The Twitter Files

I agree, nothing we didn't know. Like I suspect the further findings alluded to at the end of the thread. But it's kind of like the Snowden revelations. Anyone a bit tech savvy strongly suspected what the NSA was up to, and would have been surprised of the contrary. But it's interesting nevertheless to see the proof. And to see how political viewpoints are censored at the request of politicians.

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.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-sa...

Twitter publicly attempted to justify

I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.

The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended.

In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech?

The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.

You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't".

Friend-Enemy is all it is.

Yes, most of this was known…but the big (ugly) revelation is that it confirmed something that was suspected—Primarily the direct coordination with the Biden campaign to suppress the story and lock specific accounts that referred to it.

FWIW, by saying “we updated our hacked materials policy but we will not retroactively apply it to the event that required the update”, I think Twitter rubbed salt into a wound they created. It basically underscored that they were content to play a part in the current election manipulation (likely because of the big baddie they opposed) even though they knew it was wrong enough to change the policy.

not an argument

The scandal is that these very same policies and tools were being lent to the rich and powerful to distort the publics perception. The very thing Twitter wanted us to trust it was not doing, was exactly what it was doing.

It raises important questions on ethics and no amount of “we already know” makes this ethical.

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 about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics.

What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON.

This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together.

We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.

Having "stuff they dislike" removed would be one thing, but using the direct line at Twitter for reporting explicit ToS violations isn't a big deal.

[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760

I looked at the tweets mentioned by Taibbi in the Wayback Machine, and they didn't actually appear to be unflattering speech or even speech at all but rather photos. The first tweet, for example, was some explicit photos (which I assume would violate Twitter's rules whether or not they were of Hunter Biden).

> political parties... have a direct line to Twitter to get stuff they dislike removed

...to:

> in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online

Twitter is not the internet. It's a tiny part of the internet. You can say whatever you want on many, many platforms. In fact, people can't stop talking about some of this stuff on HN and Reddit.

Have some perspective man or woman, you're acting like we're supposed to treat you like some babe in the woods and pretend this is genuinely shocking to you? Please. Yes, powerful governments influence actors within their nations. We get it. Let's all feign surprise for a few hours online.

But that's not what bothers me. The most frustrating thing is that your perspective fails to acknowledge how this is so painfully, hilariously, boringly mild compared to the corruption and abuses of power that are the baseline norm. It's like when people treat "gig workers" like they're the new 10-year-olds in a coal mine. Yes, all abuses of power are bad, we agree. But do you really expect us to pretend this is anything other than an extremely mild, boring footnote in the grand legacy of abused power?

The only things that I'd be concerned about are (a) why is it informal? and (b) what did Twitter do about the requests?

Re (a): This should not be an informal process based upon personal contacts. This should have been a well documented procedure, if for not other reason than to remove the appearance of bias. Sure, Twitter could have assigned a "case-manager" type of contact for each group. But the process for requesting such access should have been formalized (and reviewable).

Re (b): Having a direct line to flag to request review/removal of posts is fine. You can request all you want. It's only an issue if Twitter felt like they couldn't reject the request. Again, because it was an informal process, it's not possible to have any sort of comprehensive statistics on who requested what, how often, and how many requests were approved. And again, the biggest benefit would have been to avoid the appearance of any bias.

People get things resolved via Hacker News when people comment on CEO account comments (Stripe comes to mind).

Nearly every company probably has direct lines of access for resolutions for VIPs, politicians not excluded.

> It [the system] was based on contacts.

This reminds me of past "you have to know an employee to get you ban fixed" discussions about not-Twitter here.

I'm now wondering about a general - as in not specific to any one company - "favors for friends" culture at the brand-name tech places, over what I guess would be called a "rule of law" culture.

This is the historical norm not anything new. This is very true about Fox News, CNN, and especially all the other "old media" major (alphabet soup) networks

Speaking internationally, there's no stronger propaganda force than the US. Americans very often fail to acknowledge this when criticizing "foreign election meddlers" (which the US has BY FAR the longest and most egregious record of doing)

A brief perusal of Twitter would reveal that, yes, you totally can, and people totally do, and you're making much ado over not much at all.

I'll bet most big corporations advertising on Twitter have one too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM

What if there was, say a spy, that was being outted?

Government and politics has an interest here because statecraft has a need to veto things if they want to be effective.

I would say its not a huge leap to think that.

I would even say its more than just other social media platforms. I would say it goes into main stream media on BOTH sides, Hollywood, sports, etc including global corporations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI&ab_channel=Shoot...

They lost anyway, but we have no idea what kind of effect they had and what stories were suppressed.

Zuckerberg said it himself on Joe Rogan, it's been common knowledge for years now, only contrarians and stubborn shills claimed otherwise

Algorithms, Shmalgorithms - in the end it's just some guy in the backroom who is takimg phone calls from the political commissars, just like in the old Soviet Union and nowadays China...

Absolutely everywhere.

The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story.

The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.

All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.

So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney, his forbidding of speech in schools, etc.? He's not passing literal anti press and anti speech laws to piss off the MAGA base.

It's remarkable to me he so badly wanted props for punishing Disney for exercising free speech he forgot he's supposed to be pro business and anti big government regulation.

Suppression of speech has to push you away from far left and far right, so that should cancel out. Then, if you're really prefering all the other policies as you say, you could vote center left ...

Or -- vote Forward:

"Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system."

"The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters."

-- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-former-republican...

    I'm a moderate
    
    Democrat ... authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas
    
    both sides suck

Of course cynicism is non-falsifiable, and there is no coherent notion of a moderate or independent in American politics, because there exists no coherent political position between democratic and republican policy. Anyone claiming to exist in this middle space is in practice a republican, just without the conviction that's typical to that party's base.

This feels like a universal to me that applies to both parties.

And I’m sorry, “authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas” is pure propaganda. No mainstream left leaning politician is actually perusing such an idea, it’s a boogeyman created by the right and by the looks of things it’s working great.

I find the tweetstorm format to be not particularly coherent, and I haven’t followed the story closely enough to know who the actors are, but Ro Khanna (a Democrat) is one of the names I recognize and he seems to be against the censoring.

On the other hand, where Republicans have political power, they are using it restrict speech and rights, by law.

"Both sides" are not the same.

This is a good time to plug 3rd parties and candidates. Organised pressure to make the situation better is more important than winning elections - even if they don't get voted in they may force change for the better. At some point the best options amongst two evils is still too evil to tolerate.

Yea, Democrats are annoying sometimes, but the situation we're in has consequences for a lot of people.

> At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.

I wish I could say that. For a lot of us, we can't say that. The Democratic party might be pissing you off, but the Republican party is truly harming millions of Americans. The Republican party is no longer John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have my issues with them, but both seem to genuinely care for people and want to make America a better place. Today, so many seem to want to weaponize hate.

I guess I'd ask you what you think the Democrats should do differently while protecting women, Black people, LGBT people, and other minorities. I guess I don't completely know what you mean by the Democrats having an "authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas". In most of my experience, it's been pushing for more inclusive language and not being mean to people while Republicans are forcefully trying to censor a lot of topics as they ban books and pass "don't say gay" bills. Is it that Democrats think Ye (Kanye West) shouldn't be given a massive platform to hate on Jews? Is it that Democrats think places like Netflix and SNL shouldn't pay Dave Chapelle millions to hate on Jews and trans people? I'd note about this is that the instant anyone says something bad about White people or men, Republicans all line up to say that they shouldn't have a platform to say that. Republicans try to "cancel" people just as much as Democrats do.

I think it's also important to note that there are differences between government restriction on speech and social condemnation of speech. People use speech to organize. Sometimes that's great and other times you get Nazis. There is a pretty big concern in many communities over the increase in violent attacks from right-wing groups. These are groups that are pushed forward by many main-stream Republican commentators and many Republican politicians. Sure, they'll say it should stop just short of violence, but it's an effective strategy.

I'm not arguing that the government should control speech, but any respectable person or organization should probably not promote Nazis. Would you hire a Nazi to give a speech at your company about their ideology? If you owned a newspaper, would you hire a Nazi to do your editorials? If you didn't, are you suppressing their speech? If you published a letter from a Nazi and put a big warning alongside it that your newspaper condemned the views expressed by the letter, are you suppressing that speech?

I'd also note that speech has real-world consequences. People used speech to create the political will to suppress Italian and Irish immigrants. People used speech to build coalitions to keep Black people enslaved. Nazis used speech to get the power to murder two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Bad ideas should be fought against. Not all ideas are equal or equally good. Some ideas are evil and we need to make it known that they're evil ideas. Again, I'm not saying that the government should control speech, but I do expect good politicians to speak out against evil ideas and to call the people promoting those ideas bad. Hitler was a very bad person and Ye is a bad person for promoting Hitler as good. That's not suppression of speech. That's noting that Ye is supporting evil that should be opposed.

I genuinely understand that it's difficult to know where the line should be, but I'd also note that the past was never a bastion of free speech. You needed to be wealthy to publish things in the past. Most people didn't have free speech beyond who could hear them at the pub. In the 21st century where our communication is often less in-person, what does that mean for platforms like Facebook or Twitter which are kinda like newspapers, but also kinda masquerade as a personal communication device (or a common carrier as some people argue they should be)? What did it mean when newspapers controlled information and only some ideas were pushed by the newspapers with the biggest circulation? What does it mean if the in-person communication of yore is replaced by the Facebook of today?

I'd also note that speech always had consequences. People have always been "canceled" when a powerful person or their community decided that their speech was wrong - Senator Sumner argued against slavery and was beaten half to death on the Senate floor by pro-slavery Senators. During the American Revolution, lots of people faced dire consequences if they said something that might have sounded too loyalist. People have always lost jobs because they said something a higher-up didn't like - or something a third party didn't like who had power with one of their higher-ups. People have been fired for coming out as gay. Are we talking about the same consequences that have always existed and have often been wielded (and continue to be wielded) by the right?

If you have constructive ways the Democrats could be better, I'm open to hearing them. I guess I'll close with hoping that you'll think of the LGBT people, women, Black people, and others in your life that will be harmed by today's Republican party. I hope you'll value us more than you're pissed off by Democrats. I want my life to be worth more than your resentment. I don't mean that as any kind of slight against you or anyone else - I understand how hard it is to vote for someone who genuinely pisses you off. I just truly hope that you'll choose me. I don't really know how else to say it. I like my life, I want to continue living it, I want to be protected by my government with the same rights as everyone else and not persecuted by it. Please choose me.

Really we probably need to fix all censorship issues first somehow.

I've almost completely detached from all news because none of it passes even the stuffiest nose in a sniff test.

My two favorite realizations: - Data is the best liar. - You can get -one- expert to say literally anything.

You can always find one expert with an opinion that matches what you want to say.

The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.

Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.

Over the last few years the rail companies have furloughed ~30% of their staff to the point where covering sick staff is a real problem. They've so far made $20 billion on profits this year. The excess profits have routinely been used in share buybacks and dividends.

Biden, who claims to be pro-labor, has sided with the rail companies in directing Congress to use an old law to rob these workers of their right to industrial action and mandate a contract. With no paid sick leave.

How can anyone with a straight face in good faith argue there is any leftist power in politics when Democrats side with capital and routinely go out of their way to eviscerate labor and the progressive elements of their party?

> I think people on the left have a blind spot here

So you've made two false premises here:

1. There are peeople on the left in politics. As I noted above, this is a falsehood; and

2. The "left" is a monolith and wanted to suppress the Hunter Biden story. This is right-wing propaganda because conservatives treat Trump like a cult leader who is above the law.

Speaking as a leftist (FWIW), I don't care about Hunter Biden. Throw in jail. Hilary too. I don't think Twitter should've blocked the NY Post story but ultimately it's a nothing burger because there's nothing of substance on this laptop. If there was it would've been passed on to law enforcement instead of being passed raround right-wing operatives (to the point of destroying any chain of custody) in an effort to smear the administration and nothing came of it, which is why they just fell back to the old playbook of pedo allegations.

> ... people on the right grow to resent them

People on the right already call people on the left groomers, pedos and criminals.

> ... this authoritarian suppression of speech

What suppression? Everyone knows about this story. The only "suppression" (which, again, I personally disagree with) is you couldn't share a link to one post on one site (Twitter). to believe this is "authoritarian suppression" belies successful right-wing propaganda.

> ... both sides ...

Bothsidesing American politics does nothing more than show how normalized right-wing ideas have become (and how far right the Overton window has swung). You have the former president espousing QAnon conspiracies, election denialism at every level of government and white supremacy (which is a core tenet of the Republican Party and America's founding and history) spilling over to where the likes of Kanye are saying the quiet part out loud, Elon Musk tweeted (then retracted) a conspiracy about Paul Pelosi and his attacker and the #1 "news" program in US openly pushing Nazi propaganda (ie Tucker Carlson and the Great Replacement Theory).

Bothsidesing this doesn't make one enlightened or "above the fray".

Honest question: would you be similarly dismissive if it turned out that it’s secretly mostly the right who “shapes the flow of information” in order to influence public’s opinion and has already used that power during the past election cycles?

Remember - we’re not talking about some minor news outlet here. We are talking about social media platforms that are so pervasive basically every single person knows about them and is in one way or another exposed to the information that’s presented on them. To have the power to shape the flow of information on these kind of platforms is to have power to shape whole societies.

I mostly agree with this, but the rest of your comment reads to me as "everybody else does it so it's fine", which is exactly the mindset that leads to this conversation not being had. A sensationalist story might lean the narrative one way and might be "out of touch with reality" but it's a much better starting point than nothing.

You'd think it'd be obvious but so many people seem to be convinced that Twitter was the seat of wokeness and the moderation team sat on the throne. That there was a debate totally contradicts the characterization Matt is running for.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/2/23490863/elon-musk-twitte...

I mean it makes sense, the tweets where they mention Elon or sources from Twitter have waaaay more interaction than any other articles they wrote. Like orders of magnitude different.

I personally don't like them. 90% of the things they said about Twitter never happened and not a single word from them about that. Oh and Platformer is kinda ex-Verge people so there's that.

When working class gets affected by illegal immigration then they are racists. When the white collar class gets affected by jobs getting outsourced then it's the corporate greed.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/10/05/a...

What new information would you, as a journalist, find salient and worthy of a brand new post today?

>What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/note-to-readers-8d4

> there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do

Ah yes the old, "It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, they deserved it."

If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.

You don't even need this "Twitter Files" thread to know that there is plenty of evidence; I don't really see how you can say with any such confidence that Twitter's policies have been even handed.

I don’t think he does, I think he can literally see engagement falling in the days after a stunt and he’s trying to keep it up. Matt seemed to imply there would be another thread following this one so buckle up

If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.

> Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.

Authoritarians love the idea of corporations subservient to government being used as a tool of the state to crack down on human rights. Lots of people don't see a problem with it.

You mean emails the company paid you to write for its benefit? They were never yours. Also, there's the adage about never emailing any statement you wouldn't want on the front page of the NYT for this exact reason.

If you can't handle the scrutiny, then don't accept a high powered job, at a multi-billion dollar company.

Of course people will get excited. If Elon were to flog a "Hunter Biden's laptop" story that turned out to be that its hard drive was 4500 RPM when the SKU was marketed as 5400, and that capacity was measured in gigabytes rather than gibibytes, people would still get excited. Facts have little to do with any of this, it's all a post-modern, post-truth exercise in perceptions.

If you don't think so now, you might in 2024. So it's time to care now.

"There's no REAL proof that large corporations overwhelmingly favor the left" is the political version of "there's no REAL proof that the earth is round"

What’s even more damning is how their own internal folks are sounding the alarm “how can we possibly defend this decision” and yet the decision stood.

It’s pretty clear that Twitter had a very strong alignment to one political party and that resulted in the deliberate suppression of an important news story right before an election.

It’s pretty scandalous.

Clearly they were.

>But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party

The evidence is not only clear, but overwhelming. But more than favoring a party, they favored the DC blob narrative. See the treatment of Wikileaks vs the treatment of CIA propaganda accounts like PropOrNot or Bellingcat as crystal clear examples.

>I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.

This is really the problem and the issue at hand. Many whose perceived political opponents are being silenced and attacked by the unholy cabal of government and big tech don't care (or worse, are happy) because they have no principles. At the end of the day, those they look down upon, or that they think are bad for whatever reason, are getting the shaft, and that is just fine with them. Those of us with principles think that everyone deserves to be treated by the same set of rules, even those people we don't like or who we think are bad. Unfortunately, the schism between the principled and unprincipled is only growing wider as the former group shrinks and the latter group grows daily.

The "laptop" story is a red herring for Trump's crimes and used to cover them up by making up a load of BS to give cover for Republican whataboutism.

What I find surprising is the defense many HN commentators are giving to this propaganda, especially those that try to say silliness like "Biden was installed!"

I'm neither Republican or Democrat -- I'm an equal opportunity cynic in relation to political parties -- and boy, has the GOP been taking advantage of that opportunity!

Dark money flows to high impact mass distribution channels, and who knows what is truth and what is not, and the response is social media should not be asked to take down false or misleading content?

Context matters. They didn’t fail to hide the story, that wasn’t the goal.

They succeeded in their goal of preventing the story from harming their candidate a few days before the election.

This is everything the left says they care about, a mega corp colluding with powerful connected political interests to determine the outcome of an election

Same thing happened with Andrew Cuomo. It was an elaborate play designed to make Dem voterbase to believe how amazing Dems are at handling COVID. Meanwhile dilligent citizens knew what Cuomo had done with the nrusing homes. The moment Biden took office Cuomo was thrown under bus because Dems knew due to his nursing home scandal he has become a liability. The longer he stays in the office the more it'll draw attention to Dems' creafully written PR plot.

While the latter may be more damning, it’s also pretty common.

Lesser-known domains will indeed suffer from draconian moderation policies of today's largest social media sites. Case in point, my domain appears to be shadowbanned. This Tweet [1] only appears when directly linked. It does not appear beneath its parent [2] for anyone but me. That leads me to believe that tweets mentioning my .win domain [3] are all shadowbanned. I don't know for sure what's going on. I know it wasn't the parent author's action that hid my content because Twitter is auditable for when that happens.

[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136

[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553

[3] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/

What's Elon done here that's inconsistent or hypocritical? He's never claimed to be a free speech absolutist (no-one is a free speech absolutist), nor did he say he was going to turn Twitter into a free-for-all for anyone can post anything with no moderation. Kanye posted literal Nazi content; he clearly violated Twitter's stated policies against hate speech and earned the ban.

I find government comms with social media to be interesting. Do you not? I'm not sure if there's a bombshell there or not. I believe all public servants since Nixon understand about their actions being reviewable. Not that they shouldn't be able to have private conversations, of course. That's a whole 'nother issue.

You are talking about the loud minority, but majority of people think that what Kanye said is horrible (as a half jewish European I have felt enough of what happened with my own family to make sure that I do everything in my power to make sure it is not happening again).

At the same time corruption has to be fought with transparency, that's where freedom of speech gets important for all of us.

It is (was) reality. Have you met average big-tech non-coder?

> acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is

One way of interpreting that might be that Elon thinks former Twitter execs were guilty of collusion. Yet, unless there is some really nefarious smoking gun where both parties were grinning about screwing over the public, I believe the most likely guilty party, if such events are found to have occurred, would be the government, not former Twitter employees.

I'm not sure if that's what Elon meant to imply though.

If a source reaching out to and sharing documents and hearsay with a reporter is grounds for dismissing a story - because of imagined personal/ideological/PR alignment - then you would be dismissing 95% of the "Democracy Dies In Darkness" reporting by the Washington Post and New York Times.

This story is about political operatives influencing what social media companies allow on their platform.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598864377750306816

Probably.

If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals that apply universally that should make me more concerned.

> the hunter biden laptop story should have been a much bigger story.

Should it? This is the most Barbara Streisanded news story in history; There have been two years of investigations and nothing has come of it. Maybe it was just a nothingburger that also happened to have been handled by Twitter badly. Even Matt taibbi said that the suspression was a bigger story than the original article.

Political conversation on twitter is driven by:

1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum

2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain

3) bots amplifying all of the above

Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that, yet somehow we all pretend that Twitter and other such platforms are representative of the population. I mean, if we weren't pretending, there would be very little reason to pay attention to it, yet here we are.

There are two types of platforms that (somewhat!) managed to escape the trap of extremism:

1) Those owned and controlled by billionaires for their own gain (state funded channels, major private news channels, local news stations, etc.)

2) Platforms that are too small / too niche / not used by people for sharing political opinions (niche forums, most people's email, etc.)

I am yet to see any solutions for this.

Everyone's pumping Mastodon as if it can solve extremism / spam / bots. It can't, the extremists, special interests, and their bots will just follow you there... if Mastodon ever becomes big enough to drive political discourse that is. And if it won't, then it's no different from the myriad of niche forums we already have – those are great, but utterly irrelevant to the problems we face with platforms like Twitter.

Neither will government-enforced censorship improve the situation. If you disagree, let's wait until <party-you-hate> is in power, then implement this change. <excuses follow>. Yeah, that's what I thought.

One perspective is that the medium IS the message.

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 new "Hunter Biden Laptop" story smells like the same exact ratfucking playbook.

Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497772

Those are some very strong claims. What specifically in this thread supports them? For example, we know that Twitter received these requests from both campaigns, whereas deliberate collusion would only have been with one, and the most hyped up claims are a handful of tweets which contained non-consensual nudity, which doesn’t exactly seem like it would shift the election.

The comments discussing process (was this appropriate moderation?) are much more in line with my experience in the community.

Since I had a webpage in 1994, can I reject this authority? b^)

Twitter is dumb and more avoidable than G or FB, but it does seem to have some effect on the chattering class. If it is problematic when "bad" facebook moderation affects elections (I'm not saying that has ever happened, nor that it would in fact be problematic), it seems possibly problematic when "bad" twitter moderation affects elections.

Greenwald and Snowden seem to care about this? Although of course they care more about our ongoing persecution of Assange.

I know this might sound pretty idealistic but for anyone who thinks otherwise please entertain the possibility that such control could one day turn against you, your political candidate or your personal beliefs and suddenly it will be you who finds themselves in the crosshairs of censorship when there’s a story you believe should be brought up. It’s an ugly timeline that I don’t want to live in.

So yes. Your example easily doesn't violate the 1A.

Truly the smoking gun. The irony is the misdirection worked, people in this thread are frothing at their mouths unable to tell who even was in government in 2020.

Hunter Biden is not an elected official! Who gives a shit. If this were about like, Anthony Weiner, maybe it would have the potential to be an interesting story, but this isn't even close.

Telle est la politique en Amérique

Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)

None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)

edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698592

edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang: I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.

All have had negative impact on Musk's personal brand. Viewpoints regarding worker (mis)treatment depend on people's beliefs about classism, which doesn't map cleanly onto political tribalism. The botched features get flak because many people are just like Elon and (wrongly) think they could run Twitter better than everyone else.

E.g.: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

Public shock about government involvement in speech is par for the course, in the US anyway.

For example, banning spambots should basically only need overall statistics on the bans, whereas bans/suspensions of news or public figures should require detailed insight into what happened. As a side effect it might force platforms to have some insight into automated bans instead of relying on people managing to stir up enough of a ruckus on another platform to get in touch with a human.

Maybe something about transparency would be workable? Even if the policy that whichever site is being transparent about is "all decisions are arbitrary", at least people would know that that's the policy.

“ Dear TK Readers:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.

The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.”