https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
The Biden team never asked Twitter staff to “handle” anything. They forwarded tweets that [violated twitter’s ToS][1], a Twitter staff member forwarded them for review, and at that point the reviewer said they “handled these.”
That’s what content moderation is supposed to do!
[1]: https://twitter.com/parkebench/status/1598841731763810304
[1] The tweets referenced by the biden team were Hunter Biden dick pics, you can check yourself in the Wayback Machine
I mean Zuck must be the devil himself by now then... Or is it Musk's ideological views creating such consternation? In which case, also interesting to see the federal interest.
Pretty sure “playing ball” helps build goodwill with the people who decide whether to break your company up or not.
The Taibbi tweets clearly indicate that "connections" buy influence within Twitter. So clearly Twitter sees some benefit to "helping" those in power.
Edit: It's specifically called out in Taibbi's tweets. "NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point,""
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/intimate-medi...
This page goes back to 2018, too, so it’s hardly new: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103200035/https://help.twit...
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
I mean, I guess it's ok to expand the definition, but let's be clear that's what we're doing here. Also, it isn't particularly rhetorically effective.
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
The hacked content in general is covered by this. Given the contents, it doesn’t appear that the news exemption covers most of the material:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
Here’s the history on the above quote for those that missed the allusion: https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/will-no-one-rid-me-of...
Moderating content isn't the goal. Moderating behavior is.
It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
You could also summarize the findings as “no evidence of tampered emails or hacking was found on the laptop”. But you didn’t (and I wouldn’t) as that too would be disingenuous.
Neither summary is a fair framing, particularly for techies.
For at least some of the details, see the march 2022 Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... or https://archive.ph/b1Ser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
But let me guess Wikipedia is also part of the fake news media?
Third parties on the emails have come forward to verify some of the emails.
> No criminal activity by the Bidens was ever found.
Hunter Biden is guilty of lying on a federal firearms application. For starters they should throw the book at him for that since Democrats are “tough on guns” right?
The corruption angle has never been fully investigated either. The whole Ukraine do nothing job was clearly payment for access to his father. We’ll see what comes up when they finally look into it next Congress.
> It should be impossible to look at this objectively and conclude that this wasn't a carefully timed misinformation campaign.
Just because something has a political angle doesn’t mean it’s immediately false.
> It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
The blinders worn by the half the left, and forced onto the eyes of the other half, are a much worse problem.
Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess. But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t mean the public cannot discuss the matter or present it’s opinion on the legality.
The laptop isn’t meaningless. It’s a data dump of evidence of guilt. Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm while under the influence of narcotics to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
> Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess.
The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
> But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now. They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
Then you go on to list a bunch of meaningless things to me. Hunter Biden brandishing firearms and taking drugs is meaningless. He’s a private citizen. His problems are well known. The brandishing of the firearm thing is especially hilarious, because the people who are most concerned about taking down Hunter Biden wouldn’t even consider that a crime.
Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
> the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done
And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself. People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that. Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?
With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.
That's completely bullshit. Legal gun owners are the number of advocates for actually enforcing gun laws on the books. Not creating cockamamie new ones that go after cosmetic features or make criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.
Being a drug addict and purchasing or even being in possession of a firearm is a serious crime and it should be investigated. I guarantee you that 100/100 legal gun owners would endorse prosecuting drug addicts illegally in possession of firearms.
The true hypocrisy is that while the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms. They want to throw the book at legal gun owners for some newly created minutiae, but won't endorse charging a literal meth addict brandishing a firearm with a felony.
> Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
> How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy? You don't see anything worthy of investigation in the $250K/month deal he was getting from that Ukraine gas company for his "expertise"?
> That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
> And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
> But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. It's just the same, "Can't you see it! It's everywhere!!" over and over again. Show some actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
> Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself.
Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.
> People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that.
Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.
> Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?
Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment. Read up on Occam's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
> With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.
They've had all kinds of investigations for years. The truth, or I guess "sad truth" for you, is that there's nothing there to actually charge him with.
I don't know who you've been talking to, but my family members who are very mad about this Hunter Biden laptop also believe there's no such thing as an illegal firearm, and anything labeled as such is a violation of the 2nd amendment. That's the basis for my amusement.
> the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms.
Again, don't know who you've been talking to, but I'd challenge you to actually produce an instance of someone on the left who would defend Hunter Biden's guns. The general line I've seen is that if he did something wrong, Hunter Biden should go to jail. No one on the left (that I've seen) is defending him like the right is imagining. Again, show me. I'm not seeing it.
> Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
There have been charges in jurisdictions. The first charges landing so far are that his namesake company is actually a front for massive fraud. The trial for that is currently under way. Trump was also named as an unindicted co conspirator on a crime someone else went to jail for. The only reason Trump himself wasn't indicted was, again, because he was President and his Justice Department couldn't do anything to indict him. In fact, political appointees in the DoJ worked to scrub Trump's fingerprints on the Cohen case as much as possible. Really all you're saying is that the other shoe hasn't dropped yet, and we should take that as evidence it never will.
> You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy?
Sure, investigate the hell out of this claim. But no one has been able to show that any of what you say is even remotely true, and in fact the opposite is true. The biggest claim made I've seen so far is that Hunter somehow influenced Biden to go after a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son. But this claim completely falls flat on its face when you realize that Joe Biden's actions were supported by the entire government, including Republicans. Why does Hunter Biden need to use back channels with his father to get him to do something that literally everyone agrees needs to be done?
No one can answer that without the entire narrative collapsing, so all these other unrelated conspiracy theories are added onto the pile about child porn and other nonsense. No matter what the results of this investigation are, they're already tainted to the point that no one will listen. So investigate all you want, but it's so partisan now that no one who doesn't care already will be paying attention.
> Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
I wonder if you were just as concerned with Whitewater and Benghazi and Durham. I wonder if you will be disappointed yet again when Republicans fail to deliver on their claims, and they resort to "well no laws were technically broken but we feel it was improper!"
> You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
Yes, I mean the FBI that is traditionally staffed by very conservative people, and has always been run exclusively by conservatives. Indeed that one. They've shown evidence, and given Jan 6 and recent events, I'm inclined to believe them.
> I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
Okay, the first and most obvious would by Trump's charity, which was found to be a self-dealing grift instead of a non-profit and was directed to be shut down by New York. So there's no question Trump and his entire family (they were guilty of the charity fraud too) are not above committing fraud to enrich themselves. Republicans cheered this behavior enthusiastically.
If you want to talk about Trump's government corruption, look no further than his grift with the Secret Service, where he charged them astronomical rates to stay at his own properties, while telling the public that he was only charging them at cost. Or take Trump's lease of the post office, which was found by the GSA Inspector General to have violated the Constitution's emoluments clause. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I don't want to be here all day.
All of these instances were met by yawns and shrugs by conservatives. That's how they normalized it. If they had pushed back against Trump's grift, they would have more of a sympathetic ear from me today when they complain about a supposed Biden grift. But they didn't then, so I can't take their outrage seriously now.
> Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.
The Republican-lead Senate Intel Committee investigated his campaign for colluding with Russia, and found that his campaign manager was coordinating strategy with a Russian intelligence officer. The Mueller report found that Russia attacked the 2016 election and Trump welcomed their help. They also found Trump obstructed justice into this investigation 11 times. Further it was found by the House that Trump extorted a bribe from Ukraine, but although the Senate didn't disagree, Senators from his party were swayed by Trump's argument that he did so for the good of the country. Which... okay, sure. Then the House found that Trump incited insurrection, and while the Senate agreed with the facts, they didn't agree they had the power to impeach.
Notably the investigations that got the furthest were mostly beyond Trump's reach to impede. Also notably, none of the investigations have come up as empty as Whitewater, Benghazi, and the Durham probe. For every single investigation into Trump, where there was smoke there was fire. Republicans don't have the same track record.
> Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.
Kindly, I noted the former President was corrupting the system he was supposed to run, as a tumor might. If you don't care for my analogy, move past it. No need to police my tone. I didn't claim to be unbiased, and I'm not pretending to be. Although I'm curious now if you think you're behaving in an unbiased way, because that's clearly not the case.
> Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment.
Trump's untoward influence on the DoJ and the lengths went to to protect him are not hypotheticals. Read the Mueller report, it sells it out. Read the accounts of the USAGs who resigned under political pressure from Trump and Barr. I mean, the whole fact that Barr was appointed in the first place is evidence of this. The whole fact there was a need for a Special Counsel after Comey was fired is evidence of this.
> They've had all kinds of investigations for years.
I don't know why you keep harping on this point. "For years" the investigations have been in the hands of Trump's political allies. Until "recently" i.e. the last two years, during which said investigations have rapidly progressed after political influence was lifted. Since then Trump's company has been in court and looks about to receive a death sentence, and his home has been raided by the FBI, where they found clear evidence of a crime. But despite these recent developments, because some arbitrary time has elapsed, by your estimation he's squeaky clean?
Trump's FBI.
Chain of custody is a problem.
> Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm
Conservatives supporting denying American's their right to bear arms. Gotcha.
> while under the influence of narcotics
So?
> to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
Private citizen not in government.
> The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
Gotcha. The FBI and Trump never took this seriously.
> The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
Private citizens vs Government officials. Conservatives and their big government overreach and policies and their anti-1A stance.
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
So Clinton wasn't corrupt. Gotcha.
Also, the investigations are still ongoing. See Taxes, for example. And all the previous charges filed against him and case after case he lost.
But sure, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn, Stone, and Cohen are nobody related to Trump.
> They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
They've found evidence they could charge, but not enough they want to risk a trial on as it's not a "slam dunk" case.
But hey, the Clintons are not corrupt, and the elections weren't stolen! Those are interesting points of view for you.
EDIT: In fact, let's not rely on our memories. Here's the original NY Post story, the one which you weren't allowed to share on Twitter:
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
This article doesn't make any kind of allegations about CP. Why are you making things up?
"The conservative radio host Wayne Root claimed without evidence in a tweet shared tens of thousands of times that Hunter Biden's laptop contains videos of him sexually abusing Chinese children."
That's just one article, I remember seeing many YouTube comments and 4chan posts about it, which could suggest they were bots pushing a narrative.
The Hunter Biden story is, and has always been, about him selling access to his father to Ukrainian powerbrokers so that what we're seeing unfold now over there would be possible. His claims to be saving "10% for the Big Guy" clearly allude to money being kicked back to his dad the Vice President at the time, and current man in charge of delivering billions of dollars to those same powerbrokers in Ukraine now.
This is what the investigation is about. Nobody cares if Hunter was a drug addict or a douchebag it's always been about the above.
Posted today:
https://twitter.com/JoanneRansing/status/1598963377984135183
"Hunter Biden had sex with his niece Natalie. His dead brother's underage daughter - he was also banging her Mom. Will they manage to keep this video secret forever? Lots of people have seen it including me."
https://twitter.com/kuckieman/status/1598895748636372992
"One question, Are you ok with the pictures of Hunter Biden and clearly underage girls? You and Hunter are the problem."
https://twitter.com/wokeantag0nist/status/159901527380973568...
"Hunter had sex with underage girls and used his dad to broker deals against America’s best interest, “ what’s the big heal lolz” congratulations you’re dumb and pathetic enough to be Biden’s next diversity hire"
Me: shows credible proof demonstrating that's not the case
You: feigns confusion
Why are you playing dumb?, sure seems like you get "confused" a lot.
Well, I think we've identified the issue. Please don't look up flat earth tweets, it will break you heart.
To me, the bigger issue is the white glove treatment, and the appearance of preferential moderation.
But I think that’s where political realities come into play. I don’t doubt that these companies feel the need to make lawmakers feel heard or risk legislation/regulation that will harm the platforms.
I think this is touching on something much bigger, in that these kinds of government/company relationships are everywhere, and have been for decades.
The difference with the Twitter situation is one of public visibility and direct impact on individuals trying to do something as seemingly innocuous as post and share links on social media.
Which is absolutely not to excuse the behavior. If anything, I hope this wakes up more average Americans to the kinds of quid pro quo and shady handshake deals that have been going on forever.
I think it's a good thing that we're having a discussion on when the Whitehouse is applying pressure for tweets to be removed, and how nicely asking is or isn't pressure. I actually think that these actions were entirely legal. The Biden campaign and the Trump administration can and should be allowed to ask for posts to be reviewed.
But I think we'd damn well take a close look at when and why they do choose to do so.
Removing blatantly violating content isn’t controversial, nor is a member of the concerning party’s staff emailing Twitter asking for a prompt review.
What is the news story regarding photos of Hunter Biden? That he's naked like the rest of us under his clothes?
Let the news come out and let everyone decide for themselves what the value is. Censoring it is the issue
It’s been years since the “Hunter Biden laptop” non story, and the vague unsubstantiated accusations are still flying. Zero work seems to have been done since then to substantiate any of the claims, which says a lot about how much those making them care that what they’re saying is true or accurate. The vague claims and conspiracy theories do the job just as well it seems.
You’re right after all; the only reason anyone cares about the Hunter Biden laptop is because they think it will take down a different Biden.
The problem is it actually doesn’t. Despite your innuendo, the shadiest thing that can be pointed out is vague notions of influence peddling, which has been effectively normalized after the last administration’s blatant and gratuitous influence peddling. It’s hard to get people fired up about something you’ve been claiming is totally cool and legal for the past 6 years. So no surprise that no one cares to hear about influence peddling and shady deals from the team that brought us Jared Kushner’s $2billion Saudi fund and Trump’s first impeachment.
The laptop story is a dud. Republicans will spend years investigating it and find nothing. Maybe they’ll find something like an affair or a violation of IT policy and try to make it into a huge scandal, but after living through Whitewater and Benghazi, we all know the drill. They most recently tried it with Durham and that failed miserably. It’s a long tradition in Republican politics.
The faster you get over and move past the laptop, the better (for you that is… the longer Republicans cry about this non issue, the better it is for Democrats politically, because only the most rabid partisan Republicans care about this at all).
You can argue it is minor in comparison to, say, impeachment proceedings re: Burisma, but did Twitter do the right thing in suppressing the laptop story? Probably not. I don't think most people want private citizens like Gadde tampering with elections in the future.
Thank God.
Does it still rub you the wrong way that Trump was "the government" telling Twitter to remove speech?
Biden wasn't in office at the time of communications, yet was clearly a figure of influence in government.
"Handle" is an okay word to describe the scenario via an internet comment, yet also not a literal quote.
I wish we could get back to trusted parties coming to reasonable conclusions while citing sources. It seems we're stuck in a cycle of gaming SEO and piecemeal info via social media.
I guess us "citizen journalists" are learning just how challenging it can be to relate a story accurately and with minimal bias.
What in the world are you saying here? What exactly is a “figure of influence in government“, and how does that matter?
Setup, WTF are you saying?
Second, Tucker and Thiel are influential but I probably wouldn't say government, I'd say they're influential media figures. Third, yes I imagine Tucker and Thiel do have a greater ability to influence in some areas than your average Joe.
Finally, if your next response contains another WTF-type comment, you'll have the last word.
Calls for censorship coming from individuals or groups who later assume positions within government are worth reviewing because it may inform how they operate while in office. Calls that come after taking office may be punishable. Therefore, any influence exerted during campaigns of private citizens, while unpunishable, is still interesting to follow. An incumbent up for re-election is not free to exert such influence, though I imagine it still happens on their behalf, and I'd say those unpunishable actions are worth following too.
All private messages aren't interesting, but these ones are because they called for censorship. Also, censorship just means suppression of content. It doesn't have to be done by a government.
Let’s stop being vague, what messages are you talking about?
David French explains this well https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-...
Also, the emails weren't hacked. The laptop was abandoned at a repair shop and they tried to turn it over to the FBI twice but the FBI declined. That's when they turned it over to Giuliani who sent them to the NY Post.
This is not quite accurate. The FBI did take the laptop, but Isaac (the repairman) made a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani as some sort so assurance because he feared the laptop would be black holed by the FBI.
Neither would be terribly surprising to me, although for sure the first is more damning. But Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another.
If it is just "prioritize this support request by a VIP" it's not particularly damning or even scandalous, I would assume that would be the case at any social media company.
The tweets in that citation are mostly available on the Wayback Machine, and 100% of those accessible ones contained frontal nudity: https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752. So they would have been taken down as a clear ToS violation no matter what.
2- They weren't telling, they were asking, and if Twitter feels like they were told, they can sue the government for violating their First Amendment rights.
Insofar as the Biden campaign is concerned, it is impossible to violate 1A when you are not imbued with government power. There is no such thing as a private citizen compelling Twitter to take something down, the only possible thing you can be doing is requesting. Both campaigns did this so feel free to draw your own conclusions as to whether the Trump campaign did something wrong, but I will point you to the word “campaign” and note that a campaign is also a private party, so pretty unlikely.
First, how deeply rooted democratic operatives within Twitter took totally unprecedented action to censor a potentially highly damaging story.
Second, that Twitter publicly lied about their justification for doing so, which itself probably broke laws (at the very least a serious FTC enforcement action). Companies cannot lie that something was done because of a TOS violation. Consumers have a fair and reasonable expectation here that was violated when the company made up reasons for censoring the story - even in DMs!
Third, the chaotic response within Twitter and its internal paralysis in recognizing and “unfucking” the hijacking of their toolset for overly political and nefarious purpose.
Fourth, and this one really just irks me because it was gaslighting on a national scale, that so many channels and people picked up and ran with the “disinformation” and the particularly ridiculous “Russian disinformation” angle in an attempt to discredit the reporting.
Twitter censoring the Hunter story was basically an insider breech of corporate policy. Insider communications seem to indicate that people that could have stopped this were either stunned into submission or asleep at the wheel.
Good luck out there.
Everyone should support political movements they believe in, but at a certain point when only one point of view is that deeply ingrained in your corporate culture it affects your ability to be impartial. If you look at Twitter it’s pretty obvious that their actions reflected the culture and they kept pushing the boundaries until they eventually crossed a red line.
Your post works really hard to characterize Twitter employees as "nefarious" "[D]emocratic operatives" who "publicly lied", "broke laws", and engaged in "gaslighting on a national scale", which frankly I think is baseless and unproductive. But putting that aside, it seems to me that the nature of running a communications platform like Twitter is that there's always someone who thinks this about you. The stakes are pretty high, especially around elections. I'm not a fan of social media, in particular I think Twitter on balance has been pretty bad for humanity, but my reasoning isn't that it's particularly good or bad for a given viewpoint (which seems to be yours). I think what they're trying to do is impossible, they will always fail, and there will always be big negative consequences.
For example, Twitter could've let this story ride. But it's not about Joe Biden, it's about Hunter Biden, and there's no vetted evidence of JB wrongdoing. But if JB loses the election because of this, well that's a huge failure for Twitter also. Or they can build a huge investigative unit that competes with all the disinformation bureaus of all the worlds' governments, but that's clearly a losing proposition.
We get a lot of kicks from armchair quarterbacking and our "I would fix Twitter in two shakes with my enlightened moderation policies" (at least one of us got pretty carried away with this and spent $44B to take a swing) wind-bagging, or alleging some mix of corruption and incompetence. They're a pretty good punching bag. But it's worth saying some reasonably smart people have dedicated their professional lives to solving these problems, and pretty clearly they failed. I think this is probably because what they were trying to do, while noble, is impossible. You can't make a global, public communications platform that all the world's dignitaries use that is (reasonably) free of disinformation and acceptable to all major participating parties. Hell you probably can't even do it for just the Republican and Democratic parties, let alone Germany + China.
What you can do is sell out to them over and over again, which is probably what EM will do. Twitter will become a wasteland of propaganda and banal marketing, trading whatever bona fides it has left for exposure on its platform. It's essentially a private equity buyout of Twitter's attention capital. I think the previous leadership team was wise to this, I'm pretty sure EM still isn't (he burned a lot of their attention capital in a 2 day bonfire), but give it a few weeks.
If you mean that some(all?) the particular tweets mentioned as censored by Tabibbi were about frontal nudity and thus reasonably censored I am not arguing.
So no, it’s not “the entire reason.”
For the other 2000 or more women, it was exactly what you say, he asked, and they had to say yes (to get anywhere)
What a weird thing to try to nitpick. There are plenty of shakier instances of takedowns by Me Too. Weinstein isn’t one of them and they’re not “the entire reason” for the movement.
Are you saying the metoo movement was about physical aggressive rape of women?
Because it’s not. It’s about those in power exploiting their power for sex. And how is that done? Mostly by soft power, which you can’t say no to. Which is the whole premise of the parent comment.
I think the point is that Twitter, a multibillion corporation run by rich, powerful, and well-connected people, isn’t in the same position w.r.t. the government as fledgeling starlets were against Weinstein.
Twitter could have said no, and they would have been fine; they are protected from the government by the Constitution. Twitter has tons of money, and could easily file a lawsuit or defend one as well.
You are correct, technically Joe Biden was not a part of the government at the time that this email was sent. Do you honestly believe that this behavior is keeping with the spirit of the first amendment?
His team, and the DNC (here's one that's very similar, except that its from the DNC instead of the Biden team https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjAuD6eWAAEFiXY.jpg)
are enormous and very powerful, and effectively a part of the government.
Do you think this kind of emailing Twitter and asking them to "handle" tweets they don't like, stopped on the day that Biden was inaugurated?
And, of course, it's a moot point anyway because Taibi says requests came, and were honored, from both sides, including the White House. Even if "Joe Biden wasn't President yet" is true, Trump was President and his White House was working with Twitter to suppress speech. I just don't see how it is a question, either legally or morally, that the Federal Government, with Twitter, has been violating the first amendment.
What you see is a non-government person asking a non-government business to censor something. What I see is a former Vice President, Congressman, and Presidential candidate, backed by the DNC, asking a major communications channel to censor something.
The former sounds like sophistry to me.
Okay and you are assuming that Twitter would just take down the tweets, or that the tweets didn't violate Twitter's policies. Is it not okay for someone in the gov't to hit the report button?
Being president or not seems like kind of a big deal to me.
If you are talking about the a more general ideal of "open and free speech" - which private companies are never legally required to uphold, but may choose to espouse anyway - then it's clearer to say that instead of conflating it with the First Amendment, which will just distract others from the points you're trying to make.
I guess people's argument then would be that the govt (or whatever) indirectly limited Twitter user's speech.
If you are worried about the "violation of the 1A spirit " should you not complain first about the government asking for things to be taken down? Or at least display the same level of outrage?
They can just as much suppress speech, by using the implied threat of future government action.
And this is basically just as bad.
Can you point to the emails/comms where this was implied?
That happening, ever, at all, implies a non zero chance that if you refuse, they will be upset and do something about it.
Something does not have to be 100% certain for it to have a huge chilling effect on speech.
The best kinds of threats are the ones that don't have to be spoken aloud, or even referenced in anyway.
Merely asking for content to be removed, is the threat, in and of itself, when you are the election team for a former vice president, who is running for president.
Ok. Well let me explained.
The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform.
Trump did the same for four years. (“Failing New York Times” etc. if you remember?) If Twitter acted because of coercion by the government, violating 1A, why were they not also corerced by Trump?
Nobody, including Twitter, had a crystal ball that told them that Trump was going to lose the election. Trump was in government and Biden wasn’t.
You could have just said "yes, I agree with you. Thats what happened."
And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
At no point did I say that the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Biden to be arrested for life for 1st amendment violations, or whatever other strawman that I did not say.
So, once again. You could have just said "Yes, you are correct. Biden's team did reach out to a platform to have content removed. "
See, I don’t agree with this. Trump tried to achieve the exact opposite. He and many in the GOP made it clear that they wanted the Hunter story to be kept on the agenda. If Twitter was pushed leftward by the Biden team, they were also pushed rightward by Trump and the GOP who wanted Twitter to do the exact opposite.
The outcome is at best a net zero chilling effect.
There is no logical reason to believe that a candidate has a greater chilling effect than the sitting President and the Senate majority. You have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
Both political parties do this, and have full time press relations people whose whole job is to do this. We might feel that is unhealthy, but crucially, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same as jailing those who defy the requests, or compelling their speech at gunpoint, or seizing the means of broadcast.
Ok, so then you could have just said "yes. I agree with you completely that they were trying to pressure them to remove the content.
You are completely correct in everything that you said!"
You just agreed with me.
> Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same
A chilling effect on speech can still exist. And chilling effects on speech, from government/politicians, is something we aught avoid.
Nonsense.
First of all, "government" is not an "in" or an "out". They represent their constituency; those are people, and in this case, they are the representatives of the workers at twitter (judging by the donations).
Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a newspaper that prints nothing but personals[1]. All day long. The owners make a decision every day to keep printing that newspaper with everything that's in it[2].
With that firmly in mind, let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, the people working at that newspaper saw the people working at another newspaper do something to their estimation illegal and unethical[3], and decided to use the tool at their disposal to stop it. And management backed them. It happens.
Then a rich person who thought to their estimation it wasn't, bought the newspaper and set policy that the people working at the newspaper were not allowed to use their estimation of legality or ethics.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_advertisement
[2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/1...
Third, that wasn't the government because Biden wasn't president at the time. Presidential campaigns are not the government.
…And fourth, all the posts they reported were Hunter's nudes, meaning the posts they were getting taken down were likely illegal already (under revenge porn laws) and certainly against ToS.
I want to know more about what 'handling' tweets means, whether all 'handle' requests were accepted or in which instances did twitter push back, etc.
i think those semantics matter, which is why i ask.
no outside person asked twitter to “handle” anything. they asked them to review it.
It seems like at minimum they are bypassing the reported tweet queue.
It feels likely that these report judgements disproportionately had the outcome desired by the requester. If not all requested tweets got taken down/suspended until deleted that will look a lot better than if this channel effectively allowed unchecked censorship.
It's not a hard outcome to achieve. Only report things blatantly violating the ToS and you get that outcome.
So ok, there was some new information (from which it's hard to confidently extrapolate much, I would say). But mostly it's a rehash of a known story, right?
It should come at no surprise that high profile users of twitter (government, celebs etc) can make requests to have content that clearly violates the twitter ToS removed and are served with higher priority.
[1] https://ischool.umd.edu/news/how-taliban-used-twitter-to-tak...
To be clear, first amendment doesn't say the gov't shouldn't (let alone can't) ask you to do (or not do) something. It states that the legislative body of the federal government cannot make a law abridging the freedom of speech.
I would not be surprised to find out sometime that there are judges who might disagree with you on that point.
I'm not going to claim that it isn't an issue that VIPs have excessive influence on social media companies and there operations. People with lots of followers have certainly been able to pull strings to craft the message at twitter in the past. Joe Biden and his campaign team c. Oct 2020 are certainly to be counted in that number. Things like banning certain accounts ( https://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-parody-twitter-acc... ) or getting your account unblocked ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45953747 ).
I am going to ask specifically how this is a first amendment issue when none of the people involved had any role within the government at the time this took place.
The 1st amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech. You just admitted he was not part of the government. Therefore it’s not a 1st amendment violation.
It may be morally wrong, or violating “free speech”, but I don’t see a 1st amendment violation.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? Are you talking about the tweets with nudity they emailed about?
And then I remember the number of people around me who got jobs because they "knew" someone.
I'm not even nearly shocked by this. And if you are, you don't recognize human nature.
Should it happen? No.
But it's a private company. They can do wtf they like. Just like Elon is doing now.
Should it be regulated? Maybe.
Quoted email: "Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 8:28 PM"
You: "government"
You may wish do double-check who was "in government", because checking my notes, it was not Biden.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections
Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government.
I mean, why is government control such a big deal when private citizens (like the Biden campaign, or this other guy who seems to have a lot of control over Twitter all of a sudden) can get the same favors? Either it matters or it doesn't, right?
Are people just being partisan or easily manipulated here?
The fact that you bring up something tangential instead pretty much shows how people don’t want to treat this rationally.
Was Twitter biased, is Fox biased etc. doesn’t seem particularly relevant.
It doesn't cover someone (regardless of influence or position) asking a company to review content against their own terms of service and policies.
e.g. I believe Tim Cook could probably contact someone at Twitter and get an answer. Do we really believe he would go in the same queue as a “regular” citizen?
To me this is a shocking revelation to anyone who doesn’t actually understand how the world works. Which, to be fair, I didn’t either for a good while, and empathize.