"In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen.
There's an implication based on the political donations of Twitter employees that that was likely the case.
Instead, he talks about campaign contributions, which isn't even circumstantial evidence of bias. You don't have to contribute to a political campaign to process moderation requests from them. There's no plausible mechanism by which the volume of requests that can be processed is related the amount of money donated by Twitter employees. You just need one contact and again, no evidence exists - and not even clear accusations have been made - that Twitter employees involved were reluctant to process requests made by the Trump team.
If anything the fact that Matt Taibbi is dishonestly trying to make this connection is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that they couldn't find anything even remotely damning. Because if they could find something actually damning, they would've used that instead. Resorting to, ugh, Twitter employees are liberal, so I'm sure they weren't entirely being fair in processing requests from the Trump team and ugh, more contributions to the Democrats so like, must be able to process more requests, which is a complete non-sequitur, is highly damaging to whatever narrative that he's trying to push.
Even if he had a database like that, it's unlikely it's easily classified in a way you could actually correlate individual actions to specific sources. I highly doubt there's a database column for "as commanded by the dark Democratic conspiracy."
> This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.
Yet the fact that there's absolutely no attempt to even analyze the data for signs of bias, but have to resort to a complete non-sequitur, is quite telling. It likely means that the raw data doesn't support their narrative. You can also share a sample of tweets that were requested to reviewed by both parties and which ones got removed and which ones did not. If the Trump administration's requests were not honored despite the tweets clearly being in violation or the Biden campaign's requests being honored despite the tweets clearly not being in violation, well that would be something if there was a clear pattern, or internal discussions that explicitly suggest that they are making decisions like that specifically to favor one candidate. It still has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, but it would at least corroborate the claim that Twitter was biased.
Again, the standards need to be high because they are the party with all the information. This type of insinuation can be persuasive if you're the outside party that suspects bias and the other party controls the information. But claiming that there might be some bias, look at all this external information as to why it might have happened, tells the exact opposite story, when they are the ones that control the information. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi literally have all this information at their disposal and clearly want to spread this narrative that Twitter was biased in the Democrats' favor. But they can't prove it - it seems ridiculous for them not to have looked into this, but they thought it was best not to release that information. Why not? Almost certainly because it detracts from the narrative.
Hold on the second does not follow from the first. They might have send more request because they had a more savy social media team, they might have send more request because much more ToS violating content was posted about Biden.
If there is a massive difference in percentages of honored requests that could _maybe_ indicate bias (but that's still a bi maybe).
https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/159882999626439065...
It does not say "98.47% of Twitter donated to Dems".
Rather it says: "Of the $968,749 contributions made by employees of Twitter, 98.47% of those contributions went to Dems."
It says nothing about the number of people making those donations and thus nothing about the percent of the employees that made those contributions.
(edit)
It is also fun to extend that table to 2016 and before:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...
Contributions by Party of Recipient
Cycle Total Democrats % to Dems Republicans % to Repubs
2022 $185,267 $165,969 99.73% $451 0.27%
2020 $968,749 $909,431 98.47% $14,137 1.53%
2018 $309,394 $295,722 96.38% $11,100 3.62%
2016 $858,596 $589,301 69.07% $263,945 30.93%
2014 $41,300 $23,300 88.59% $3,000 11.41%
2012 $35,529 $34,279 99.28% $250 0.72%
2008 $3,000 $3,000 100.00% $0 0.00%If not, would you please restate "98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems" to be more representative of what the numbers say.
Your argument is totally dishonest. It's infuriating. What are you saying? That because it's possible 14,137 Twitter employees donated $1 each to the republicans and 1 person donated the other 900K, we can ignore this 98.47% figure entirely?
Second of all, the dollar measurement is not a useless one. It is a measure of wealth, influence, and conviction in the cause. Those Republicans donating $1 probably aren't in charge of censorship. The guy who donated $900K though...
Third, this is Twitter we're talking about. They are headquartered in San Francisco, a very blue city in a very blue state. Their employees are young educated techies. I have friends who work there and have visited their office several times.
Point is, you're not fooling anybody but yourself. Enjoy your motivated reasoning.