Twitter removes pictures of Hunter Biden's penis, and US three-letter agencies meet with top social media execs seem pretty weak.
I'm fairly left-leaning though, so I may be glossing over something. Objectivity, are there details that are valuable outside of scoring political points?
"Certain foreign governments have been known to engage in hacking to obtain dirt on politicians, which they then leak around election time to influence voters (remember the DNC leaks? That was Russian Intelligence). Social media platforms are aware of this, and are actively working to try and limit foreign intelligence agencies ability to influences the public via these 'hack-and-leak' operations. [...]"
What the hell happened? How is this a nothingburger? The latest drop reveals that the pentagon was involved too, and it was using special access to promote US propaganda in the middle east. Now that it’s not about “hunter biden’s penis” anymore, can we start getting upset? I feel like I’m losing my mind!
The real issues are (1) What government requests are reasonable and what should Twitter respond to outside of subpoenas, and (2) Should certain groups, such as celebrities and political campaigns, have their review requests prioritized.
However, the Twitter files are trying to convince you that Twitter threw the election to Biden, and that any moderation discussions are inappropriate. These are stupid and highly biased points of view. It's no wonder we cannot discuss it meaningfully. The Twitter files themselves poisoned the discussion.
It's very similar to the lab leak theory? Should we check whether the virus had origins in a lab? Of course! However, the real question being asked by its store supporters is "Can we blame the Covid crisis on the scientific community, and also maybe democrats?" Again, how do you even address the important question when it's drowned out by a ludicrous and biased political question?
That's the thing about the Twitter files. They almost purposefully sank their own message. It's so frustrating.
I also think you’re being a bit disingenuous and assuming bad faith from the get go. I’m sure there are tons of replies to the original tweets saying the things you’re claiming are being said, but the original tweets don’t make such bold claims. The main message I got from everything so far is that the feds had a lot of influence over twitters moderation decisions, from inside and out. As a leftist, I think that’s a bad thing.
I do think that the hunter biden laptop story is a massive scandal and I detest how it’s been reframed as “it’s just dick pics bro.” That was a coverup of pretty clear cut corruption and it seems that the FBI ordered it, and I think that’s bad.
I do really hate that they were forced to release this stuff on twitter, and I’m optimistically hoping that’s the main reason it isn’t being discussed as much as I think it should be. (I almost never click twitter links on hn.) It could absolutely have been done better and I know it’s just to drive traffic to the site. I’m hoping mainstream outlets actually cover it once everything has been released, but I’m pretty doubtful.
Frustrating indeed.
It sounds like you’re interpreting this as “the FBI colluded with twitter to influence the election,” when a more parsimonious interpretation might be “Democratic candidates received more violent rhetoric and domestic terror threats that warranted FBI involvement.”
> That was a coverup of pretty clear cut corruption and it seems that the FBI ordered
I just re-read files 7 and don't see them claim either of those things, let alone offer proof. There is a lot of insinuation - shared documents (content unknown), and an internal conversation with a guy who USED to be FBI. But no request from the FBI to suppress the story.
In other circumstances the fact pattern might count for something. But when you have an owner with full access to company records trying desperately to make this a Thing, the absence of direct evidence is deafening. Why do multiple days of the dumps keep referencing public campaign contributions, when it would be easy for Twitter to demonstrate a bias in moderation requests quantitatively if it existed? Why focus on Baker if there were any direct requests from the FBI?
The answer is obvious: the truth was boring enough that they had to rely on insinuation to spice it up. All of the leaked info before today is consistent with the public story: Twitter had policies for dealing with the confirmed threat of hack-and-plant interference, including channels for the government to share specific concerns. When a real situation came up, they had trouble figuring out what to do and discussed it.
With all that said, I think this latest dump is newsworthy if not surprising. Everyone expects that tech companies have special policies for the government of the country they are based in, and that governments play psy-ops while decrying each others'. But it's still important to call them on it periodically.
But "Election Interference" has been a very popular term in past few years and that seems to describe what was done quite accurately.
Businesses get favors from the government whenever they call the police or are involved in a lawsuit. They help the government when they pay taxes, and when they give information to the police. The BTK killer was busted because T-Mobile shared his information with the FBI. This was considered normal at the time, and is considered normal today.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. It's how capitalism works. If you don't like capitalism that's fine, but you shouldn't be surprised when the capitalist country you live in does capitalism.
"but Twitter is a private company, they can censor whomever they want"
"well actually they were getting paid to censor whatever the government told them to"
And a pivot to capitalism at the end too, nice
Private companies can censor whomever they want, and that has been the case as long as the US has existed. I'd prefer it if Twitter was more consistent about it, but that's just my opinion.
The government never paid Twitter to censor anyone. The FBI paid Twitter 4 million as reimbursement for processing their information requests, and Twitter pushed back against a lot of those requests.
Companies getting paid by the government is absolutely how capitalism works. Lockheed Martin and Boeing get trillions of dollars of government money to build weapons. SpaceX gets paid to launch satellites. Tesla gets paid to make electric cars. Hell Elon wouldn't be the (second) richest man in the world if it wasn't for our tax dollars.
Nobody should be surprised by any of this. It's how our system has worked for over 250 years.
The government is paying Twitter to do work in the same way arduous FOIA requests have to pay the government for work. It's not like you can request millions of paper documents from the government without paying for it.
Is there any proof Twitter actually profited from these requests? It appears they are paying for the work itself. Twitter may have actually lost money if you add the total cost of employee compensation plus the cost of managing this whole infrastructure.
It's unsurprising for sure, but still improper and disturbing in a nominally free and democratic society.
"4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others."
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605294744833343488?s=20&t...
"6. The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists."
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605295735553118245?s=20&t...
It's easy to ignore that point when you're happy with the outcome, but it should give you the heebie-jeebies to see that kind of political collusion between the government and big tech.
Jack as expected generally was pretty consistently seen pushing back against such notions but not very strongly. One thing the Twitter files did reveal to me is that Jack is exactly the sort of person I thought he was, mostly a voice of sober second thought relative to those reporting to him.
The thing I've found most interesting about the Twitter files is how Musk insisted on a selective leak honestly. Because this leak was so selective, I don't have much choice but to presume what he isn't leaking is exculpatory evidence. I don't see how Twitter was run under Agarwal to be any worse than how it's run under Musk honestly, it just sucked in a different way, and mostly wish Jack was still in charge. Because you know, he actually believed in Free Speech and wasn't a phony like Musk.
A private company censoring speech is one thing- it was widely known that Twitter was moderated with a bias towards liberals. But the government doing so seems like a violation of the first amendment, doesn’t it?
But they seem to be a bunch of half-truths, only releasing information that Musk wants. @jack asked Elon to release all his email yet that wasn't done, so it's very possible there's a lot that either contradicts and/or puts in context that goes against the narrative the files are trying to push.
It's not just the penis; it's the emails detailing "10% for the big guy". Just like it wasn't the "pee tape," but the komprmat; right?
It's have no problem with Trump getting the actual "pee tape" scrubbed. I definitely have a problem of discussion of it is scrubbed
They also only did so for ~24h during which Fox News didn't even run the story because even they thought it might be fake. Which is less of a stance than twitter took. Twitter just disallowed pointing links to the NYPost article for 24h but you were free to talk about the content on twitter.
With a 100% chance it would have been broadcasted by Twitter to the entire world, from where it would have been become the biggest "news story" of the months. Journalists would have unanimously declared solidarity with twitter, lawsuits would have been launched and investigations would have been performed.
Do you actually believe that anybody on Twitter would have taken it and covered it up that Trump was forcing them to censor? What world do you live in?
Also remember that for as much as conservatives say that Twitter is a bastion of left wing thought, Trump was permitted on the platform even though he repeatedly violated the TOS. He was treated better than most any Twitter user up until he used the platform to stage an attempted coup against the US government. So not only was Twitter protecting him, the bar for taking action against him was astronomically high.
Moreover, Trump didn’t have to use Twitter to suppress the Russia investigation; he obstructed justice and then his hand-picked attorney general used the DOJ to run interference on the Mueller report, which mainstream media credulously accepted. That’s far worse than anything alleged in the so-called Twitter files, but you didn’t see Republicans mad at the DOJ for that.
This is why their current indignation over the Twitter Files rings so hollow. If the FBI is really acting politically through Twitter, part of the cause must be the politicization of the DOJ under Trump administration, which was gleefully used as a political tool for 4 years. You’ll never see that level of self-reflection though.
So my answer to the original question of “do these files contain valuable information?” is: maybe, but if you expect the people who are maddest about the Twitter Files to actually fix anything they allege, that would be like thinking Elon Musk is the guy to bring free speech to Twitter; the people who are the maddest are hypocrites only mad that this tactic is being used against them. They will happily use this tactic against others once they have power (all the while suggesting they will fix the issue). And we know this because they did exactly that from 2016 to 2020.