They recently unbanned many controversial accounts based solely on Twitter polls. Who do they expect will believe these statements?
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
I'm having a hard time thinking that anyone should be called a journalist -- without mocking quotes -- at this point. After the past couple of years of "reporting" about COVID, vaccines, protests, Ukraine, China, Twitter, etc., et. al., EVERYONE has taken positions at the "fringe."
For 20 years, I've made sense of the news by looking for the pieces of the puzzle where people agree. That is now literally impossible. There is ZERO overlap on ANY issue between the two sides now.
The few actual journalists remaining are known by name, and moving from newspapers to Substack.
But Andy NGO has an especially concerning history of misrepresenting facts, using misleading cuts, and closely associating with far right insurrectionary groups such as the Proud Boys.
I don't know who Andy Ngo is, and I don't care, but if we're talking about misleading cuts, let's talk about the ENTIRETY of the mass media making out like Trump said Nazis were "fine people." All it took was 2 minutes of looking at the transcript when the furor broke out to understand that's NOT what he said, but half the country still believes he somehow came out in direct support of them. And this is precisely the back and forth I was alluding to when I say that there is literally no overlap on what is considered truth any more.
Even when Loder is quoted he openly speculated about what happened and says he doesn’t know. The piece is just a tissue of insinuations.
In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.
Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.
You can call this piece "a tissue of insinuations", but the evidence, taken together, is quite damning. A pattern emerges. At least for anyone who does not have tissues in their ears.
So yes, in addition to clearly misreporting and making misleading and false statements about their lead example Loder they seem to have other examples where there is circumstantial (but zero actual) evidence Musk may have done something.
Personally I like much more rigorous journalism than this even when it’s about people like Musk who I dislike.
I also wouldn't call Andy Ngo, a gay asian journalist who's spoken in front of congress, far right. He basically records riots in Portland and uploads them to twitter, and he's only right wing in the sense that more republicans watch his videos than democrats
The Gun Club arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence.
To date, Gun Club members have reportedly not engaged anyone with their weapons during one of these protests.
https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/john-brown-gun-cl...
Being invited by Republicans to speak before Congress is just more evidence that Andy Ngo is far right, from my perspective.
I guess as long as you hold that being invited by Democrats to speak before Congress makes someone far left, that would be fair.
https://www.courthousenews.com/domestic-terror-still-thorny-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/sunday/police-rio...
But banning antifa-accounts, that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence… that is bad?
Is this satire? Is this an honestly held opinion? Or am I missing something?
If so, check out that article. It should clear things up.
If not, and you have read the article, you probably skimmed it and mixed up antifascist and antifa. Generally the later is a subset of the former.
The Intercept article is not journalism. It’s a PR piece for the accounts that were banned and quotes spokespeople for the impacted groups totally uncritically.
Calling them antifascists seems a misnomer too, they seem to me to be actually anti-capitalist rabble-rousers and professional rioters. Educating, equipping, funding and inciting violent riots seems a clear TOS violation to me.
The “no true antifa” arguments sounds like the sort of ploy that was used when these riots kicked off and democrats in Congress and MSM talking heads were trying to laugh off the idea of “antifa” as a violent domestic terrorist organization simply because they don’t have an org chart.
The “antifascists” literally wore the mark themselves while committing upwards of a billion dollars of property damage over the course of a year+ of riots.
But seriously, please just take it elsewhere. Your innuendo is borderline if not actual libel.
So I take it you think everyone involved in the January 6 riot including Donald Trump should be banned from Twitter then?.
What views?
I saw some of the tweets people got banned for. Are you okay with me associating those views with right wing views?
> that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence
So, you are saying that your alleged criminal activities off Twitter should feature into whether you are banned? (Note, you never claimed they violated ANY of Twitters rules in your comment)
Is this satire? Is this an honestly held opinion? Or am I missing something?
And what happened here is that those left-wing accounts were banned without any such violation i.e. it was purely arbitrary and the very thing you claim you don't want.
Where's the evidence for this claim? Twitter did not publish rationales for bans and there was no clarity or consistent enforcement of what did or didn't constitute a ToS violation.
Those left wing people that were banned, very likey supported the system that just got them banned.
He is free to do this all he wants. We are free to laugh and mock as he flails around, lying and making stuff up.
You just wanted to quickly jump in and make this comment because you "got 'em" but really you just missed the mark.
Right wing people seemed to act like shitheads more often so they are banned more often.
I'd continue arguing however, conservative law, jurisprudence and overall culture seems to always boil down to that there are in groups who the law protects BUT does not bind, and out groups who the law binds but does not protect.
You can pretty much view all of twitter's new moderation capability through that lens and then it starts to make perfect sense.
> Those left wing people that were banned, very likey supported the system that just got them banned.
Exactly, and the rules must be applied equally, which wasn't the case before.
If both sides are now angry over Twitter's moderation system and are building their own echo-chambers, then Twitter (2.0) will remain as a site for a more balanced discussion without either extreme screaming on the platform.
At the end of the day, I'm still laughing at the entire Twitter chaos and the screeching minority who are pretending to leave Twitter whilst keeping their accounts and screaming about Elon Musk elsewhere rent free unable to ignore him in their own echo chambers.
The right-wingers that got banned presumably broke one of Twitter's rules - maybe they said "I wish someone would shoot (insert politician they don't like here)". Even if you take "pre-Musk Twitter had a left wing bias" as granted, that doesn't mean the right-wingers were wrongfully banned.
>But banning antifa-accounts, that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence… that is bad?
The only way to boil this down to a politically neutral rule is if we banned every right-winger who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 alongside everyone who went to a BLM rally that turned violent in 2020. And as far as I can tell neither behavior alone was a violation of Twitter rules as they stood at the time. The rule was no inciting violence on-platform, not no being involved in violence whatsoever.
As far as I can tell, pre-Musk Twitter had two biases:
- Their moderation team was understaffed and overworked because Twitter was too big of a target to effectively moderate. Twitter moderation would overprosecute easy-to-detect cases (i.e. LMG staff getting banned for months because of them sarcastically saying "I'll kill you") and underprosecute difficult ones (i.e. everyone harassing Twitter's villain-of-the-day).
- As a direct consequence of this, right-wingers were more likely to be banned. This is because their rhetoric is inherently more violent[0] in ways that were easier to detect.
Musk has basically decided to cut the moderation team in half and unban all the right-wingers in the name of "balance". All this does is say "we are now letting right-wingers break all the rules, but left-wingers must be on their best behavior, if we let them stay on the platform at all".
[0] Specifically, left-wingers were saying to smash windows, right-wingers were saying to smash people.
Do you have any evidence for this generalization? The only overt violent threats I’ve seen on Twitter are men encouraging rape and murder of JK Rowling and other supporters of women’s rights. I don’t know if they’re “right wing” or not, but their surrounding rhetoric is what’s usually associated loosely with the “left”.
But surely this depends on what one happens to see. That’s why I’m wondering if you have any kind of random sample from which you can draw your conclusions.
Perhaps this is your inner transphobe trying to come out?
Maybe! Being part of a group that also holds certain opinions isn't really relevant to whether expressing those opinions violates a policy. But which opinions did you have in mind?
Here have an extremely relevant tweet.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
pure gold
This is bullshit on its face. The first sentence and the second sentence directly contradict each other.
The previous policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation. When journalist Kara Swisher in September 2020 confronted Musk with the possibility that many people could die if they didn’t follow public health recommendations, the man who believes he is making cars safer and saving mankind by going to Mars replied bluntly: “Everybody dies.”
The argument could be made that Elon cares more about virtual, future people than actual people living today.
This is what Longtermists actually believe.
All of whom have now been suspended despite there being no infringement on terms of service.
[CITATION NEEDED]
Musk said they were in "clear violation of ToS." I want to see both the pro- and the anti- on that before passing judgement on the move.
Is there a source on that? Because if so, holy crap... but I'd like to see some evidence.
And note how Musk through simply engaging with these people gives endorsement to this ridiculous and baseless link between pedophiles and left-wing accounts.
Are we talking about the same Antifa? Political terrorists, violently attacking civilians for having opposing beliefs?
If inciting real-world political violence and terror is not against the TOS, why were supposedly all those right wingers banned?