Why the Twitter files are in fact a big deal
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
I've been continually amazed, since more and more of the general population has become represented on the internet, how few people do care about free speech. Belief in freedom of speech seems to be a fringe position that's somehow managed to stay in the US legal system in spite of depressingly overwhelming opposition.
In other words, the creeping merger of the national security state with Twitter doesn’t just bring up issues of political censorship. It also suggests that the website supposedly meant to be the “global public square” is being used as a geopolitical tool in the service of one government’s foreign policy interests.
If it's true, then that is indeed a big deal, seen from an international perspective. (And it doesn't just affect Twitter, of course.)
If you're foolish enough to treat Twitter like a global public square, you deserve everything that's coming to you. That's just the way the free market works in it's current incarnation.
The result was a deluge of censorship requests from the FBI. The bureau, Taibbi reports, sent over “lists of hundreds of problem accounts” to Twitter executives, often so lengthy they came in the form of Excel spreadsheets, and “thousands of mostly domestic reports,” despite the fact that the FITF was meant to be focused on foreign influence.
This actively harms the progress in general social awareness made by Snowden, by reducing the issue to a single party who is no more responsible than the other party - as if we could fix it by voting out democrats. This article would be so much better if it were merely useless
... many things could change in the years ahead that make the existing status quo more perilous for leftists: Twitter could start hiring conservatives; it could overcorrect in the face of right-wing criticism, or buckle under mounting FBI pressure; national security agencies could embark on a fiercer crackdown of the Left; a Republican could return to the White House; or a GOP Congress could follow Democrats’ example and pressure tech firms to censor what conservatives consider dangerous speech, to name a few possibilities. The best defense against this is to start opposing these trends now, not when it’s too late.
I didn't think they were trying to make the Left look bad. I thought they were trying to mobilise their fellow progressives, to get them to take an interest.
> The best defense against this is to start opposing these trends now, not when it’s too late.
It is, ostensibly, too late. We had a chance to protest this, back when the roadmaps were leaking and government collaboration wasn't fully instated yet. But it wasn't just progressives who didn't care, conservatives also rolled over and let this happen. It's both a failure of the Free Market and our democratic process that this happens in the first place.
The point is, now is a hell of a time to start getting mad at government intervention. We've proven that Twitter is a private platform that can be owned and traded like a deck of Pokemon cards. We've proven that every major social media company is in collusion with the government's surveillance agencies. Now, that people discover shadowbanning is a real thing, everyone is expecting riots in the street on behalf of Twitter's users. Really though, if you're lazy enough to stay on Twitter after the acquisition, you're probably not motivated enough to protest it's leadership.
Here are three potential solutions to the problem you perceive:
- Allow courts to compel private platforms to host free speech
- Use the free market to develop a compelling alternative
- Accept Twitter's corruption as a natural process of the free market
The nice thing about Mastodon is that it is federated, with servers in various different countries and jurisdictions. As such, it's not that vulnerable to pressures issuing from a specific nation state. I like that about it. A lot of people who feel wary about Musk are there already. That's a good thing.
Also, I have no idea what Mastodon's significance is in this conversation. Did I miss something?
Mastodon is seen as the main Twitter alternative by many. Lots of people migrating there from Twitter.
I am a bit sensitive when articles like this even refer to "the left" or "the right" because I'm so conditioned to think it's another misconstruction intended to create blame and hate instead of awareness and healing/resolution. I should've have commented if I didn't have time to read it all carefully though
> The files confirm something that we’d previously only learned through a lawsuit: that Twitter and other tech executives were having regular monthly and even weekly meetings with not just the FBI and its Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) — the eighty-person counterintelligence division made to combat foreign disinformation campaigns — but pretty much every security agency under the sun. Besides the bureau, those named include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, state governments like that of California, the justice and state departments, even the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested to be included in a special Signal channel set up for the election period to let government agencies feed information to social media companies, or “the industry.”
[...]
> The significance of this should be obvious. Many shortsightedly dismissed the first Twitter Files release about Twitter’s outrageous censorship of the New York Post on the grounds that because the government wasn’t involved, such censorship shouldn’t concern us. That premise is wrong, but even if we were to accept it, the fact is that the FBI and a host of other shadowy security agencies are clearly knee-deep in the decisions over what Twitter and other companies decide to censor.
- Twitter is a privately-owned, for-profit platform that can ultimately decide what stays and goes
- The New York Post isn't protected by special rights or Twitter rules that normal users aren't subject to
- The dismissive response to this 'leak' is not unsubstantiated, since we've seen much more harrowing releases with much less proportional reactions (see: Snowden, Wikileaks, et. al)
Considering those points, it's hard to listen to the Twitter Files with a straight face. Not only is none of the behavior criminal, but we didn't even learn anything here. We already knew that Twitter worked with the government during the election season to fight whatever they consider 'misinformation'. Even before that, Snowden leaked the PRISM roadmap that clearly shows Twitter and Facebook with FBI/NSA correspondence.
So again, I'm not sure if I follow the author. Not an attack on you, I understand that you're trying to cite relevant source material, but I feel like their thesis can be easily refuted.
It should be unsurprising to anyone properly aware of the facts and context that others do find it to be noteworthy, however.
> we've seen much more harrowing releases with much less proportional reactions (see: Snowden, Wikileaks, et. al)
Not sure what you intend by "proportional" here ('proportionate'?) - but Snowden, for example (avowedly a much more significant story) received weeks of headlines and coverage here in UK.
Of course, much of that coverage was of the form: "Not true -> Maybe somewhat true; Snowden is a traitor -> True but no big deal, security trumps legality -> True, but so what, we already knew all that."
And we did know a lot of that - see Duncan Campbell's reporting on Echelon, for example, as early as 1988! - but detail and documentary evidence was nonetheless important and worth publishing.
> In the 1930s, six right-wing oligarchs used the US’s and UK’s largest newspapers to spout sensationalist xenophobia, and at times even boost fascist propaganda. Today, Fox News and other right-wing mass media outlets are using the very same blueprint ...
Whereas the politicized gaming of twitter's moderation system is comparatively unacknowledged and even denied in the face of the evidence.