Mudge Twitter whistleblower testimony [video]
judiciary.senate.gov
judiciary.senate.gov
28:25 [Mudge] "We're already in bed, it would be problematic if we lost that revenue stream, so figure out a way to make people comfortable with it."
That isn't really surprising, but it's still bad.
It's also worrying that some Americans complain about "big [US] government" to justify the very limited size and power of the FTC to regulate US big tech, while somehow overlooking the threat from the big Chinese government, its awful human rights record, and its track record of working to gain access into US companies.
It's really easy to criticize these senators for not being tech ignorant, but this is the only govt we have, and it's the only one that can empower the FTC to do more.
How is a bigger/more powerful FTC an antidote to the bad behavior of the Chinese government, or a defense against them?
The hearing also shed light on how European regulation (France in particular, I think), was recognized within Twitter as something to take seriously, as opposed to how US regulation would result in, at worst, one-time fines.
Another revelation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32566507 is that India had an agent working within Twitter. I don't know if that's a Dept of Labor regulation violation, but my general concern is that if you celebrate limits in US govt regulation, you may be celebrating having low vision of the harmful activities of foreign governments.
Without proof, this is pure propaganda. India is a sovereign democracy with its own laws and regulations. India required all media platforms acting as intermediaries to have three permanent job roles with proper governance structure – a Chief Compliance Officer, a Resident Grievance Officer and a Nodal Contact Person – these job roles are expected to have specific responsibilities w.r.t dealing with consumer complaints. You can read the official government brief here – https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documen...
Twitter would have interviewed and hired competent people of their choice into these roles. If any motivated government/corporate wants to infiltrate twitter, I doubt they would go about it by engaging in high-profile court battles and democratic parliamentary processes to do it.
It seems like Parag was a terrible exec, is losing his job, and the market knows it. Twitter’s stock is the only social media platform whose stock is up today.
My question is who cares? They are a sovreign nation and the form of government they have is an internal matter. Their leaders and government are recognized by the world (even America) as legitimate rulers of their country
As you may be aware, said senile old man just invaded a neighboring country. The same issue we have with DPRK.
Last time we did the "mind our own business" the jerk of the moment took most of Europe and killed several million people. Putin is doing his best to exterminate the Ukrainians now.
Regardless of the ruler or government invading another country means more countries that have an interest in the invaded country can get involved because sovreignity was violates. In case of hitler the moment he invaded another country it was everyone's concern just like putin but before that it was only the german people who had a say in who leads them. If I remember right even hitler was voted in and his socialist party won election because they were loud and scary.
Twitter is a company that operates under US laws not under the laws of random public outrage. If you want your government to sanction doing business in russia or declare war on it by all means call your rep or discuss that until then it is perfectly acceptable for twitter to operate in Russia which means obeying their laws.
By your logic, what if a UK company refuses to block illegal content in the US. They are both democracies so the UK co should obey laws? But if the US became a dictatorship then it should break laws? What is this nonsense, you expect companies to break laws because you don't like the government of a foreign country?
In Sen. Klobuchar's questioning, Mudge quotes a conversation he'd had with Parag Agrawal regarding a request by Vladimir Putin to censor and surveil Russian Twitter users: "we don't really have the ability and tools to do things correctly, this is a lot of work, it's not really driving our main executive incentive goals, is there a way that we can simply punt? And since they have elections, doesn't this make them a democracy?"
That specific Q&A exchange begins at 1:00:15.
The immediate prior exchange with Sen. See is also telling. "I'm reminded of one conversation with an executive, when I said, 'I am confident we have a foreign agent', and their response was 'Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more? Let's keep growing the office.'"
For those who haven't listened to the testimony, I strongly recommend doing so --- it's informative, level-headed, and reasonably fast-paced.
Your focus seems preternaturally narrow and short. Much as that of Twitter's executive staff.
Is this an age and maturity thing? I can see how someone under early twenties can be this immature where either you hate twitter execs or you are completely in love with them. Be rational and reasonable, if you would like to disagree or counter any of my points feel free but I have no interest in paricipating in a "cancel" fight.
I generally try to run adversarial assessment even on my own most cherished views or takes, as well as charitable interpretation of those of othsers. Both can lead to interesting places, much more so than the opposite strategies. More practices I recommend.
Not sure congress or FTC can do much. Ban click ads? Ban Chinese advertiser? Ban links to Chinese-owned websites? Ban BGP to China?
can someone explain this to me?
if the users are accessing twitter + any ad clicks through a GFW-bypassing VPN, and china can target an advertisement to a single user, then they can figure out that that user uses a VPN if they click on the advertisement? how do they unmask the VPN IP address? my understanding is that VPN providers (should! i hope!) internally transit the traffic so that the exit node isn't the same as the IP address the GFW would see users connect to, so i'm not sure how they could correlate that traffic to a "real" IP/identity.
Yeah it's poor opsec, but quite possible. The cookie can even store what pages and how long the user spent on the honeypot site. Or the cookie can just be an identifier, and the honeypot site can send which pages were visited (and at what time) to the nothing-to-see-here.cn, which builds a visitor's profile for the reeducation police.
2. Handled phone# and geo-location data as sensitive personally identifiable information (SPII) – kept this data in one centralized place (a micro service with well-defined access controlled apis) and prevented its proliferation into other systems. And promptly deleted it when users deleted their accounts.
To implement these two things, it wouldn't cost anywhere near $150M. And likely it wouldn't impact the velocity of their revenue features too much either (impact would be something like slow-down for quarter).
Sad thing is senators are picking on only some companies and not others. Instead, they should be making a comprehensive data privacy act that applies to all companies – like credit card companies, shopping/loyalty-card companies, all the data brokers etc.
Twitter sticks up as it is such a large company with so many customers, the complaint is authoritative, and there was an agreement in 2011 with the government which the complaint argues has been broken by Twitter. That agreement implied that Twitter would do your 1. and 2., starting 11 years ago, and they seem to have not.
Senate =/= SEC
GPs claim was congress would better spend its time writing industry-wide laws instead of this dog-and-pony show (my words). Parent refutation was that the SEC is obligated to look into every allegation - my observation was that congress doesn't have to micromanage SEC investigations. I support gp - congress should be legislating or involving the SEC officials to see where the gaps in the law are, rather than seeking soundbites.
What till these Senators learn about basically every other business in America.
/s
Twitter must have test environments for developers and automatic tests.
Do they just not have a full staging environment? That would be understandable. It's impossible to create a production-like test environment for a product like Twitter. You're better off just doing canary releases or feature flags with slow rollouts.
What makes you think that?
I mean, I know it costs money and needs people who understand how the product works and how customers behave - but why on earth would it be impossible?
For something with many millions of users, it makes more sense to do canary releases to internal users, then to a few thousand, and then scale up from there.
And if can't afford a 1:1 scale replica, build a 1/10th scale replica and have your senior engineers use their expertise to ensure it's representative enough for test purposes.
Unstable connections. Traffic spikes that can be highly localized or nearly system wide. System maintenance, planned and reactive. Poorly behaved clients. Malicious traffic. Many more similar factors...and yes, each of these you could throw engineers at them and get solutions eventually. You might also end up with a testing engineering team that dwarfs the product engineering team.
Also, Twitter doesn't make money. $5B revenue vs $5.5B opex in 2021. They can't really afford to run the actual system, much less a fully representative one. Even a 1/10th replica, which would be unable to find some classes of problems no matter how many engineers you throw at, would further break the bank. As would the engineering staff to support it.
A 1:10 replica is fine, but also astronomically expensive. What's better about it than 1:100? Or 1:10000?
Once you give up on 1:1 (which is reasonable), you're either testing in production or not really testing at all. You'll have many lines of code that will only apply to the 1:1 scale.
Sure, you won’t be simulating a whole class of problems that can arise at scale, but you can still test the more localized features in a safe environment.
For large scale sites you need a parallel copy of the internet which doesn't exist. For example, we once caused a production incident (for us and other people) by simulating a major business event to our test stack and saturated links between <Cloud Provider> and <CDN Provider>. For future tests that was always an edge case that we couldn't fully test. Rinse and repeat those kinds of problems with every vender, service, and traffic source.
"Every company has a test environment. Some companies are disciplined enough to have a production environment separate from the test environment."
I'm reminded of one conversation with an executive, when I said I am confident we have a foreign agent, and their response was "well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more, let's keep growing the office"
Education should give an adult the set of tools to navigate a complex situation and achieve a balanced point of view
It should be much easier for Twitter to do this, so there are no user merges (anonymous user becomes identified and merges), but I'm not sure about their data storage.
This should have been done years ago.
Alternative take: Lawmakers are finally waking up and realizing how much these platforms can affect our daily lives, mostly because most common folk are signed up and use these platforms, and are starting to figure out how we can limit the damage for when things go wrong.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-s...
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-an...
Administrative law is broken. Doubling-down on it isn't going to solve the problem.
Anyway, the alternative of me being forced to huff your SUV exhaust and listen to your 6am leafblower and get early dementia is not a world I want to be a part of.
If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world‑improvers' and freedom‑teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number—expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage—is just as much a class‑ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. … the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land. There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time being permitted by money—and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact. The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both into that of the Bourse.
Any reflection on why that was?
Don't get me wrong, such inventions are net good (cars and motorbikes yes, not so much leafblowers), but they need to be regulated and taxed in a way that manages the additional cost burden that others are forced to pay.
Correct?, no. Irreplaceable incentive to not be a dick? Seemingly.
I think a better solution to the problems Spengler pointed out (see below) would be good old-fashioned torts. We have plenty of under-employed ambulance chasers. If only a few of them manage their way to the middle of the big-tech tootsie-roll pop, that would be one hell of a message, and far more effective at improving practices than the occasional $150M slap on the wrist.
PS> Churchill was a fat drunk who went into the war against methed-out nazis with an empire upon which the sun never set, and came out of it only by the skin of his teeth despite plenty of help. The Greeks & Romans will still be quoted long after he has (rightfully, mercifully) been forgotten.
I've seen a small time civil case pertaining to a dispute totalling sub-$50k drag out for 10 years and cost more than the damages. It doesn't work empirically for everyday disputes because it puts the onus and burden onto the small time victim, which is net unprofitable given all the frictions, leading to persistence of externalities.
You also don't solve the root problem of corruption by moving to a torts only system. Torts as a solution would rely on property laws that are themselves free of moneyed corruption. It also would rely on a judiciary that can't be bought. So it's shifting the same problem we have now (corporatocracy and entrenched interests) to a stunted and less competent system of enforcement.
"My point is that administrative law has failed."
Small infractions by small operators, perhaps so. Small infractions by big operators, hell no. Thanks to class action, civil suits are perpetual hearburn & lost sleep for them. There's always a batch of aggressive trial lawyers ready to take the case on contingency, and even if the original plaintiff's damages are very small, it still adds up to big money when you include payouts to the rest of the class, & of course, punitive damages--which can exceed the damages by orders of magnitude.
> It also would rely on a judiciary that can't be bought
Buying off judges and juries is a costlier & dangerously more sensitive task than promising a comfy board position to an agency head over drinks and a meal at a restaurant in DC.
> It hasn't failed.
The microplastics in our bloodstreams and the glyphosate in our cheerios say otherwise.
Hell yes.
The large majority of infractions, perpetrated by both small and large companies, are infeasible to address via courts, for a multitude of reasons. Either the frictions exceed the benefit to a class action, or the cost is too diffuse.
Consider global warming. In a torts system, how can I hold an industrial farm or a car manufacturer to account for the role they're playing? You can't, because the cost is too diffuse.
Consider social media. In a torts system, how can I hold a social media company to account for the role they play in an uptick of stochastic terrorism? You can't, because the cost is too diffuse and the burden of proof makes it difficult to draw causal links in single cases.
Consider fast food. In a torts system, how can you address the downstream negative externalities of obesity on society by mass producing unhealthy, unhappy people, which has downstream impacts on the polity, health system, and so on? You can't.
Centralized regulation is the only pragmatic solution to certain problems.
Besides, even if all large-scale infractions were addressable (they're not, as the above examples show), it's still a massive hole in your system to simply allow all small-scale infractions to persist.
> The microplastics in our bloodstreams and the glyphosate in our cheerios say otherwise.
This is the binary bias. Failure isn't a binary switch. We've had a degree of good success (leaded petrol, ozone layer) and a degree of failure (microplastics, carbon pollution).
You also unjustifiably blame all failures on the administrative system, which conveniently leaves out that we actually do also have a torts system in place now. Our system is mixed. So, both your hated system and your desired system are simultaneously failing, but you post hoc attribute all failures to the former.
> Buying off judges and juries is a costlier & dangerously more sensitive
Even if I accepted that bribing a judge is riskier than bribing an agency head, you still have no good solution to buying off lawmakers under a torts-only system, or to costs imposed by operators that aren't pragmatically addressable in a court.
While what we really need is API access, data portability, privacy ala GDPR, and other laws that will foster competition between services, to straight up end their current playbook of creating mini-monopolies via Metcalfe's law. The standard tech-literate workflow to interact with Twitter should involve a third party client that abstracts over all such publishing services, and not defaulting to Twitter's proprietary web/mobile apps.
Public comms can go on publicly funded infrastructure, using open protocols like the W3C's ActivityPub (or just RSS if we want to keep things adequate).
Twitter is absolutely not immune from being a member of this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
Just as I tuned in, Mudge was talking about how Twitter repeatedly mismanaged peoples emails, citing that if they didn't sell emails, their competitors would get an unfair advantage.
The same is true of Facebook and Google.
Foreign agents still running amok after an FBI warning: WTF?!
> "It's not far fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the Senators in this room," @dotMudge with a warning here on Captiol Hill. #Twitter
perhaps a valid reason?
We've had that at places I've worked. Where you'd be able to impersonate a user in order to see what was going on with their specific set of user data to corroborate their report and find a fix.
The question is... are the permissions locked down, is access audited and immutable, etc I think.
You don't really own a Twitter (or Facebook, or ycombinator) account. Those services have an account on you. You update their account on you when you use their service to post (and they keep other information useful to their business on your account that you have no access to).
This is just the way social media works.
Most companies the size of Twitter would have a lot more controls than that on random employees' write access to production.
If I want to assume a user's identity in my employer's production system I have to fill out a form justifying it, get my manager's approval for each account accessed, and my activity is subject to logging.
...on the other hand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
First it was "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee." Then "Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day."
It was kinda funny but you would expect that they would learn and improve from it.
Edit: Thank you siblings for showing that it has continued to happen. Obviously not lesson not learnt.
That's why I specifically said "from a naive standpoint." I'm not arguing against valid reasons, I'm pointing out how absurd the situation is.
From my comment:
> I understand that there are consequences of Mudge's information
It's not far fetched to say a the line cook at a Senator's restaurant could poison their food.
It's not far fetched to say that a Senator's financial advisor could run off with their money.
It's not far fetched to say the teachers who instruct a Senator's kids could fill their heads with lies.
Humans have all sorts of ways to wreak destruction on one another but it mostly doesn't happen, and when it does, we have many, many systems in place to detect and punish. And we tend to scale the weight of these systems to the size of the perceived threat - that's why doctors and pilots are more burdened than bankers who are more burdened than cooks.
How likely is someone to actually take over these accounts (what's to gain)? How much damage would it do (not too much, people get hacked on Twitter all the time and that's baked in to the credulity of each tweet)? How likely is that employee to get caught (high), and how much punishment would they face (huge fines, possible jail time, unemployable in many industries for the rest of their lives).
Technical safeguards are not our only safeguards, especially for insider threats, which long predate the Internet. External hackers do dramatically change the calculus here (unlikely to get caught or punished) but that's not what's being alleged.
Technical safeguards against insider threats protect your insiders. They give your insiders cover in situations where they might be coerced to do things.
When I was at G, I likely could have read some data from cloud customers with some social engineering and the permissions I had. It would have taken hours to get the first byte, and I would have been fired within 10 minutes if I did without a good reason. The fact that it would have taken hours and some social engineering would let me plausibly tell the police (or the Chinese government or the mob or anyone else), "no, I don't have access to that data." Twitter's engineers didn't have that cover.
I'd slightly disagree that technical safeguards don't provide any protection against insider attacks. But yes, the deterrent effect of having a high chance of being caught is very effective.
High-growth companies prefer to prioritize features and kick the access control can down the lane until they absolutely have to. Without looking at revenue and employee numbers, I suspect 2010 Google and 2016-ish Uber are comparable to current Twitter, IMO.
Edit: the Googler story is far worse that I remembered: he had unfettered access to underaged victims' mailboxes, chat logs, contacts and Voice accounts and used that information to taunt one victim, and unblocked himself from another victim who had blocked him on Gchat - Google only became aware of it when it was reported externally.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
Aviation has the state imposing licensing requirements, the state certifying which vehicles can take passengers, the state imposing technical requirements like transponders, the state investigating accidents, the state telling pilots when they can take off and land, the state searching passengers' luggage and sending them shuffling through scanners without their shoes, the state establishing no-fly lists, and the state wading into the industry and choosing winners and losers whenever it's geopolically convenient.
If you tell the senate you'd like the tech industry to be regulated no more heavily than the aviation industry we'd be in for a lot more regulation.
We kind of have answers to these questions already:
- A rogue employee/contractor deactivated Trump's account back in 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/03/experts-w...
- "130 high-profile Twitter accounts [including Apple, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Gates] were compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam" using internal Twitter admin tools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
The impact of both of these was basically zero.
Nobody's account is safe. Doesn't matter what 2FA methods you use, whether you're verified or not, how many followers you have, all it takes is a couple grand for someone else to take it over.
> The impact of both of these was basically zero.
Per the Wikipedia article you linked, the attackers got $110k in Bitcoin, which is not "basically zero" (even if the price of BTC has fallen since then).
[0]: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=researcher-zachxbt-alle...
Just people huh? Not the Presidents, politicians, richest business men and high profile journalists right? To say nothing of all the other niche communities like finance and tech.
Social media has become extremely important to the free and open exchange of ideas between people.
Then what is the threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda? Why is Twitter propaganda but not HN or my blog? When does it cross the line?
You're trying to come up with hard distinctions and categories, when trying to do so is totally uninteresting and without any utility. I notice it's extremely common here on HN[2], perhaps because the job of an engineer involves working with categories, and something that's linguistically fuzzy is uncomfortable to them. I write more about this cognitive failing in the second half of my post here[3].
In short, there is no objective threshold wherein the natural inability to avoid bias becomes propaganda. And nor should we waste time on that point. Such a discussion is merely semantics around the definition of the word "propaganda". We should leave that to the people who compile dictionaries.
Such clouded thinking has created a blind spot here in this very thread, e.g. that someone can say something so ridiculous as "How is that different than literally every other website or publication on earth?" and not get downvoted, as if the practical difference between a social media platform with access to hundreds of millions of eyeballs on the one hand, and a small blog on the other, is not self-evident. Such an obvious difference can only not be self-evident to someone who is incapable of understanding that things can vary by degree instead of by category.
[1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/binary-bi...
I'm sorry, but I'm asking how and why the number of people suddenly flips the switch to propaganda and all I'm seeing is a flippant dismissal from you.
It's my stance that it is not the number of people who see it that dictates that it's propaganda, and that the definition supplied fails to meet any real criteria for propaganda.
This isn't a binary bias, I'm not asking "is it or is it not?" I'm asking someone _why_ they think it's propaganda.
I find your response reductionist, and the appeal for downvotes snarky. I'll let citations of your own comments stand on its own merit.
It is a matter of degree, but you keep insisting it's a matter of category.
If the CCP uses networks of bots to amplify pro-CCP stories and viewpoints on Twitter, then that's "different" (to answer your original question) in an extremely important way to if someone pushed those views on their own small blog. It's different because the scale and impact is different.
Also, both of those things belong, to some extent, to the category of "propaganda network capable of controlling the narrative". But one belongs to it more, and one is more of an issue, because the world isn't binary.
No, you added the second part. That could indeed bolster the argument, but it wasn't made in the initial claim.
If scope is the tipping point - which appears to be your argument here with regard to degree - recall my initial question was about the threshold. Which is conveniently what you're saying we should ignore because it's unimportant. So which is it?
I contend that one of the core tenets of "propaganda" is that there needs to be a deliberate and centralized. It's easy to call something propaganda but it's much harder to defend that claim.
Also, when we say degree, we don't mean the degree to which the definition fits. That's a boring discussion. We simply mean the degree to which it's a problem.
Twitter, to the extent that it's being used as a propaganda network by CCP bots, which it is, is a big problem for us.
A small blog being used for propaganda... not such a big problem.
That's the difference that you're missing. The scale and scope is different. Therefore the extent to which they're important is different.
Quite the opposite. I've asked about degree the entire time. "Opinion" does not mean the same thing as "Propaganda," but the scale of the former could transform it into the latter.
What's the degree here? That's what I'm asking.
> That's a boring discussion.
This is dismissive. If you want to discuss things in good faith, please avoid language like this. You're refusing to engage with an aspect of my reply - and that's fine - but don't pretend my thought are meaningless or boring as a response.
I'm ending this convo here. It's become a tedious debate about semantics and nothing productive is being achieved.
You could use a multi-prong test like they do for determining whether an entity constitutes a monopoly.
Or you could use the old Justice Stewart's test for obscenity..."I know it when I see it."
But given what we've learned of late about the government influencing social media sites to censor citizens on their platforms, I don't think there's a legitimate argument that certain social media sites are not different from the general internet.
None of Twitter/FB/Youtube has that kind of correlation
Most of the "real time" aspect of Twitter is a reaction to something, often publications themselves.
I can't think of a better word. Suggestions?
Shedding light on an (unfortunately very) influential company is good for the public.
Musk shouldn't get out of his deal, but whatever he does to reveal malpractice at Twitter is good for all of us.
Perhaps a less dismissive characterization of Twitter would help make it less bizarre?
It's a platform used by many leading public figures, including US presidents, to share information and the 280 character limit is a format that often leads to less filtered communication than you'd get in other mediums.
And then you stop and realize that the user numbers on Twitter are DWARFED by Facebook (and Instagram and TikTok), and you realize just how screwed we really are.
And all for the sake of making some people insanely rich, by flooding every aspect of our lives with advertising.
We've accepted emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical (to some extent) abstractions of ourselves as our true selves. And exchanged social cues for algorithms to manipulate our behaviors.
In the moments when you can break out of that abstraction the parody becomes so clear, and also terrifying. Like what are we actually building towards?
If you instead say “international information system responsible for sending 500m messages daily including by senior govt/business officials has poor stewardship” I think it doesn’t seem so rediculous that senior government officials are so concerned. They all use Twitter, why wouldn’t they be concerned? You could easily cause militarily significant damage to a country with a good hack against twitter.
There was a very politically significant insurrection organized on twitter, this system has already been used to direct an angry mob in the general direction of these high level government officials who proceeded to attempt to break down barricades and assault them.
1) After Snowden, after Experian, after Pegasus, after decades of screaming about these issues and getting shushed and laughed at - that lefties might take over your twitter account is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back? Are you freaking kidding me?
2) Elon is going to get away with it. And he really shouldn’t - he already waived his right to back out based on any of this. Just because you like someone shouldn’t make them above the law, and basically the takeaway here will be that like Trump he’s above the law because a large enough section of the public likes him.
Setting all of this aside, maybe it’s worth actually trying to do something about the real problem - that too many members of society (including the leaders) are dangerously under-informed for living in it, let alone governing. None of this should be news to anyone here.
And this might even be tenable, if they were to surround themselves with knowledgable people who could give them advice. But, in a situation not entirely dissimilar to the inner workings of large corporations, our leaders are surrounded by parasites who ride on the their backs, and lead them into making decisions that benefit themselves in the short term, instead of benefitting the country (or the company) in the long run. You can fix this in government by amending the Constitution to get rid of Citizens United ruling, and then tackling the lobbyist problem, as if either one were possible. And I don't know how you'd even begin to fix it in large corporations.
Most of the legal professionals I've seen comment on the case so far are of the opinion that Musk is likely to lose this case in chancery court, and see few ways that Musk could evade a ruling of specific performance should he lose.
There’s no getting away with it. This was one hundred percent his plan the whole time - throw Twitter into chaos internally. Now for what reasons remain to be seen, but his extensive use of Twitter was highly unusual as a high profile CEO basically rewriting the PR game (which the SEC tried to reign in). That experience gives him unique insight into how Twitter works and what power it holds - he may very well feel a government party is influencing the platform too much and he’d rather destroy Twitter than lose control of it.
He got a $44 billion dollar excuse to sell Tesla stock at the height of an unprecedented bubble without causing his zealots to do the same and crash the stock.
I'm not saying that's why that happened, but here we are.
public opinion is the voice of God
None of this is new.
You name-dropped all of those spooky nation-state related phrases, but still can't acknowledge the very real scenario where a government official's second (or forth) account on Twitter is compromised by a nation state — competing, their own, doesn't much matter — for blackmail material?
That sbouldn't be of interest?
but Twitter has already testified more or less through compliance statements and attestations about their security, and now we’re finding out about what they’ve been sweeping under the rug.
And they also control a big megaphone. If they want to release a statement, they can tweet it and boost it directly into everyone's feed.
All it takes is this experienced security professional to bring down the house of cards that Twitter security is built on and it will just tell us that they have been hiding lots of skeletons and nasty secrets that were spun by the company for years.
Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter
Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn.
As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4].
It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-a...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-ov...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings
[4] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-d...
In a country that values freedom of speech and association, this is considered a feature, not a bug.
It seems that much of the world has forgotten or willfully ignore these lessons.
The cost of freedom is that people will use it to do things you don't like.
Freedom isn't necessary for a society to function, lots of societies function without it, and have for most of human history.
Given the choice though, I prefer to live in a society that chooses to maximize liberty. Without freedom of speech, all other liberties are irrelevant.
There's a reason why it's the first amendment.
Your country is barely 300 years old and has had a single constitution for its whole existence. The US has learned _no_ lessons through its existence. It's a country founded by colons who didn't want to pay taxes to the UK. The amount of lessons the US can give the world is about... none.
I'm German. My ancestors should have shown the world just enough on where not restricting hate speech and conspiracy crap leads: into murder, into genocide, into the dissolution of democracy itself.
It's astonishing that the US hasn't realized this as well after Jan 6th. You all don't realize just how fucking close you came and how thin the edge is you all are standing on.
In the history of German regimes, perhaps take a look at the degree to which each one suppressed free expression, and think about which were better.
Holocaust denial is banned in the majority of European countries, and at least in some countries Nazi symbolics are banned as well [1].
I live maybe an hour away from the KZ Dachau and have visited it. It's hard to have any other stance than "antisemitism, racism and other similar discrimination must be banned at all costs" when you personally see the evidence just how depraved humans can be.
Let humans go unchecked and you get anything from online mobs driving trans people to suicide (Kiwifarms) over murder (Heather Heyer) and lone wolf terrorism (Christchurch) and finally, a putsch attempt. Then, once a strongman/dictator has taken over, you will eventually see ethnic cleansings and genocide (see e.g. Russia's Ukraine invasion).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial
You really think that the police, especially federal police, would have disobeyed a direct request from the President asking them to stand down? There were only two completely random things that prevented an utter disaster at Jan 6th: Eugene Goodman, the brave cop redirecting the mob away just mere minutes after the Senate chamber was sealed [1], likely saving the Senators' lives, and Bobby Engel from the Secret Service [2], who reportedly resisted physical violence by the President himself and did not drive him to the Capitol as requested.
Had Trump been at the Capitol, I have absolutely zero doubt he would have crowned himself President that day - and that neither the Republican leadership nor the courts would have objected to this.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/goodman-c...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/28/trump-lunged-at-secret-servi...
Also, you should check your sources (or rather, your sources' sources): there's a lot of fake news out about 1/6, a lot of it from "reliable" sources. The second story there is single-sourced from someone who wasn't in Trump's car whose story was disproven by someone who was actually in the car. The same outlets have been repeating the lie that one of the Trumpkins killed a capitol police officer with a fire extinguisher.
This takes me back to my German friends confidently predicting that the election of George W. Bush was the dawn of Nazi America. No, George W. Bush isn't going to roll the army out of Iraq and conquer the entire Middle East. No, Trump isn't going to disband the free press with the assent of Congress. No, the Capital Police, who work for Congress, are not going to stand down and let rioters run rampant, and no, neither Republican leadership (which wasn't in charge of Congress in any case) nor the courts are going to let anyone crown himself president.
All of those are actual predictions I heard from Germans. Trump did crown himself president, with the result any American would have predicted: he was derided and ignored by the majority of the country, and the location wouldn't have mattered at all to that.
I totally get given your country's history why this stuff comes up. But some of it is very, very alien to an American cultural consciousness. It turns out countries differ from one another.
It's worth reading about the relationship between Trump and his generals to understand the attitude that the American military takes, and is expected and required by their oath to take, toward the president.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war...
I am definitely not saying that fascism can't happen here. I'm saying that if it does it won't look like anything predictable from German history because there are vastly different cultural norms to bulldoze.
You are right to say that the impact falls on the marginalized. You are wrong to blame the free speech policy for that.
The point there is that had we lived in a country where censoring speech was legal, there's every reason to believe even speaking of e.g. abolition could have landed you in jail, or worse. Would this have deterred change? Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing is for sure is that it'd have made the country a far less free place for everybody.
Good.
It is an indefensible house of cards where it can take someone like Mudge to just blow it up and give the regulators a reason to give a massive fine and put them under strict rules to do better, and they should give them massive fines.
The only reason this one is different is because of the specter of Elon Musk's acquisition falling through.
Repubs want free speech (unbanning of conservatives, Trump), Dems want control (what can and can't be said on the platform).
Bottomline, Ain't happening
In declining to appear, their CEO traded the ability to refute statements in real time alongside Mudge for the ability to release carefully crafted statements after the fact that will receive public scrutiny but do not require him to tell the truth in response to any questions from congress, the content of which are out of his control. Misleading public statements can get them in hot water with regulators, but lying to congress is a crime.
It's probably a smart move, and it's certainly not unfair to Twitter.
Their staff and advisors most certainly are not. When Sen Orrin Hatch is asking stupid questions about facebook and ads, it's most certainly an act. For the benefit of the blue hairs back home.
As a former activist, I assume any public hearing is performance art.
Personal anecdote. One time the rules were suspended and I was allowed to testify about a bill being considered. I pointed out the vendor they were about to award an important contract appeared to be out of business. No phone, website offline, offices shuttered.
(I had prev made sure some contacts from the local media were present.)
Whoops!
Immediate recess. Hour later they reconvene. That bill is promptly tabled and onto next order of business. Exactly zero comment made about the matter.
That council never repeated the mistake of letting me go off script.