?

Re: The Twitter Files

#852

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

geocar wrote: post #683

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.

> 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. Nonsense. First of all, "government" is not an "in" or an "out". They represent their constituency; those are people, and in this case, they are the representatives of the workers at twitter (judging by the donations). Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a news…

Curtis Pub. Co. v. Butts is irrelevant in the case of an entity like Twitter due to the CDA. 47 USC section 230 C1: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Re: The Twitter Files

#853

Post by refurb » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

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…

Pretty much this.

It’s a set of rules selectively applied depending on whether or not your political allies or opponents are on the receiving end.

Taibbi leans left and I don’t but I like reading his articles (despite premises I may not agree with) because he’s at least honest in his arguments and doesn’t try to bury or twist inconvenient facts.

Re: The Twitter Files

#854

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #755

nathias wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the life of a politically inconvenient story: 1. it's conspiracy theory 2. it was obvious to everyone 3. forgotten

I had this happen on Reddit personally. Shared my Covid experience. Got accused of spreading misinformation. Makes me wonder, if conspiracy theorists might have a point.

It can be impossible to tell conspiracies apart from many people independently wanting the same things.

Re: The Twitter Files

#855

Post by gilbetron » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

bjornsing wrote: post #820

boc wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition. This line of thinking is so weird to me. When I tweet that’s me speaking. If the story turns out to be false I should feel guilty about that, and apologize to my followers. Twitter has little to do with it. To me Twitter e.g. censoring direct messages feels like the postal service reading letters and filtering…

The postal service is a governmental entity, you do see the difference between it and Twitter, a private company, don't you?

Re: The Twitter Files

#856

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #691

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.…

the life of a politically inconvenient story: 1. it's conspiracy theory 2. it was obvious to everyone 3. forgotten

[deleted]

Re: The Twitter Files

#857

Post by tootie » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #472

mbreese wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is having a direct line to Twitter the most disconcerting thing for you? Of course they have a direct line. I expect that all major political parties, the white house, various legislative committees, etc... would all have a direct line to communicate with Twitter. It's explicitly said that both major parties had these lines of communication, so it's hard to see a problem with the existence of back-channel methods…

How about neither have a direct line? Trying to say censorship is fine as long as the current party in power also gets it like the last guy isn’t a persuasive argument. You can’t abuse power you don’t have. We stopped letting monarchs control things via backroom dealings with their elite friends back in the 1700s for a good reason. Creating a system with zero transparency that’s at the whims of whoever currently has…

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/04/sean-hannity-dissua...

It is well-known that Hannity among many others are in direct communication with republicans and directly coordinate their messages. Nobody bats an eye because nobody is surprised that Fox/Murdoch are conservative media despite an explicit mission to be "fair and balanced" news. Yet somehow reading emails from Democrats makes Twitter a complete traitor to their mission.

Re: The Twitter Files

#858

Post by ethanbond » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

kryogen1c wrote: post #831

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…

> doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known? This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs. The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry…

I think the thrust of your argument is really the only meaningful story here, but I don’t think it’s an especially good example of it. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that influential people and orgs have more direct lines into channels of influence.

Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.

Re: The Twitter Files

#859

Post by joenot443 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

myko wrote: post #309

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people talking about ToS as if it's applied consistently and without bias. Let's assume that the oft-storied "pee tapes" were real, published by a mainstream news outlet and posted to Twitter. Would those same individuals regurgitating ToS violations agree that should receive the same treatment, or would they have been complicit in spreading it as far and wide as possible?

I think there is a big difference between the sitting POTUS who was known to ask for and receive Russia's help getting elected being shown to have kompromat on him vs the unelected son of a presidential candidate's hacked iCloud nudes being posted Especially given that in the "pee tapes" trump is clothed while the women are nude and unknown individuals

Sigh, this is why discussing politics with Americans gets exhausting. It's difficult to get a serious answer out of someone, because all they really care about deep down is making their party look good and the other party look bad.

So often they'll reach for "it's different when my party does it because the other party are nazis/communists/russians/pedophiles/etc." It's just so tiresome and anyone outside the circus can see how unproductive it all is, but people in the thick of it really do see it as Marvel vs Thanos.

Re: The Twitter Files

#860

Post by acdha » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #347

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…

It doesn't look good that a lot of credible media outlets had to walk back their stances on the Hnuter Biden laptop and lab-origin covid. Both proved to be plausible enough that they never should have been censored or suppressed.

It’s useful to read what the media actually wrote at the time rather than how Republicans portray it. I’ve included a number of links below but the main thing which is obvious is that coverage was dominated by the questions of authenticity and especially the challenges of not having a forensic trail which wasn’t tainted by Giuliani, who was so unreliable that even Fox News warned reporters not go trust him. A lot of that coverage also focused on how Fox and the WSJ passed on the story because they couldn’t verify key details, or how the Post’s own journalists had reservations because they couldn’t verify details such as whether an email ever got a reply or particular meetings actually happened. Years later, the story remains the same: some relatively boring details have been confirmed but nothing explosive has been found and evidence of tampering likely means that if something was buried in there Giuliani would have helped Hunter Biden by tainting the evidence to the point that it wouldn’t stand up in court.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/ratcliffe...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-limit-sharing-...

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hunter-joe-biden-ema...