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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

> "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.

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