Comment by md_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by md_ | Hacker News Reader

For those of us with, like, day jobs, can someone summarize what damning discoveries were actually revealed in the "Twitter Files"?

My impression is:

1. These "independent journalists" like numbered lists instead of prose (OK?)

2. I find numbered lists a bit hard to read.

3. There's no headline or lede that suggests...anything? But I keep reading the numbered lists out of morbid curiosity.

4. At some point it's revealed that, shockingly, an American tech company was in contact with American government officials.

5. Those officials spoke to the tech company about known or suspected foreign influence operations that might affect that tech company.

6. The tech company expressed gratitude for those tips.

Like, honestly, isn't the reason the "mainstream media" hasn't reported on this because they're in the business of reporting on things that their viewers would find interesting, and this is a super boring story?

Yes, if you name anything "the [something] files" and label it "suppressed knowledge now come to light", it sounds sexy. But is there anything actually significant here? If so, can someone summarize it for me in a numbered list?

Even the world's least liked personality can still make valid points. The presentation was crappy, but it was indeed an expose on how Social Media in all varieties works to gaslight users of all kinds... Not just journalists.

Shadowbanning has cost a lot of people incalculable amounts of time and progress in work, while platforms were really made to push their own profit and any agenda that supported their profit.

If a huge platform like Facebook or TikTok were to simply admit the truth, it would basically be - Hey, we don't provide you any ability to chose what you'll see, and we don't even want to help you to succeed in promoting your own business, but struggle on that while we show you all of these ads...

It's bleak, and grim, and now that the world has allowed social media to infect almost every segment of the Internet, logging off means staying off the Internet entirely... Years of secret shadowbanning, covert control, info warfare, and psych manipulation on the Internet have possibly corrupted everything of value online already, but we're still only talking about Twitter... It's not just on Twitter, nothing social online is working right anymore.

Does it turn out that Twitter was shadowbanning? As far as I could tell from the "Twitter Files", no. The only thing "revealed" was that...

...Twitter ranked tweets? Which they always said they did? (e.g. https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1601019554980761600)

Even stranger, Musk himself seems to be a big fan of this approach? ("Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach"? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864)

What about Hacker news?

I agree with you about the formatting it's pretty bad.

That's exactly it. There is no smoking gun. What we've learned is that, somewhat paradoxically if not surprisingly, is that previous Twitter management had both a leftward bent to it's moderation perspectives (i.e. what to moderate and when) and a general deference to requests from agents of its host nation's government.

Which we basically knew already.

This is like if someone else buys Twitter and published Twitter Files 2.0 and we discover that Musk was sharing conspiracy memes with right wingers. Not much of a shock.

> "we basically knew already"

More gaslighting.

The fact is this behaviour and bias was rejected and ignored as "paranoia" for years until these files were released to confirm it all and worse - US intelligence and law enforcement involvement.

Shame on them & you.

I think Musk’s move is just to get the most profitable people back on the platform. Fire them up. Get them clicking ads for gold, crypto, pillows, and survival gear.

Right wingers never left twitter though. Go look at the comments to basically any partisan comment from any perspective. With only a tiny handful of the most controversial accounts as exceptions, right wing thought leaders are all still there, still tweeting daily. The idea that Twitter somehow drove conservatives away is just a convenient meme. It was never true.

It's a neat theory, but Apple was 4% of Twitter's Q1 ad revenue. I don't think the My Pillow guy has $100M to spend on anything, let alone Twitter ads.

Crypto scams and fake nutrition pills aren't the top advertisements on Infowars because Alex Jones knows more about the media business than Fox or CNN. They're the top advertisements on Infowars because mainstream advertisers won't touch Jones with a ten foot pole.

Same goes for the Twitter that Musk built.

>Which we basically knew already.

I disagree.

I don't think the vast majority of people realized to what extent the US government set the boundaries of acceptable opinions/topics and were given free passage and in some cases assistance in conducting psyops.

This will be especially eye-opening for non-US users who may now seriously consider whether to continue using US based platforms at all.

Can you point me to the “Twitter Files” showing the government set the bounds of acceptable topics? Like I said above, I had trouble picking through these long tweet threads.

This thread touches on some of the censorship of legitimate debate.

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607378386338340867

That thread seems to show two things:

1. Trust and safety is a hard job, and Twitter was...kinda not great at it, I think? Honestly, not a big surprise.

2. In high-level discussions with government policymakers, policymakers expressed general desires for what kind of misinformation might be of particular concern (like health misinfo, or misinfo leading to hoarding and panic buying).

#2 seems...sorta fine to me? #1 seems like a product problem, to be perfectly clear, but it's hard to connect that to government censorship.

I'm not trying to make light of all the failures in #1. But I find it a bit hard, assuming good faith, to understand if the view of most critics is:

a. There should be zero content filtering or content-related ranking. (I mean, that's fine; Mastodon doesn't have algorithmic ranking, and if you don't want filtering, enjoy the Viagra spam I guess?)

b. There should be content filtering and ranking, but it should rank things the way critics want. (For example, a lot of critics seem concerned not with ranking in general, but with downranking of heterodox views on Covid.)

c. There should be content filtering and ranking, but Twitter just wasn't great at it; we'd like to see them improve their processes (which I am not optimistic about given the headcount story at Twitter).

Or something else?

>it's hard to connect that to government censorship.

Mislabeling as misinfo either intentionally or unintentionally and marking links, tweets, and accounts for suppression just because they dont push a government's view is by definition "government censorship".

Concerning abc: A government that is bound by the 1st amend. should ultimately play no role in policing speech. It's not any more complicated than that.

I mean, hypothetically, what if Twitter said, "We really think it's bad for our brand to be connected to state sponsored info ops, and we'd like help avoiding it. Let's reach out to the FBI for threat intel to help us keep abreast of info ops."

(To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. In particular, Twitter's allowing Pentagon information operations--apparently by accident--on their platform doesn't look great.)

As a hypothetical--is that bad? It seems like it runs afoul of your "government should play no role in policing speech." But that seems like a somewhat oddly absolutist stance to me.

(For another hypothetical: let's say I'm Fox News, and I want to have a commentator on, but first I ping some buddies at the FBI and ask, "Is this commentator known to be an unregistered foreign agent?" Again, is it bad?)

A lot of these things could be bad. We might argue for some sort of firewall between anything involving media and private speech and anyone working in government ever. But that seems like a pretty radical departure from the status quo, and it's not obvious to me that what Twitter did was in bad faith or really different than the above examples.

It's not radical. The idea that an inherently biased 3 letter agency should be given any say in who gets to express an opinion publicly is anti-American at its core.

Good thing newer protocols like Nostr kill these attempts to weaken freedom of speech by mongers.

The idea that a social network might ask their government for assistance in identifying foreign influence operations...is pretty run of the mill?

Not sure what a "monger" is in this context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com