1- Biden wasn't in government, he was running for office. Private citizen at the time.
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.
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?