Just an observation, but it seems that the Twitter files revelations are getting drastically less press than everything else Elon does. It almost feels like kill the messenger
I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat.
Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah?
> Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else.
> If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway.
Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
> Dicks. Dicks were censored.
Dicks for the big guy.
The reporting in 2020 had emails that showed Hunter arranging meetings with Joe that Joe denied, texts telling associates not to refer to Joe Biden by name, as well as an email where Hunter would be holding money for "the big guy."
It looks like this could be quid pro quo official corruption, but there's not enough there yet to be sure. It needs to be investigated.
We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Bill Clinton because it looked like his real estate investment was too good to be true and he had a dodgy tax deduction. We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump based on non-specific allegations of collusion. The evidence here is at least as strong as it was in those cases.
Change it to a knitting forum that bans crochet posting, the principle is the same. Is it government censorship if the government helps the knitting forum to develop the anti-crochet rule, and then acts as watchdogs?
- The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
- Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval"
In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned.
What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
>In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards.
I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
I don't understand why this gets so oft repeated. The Post article (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...) contains nothing resembling porn. There are some pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe, but that's not even a revelation. We already knew he had a drug problem.
What is a revelation is what could be official corruption, where Hunter gets paid exorbitant salaries to hold jobs he's not at all qualified for, and then funnels a portion of that money on to Joe. There's a possibility of quid pro quo that needs to be taken seriously and investigated further.
The evidence here is at least as strong as Whitewater and Russian collusion, and we appointed special prosecutors to investigate those. We should do the same here.
Who else could be "the big guy" that Hunter is to hold 10% for?
We don't have a comprehensive list of tweets the campaign and the DNC forwarded. I looked at archive.org for the tweets linked here: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
2 of these include Hunter nudity, one is a video that doesn't play, one was never archived.
One, from GuySquiggs, is a Hunter photo with the nudity mspainted out, but questioning the age of the woman in the photo.
Also, is that a legal use of campaign funds to have staffers try to scrub the candidate's son's nudes from Twitter?
I'm also not making any claim about the contents of taken down tweets aside from the ones I was able to see on archive.org. Those are just 3 tweets of 5 that were requested to be taken down by "the Biden team."
AFAIK we haven't been given any links to tweets that the DNC requested to be taken down.
The Twitter Files also says that the Trump White House made some takedown requests. Excepting actually illegal content like CSAM, any such request would be government censorship.
If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging.
So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.