Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by murg27 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

murg27

[flagged]

View on HN

> Remember how he exposed government meddling with twitter and everyone called it nothing burger.

Please provide actual evidence of said government meddling with Twitter.

I can't speak to the evidence or lack thereof, but this is what they were referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

IIRC, Twitter(and several other social media platforms) was asked to limit/block accounts that were spreading Covid misinformation at the height of the pandemic. You know, the kind of stuff a functioning government interested in protecting ALL of it's citizens would do. That's "heart" of this "government meddling" excuse.

I would say there is all sorts of "government meddling" going on right now, with all the uncertanty and mess with all the services + departments we all rely on over the last month....

A government might want to do it for good motives, but its still a restriction on free speech.

Otherwise you are appointing some group of people to decide what is "good speech" and "bad speech" and banning the latter.

It was a nothing burger because Twitter didn't blindly do everything they were asked to do, they rejected a bunch of the government requests. It's not weird for law enforcement to notify a platform of something suspicious they found on the platform.

The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.

> The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.

It got requests from both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign. Joe Biden was not President in 2020. Donald Trump was still running the government that was "censoring" social media.

I don't know why this never comes up when people talk about the Twitter Files. .

That's because it was a nothingburger.

Remember how Taibbi got an agency name wrong and used that to make a bunch of conjectures that didn't actually align to reality?

If you don't, maybe you should refresh your memory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com