Mehdi Hasan Dismantles the Entire Foundation of the Twitter Files | Hacker News Reader

Mehdi Hasan Dismantles the Entire Foundation of the Twitter Files

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32 pointspulisse12 comments

This looks like the correction Matt Taibbi gave (https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1644086708252684288) about the 22 million flagged tweets number. Presented without comment.

This points out some important oversights, but goes off the rails here:

> But, more importantly, regarding the small number of tweets that EIP did report to Twitter… it never suggested what Twitter should do about them

Someone should read Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent.” You don’t need express collusion for the result to resemble express collusion.

The broader issue here is trust, or lack thereof. Do you agree with Hasan here because you trust the organizations and people involved, or because the structure of the system provides assurance that you don’t need to trust them? For example, if the actors involved were faith based organizations rather than non-profits, would you feel the same way?

Zoom all the way out here: Twitter is partnering with organizations (universities, non-profits) where 90%+ of members support one party to help monitor “election information.” You cannot defuse that problem by saying that we should just trust those people to be impartial. It’s like computer security: look at the system assuming everyone is a malicious actor. How does this Twitter’s system look from that vantage point?

It's not even worth refuting because Hasan got his assertion wrong, or is using the confusing nature of the CIS/CISA naming conventions to his advantage. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the government using NGOs to launder their preferred policy/other outcomes into the public consciousness is just bog standard behavior.

https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1644392551066255361

This doesn't establish anything other than that someone at CISA saw some of the work product of the EIP, an academic project run out of Stanford. Taibbi's tweet was quoted on screen, and appears to be facially incorrect.

Calling EIP an academic project is, I think, grossly misleading. If only because it makes it sound like a bunch of college kids running regression analyses on Twitter trends.

That's not the claim Taibbi made; he made a much stronger claim, which MSNBC managed to trivially refute.

It’s the claim I’m making.

As to the error—I don’t think anything is “trivial” here. In the EIP study, there were 181 tickets, with almost 6 million tweets “directly referenced in a ticket.”

If you flag a tweet and it’s removed, what happens to the associated tweets? I believe retweets and replies are removed too, right? If so, I don’t see how Hassan’s characterization is accurate either. EIP is shooting at the roots of information trees that branch out. They don’t need to shoot at all the leaves.

Mohdi Hasan didn't have you on his show to confront you about your claims, because very few people know or care that you made them, unlike the claims Taibbi made, which went viral. The mistakes you're making in your analysis just aren't newsworthy.

That’s kind of how online forums work, right? People make points such as “Party B’s rebuttal to Party A misses the larger picture”—without necessarily reiterating Party A’s point

And as noted above—Hassan’s rebuttal seems equally if not more mistaken. Taibbi is being sloppy with the definition of “flag.” But the end result—in terms of what happens if a flagged tweet is removed—is closer to Taibbi’s characterization.

I can't tell which formulation I'm meant to be responding to at this point: is it Hasan's takedown of Taibbi's clearly-flawed reporting, or is it the way Hasan's takedown applies to your own beliefs?

Your original post implicated both points (the two thoughts separated by the semicolon). But I suspect we would make more progress talking about why you think Hasan’s response isn’t clearly flawed.

I only care that Taibbi is demonstrably wrong, because I have a very low opinion of Matt Taibbi's reporting (this is a hobbyhorse of mine; I don't even think he got the Vampire Squid story right.)

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