The honest truth: I don't think twitter is useful enough to truly care, definitely not anywhere near as much as some people in this thread seem to. So i'll write a comment or two, but then i'll go back to woodworking or whatever and it will not reenter my mind till the next story pops up on the frontpage.
As for my views:
I believed twitter is a serious net negative for society before this story, and it hasn't changed that view.
If it went away tomorrow, i would not shed a single tear.
As for my politics - while it's really none of your business, since you seem to care a lot:
Being in DC for a long time drove any desire to identify with any particular party well out of my mind.
Georgia thankfully does not have registered party affiliation.
There is some politically active Daniel Berlin in NY that donates a bunch, but it ain't me.
> 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats?
So what’s the principle here? What’s the plan. Which companies should have to disclose the political contributions of their employees and what should they do if it’s unbalanced at more than say 60-40, randomly fire employees until it’s back in line?
The "driven by connections" and the culture that implies is the interesting part. It highlights how they're a center of power that needs similar anti-corruption traditions as any other center of power; there's at least the possibility of something generally useful coming out of this being known.
Looking at the donation ratio as proof of the very obvious bias that everyone who cared to look already know about, is good for... what, playing "I told you so"?
I lived and worked in DC for 10+ years.
I watched this sort of thing happen live just sitting in coffee shops and restaurants near K street or the capitol, or just walking the halls in the office buildings.
This is not driven by political donations at the 500-1000 level that employees are doing.
No one gives a crap about those. Sorry. they just don't.
Maybe you get invited to a dinner with 10000 other people and sit 1000 feet away from a candidate.
The people who have "connections" to a place like twitter exist on both sides, aren't getting them from small donations to candidates, and believing otherwise is pretty far out there.
If you want to use the donation number to paint this as "twitter has a liberal censorship bent because it's employees are democrats", the problem is that despite matt's anecdote, actual research doesn't back this up:
I'm also incredibly curious what you think should happen that would actually be better?
Everything that involves humans is biased in some way by humans.
You ban them from donating - well, if your problem is really they are democrats, this will fix nothing, of course.
You force them to hire equal numbers of people from various political ideologies - There's a lot of them!
You hold them criminally liable for something or other - good luck defining what "wrong" means. Or getting something other than robots to be good at it.
Unless you are going to sequester people in a room, without access to anything outside, and somehow suppress all their lived experiences, you are going to end up with biased people moderating content.
But here's the thing: If you want the platform to be useful in any meaningful way, you need to moderate content anyway, and live with the fact that it's always going to be biased. Free speech absolutism is not actually a highly useful thing for society in the end, despite the dangers of everything else. That's humans for you.
All of our systems and all of the things we build are biased by the people who create and run them. That's true of justice systems, governments, your friend groups, everything.
Trying to remove all the bias from decision making in something as large as twitter is like trying to kill all the ants in your backyard.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. You seem to have gone off on some wild tangent and started it with calling me "naive".
Let me break it down:
- Influence over Twitter policy is mostly through connections with politicians
- At least using donations as a metric, 97%+ of Twitter employees support the Democrats
- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy
- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform.
Which is kind of the key point of the story?
I mean the banning of Trump while President kind of makes sense. There was nobody (or maybe 3% of employees) who who leaned Republican who could actually argue their point.
Given that you seem to be incorrect on the second part, the rest of your statement falls apart. You seem to have a severe misunderstanding of math, 97% of donations went to Democrats. Not 97% of employees donated to Democrats. If you can do basic napkin math, this means if you had one leader, manager or whatever be a particularly prolific donator they could crowd out the entire company in terms of donations. This has zero actual bearing on how much influence the company as a whole has, unless you want to argue that it's illegal for private individuals to ever donate to a political party under fear of biasing their company.
Though given that you've made this mistaken point multiple times now I don't think you actually care and are just pushing a narrative here.
Here:
"- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy"
No, this does not follow, even a little.
The donations are to politicians, not from politicians.
So you seem to be trying to argue "because some of the employees donate to democrats, all employees therefore accept influence from democrats overwhelmingly". But this is not logical in any way, shape or form.
First, as pointed out numerous times, you don't know who the donations are from, and what population at twitter they represent.
For all you know, the entire policy team is republican or whatever and didn't donate at all!
Using the small percent who did donate somewhere as a proxy smear of the entire population of twitter employees is beyond silly.
Second, you have established zero connection between donation and influence of the donatee, because none can exist.
If i donate to say the ACLU, it doesn't mean the ACLU has influence over me.
It may (or may not!) mean we share some views, but that's not the same as them being able to influence me at all.
I donated a bunch to toys to toys for tots and the salvation army this season. By your argument, apparently they have a massive amount of influence on me through some unknown, unproven connection!
Yes, I think it is naive to believe otherwise, and that most of your argument is incredibly biased and naive, so i did call you naive for believing so.
Third, using donations of employees as a proxy metric for who has influence on employees is not backed up by any research, which i explicitly gave you, shows exactly the opposite of what you are claiming, and you just ignored.
"- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform."
Except the evidence shows when anyone expressed concern, they were fast to censor it.
It even says that!
So your whole point here, where it's about some twitter = democrat conspiracy, is nonsense.
Blocking DMs from sharing URLs to a mainstream news story is CCP-level censorship. I'd expect to read about this happening on WeChat, not here. Yet here we are.
> Blocking DMs from sharing URLs to a mainstream news story is CCP-level censorship. I'd expect to read about this happening on WeChat, not here. Yet here we are.
Twitter admitted it was a wrong decision and reverted it. So it’s more "here we were" than "here we are".
No, this will almost certainly not hit the frontpage. The dupe detector has already started removing all the threads, even though on other topics it only engages after a topic actually gets picked up.
Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)
None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)
edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:
edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang:
I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.
It'll be really interesting tomorrow to see how much tech and media end up suppressing this story too.
Presumably, just like with the story this is all about, they'll just ban all mention of it and delete everybody's accounts because of "safety" or something.
I'm actively watching a variety of mainstream press to see if any of them cover the story, but honestly I doubt they will, other than maybe to have an AP fact check that says that the whole thing is false and that Elon made it all up.
You're posting on a site where I'd guess that even the figurehead (PG) is so sick of the petty squabbling that he now almost never posts here himself. I imagine PG has confidence in how @dang attempts to moderate HN.
My suggestion is that instead of thinking about the moderating preventing certain topics being discussed, understand that it's trying to discourage things that engender certain styles of discussions. @dang talks consistently and clearly about wanting posts that satisfy intellectual curiosity. There are other sites for that.
As one example to hopefully demonstrate this isn't some political bias: while other sites seem forever covered with articles and threads about negative Musk/Twitter stories, they very rarely make it from New to Front here, because I'd say moderators have little confidence they ever lead to HN-style discussions.
Seems pretty silly to cherry-pick one comment as if it's a gotcha when I've posted such things a thousand times or more and none of it is secret. HN is a moderated/curated site—it always has been, and no one has ever claimed otherwise.
> edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang
You're allowed to reply to me just fine. Your account is rate-limited because you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. That's against the rules for good reason: it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, and you know what else? despite every ideologue's passionate perception, we do so regardless of which ideology they're wedded to.
Normally I'd take the rate limit off, at least temporarily, since there's nothing you're saying that doesn't have a straightforward refutation, and I like answering criticisms and trusting readers to make up their own minds. However, I have to meet a friend for dinner in 5 minutes and probably won't be able to look in on this thread for a few hours. Since you've already posted a bunch of false and/or misleading things (starting with "Every effort will be taken to suppress this story" and downhill from there), I think it prudent to wait until I'm free to respond.
I love drama and chaos as much as any nerd with too much time on their hands… but this story has not a single compelling nugget to it. Like, the tweets so far are so un-juicy that I would like to ensure this doesn’t ever go to the frontpage so nobody else wastes their time reading this boring non-story. I wish it was worth reading.
There’s zero evidence of that, so far at least. The emails show nothing of the sort: they show a bunch of people ham-fistedly trying to enforce policies designed to protect the company. I look forward to seeing some evidence that people at Twitter were in cahoots in order to support Joe Biden, but thus far, there’s zero evidence of that — it’s the most mundane behaviour you could imagine.
That’s evidence that they applied their policies. There is no evidence that they applied these policies in order to favour Biden. I will happily accept evidence that they did it to favour Biden, if some is shown… but that has not happened yet.
In their emails, they seemed to be be brainstorming ways of insisting that they were only applying their policies as normal, but not everybody agreed that this was the case.
I don't think we need to read between the lines here. There were people in Twitter that felt they were overstepping things and emails from various people in the US government, but the communications team were very careful to ensure that they pointed towards their policy about hacked materials and to give themselves leeway by claiming that they were just applying an abundance of caution to the situation.
This looks much more like evidence of Republicans trying and failing to shape a political narrative right before an election. And yes, I have dug through the contents of the laptop. Dysfunctional heir takes a lot of drugs, has a lot of sex, and has a lot of daddy issues, big whoop.
Twitter's grounds for suppressing it were kinda bullshit, but they rightly suspected they were being used as the launchpad for a PR campaign and and didn't want to find themselves in a Cambridge Analytica-type situation and decided not to touch the hot potato.
At least put more effort into naming your throwaway account next time.
No, this is just an attempt to get the stink of a scandal to stick to Biden during election season because calling him a dementia-ridden pedophile wasn't resonating with the public as well as they had hoped.
At best, this is a story of Twitter being over-cautious about handling potential misinformation - which is a valid criticism to make and a conversation worth having - but the narrative that the government and Twitter collaborated to suppress "the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop" in order to manipulate the election is plain BS.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing. Given that it was indeed Hunter Biden's laptop, why isn't it fair to say that their overly-cautious approach to handling potential misinformation led to them attempting to suppress the truth about it? (It's also worth noting that much of the discussion - both the reporting in this thread and Twitter's original public responses - was not about misinformation but about whether the information gathered from the laptop should be considered "hacked" and therefore prohibited regardless of whether it's true.)
By "the truth" I don't mean the literal truth of the laptop's existence or ownership, but to refer facetiously to the various conspiracy theories surrounding the laptop's contents, such as proof of Biden having stolen the election, child pornography, video of him doing drugs with Hunter, evidence that he and Fauci manufactured COVID, etc. Something damning that the Democrats and Twitter (being puppets of the DNC) desperately wanted suppressed because it would immediately disqualify Biden as a candidate if it got out.
But as far as is known, the laptop contained nothing of the sort. Hunter Biden being a drug-using fuckup who trades on his father's fame isn't a scandal, it's basic rich kid behavior.
I'd add that at least AFAICT, Twitter's ban of the NY Post's tweet about the laptop story, which hyped the article posted on the NY Post's website, gave the story even more visibility than if they'd just ignored it.
As I recall, the entire media world had to weigh in, telling many more folks about the story than would have heard about it without the controversy over the tweet.
In fact, I don't use Twitter and generally don't read the NY Post. Yet I heard about the tweet and the story based on the uproar that the tweet had been removed. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have heard much about it unless there were actual indictments.
And AFAIK, at no time was the NY Post website impeded from serving the story.
If censorship was the goal, it was completely misdirected and, unsurprisingly, ineffective.
So far I file this as another in the long line of very handwavy scandals that Democrats did. I'd be more willing to consider merits when someone writes an article and explains what the accusation is instead of the hypey tone with not very clear emails. Seems like more "this is huge! gamechanging" type of story that was used for Benghazi where I couldn't even figure out who was being accused of what.
I don't doubt there are some individuals who acted too politically at Twitter, but of course many people are going to insist this should be the only thing discussed in the media and should invalidate Biden and make everything anyone has ever said in the media false.
Several Republicans, particularly Kevin McCarthy, have already admitted the real purpose of the Benghazi hearings was to hurt Hillary Clinton's poll numbers, so yeah. Same shit, different Democrat.
Because at the end of the day people chose what they want to believe in based on their own beliefs, values and biases, making the poop stick. Like how there were (are?) people who believed that there's a secret basement in a pizza restaurant used by politicians to hurt children.
Wait, you're suggesting because "people chose what they want to believe in based on their own beliefs, values and biases, making the poop stick", politicians are justified in suppressing truthful news stories?
I feel like it might be of relevance to the hacker community in what way social media companies attempt to shape our views and opinions. The mere fact that this may be seen as targeted at one party or another really shouldn't matter (I'm not American and so luckily don't have to choose between Democrats/Republicans, as I find them both pretty dreadful - Republicans more so.)
But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.
It's definitely not dead; there are some amazing projects being hacked on right now.
But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story).
I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space.
(And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)
"Corporate coders" is such a perfect, succinct phrase; the antithesis of what I remember from the early days of Linux. It's so well said it requires no further description.
I can't speak for everyone who flagged it, but I routinely flag Twitter threads on nontechnical topics because in my experience they're almost always a vector for shoddily sourced news that confirms the readers' biases. Matt Taibbi in particular is someone who I personally find trustworthy enough to tell a story like this. But if I hadn't clicked into this thread already convinced that the broad outline of his story was true, I'd be asking a lot of questions about where Taibbi got his information from and how he knows it wasn't a selective leak to misrepresent the discussions.
Why would you "routinely flag Twitter threads" if they are not obvious spam, dupes, or egregiously off-topic? You are not a guest curator. There is a reason you cannot downvote submissions on HN and the flag button is not a substitute for that.
If you don't like something, ignore it and move on. Someone else may find it interesting. It's not your duty to prevent the rest of the community from reading something you don't like.
It’s not a question of personal dislike. There are plenty of news articles, blog posts, etc. whose positions I think are nonsensical or wrongheaded yet clearly align with HN’s mission of intellectual curiosity. But with Twitter threads on nontechnical topics, in my experience, the intent and effect of posting them is to whip people up into a rage. This not particularly civil comments section is one of the better ones I’ve seen - the top comment as of when im posting this only has two angry exclamation points.
Maybe I’m not deep enough in the weeds on the laptop story to understand the bigger picture, but so far, all the emails have shown are that members of the US government (which regulates Twitter) have the ability to contact Twitter and Twitter (as an organisation) does what it thinks will best ensure the survival of the company. This is a company that has executives forced to sit in front of and answer to congress, of course they would behave this way? What other possible outcome could there be? The problem here is, surely, using the NSA example, that the government has the power to regulate Twitter (which in turn puts pressure on Twitter to comply with the government). But that’s not what the story is apparently about, apparently the story is about the democrats?
I guess you could try to massage the word “regulate” to make it untrue but given Twitter has literally been fined by the FTC multiple times and is subject to a consent decree which applies legal culpability to Twitter executives unless they do what the FTC require… they are absolutely at the behest of the US government.
Twitter censoring at the behest of political party operatives is pretty sketchy if true. The claim was made in the thread, I'm curious if there will be more evidence in this thread to substantiate it.
I agree with you, and I’m surprised Matt glossed over it. I think the question for me as a more government trusting person is;
What is the difference between the government providing unique information, because of its potential Intelligence insights, and what is the government trying to get things taken down that are not against twitters policies
> what is the government trying to get things taken down that are not against twitters policies
Twitter's policies being the basis of credibility in this question?
If this story showed us anything it's clear they were censoring at the whims of the moderators feelings, not based on some predefined set of rules or conditions. Even when multiple people brought up the fact the hacking angle was mere speculation, the Twitter execs glossed over it and said to say it's true in public communiqués anyway (until they have time to find out if it is true).
As long as there's a strong culture of censorship, all that matters is who has influence on the gatekeepers. Not what arbitrary rules they set for themselves.
Are you saying they were expecting to get proof it was a hack within the next day and simply jumped the gun? What happened after those 24hrs of “deliberation” then? Did they backtrack?
It took almost a year to find out it wasn’t hacked and it was bullshit like everyone thought it might be from day 1 (including we found out today even Twitter employees). Plenty of time to deliberate I guess.
Well if you're drama starved "just" confirmation that they purposefully manipulated public opinion, the thing that was already obvious, isn't exactly another drama to watch but nonetheless it's good to get confirmation of that
How about the fact that they knew their justified reason for blocking the content, hacked materials, was an utter farce, and yet they kept on trucking along with bald faced lies?
What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?
This comment illustrates why it's a good idea to prune these kinds of stories from the homepage. No one learns anything new or surprising from discussing this stuff here, at this point we could have the same political nerdfight in our sleep.
I think if your focus is on the discourse, you’re right.
But I bet you the majority of people who saw this item on the front page aren’t interested in comments and this is a form of news. To be aware that this is a thing.
My belief is this kind of news is hard to miss elsewhere, so no one is harmed if it's culled from here. But I'm open to correction on that point; everyone has their own surfing habits.
It's awfully stupid, but as a meta point, take a step back and see how well HN's moderation focuses it all on this one dumb thread, and preserves the rest of the home page for a bunch of random tech stories, to the point where there's still room for "Roman Egypt was a strange province".
It's pretty impressive. It wasn't always this good! Back during Snowdonia, the whole front page would be 11 different flavors of NSA stories.
> No one learns anything new or surprising from discussing this stuff here
It was surprising to me to see that the various political parties are in direct contact with people at Twitter to remove stuff, and I consider myself fairly well informed.
I've run a forum for almost 20 years. There are reporting tools that most people use, but regular reporters (either a contentious personality or just a regular and conscientious user) often just contact me directly after the email address was revealed previously. Seems completely obvious that media reps from every political party would have some direct line or priority tool to report things. They have this with newspapers and TV networks as well. They plead their case or make a legal threat, or appeal on personal grounds.
As another "VIP contact" example, look at Musk supposedly directly contacting Kanye regarding his ban. The average user just sees a block screen. That seems fairly unremarkable to me.
Do you actually care about what happens on this website or is this just a good chance for you to emerge randomly and make some arch point about how stupid everyone is for falling for this garbage?
I don't have a particular attachment to this website, but I admire 'dang for doing the hard work of moderating it, and for doing so in an honest and transparent way for a very long time now. So it bugs me to see people disparage that work by insinuating darker motives.
And he's pretty transparent about wanting discussions satisfying intellectual curiosity. I'd guess that a lot of Twitter discussions are dampened (e.g., from hitting the front page) because the chance that they'll engender that sort of discussion is very, very low. I think the idea is that Hacker News isn't the place where you discuss anything tech in any way you want, but where you have that certain mode of discussion (rather than certain bias of viewpoint).
I'm a moderate, not a Democrat and not a Republican.
I think people on the left have a blind spot here, that the more suppression they use, the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the right grow to resent them. I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely.
At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.
If this issue is the sticking point given the other differences in platform (many that involve fundamental rights and freedoms), then it sounds like Republicans have managed to find a good new wedge issue (you not voting is a known part of their playbook).
The whole idea that there are "sides" to be had is IMHO extremely sad in the first place. This whole bipartisan system bullshit is causing so much damage, and its been going on since at least the 70s.
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” -John Adams in letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.
That's an odd take on US history-- it certainly wasn't all roses before the 70s, what with political sides getting people blacklisted, killed, or even starting a civil war.
Is there a smoking gun here that points the blame to any officials representing the party, as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias?
I find the tweetstorm format to be not particularly coherent, and I haven’t followed the story closely enough to know who the actors are, but Ro Khanna (a Democrat) is one of the names I recognize and he seems to be against the censoring.
Joe Biden wasn’t “the government” yet, look at the date. I wish we knew what these tweets actually were. If it was suppressing a news story, that’s bad. If it’s asking for death threats to be removed, that’s not bad.
Wow, 99.7% contributions went to democrats... If that isn't damning evidence of partisan bias I don't know what is! I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that one-sided.
The two "others" were Bernie Sanders and Evan McMullin, and the one Republican was Adam Kinzinger, a high-profile Trump critic who didn't even run for reelection in '22. There was a single individual donation of $200 to the RNC.
I don't know what anybody expects, though. Tech workers tend to be young, affluent, educated city-dwellers, and that demographic is strongly and increasingly inclined toward supporting Democrats. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, a liberal city in a heavily Democratic state. There's no conspiracy at work here. Republicans could choose to try to appeal to tech workers if they wanted.
Those are from individuals, capped at a few thousand dollars. The GOP raised more than the Democrats in the PAC arena, so we’ll never know the true balance when accounting for big donations at the top.
I would, yes. In fact, the Trump White House did just that, it’s right there in the thread. Without knowing what the tweets they had removed were, I don’t see evidence of wrongdoing. There are legitimate reasons to have tweets taken down: malicious impersonation, revenge porn (which apparently some of these were), death threats, etc.
Is that a defence or further proof of malfeasance?
The Biden campaign, which became the government, perhaps in part due to the assistance provided, requested and received assistance. If the campaign wasn't the government and didn't have the power to compel assistance, why did Twitter help?
Because at least some of the content reported by them was unequivocally bad? Like someone's nudes that were published without consent. Or are you saying that if NYPost decides to run some candidate's children's nudes all of a sudden it's journalism instead of revenge porn?
Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives, the executives specifically mentioned the "Biden Team", Ro Khanna wasn't necessarily against censoring the story she was upset that Twitter shut down the Trump admin's press secretary account for dm'ing the NY Post Story and that Republicans on the Hill were rightfully so making a big deal out of that.
Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.
More than one smoking gun here and yes this is a huge story. I doubt we'll hear much out of it on CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC oligopolists.
> Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives
Thinking that this isn't happening, particularly by parties during an election is massively naive. How Twitter responds to it, and whether there was any undue pressure made by those parties would be a scandal, but "VIP account has a direct line to higher ups" is nothing.
Weird how you say it was blatant partisan censorship but ignore that the Trump administration did the same exact thing while they were actually in the executive branch. It's almost like there is something blatantly partisan here going on, but it's not the "censorship"
Not sure why you're singling out Fox News and "right wing" media here, but I certainly think it's a problem when major networks coordinate coverage with their preferred candidate. That certainly counts as a "service" to me.
You should be explaining this to the poster I responded to, not me. But, generally, no. I don't think it's a big deal that anyone emails twitter and then twitter's moderation team looks at a post to see if it violates the rules.
> If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?
if this is our metric (and it very well could be) then every industry ever needs to be investigated--i guarantee you religions are massively guilty of this. we don't have to look far at all to see churches loudly preaching for one party right now. i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states. and i guarantee you countless other industries will be as well.
im sure elon himself has direct lines to many politicians. honestly i think this is a path we should explore with all monied/influential folks and politicians. lets mitigate quid pro quo with these people.
I clarified in a subsequent comment that what I'm talking about is explicit coordination. There's a major and consequential difference between a Priest telling his Parishioners during Mass that one candidate is better than another, or a media outlet saying the same thing during their prime time show, and some kind of explicit coordination between the campaign and those entities. The former is just run of the mill 1A protected speech, the latter is much more nebulous.
>i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states.
This is a dangerous subject, but KSA obviously does this all the time and it's not any different than Russian tomfoolery on social media, or what all these people did with Twitter, but we all just sort of let it happen because reasons. It's honestly disgusting.
sure, i’m just pointing that, if our metrics are that whatever-this-is should be considered scandalous and that it should be mitigated, then i can guarantee that we’d find way more of this out there. way more.
and i think we’d all win.
direct lines of communications, closed door meetings, etc… between religious leaders and candidates are widely known and id love for us to scandalize this and insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.
direct lines of communication, meetings etc… between oil execs and politicians is also widely known. i’d love to insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.
same with elon too. since the immediate realm we’re in surrounds twitter execs, i absolutely think we need to know which political influencers, politicians, and aspiring politicians he’s been in touch with and what exactly they’ve been discussing. this is absolutely 100% relevant to this exact tweet thread. twitter execs communicating with politically active people.
i can almost guarantee we will uncover all kinds of shady things happening across the board. we all can win here.
Zero disagreement. Maybe what we should be hoping/praying for is a deluge of leaks and whistle blowing from social media employees, explaining how all of this is Oz behind a curtain and Oz, as it happens, is rather stupid.
From a country with five viable parties: this picking sides thing, or even being a “moderate” is just weird and kind of horrifying how normal the populace thinks it is. It’s not normal. People should be FREAKING OUT that their governmental system is in such bad shape. They’re too busy cheering for whichever tribe they’re in.
All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.
I don't think Americans are particularly likely to think politics is one dimensional. Each of our two parties is composed of multiple subgroups whose ideals and interests don't match - they regularly have disputes among each other, and it's less common but far from unheard of for an interest group to migrate between parties. What we call a "party" just mixes in components of what a European-style system would call the "governing majority".
I think I generally sympathize with your point. There’s probably truth to that.
I think it’s also perilous to collapse “Americans” into zero dimensions by speaking as if they’re one entity with one perspective. I would bet my house that a frighteningly many millions of Americans DO see it as one dimensional tribalism.
A two party system works. I'm from a country with a 20+ party system and it's dysfunctional. In addition, you can't lump Democrats or Republicans in the USA in their respective boats. There's a hundred shades of grey within each party. But rallying behind one candidate versus a hundred in a primary makes for a better setup than anything else I've seen in other countries.
I don't really agree with you but you shouldn't be grayed out. The idea of a dysfunctional government sounds bad, but ironically that is precisely what the Founding Fathers endeavored to create. And it sounds absurd for all the reasons you're certainly aware of. Yet is the opposite desirable? In modern US politics, parties have become capable of enacting pretty substantial change on very narrow margins. This can be good in one manner of thought because "good" change can happen at an accelerated rate.
The problem is "good" is subjective. It was big news when the 2016 election was decided by as few as 78,000 votes, yet the 2020 election was now decided by as few as 45,000 votes [1]. The one thing everybody would agree on is that the country (and world) would look radically different today had the US election in 2020 gone differently.
And so we're living in a boat that keeps getting increasingly violently rocked back and forth, all based on who wins a coin flip. A bit of dysfunction to cool things (and people) down doesn't seem so bad.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
And on and on, the amount of comments in this thread alone that don't stick to the guidelines is too high, but I think the moderation team is very small (just dang?)
The difference between the multiparty countries and the USA is that in the USA the compromises needed to form a government are made before you do the final vote. In some ways I think that's better because the parties have to have a fuller and more realistic platform than in Europe where you can get a bunch of parties in power only caring about a few issues each and the tradeoffs aren't presented upfront
I find it works amazingly well in Canada where there is commonly no one party in power. That any one party must get the support of one or more other parties to pass any bill. This creates mandatory compromise.
During a majority government where a single party has enough votes, I generally agree with you.
You are grossly overselling how "amazing" Canadian governance is.
Canada has essentially the same two party system as the US, with one of the two major parties winning literally every election in the last 100 years, and all but one election since the country's inception.
Occasional minority governments gave us some nice things, but that was decades ago, in a whole other world.
Canadian elections are cursed by FPTP much like the US is, and much unlike all the other developed countries that have true multi-party governance with some form of proportional representation.
FPTP caused the Liberal party to be in power in Canada for most governments until they were ejected from politics for gross corruption. And since then they've been put in the corner for a bit, and slowly are coming back to being the prevalent ruling party.
Justin Trudeau made a campaign promise a few elections ago about replacing FPTP for a multi turn system and after being elected, promptly setup a sham study, which unsurprisingly found out that Canadian voters would be oh so confused if FPTP was to be replaced by a multi turn election system.
I wouldn't say Canada fares much better, in the long term. At least the Liberals are pretty benign.
"people on the left" have no better than than people on the right or anybody else in this regard. When it suits them, when they believe it will advantage them, they are all for suppression of peoples' rights.
At that point, we are just hijacking the libertarian party and turning it into something it isn't, which its adherents today would oppose.
Most of the disenchanted voters from the Democratic/Republican parties can agree on policies that the libertarians abhor. For example, many of us would support foreign aid to Ukraine, but the LP takes an isolationist stance.
The irony of that statement is that we're talking about a private company deciding what is or isn't appropriate on its platform, not de jure censorship. It is not Twitter's responsibility to facilitate the Republicans' attempted October Surprise.
On the other hand, where Republicans have political power, they are using it restrict speech and rights, by law.
No, because "partisan" would imply they work on behalf of a political party. The so-called Twitter Files themselves demonstrate that this is not true.
I'm not here to claim that people working at Twitter are unbiased. Everyone has bias. But also, there's extrinsic bias in what they're dealing with, in the sense that "both sides" aren't doing the same things. One trick is to behave egregiously and then when called out for it, claim bias.
It's also ridiculous to me that they think removing a couple naked pictures of Hunter is "censorship". As if you can truly "censor" information on the internet. You can maybe slow its spread, but if anything, the hardest thing is get things off the internet, not on.
These people keep blaming some vague magical power for the reason Hunter stories never went anywhere, but the real reason no one talks about them isn't censorship, it's because they're literally non-stories. It's just revenge porn videos of a known drug abuser.
To call this "authoritarian censorship" is honestly mind boggling.
> but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely
So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney, his forbidding of speech in schools, etc.? He's not passing literal anti press and anti speech laws to piss off the MAGA base.
It's remarkable to me he so badly wanted props for punishing Disney for exercising free speech he forgot he's supposed to be pro business and anti big government regulation.
Suppression of speech has to push you away from far left and far right, so that should cancel out. Then, if you're really prefering all the other policies as you say, you could vote center left ...
Or -- vote Forward:
"Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system."
"The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters."
Just to set the record straight, it was not a subsidy.
When Orlando papers did the math, they showed it will cost the tax jurisdictions more to provide the services than it cost to waive the taxes and let Disney provide them to itself. Further, Disney is far from the only private town with the same arrangement; it's how Florida does it all over the state any time there's a big enough planned development, because that saves the government money.
Republicans should love this, because it proves government services privatized can cost the tax payer less.
That narrative was inconvenient to "the right" so didn't get talked about much because then the entire thing would just look astonishingly petty. And "the left" didn't really want to have to talk about how it saves towns money to privatize services. So that whole angle, swept under the rug by 'both sides'.
UPDATE
After posting this, I just saw this in Financial Times:
> Florida prepares U-turn on Disney's 'Don't Say
Gay' punishment -- Lawmakers seek compromise preserving theme park operator's right to run private government
> By Christopher Grimes in Orlando, Florida (yesterday)
> In other words, this looks like it was never much more than a pissing match between DeSantis and Chapek, who drew the governor's ire when he sharply criticized Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law that censored discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. DeSantis signed the bill into law in March.
> Florida has hundreds of special tax districts like Reedy Creek, but DeSantis seized on Chapek's criticism and framed the whole thing as a culture war fight against a corporation that had received special privileges from the state. Chapek's criticism of the new law amounted to "provocation, and we're going to fight back," DeSantis said in April as he signed the law undoing Disney's special status.
> But most of that was a wild exaggeration. As Reason's Scott Shackford wrote in April, the special tax and governing status granted to Disney in 1967 aren't so much privileges for the corporation as they are gifts to the local governments surrounding the Walt Disney World resort. If the special status were revoked, Orange and Osceola counties would become responsible for providing mandatory public services—including basic infrastructure like water supplies and emergency services like fire departments, all of which Disney currently self-operates and self-funds within Reedy Creek—to the massive resort. It would effectively put local taxpayers on the hook for essential services that Disney used to pay for itself.
> "Any contention that DeSantis is eliminating some sort of 'special treatment' for Disney comes with it the perhaps mistaken assumption that the two counties suddenly in charge of all of this infrastructure will somehow make the park better and not worse. In reality, putting Disney parks at the mercy of two different counties with different laws will be a huge mess for everybody involved, and that's the point," Shackford wrote. "It's not about what's fair or what's best for the citizens in the area. It's about punishing political foes and centralizing government power (a very nonconservative approach) to do so."
> Friday's report that lawmakers are preparing to back down from those proposals only seems to confirm that conclusion.
DeSantis' actions are the will of the people. The only question is whether it's a violation of a corporation's free speech - and when does anyone ever really care about that.
Imagine a scenario where a corporation was talking anti-left stuff in a blue state. E.g. immigration, unions, etc. Would the people not be entitled to revoke their special privileges because they don't like what they are saying? This is the real test.
I'm actually not sure, but its interesting to flip the actors political affiliation to check for fairness.
Many of DeSantis’ politically motivated actions target counties/municipalities that overwhelmingly voted for a different candidate. The majority of “South Florida” is made up of diverse, densely populated, areas that lean slightly left of center. “North Florida” by comparison is sparsely populated and leans heavily right. Yet, for some reason the state government feels the need to consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities. Repeatedly overriding the will of the people in those areas.
Speech by teachers in school isn't free. It is delivered to a captive and inexperienced audience (children).
That's why school should focus on teaching skills and not interpersonal issues. Overloading children with 50 genders is just nonsense and confuses them.
> that because his statements were made pursuant to his position as a public employee, rather than as a private citizen, his speech had no First Amendment protection.
The point is that the principle of free speech is far more important than any topic of the day. Enemy of my enemy situation.
Everything bad in politics has come from the downward cycle of political parties censoring each other.
It takes a lot of courage because the defenders of free speech, to also defend the right for those to campaign for the destruction of free speech. Things become really bad when exceptions are made to restrict the free speech of those campaigning against it.
You can see how easily people can fall into the trap though, because humans can only take so much abuse while being attacked by people they are inadvertently helping.
Now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, you start to see them take more interest in free speech and the importance of it.
> his forbidding of speech in schools
Garcetti 2006 - legal free speech only applies to private citizens not public employees.
The will of the people of the state should democratically determine what should be taught and what should not.
If creationism was to be taught in schools, I would certainly want the right as a private citizen to campaign against my children having to listen to that crap, without being impeded by "free speech" (a good way to evaluate free speech is to think about things you agree with and disagree with and see if you are happy with the law both cases).
> DeSantis approach to Disney
This is a interesting case indeed. Hacker News at its best when I have an excuse to dive into a case I'm not familiar with.
Personally, I think their speech is not being restricted by the new law. And the law is the will of the people.
As a voting citizen, would I really want to be denied being able to enact a law because a company complains about it's free speech rights? Probably not. I don't relate as much to a corporation than I do to an actual person - regardless of what the law says.
The retaliatory aspect is interesting though - and I would defer to the supreme court for this.
> the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the [opposite side] grow to resent them
This feels like a universal to me that applies to both parties.
And I’m sorry, “authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas” is pure propaganda. No mainstream left leaning politician is actually perusing such an idea, it’s a boogeyman created by the right and by the looks of things it’s working great.
There are extremes in every political movement, no doubt. I don’t deny that there are people on the left out there protesting against “hate speech”. There are also people on the right that are out and out racist. I think choosing whether to vote Democrat or Republican based on either of those extremes is a poor choice.
OP said:
> I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression
So we’re not talking about vague “leftists” here, we’re specifically talking about the Democratic Party. You’re going to have a rough time arguing they are campaigning on authoritarianism.
So in this specific case, for one example, we're talking about Biden's team requesting the removal of revenge porn. Do you think it's acceptable to make that request? Should Twitter be obligated to leave revenge porn up? Is this an example of the 'suppression of "hate speech"' you're referring to with scare quotes? Because it doesn't seem like one to me.
Twitter is (or was) filled with young, affluent, highly educated (at least college graduate) city dwellers. By any metric that's a demographics that leans heavily left. How is that a surprise that Twitter was straight left?
Because tech workers aren’t always straight left. HN is a fantastic example — it leans much more right than a lot of other internet forums. Partly just because entrepreneurship means you have to get along with capitalism at some level.
Saying this as someone who is progressive. It’s definitely a relatively progressive field, but maybe not as much as you’d think!
One of the curses of democracy is you have to form coalitions with other humans instead of ideals. At least in the US it is out in the open. Many countries have worse problems and bigger, more friendly smiles.
This is a good time to plug 3rd parties and candidates. Organised pressure to make the situation better is more important than winning elections - even if they don't get voted in they may force change for the better. At some point the best options amongst two evils is still too evil to tolerate.
Pedantic reminder that the US is not a democracy, and representing it as one is missing the point of the US. We are a constitutional republic, because democratic decisions need reigning in.
The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.
Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.
Over the last few years the rail companies have furloughed ~30% of their staff to the point where covering sick staff is a real problem. They've so far made $20 billion on profits this year. The excess profits have routinely been used in share buybacks and dividends.
Biden, who claims to be pro-labor, has sided with the rail companies in directing Congress to use an old law to rob these workers of their right to industrial action and mandate a contract. With no paid sick leave.
How can anyone with a straight face in good faith argue there is any leftist power in politics when Democrats side with capital and routinely go out of their way to eviscerate labor and the progressive elements of their party?
> I think people on the left have a blind spot here
So you've made two false premises here:
1. There are peeople on the left in politics. As I noted above, this is a falsehood; and
2. The "left" is a monolith and wanted to suppress the Hunter Biden story. This is right-wing propaganda because conservatives treat Trump like a cult leader who is above the law.
Speaking as a leftist (FWIW), I don't care about Hunter Biden. Throw in jail. Hilary too. I don't think Twitter should've blocked the NY Post story but ultimately it's a nothing burger because there's nothing of substance on this laptop. If there was it would've been passed on to law enforcement instead of being passed raround right-wing operatives (to the point of destroying any chain of custody) in an effort to smear the administration and nothing came of it, which is why they just fell back to the old playbook of pedo allegations.
> ... people on the right grow to resent them
People on the right already call people on the left groomers, pedos and criminals.
> ... this authoritarian suppression of speech
What suppression? Everyone knows about this story. The only "suppression" (which, again, I personally disagree with) is you couldn't share a link to one post on one site (Twitter). to believe this is "authoritarian suppression" belies successful right-wing propaganda.
> ... both sides ...
Bothsidesing American politics does nothing more than show how normalized right-wing ideas have become (and how far right the Overton window has swung). You have the former president espousing QAnon conspiracies, election denialism at every level of government and white supremacy (which is a core tenet of the Republican Party and America's founding and history) spilling over to where the likes of Kanye are saying the quiet part out loud, Elon Musk tweeted (then retracted) a conspiracy about Paul Pelosi and his attacker and the #1 "news" program in US openly pushing Nazi propaganda (ie Tucker Carlson and the Great Replacement Theory).
Bothsidesing this doesn't make one enlightened or "above the fray".
You're comment is a little greyed out which means people are downvoting it. The core aspect being that democrats are center right and republicans are extreme right. The both-sides enlightened centrists can't accept this. The do-nothingness tenant of being in the middle regardless of ideology simply shatters.
> Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.
The current Administration is the one forcing rail workers to accept a deal that doesn't give them what they want and forces them not to strike.
> The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.
This is something Europeans have been saying online since at least the early 00s. It might be worth splitting it up into "social" policies and "economic" policies.
Democrats are a socially very left (dissenting views are not allowed), economically right party. republicans are a socially right, economically very right (taxation is theft) party.
> it up into "social" policies and "economic" policies.
I understand that inclination but you cannot separate economic and social policy.
Example: consider post-WWII development in the US. The GI Bill gave cheap loans and college education to returning servicement but not if you're black. The rise of the automobile lead to the explosion in suburbs, which became completely car-dependent. These suburbs and the required infrastructure (eg roads) were government subsidized. This allowed some to build up generational wealth.
In building those roads (and the Interstate system) these tended to divide communities along racial lines and in many cases wiped out minority communities.
Further you had redlining.
Once segregation was officially outlawed you had a bunch of communities that became effectively segregated because black people couldn not afford to live there (because restrictive zoning drove up prices) but black people had been denied the ability to build up wealth.
That's an example of what people mean by systemic racism.
Likewise, economic policy creates over-policing and mass incarceration that predominantly affects the poor and economic policy has made sure that black people are disproportionately affected.
> Democrats are a socially very left
I disagree. Biden was the architect of Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill that ushered in mass incarceration and over-policing shows where Democrats stand: in the same place Republicans are, which is protecting capital and capital owners.
Literally the only reason people accuse Democrats of being very far left is the support of trans people. I would urge people to really examine their feelings here and really ask themselves why they think not being transphobic is an extreme position.
I think something a lot of people miss is the difference between Democratic voters and Democratic politicians.
Democratic politicians generally lean substantially farther right than their voters.
"Centrists" typically take the position that Democratic politicians are too left-leaning. This puts them very far to the right of the Democratic voter. It puts them much closer to... Republicans.
It doesn't look good that a lot of credible media outlets had to walk back their stances on the Hnuter Biden laptop and lab-origin covid. Both proved to be plausible enough that they never should have been censored or suppressed.
It’s useful to read what the media actually wrote at the time rather than how Republicans portray it. I’ve included a number of links below but the main thing which is obvious is that coverage was dominated by the questions of authenticity and especially the challenges of not having a forensic trail which wasn’t tainted by Giuliani, who was so unreliable that even Fox News warned reporters not go trust him. A lot of that coverage also focused on how Fox and the WSJ passed on the story because they couldn’t verify key details, or how the Post’s own journalists had reservations because they couldn’t verify details such as whether an email ever got a reply or particular meetings actually happened. Years later, the story remains the same: some relatively boring details have been confirmed but nothing explosive has been found and evidence of tampering likely means that if something was buried in there Giuliani would have helped Hunter Biden by tainting the evidence to the point that it wouldn’t stand up in court.
I agree that the story of the laptop is sketchy. First, it's surprising it was abandoned. The shop owner just happened to have horrible eyesight and couldn't actually identify Biden. Then Biden doesn't collect the laptop, and the owner, rather than wiping it and selling it, eventually gets it to Trump's lawyer?
When the Washington Post finally looked at it, it was pretty tainted, and about the only conclusion you can draw is that there are some authentic emails on it, but that doesn't make the device authentic.
Or even if the device is authentic, every bit of data has to be assiduously validated because there’s known evidence of modifications after it left the repair shop. DKIM signatures did that for some emails but a lot of stuff has no obvious path to validate like that and now the repair shop guy is expressing concern, too:
I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm millions of Americans in very significant ways. Tucker Carlson and Libs of TikTok all but encourage violence against LGBT people. Republicans are trying to prevent Black people from voting. Many Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election and are actively working to be able to overturn future elections. Republicans have gerrymandered many states so that Democrats don't have a chance. Women have lost access to abortion which is medically necessary in many cases and has left them in situations where they don't get treatment until sepsis or other serious complications have set in even if they survive, it can have a huge recovery time (and they may never fully recover) and it can end up costing a lot of money due to lost wages and healthcare costs.
Yea, Democrats are annoying sometimes, but the situation we're in has consequences for a lot of people.
> At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.
I wish I could say that. For a lot of us, we can't say that. The Democratic party might be pissing you off, but the Republican party is truly harming millions of Americans. The Republican party is no longer John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have my issues with them, but both seem to genuinely care for people and want to make America a better place. Today, so many seem to want to weaponize hate.
I guess I'd ask you what you think the Democrats should do differently while protecting women, Black people, LGBT people, and other minorities. I guess I don't completely know what you mean by the Democrats having an "authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas". In most of my experience, it's been pushing for more inclusive language and not being mean to people while Republicans are forcefully trying to censor a lot of topics as they ban books and pass "don't say gay" bills. Is it that Democrats think Ye (Kanye West) shouldn't be given a massive platform to hate on Jews? Is it that Democrats think places like Netflix and SNL shouldn't pay Dave Chapelle millions to hate on Jews and trans people? I'd note about this is that the instant anyone says something bad about White people or men, Republicans all line up to say that they shouldn't have a platform to say that. Republicans try to "cancel" people just as much as Democrats do.
I think it's also important to note that there are differences between government restriction on speech and social condemnation of speech. People use speech to organize. Sometimes that's great and other times you get Nazis. There is a pretty big concern in many communities over the increase in violent attacks from right-wing groups. These are groups that are pushed forward by many main-stream Republican commentators and many Republican politicians. Sure, they'll say it should stop just short of violence, but it's an effective strategy.
I'm not arguing that the government should control speech, but any respectable person or organization should probably not promote Nazis. Would you hire a Nazi to give a speech at your company about their ideology? If you owned a newspaper, would you hire a Nazi to do your editorials? If you didn't, are you suppressing their speech? If you published a letter from a Nazi and put a big warning alongside it that your newspaper condemned the views expressed by the letter, are you suppressing that speech?
I'd also note that speech has real-world consequences. People used speech to create the political will to suppress Italian and Irish immigrants. People used speech to build coalitions to keep Black people enslaved. Nazis used speech to get the power to murder two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Bad ideas should be fought against. Not all ideas are equal or equally good. Some ideas are evil and we need to make it know...
Reorient the gun control efforts around the statistical realities of how guns are actually killing the most people. Throwing away all their political capital on banning semiautomatic rifles, in a ‘maximum success’ outcome, would prevent something like 2% of all firearm related deaths. I did some napkin math a couple months ago and children are more likely to die of leukemia than in a school shooting. No doubt school shootings indicate a moral failure in our society, but if you wanna budget out your political capital to do the most good, that’s not the place to look.
Drop the attacks on 2A and watch how much wind you take out of Republican sails. Dems love talking about how racist the Republicans are, but stick an AR15 in a Black woman’s hands for a photo op and boom she’s elected. Have someone run on a slogan “tax the rich and don’t take my fucking guns”. See what happens.
Disclosure: I don’t own guns, have never owned guns, and don’t really expect to.
Every human being in the world understands that guns are a clear threat to civil society, except for this bizarre hyperminority of americans who seem to stuck in some anachronistic fantasy universe. Move on.
Don't the Swiss and Canadians have similar gun numbers? Most of the murders are due to gang violence, school shootings and the like are a rounding error.
You've clearly put a lot of effort into this post, but I think you need more one on one time with the more reasonable people who now vote Republican as I don't think you'd pass an ideological Turing test atm.
Understanding the perspective and desires of those voters (rather than just the impression one hears from social media and the news) is important to then figure out how to appeal to prevent them being alienated.
I sometimes lurk in a far(!) right internet forum and even there the vast majority also want to protect women, black people and LGBTQ people and think their policies will improve things.
I don’t think this is very true, and I have spent time with conservatives. While they don’t think they’re racist, they also think racism is a solved problem (as if all the racist folks in the civil rights area only 60yrs ago just became good somehow?) Religious folk in general (huge part of the GOP base) don’t accept LGBTQ people at all. Policy-wise, the party never even tries to show they support these groups by collaborating on bills in congress, for example.
I mean every individual has different concepts… plenty who aren’t racist but super homophobic. And plenty of religious folks doing good community work and hot hurting anyone (assuming no one came out to them in the church!) So while conservatives vary a lot, it just doesn’t seem the party itself tries to reflect that.
> I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm ...
Just realize you bee-lined straight into partisan politics. Speech policies need to be above that.
Good, don't ever choose a "side". "Sides" are for corralling people into manipulable herds. Every issue should be considered individually using logic and data, rather than following the blind recommendations of a "side" down the line.
I think a story one could tell about more recent events is that Twitter banning various extreme right wing views was good for the Republican Party because they could make arguments about free speech or whatever and not need to deal with those extreme views being associated with the Republican Party. If such views aren’t hidden, maybe it will force Republicans to work harder to separate themselves from such views, similarly to the way that Democrats expend much effort trying to show that they aren’t secretly communists or whatever.
Hunter biden laptop story isnt really a right wing view and clearly benefits Biden. There is a performative aspect to banning "extreme" views that certainly domt help Republicans.
I'm a moderate
Democrat ... authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas
both sides suck
This is a great expression of what is commonly described as a South Park republican. That is, someone who believes they live in a political space between republicans and democrats which does not actually exist. The fundamental emotion is cynicism, which manifests as active hostility towards any notion of empathy for any other dimension of society, and ultimately distills down to status-quo-ism.
Of course cynicism is non-falsifiable, and there is no coherent notion of a moderate or independent in American politics, because there exists no coherent political position between democratic and republican policy. Anyone claiming to exist in this middle space is in practice a republican, just without the conviction that's typical to that party's base.
Maybe you missed this part in the parent message: "I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely."
It's so absurd as a statement, no one does a 180 "because free speech".
Both parties are so clearly distinct that if you claim to be something in the middle you'd better explain what you mean. But I'm not an american, I could be wrong, I just watch the show from the outside and sometimes it's sad.
Yes, this is the case here. There are a number of issues that matter enough to make people switch parties, particularly the more moderate people in each party. In fact you can see entire swathes of voter blocks having changed parties over the last 20 years as party platforms have changed focus on some core issues.
They won't necessarily switch from D -> R or R -> D. They will often switch to a 3rd party or Independent. Over time they may eventually find their way into supporting the opposite major party. Occasionally they will switch directly from one major party to the other. Just depends on the issues and where people are at in their lives.
Single issue voters, like those who only vote for/against abortion, are literally throwing aside every other issue. It’s a disservice to themselves and a disservice to others who have to live with their decision.
Switching to a third party which agrees on a subset of topics with the original party they come from is completely understandable. But again, doing a complete 180, especially knowing what parties stands for in the US is hard to believe. It should takes years, and I mean more than a decade.
It depends on what matters to people. In the US, there have been a number of significant platform shifts in the major parties over the last 10 years. Think of Trump vs mainstream Republicans, or the shift in the Democratic party from support of racial equality to support of racial equity. These are foundational changes that can completely alienate large blocks of voters.
In fact, I would argue those least likely to switch parties are the single issue voters (esp. gun control or abortion) since the parties have not shifted on those issues. Whereas blue collar whites have been abandoning the Democratic party in droves lately despite that being their home for a century. It started after Clinton signed NAFTA, but has really excelled over the last 5-10 years.
Also, a lot of people vote a split ticket where they support people form different parties depending on local/state/federal or even if they just don't like a candidate in their preferred party (see the difference in votes for Walker and Kemp in Georgia for instance).
No, it is not the case. There is no coherent political position which exists between the American democratic and republican parties. Anyone who believes they exist in such a middle space is lying to themselves.
This is such a ridiculous political narrative. The Democrats are not for policing speech, Twitter can police whatever it wants. Imagine being a conservative and thinking government regulation of corporations is wrong and simultaneously thinking you have a right to post stuff on twitter.
The tweets the Biden campaign asked Twitter to take down (you can verify this yourself) were all non consentual intimate images of Hunter. That is both against the Twitter ToS, hence flagging to them, and illegal in 48 states + DC, including California, where Twitter is based.
Twitter's now owned by Elon, who is making friends with right wing reactionaries in public.
Fox News is the most watched news channel on the continent.
All tech companies at the very least are pro-capitalist, it's often a choice of whether they're outwardly more pro-market or more technocratic, which has nothing to do with political lefts and rights.
> Fox News is the most watched news channel on the continent.
They have high viewership in spite of the fact that liberals have complete dominance over so-called "official" news media & centers of cultural production, as well as universities. Conservatives don't control government or anything else in any meaningful sense. Just look at American govt over the course of the 20th & 21st century to see that progressives squarely won in terms of shaping the size, scope & spending of govt.
> has nothing to do with political lefts and rights
You're supposing a True Scotsman that "liberals" aren't true left or something, that's complete nonsense. You may as well be regretting that a horse isn't a unicorn.
Tech companies are overwhelmingly biased towards liberals. Don't play dumb.
More like a just over a sixth, there's three branches, executive, legislature, and judicial. If you buy into the whole "media is the fourth branch" thing, I say that's actually a minority or a plurality.
If you think "complete functional control over the supreme court for likely decades" is insignificant enough to make conservatives count as a minority you need to pay more attention to the powers and impact of the supreme court. They can effectively overrule any legislation if they wish and have proven a desire to do so.
They say they can do that (judicial review is kind of not in the constitution) but what California and New York are doing post New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen puts a bit of a question on that. Making much of New York City a "gun free zone" is not what "the right to keep and bear arms" sounds like to me.
I’m counting executive branch, judicial branch, and congress as two because they each individually have their own mandated powers.
The conservative Supreme Court just unilaterally gutted fundamental human rights for everyone in the country. That’s serious power that not even the President has. It’s a joke to pretend conservatives have no political power in the face of that.
The third highest government official is the Speaker of the House, who will be a Republican in January, so it’s pretty hard to say Republicans have no power when they control the Speaker. It’s crazy how much power that is.
But to call the media a branch of government and to assign “control” of media to Democrats is really a stretch. Pretty hard to make that case with Fox News around.
Progressives aren't able to beat conservatives into submission because there's foundational checks and balances against that.
That conservatives have any power at all is a testament to progressives ability to catastrophically & embarrassingly mismanage themselves and fail to deliver.
But really progressives are just complaining that things aren't changing fast enough, it's inarguable that govt as it exists today is nothing remotely like limited govt.
There's no political constituency for "limited government". Most voters want the government to do things they like and not do things they dislike. They just disagree on what those things are.
Progressives aren’t trying to “beat conservatives into submission”, where do you get that? Political violence is currently a big problem on the right, according to the head of the FBI (who himself is a conservative). Conservatives were the ones who lost in 2020 and attempted to literally beat their opponents into submission on Jan 6 2021, ending a record of peaceful transitions of power.
> Political violence is currently a big problem on the right
Political violence was pioneered by far-left terrorists, famously when they bombed Congress.
More recently, Rand Paul got violently attacked. And a Bernie supporter committed a mass shooting & shot a Republican congressman. Of course you can't ignore there was the pervasive political violence throughout 2020 during BLM rioting.
Remember the guy who mowed down a Christmas parade?
Really the worst was when Hilary Clinton was the first to go all-in on election denial in 2016. And then spawned an entire 4 years of conspiracy theories surrounding Russia. Liberals largely failed to call her out & hold her accountable. They just project all of their worst crimes on their opponents.
Three days ago the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right wing paramilitary organization, was found guilty of seditious conspiracy. As it’s a conspiracy conviction, we can expect more convictions to come.
You whatabout this with several examples that aren’t even political violence. Rand Paul’s neighborhood spat isn’t political violence. How is the Waukesha attack political violence, I just don’t see it.
Republicans have shown us exactly what political violence looks like. Thousands of people, flying the banner of a political party, organizing to attack the government. Seditious conspiracy is coming from the right, and nothing even approaching that severity is seen on the left. The FBI director is right to draw a distinction between left- and righ-wing violence.
The age of small-scale lone wolf attacks being the worst of political violence in the US are over thanks to the right. Now the biggest problems are homegrown terror cells like the oath keepers, and terror attacks instigated by media and the high ranking government officials, as the former President did on Jan 6.
> 4 years of conspiracy theories surrounding Russia
You need to catch up; the only ones still denying Trump’s collusion with Russia are Trump and Russia. Even Trump’s campaign manager has admitted to his role of coordinating campaign strategy with a Russian intel officer, which is a fact reported by Senate Republicans in their investigation.
The Trump tower meeting with the Russian spy is known by all and admitted to by all participants. The Trump Tower Moscow deal is known by all and admitted to by Trump. We know Russia hacked the DNC and Trump admits to welcoming that help, as shown in the Mueller report. Hillary Clinton was largely vindicated.
This is what I find fascinating. A majority of these companies are staffed by the best in technology who are particularly intelligent and vote more progressive. Then comes along some dumb conservative complaining that a majority of people working there don't want to hear some dumb conspiracy.
You're saying that if people have no medical degree that they should be given jobs as surgeons because they are in a minority group of not having the skills necessary to perform surgeries? No where have you claimed or provided proof that conservatives are being discriminated against in hiring.
Nobody on the left cares about protecting Hunter Biden. IF he broke any laws, then he should be in jail. AFAIK, there's no current legal case against him.
What you're seeing here is the "left" learning to not take everything the right screams about at face value. They watched Hillary get dragged through the mud with Benghazi over absolutely nothing of substance, including months of Congressional hearings. Thus this new "Hunter Biden Laptop" story smells like the same exact ratfucking playbook.
Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition.
> Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias.
What do you mean by “didn’t amplify”? They actively suppressed/banned the story (based on a policy that didn’t even apply in this case) instead of “not amplifying it”, these are two totally separate things.
You'll have to do your own digging around to build up your own opinion if you want more info. From my digging, it still seems like pretty much nothing we didn't already know.
Joe Biden (AKA "The Big Guy") was taking a cut from Hunter Biden's ridiculous business dealings with foreign entities (otherwise known as "influence peddling").
With zero relevant business experience Hunter Biden was getting highly lucrative business deals with all kinds of shady people connected to foreign govts.
Joe Biden denied any involvement with his son's business but there is evidence that he was involved from witnesses (including attending business meetings) and emails on the laptop to indicate he was involved but they were conscious of the need to publicly at least, keep his name out of it.
It's the kind of thing for which, if it was Trump, we would have seen 24/7 media meltdown for years but because its a Biden well "media companies are privately owned and can do what they want".
> Joe Biden (AKA "The Big Guy") was taking a cut from Hunter Biden's ridiculous business dealings with foreign entities
Parent asked for an unbiased summary. Right off the bat you’re providing the right wing narrative. There is nothing in the laptop or elsewhere to show that:
- the “big guy” referenced in the email is in fact Joe Biden
- that even if it is, Joe Biden was aware of the e-mail
- that even if he was, that Joe was actually taking a cut.
The evidence before you is so far off from the narrative you’re spouting that you might as well be making it all up. But sadly you’re not, you’re just regurgitating the leaps of logic that have been fed to you.
> they were conscious of the need to publicly at least, keep his name out of it.
The lack of evidence of a crime is evidence of how well the crime was covered up. Classic conspiratorial thinking.
> if it was Trump, we would have seen 24/7 media meltdown
Here’s the thing. If it weren’t for Trump, this would be a bigger deal because Trump normalized government corruption during his presidency. Even the worst case scenario imagined by Republicans about Biden is mild compared to Trump’s least concerning corruption.
Conservatives can’t get any traction with their “Biden’s corrupt!” narrative as long as they ignore and excuse Trump’s corruption. It’s impossible to convince the world that Joe Biden who takes the train to work from Delaware is corrupt, while Trump who flies around in a jet with his name on it is squeaky clean. As dumb as people are, there appears to be a limit to what they will accept.
Firstly, it's difficult to talk about this because discussing anything the media wilfully chooses to ignore sounds like a conspiracy theory (media self-censorship is incredibly powerful).
Secondly just because something reflects badly on the Democrat party doesn't mean it's a "right-wing narrative". If one team does something bad, then of course they are going to try to cover it up, and it's up to the opposing team to hold them to account. This is human nature, and this is what democracy is designed to compensate for.
One of Hunter Biden's business partners confirmed Joe Biden was the "Big Guy".
I believe also there was some discussion in the emails on Hunters laptop of the need distance themselves from Joe Biden at least publically.
Trump is not relevant to whether Joe Biden is corrupt is or not. He is also not relevant as to whether the media should cover important stories that aren't about Trump.
Need to get away from this idea that the Dems can do whatever they want "because Trump".
> Firstly, it's difficult to talk about this because discussing anything the media wilfully chooses to ignore sounds like a conspiracy theory
Then just stick to the facts.
> Secondly just because something reflects badly on the Democrat party doesn't mean it's a "right-wing narrative"
It’s a narrative precisely because the story you presented is ahead of the facts. You’re telling the story you want to tell and backfilling it in with facts as necessary when they become available, making omissions as necessary. The problem with this is you’ll keep telling this story like the facts support it even if they never come.
> One of Hunter Biden's business partners confirmed Joe Biden was the "Big Guy".
I wasn’t aware this was confirmed, but unfortunately all this proves is that someone was trying to gain access to Joe Biden. Not exactly surprising. Showing Joe Biden was receptive to the overture is much harder to prove.
> Trump is not relevant to whether Joe Biden is corrupt is or not.
One thing I have said and I will keep saying is that if Hunter did something wrong he should be investigated and prosecuted. If Joe Biden did something wrong he should be investigated and prosecuted as well. I haven’t met a single left leaning person who disagrees with me there. (And believe me, I’m no fan of Joe Biden, he was like my 6th choice). In that sense you’re right, it doesn’t matter what Trump has done.
But not all corruption is equal, and Republicans have spent the last 7 years excusing and equivocating some of the most egregious examples of corruption I’ve ever seen.
So now they are out there saying we should all be very concerned about Joe Biden’s corruption. Their problem is that we can pull up any number of sound bytes from the same people excusing Trump’s corruption.
Hell, we just have to use Trump’s own impeachment argument against them: if the executive believes what he is doing is for the benefit of the country, then his motives cannot be corrupt, even in the case of extorting a bribe as Trump did. Republicans bought that argument and in doing so set a precedent.
To me, this shows the outrage is all just political theatre, on the order of Benghazi, election denial, Whitewater/Clinton impeachment, or the Hillary Clinton emails.
> Need to get away from this idea that the Dems can do whatever they want "because Trump".
I believe in equal justice under the law, one of the foundational pillars of democracy. If Trump can get away with crimes but Biden is prosecuted for the same, this is actually a miscarriage of justice and a danger to democracy. Either the law is applied equally to everyone, or it is applied to no one.
Well Trump has a few investigations going so hopefully next year the Dems will be rendered impotent and unable to bury the Hunter Biden investigation.
I've always considered the Dems to be incredibly corrupt. I dont really know what Trump has or hasn't done because my only sources are the media and the media is garbage.
But for me the Democrats politicizing/weaponizing the FBI/Justice system for example, is way more corrupt than whatever stupid real-estate developer BS Trump has done (if he has in fact, done something).
The long-term impact of this kind of behaviour is incredibly corrosive to democracy.
Outsourcing your breaches of the constitution to private enterprise (suppressing free speech totally legal!!) would be another.
I know, more "right-wing narratives blah blah etc".
> I've always considered the Dems to be incredibly corrupt. I dont really know what Trump has or hasn't done because my only sources are the media and the media is garbage.
Okay, then stick to primary sources who are Republican.
The Mueller Report was authored by Republican Robert Mueller, was authorized and overseen by Republican Rod Rosenstein and was signed off by Republican Bill Barr. It details that Russia hacked the Democrats in 2016, attacked the 2016 election, and Trump obstructed the investigation into said hacking.
Or read the Senate Intel report on Russia, authored by the Republican senate and chaired by Republican Marco Rubio. It shows that Trump’s campaign collaborated with a Russian Intel officer to exchange day during the 2016 election.
Or look at primary sources like court filings. When you say the Dems have politicized the Doj and FBI, I’m assuming you’re talking about the recent raids on Trump’s home. But wouldn’t you agree that if the raid was properly authorized by a judge based on the facts, that wouldn’t be politicization?
Since the raid, the DOJ has won in court over and over again as Trump has challenged the basis of the raid. The only wins he has gotten have been overturned on appeal, with those decisions saying that Judge Aileen Cannon (who Trump appointed and forum shopped to hear his case) abused her power in deciding for Trump.
Or take the January 6 insurrection. If you don’t trust Democrats about that day, just listen to Republicans. The 1/6 hearings had testimony from 90% Republicans — from Republican staffers to Republican political operatives to life-long Republican politicians (maybe some you’ve voted for). Their testimony shows Trump planned and was responsible for that day.
At this point if you don’t know who Trump is and what he’s done, that’s not on the Dems or the media. That’s on you for not paying attention.
> Outsourcing your breaches of the constitution to private enterprise (suppressing free speech totally legal!!) would be another.
You do realize Matt Tiabbi says in his story the Trump admin was doing the same thing as the Biden Campaign. If you think what Biden did was violating the constitution by outsourcing, you must think the same of Trump and Republicans. Anything less and you’re being intellectually dishonest with yourself.
That’s not at all what I’ve done. It’s called arguing in the alternative and it’s a form of discourse typically found in legal proceedings to argue against anticipated counterpoints.
The idea is to show just how far one is from properly supporting the assertion. You can’t claim Joe Biden is corrupt because someone was trying to solicit a deal from a family member. In order to make a convincing case, the parent would have had to show Biden not only knew of the communication but also was receptive to it. The mere existence of an inbound solicitation is not evidence of corruption.
It was an uncharitable characterization, my apologies.
>The mere existence of an inbound solicitation is not evidence of corruption.
This is true. The counterpoint is that there's a lot of evidence that people found solicitation of Hunter Biden worthwhile (illustrated by the fact that they kept paying him).
A healthy skepticism suggests those payments were not made on the basis of his business acumen, in the same way we can suspect purchases of his paintings were not made on the basis of his artistic skill.
You can be skeptical, but the answer to the question “What was actually on Hunter Biden's laptop?” is not “Joe Biden (AKA "The Big Guy") was taking a cut from Hunter Biden's ridiculous business dealings with foreign entities”.
The laptop has been in the possession of partisan actors and has been examined forensically. I’m assuming everything and anything on the laptop that could possibly implicate Biden in so much as a parking infraction has been released. If your implying there may be heretofore unreleased information from the laptop, that would be the first time I’ve encountered that notion.
I appreciate the input, but I'm going to do a heel-face (face-heel?) turn and say that I trust that book about as far as I can throw it. There's an entire industry dedicated to rapidly churning out books on right-wing culture war topics, and the quality tends to be low.
I have, in the course of my travels, been told many times that I need to read such-and-such a book on a topic before I can "really have an opinion". I get the taste in my mouth that such books tend to serve a defensive role in conversations (like barbed wire, with a machine gun pointed at it) instead of an educational one, and put the recommendee on the back foot where they're refusing to read a source as offered.
It works because--going back to point 1--there's so many books out there that reading them all doesn't scale and never will. They take far, far more than they give. The youtube videos of the genre "three hours of some guy talking into the camera" occupy a similar niche.
It sounds to me like you are just providing a rationalisation for a closed mind.
There are plenty of smart people on the right, and lots of bad behaviour on the left that needs highlighting (and vice versa).
And of course it's only people in opposition that will do this.
We can't rely on the media because they are clearly partisan, so to dismiss anything beyond the media leaves you in an information desert basically.
>It sounds to me like you are just providing a rationalisation for a closed mind.
Oh no I'm accused of being anti-intellectual. Wait, see:
>put the recommendee on the back foot where they're refusing to read a source as offered
Let's circle back--did you honestly expect people to buy and read a 224 page book that you couldn't be bothered to summarize (besides touting the Amazon reviews?)? What's the conversion rate on that? Or is it more that you can recommend a book, people don't read it (surprise), and then it's their fault for not finding out the facts?
Well I dont know what else to say to someone who thinks they are informed, when they aren't and who refuses to look elsewhere.
Ok to summarise...(you really have to read the book to get the detail so this is just a skim)
Joe Biden home is in Delaware, the US geographical center for businesses that like doing things privately. Joe has operated firmly in the center of this milieu of financially sophisticated elite for decades.
Joe Biden likes to pretend he's a man of the people and not interested in financial wealth. I'm "middle-class Joe", "don't fault me because I don't own a single stock or bond" etc.. you get the get the drift.
However he lives in a large mansion in Brandywine Valley (home of rich elite), is worth millions of dollars and has a remarkable history of incredibly good real estate investments. Usually buying directly from business people and donors.
Note: this is a very typical way for corruption to be completely above board.
"I'II give you a million bucks discount on a nice bit of property and you repay the favour when my business needs it". And of course the presented optics are just that Joe is a "really good real estate investor". Circumstantial I guess? But not really to anyone with a bit of commonsense. The rich elite in Delaware are financially sophisticated and used to dealing with power. They know how to move money around and still maintain plausible deniability.
I'm sure this kind of "deniable" corruption is common across parties, so I'm not suggesting Joe is unique in this. I am suggesting though that Joe is more than likely just as corrupt as Trump or anyone else.
Hunter Biden's career is 100% pure nepotism at every level. His entire history in terms of schools, consecutive board positions etc is due to Joe pulling strings with business people and donors.
The Biden family structure has typically been Joe and Hunter's brother Beau (now deceased) sought power and influence whilst it was Hunter's role to "monetise" the influence whilst maintaining a wall of plausible deniability back to the family. Hunter Biden is on record complaining about having to give 50% of his income (millions) to Joe Biden. So this would mean things like Hunter paying for all the upkeep of Joe's mansions etc. There is also evidence of them sharing co-mingled bank accounts.
So it seems what happened is that they took their approach they'd been using for decades in Delaware and just went global with their influence-peddling schemes. And Hunter was playing the same role except now on a global scale. This means, for example, forming a business partnership with a Chinese company connected to CCP intelligence for which they were hoping to get 100's of millions. This fell through in the end.
I recommend reading a book called "Red-Handed" by Peter Schweizer (yes another "right-wing culture war book"!) where he talks about the well-documented Chinese "elite capture" program where they ensnare foreign elites (business, govt, academia) in lucrative business deals (millions of dollars) to ensure they remain pro-China's interests. Clearly Hunter Biden was a target for this, he has zero relevant experience or track record to justify his involvement in anything beyond organising a drug deal.
Hunter Biden's laptop provided clear and direct evidence of the stuff I'm talking about however the story has been suppressed (did I mention the media is garbage?)
Hunter Biden's business partner, Tony Bobulinski, has stated that Joe Biden was the effective chairman of the enterprise (just not on paper). Joe was present at multiple meetings (Joe Biden lied about this). Tony Bobulinski also mentioned to Jim Biden (Joe's brother) he was concerned about some of the things they were doing. In reply Jim smirked and commented about "plausible deniability". Tony also took all his evidence to the FBI but they also suppressed the story.
>Well I dont know what else to say to someone who thinks they are informed, when they aren't and who refuses to look elsewhere.
Did you read my comments before you showed up and started shooting holes in the floor? Specifically:
>A healthy skepticism suggests those payments [made to Hunter Biden] were not made on the basis of his business acumen, in the same way we can suspect purchases of his paintings were not made on the basis of his artistic skill.
And is it your impression that I agree that the argument in the summary you provided is more or less accurate, and the material on the laptop as reported is evidence of foul play and cause for further investigation?
There is nothing in the laptop or elsewhere to show that... the “big guy” referenced in the email is in fact Joe Biden
This sort of skepticism would make sense in a court of law, but on an online forum it is risible. Hunter knows nothing about Ukrainian energy, nor does he speak any Slavic languages. Also he is an unstable drug addict. There is only one possible explanation for his lucrative employment by Burisma. There certainly was an attempt to influence Joe, and that was the topic considered by that email. Your other caveats might well be correct; one suspects Hunter may be too much of a fuck-up to successfully convey an attempted bribe to its intended target.
> Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition.
This line of thinking is so weird to me. When I tweet that’s me speaking. If the story turns out to be false I should feel guilty about that, and apologize to my followers. Twitter has little to do with it.
To me Twitter e.g. censoring direct messages feels like the postal service reading letters and filtering those that they deem untrue. Absolutely dystopian. Who would want this…?
Well let’s say UPS then. When I send a document through UPS, should they take some responsibility for the truthfulness of its contents…? That’s just a very weird way to organize society…
1. If a law was passed that said twitter cannot moderate user content, Twitter would be ecstatic. It is a tremendous cost to them to do so, and not having to do so would largely be a win in their books (they'd still probably have to generate tools to allows users to moderate their own content, so not a total win)
2. If UPS shipped your products for free, but there were ads on the boxes, and they examined the contents to make sure there wasn't any content that they didn't want to ship, I'm guessing it would be a pretty popular service!
It’s because you used a radioactive term “affect elections”. I’m not from USA but I noticed that nowadays even the slightest suggestion that X (whatever X might be) influenced the outcome of an election will get you downvoted/flagged into oblivion. That is, if you’re talking about the 2020 election, suggesting that anything was wrong with the 2016 ones is perfectly fine for some reason.
Those are some very strong claims. What specifically in this thread supports them? For example, we know that Twitter received these requests from both campaigns, whereas deliberate collusion would only have been with one, and the most hyped up claims are a handful of tweets which contained non-consensual nudity, which doesn’t exactly seem like it would shift the election.
I am fully prepared for folks on the left to pretend this is a non-issue / not important. The probability that they consider this an abuse of power is zero.
The head of legal at of a publicly traded corporation acting without knowledge of the CEO to suppress a story about a presidential candidates son, while other internal executives argue in writing if they even have the legal/policy grounds to do so - Ive spent decades in corporations and I can think of few more obvious abuses of power.
I mean, this is an event that lasted a day, they admitted their own mistakes, and they clearly deliberated over it. Like I agree with you in principal and could agree if they tried to keep it going, but they even said they should probably stop suppressing it because it was against their policies. They in fact seemed to not want to use their power.
So I guess, yeah, what do you propose gets done about it? What is the core principal here that should get applied equally across the political spectrum. If you misapply your moderation policies you should be hanged?
It is literally the job of the head of legal to act, often without knowledge of the CEO (especially on time sensitive matters). The CEO is usually informed at some point, of course.
But this is why they are the head of legal.
It's often actually written into their policies. There are certainly corporations that say the opposite, or require the board to be notified, or whatever, but it would not be that uncommon for the head of legal to respond to something and then inform the CEO after doing it.
As for suppressing stories - it seems they suppressed stories from pretty much anyone who asked - Matt says explicitly they did it for "both sides".
That does not seem like an abuse of power. It may be a crappy policy, but despite all the hand-wringing, Twitter is just a platform, not anything special. So maybe it's a platform with a crappy policy.
Believing that 7.8 billion people talking at each other directly (where if 99% of people agree, you are still arguing with 78 million people) is somehow advancing anything useful is, honestly, crazy or highly ignorant of why we moved towards representative systems of (government, et al) in the first place.
It wasn't because we couldn't get all the people in the room.
Seeing it as a place to shoot the shit, awesome.
Seeing it as a foundational block of democracy - uh, no. Or at least, if it ever became that, democracy is doomed. Thankfully, it isn't, really.
This is not an abuse of power. It's literally what the job entails.
This is why companies have leadership, with diversified duties. So the CEO doesn't have to have knowledge.
You can absolutely, and fairly, argue that is the wrong call, that the team acted too swiftly, but it's weird to look at what has been reported so far and say it was "abuse of power".
I would say I consider it both an abuse of power and not important. Musk is also abusing his power as dear leader of Twitter and I also consider that not important. All the drama about Twitter is a just a gossipy sideshow.
Interesting to highlight that there was actually some structured internal back & forth about content moderation which was amenable to improvement. This was then completely replaced by the "Musk Himself" Content Moderation Engine.
Some people are probably going to call for legislation to address this twitter thread. What kinds of laws or regulations do you think could solve this?
Yes yes, someone has already said something about one of them being a dick pic, remove that one, whatever. But do you think they are ALL dick picks? This email is one out of many.
But that is still within the company's First Amendment right. This was settled when the Supreme Court ruled that political donations are a company's First Amendment right. So now companies are allowed to have a direct influence on elections.
The point being made by the commenter you replied to, which I think you missed, is that if the government passed a law preventing one private entity (a political campaign) from emailing another private entity (a business), that would be government interference in speech.
Hopefully ones requiring this kind of transparency regarding moderation actions on platforms of sufficiently large size. A lot of concerns about bias would go away if platforms had to give proper reasoning/justification for moderation actions in more definite terms than the vague statements we're used to. It might be a bit much to expect that for every moderation action, so maybe something that balances the required detail against the visibility of the action.
For example, banning spambots should basically only need overall statistics on the bans, whereas bans/suspensions of news or public figures should require detailed insight into what happened. As a side effect it might force platforms to have some insight into automated bans instead of relying on people managing to stir up enough of a ruckus on another platform to get in touch with a human.
Well, the one party wants to require more censorship, which would be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US), and the other party wants to ban censorship, which would also be bad (and unconstitutional here in the US).
Maybe something about transparency would be workable? Even if the policy that whichever site is being transparent about is "all decisions are arbitrary", at least people would know that that's the policy.
So the journalist gets access to the emails in return for promising to dribble the story on Twitter over 30 minutes? Would be a much better experience if he wrote an article or at least tweeted faster, but not as much refreshing I guess.
Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.
The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.
Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.”
Yes, it's almost certainly the case that dribbling these out on Twitter first is part of a deal. Musk certainly would want that to help keep Twitter relevant.
Anyone have the 'long form' of this to read? Twitter is such a terrible way to read long content.
Aside: I really enjoyed Taibbi's few books, but haven't respected his online opinions since around 2016. I'm not surprised Elon chose Taibbi to 'break this story' considering what 'side' Taibbi's been on -- he's had a pretty clear bias, but I'm willing to check out more of his reporting here in long form.
Just wait until he's done and then tweet '@threadreaderapp unroll' (or look for replies to people who already placed the request. You'll get a link toa. single-page version.
I'm pretty sure that he'll write this up as a proper article too.
Edit : just listened to the podcast episode he linked at the end of the tweet thread and it appears from what he's saying there that he might only write about it on twitter. (Perhaps for legal indemnity reasons?)
To get access to the material he had to agree to a bunch of conditions, and it seems like one of those conditions was 'you can only tweet about it' (presumably to drive Twitter traffic).
Yeah I think twitter started rotting Taibbi's synapses around that time. He's become so hyper-concerned with the hypocrisy of liberals that he's not even aware how he's just become a gullible parrot for right-wing spew. Sorry but I’m done with all this fake moral outrage about a laptop or whatever.
I don't follow or give attention to American politics, I don't live in America, and probably never will.
But the Left bias in Social media is extremely concerning, its so apparent from the type of people who work in tech, especially in Silicon valley, that they have a Leftist bias, whether the Left or the Right are correct doesn’t matter.
The issue is Social media in our time is it’s where a lot of people form opinions, follow news coverage, and basically inform themselves about the world.
Instead of it just being a impartial medium, it actively controls and narrates the conversation.
before Social media (IMO) no conversational medium strived to control and influence the conversation itself.
the coffee shop didn’t really pay attention to what you said(with exceptions of course) they just cared that you ordered something.
In a family gathering the medium itself doesn’t influence the conversation, your family members do.
And when People go to complain about this, Left-leaning tech workers will just say “don’t be mean”, or don’t break the rules, I doubt their reaction would be the same if Social media was more right leaning, heck Left-leaning journalists are already trying to dismiss the story as nothing important, while it’s the first known proof of political leaning affecting moderation by going beyond the rules.
the Hunter Biden laptop story should’ve been much bigger, and downplaying the affect social media censorship had on it, is just lying.
Its a problem and I don’t know the solution either, is it creating a new type of classification that forces Social networks to act as an impartial communication medium? Is it creating a public social media for each country?, almost nobody knows, but acknowledging the problem is a first step.
(Please don’t go into a flame war about American politics, this is a conversations about Social media political leanings, not American politics)
Why should it have been a bigger story exactly? My understanding is there wasn't any wrongdoing found (not to mention the chain of custody was a mess).
I didn't read the whole thing, but from the reactions of politicians in the Twitter files and some news writers, it looks like it was something worth paying attention to, surely more than the every day doom and gloom headlines.
(As I said I am not an avid american politics follower, I would remove the "should've been a bigger story" line if that's an issue)
Here’s the thing thought. So far the emails show a team making a mistake, and being thoughtful about it. Trying to look to their moderation principals and disagreeing about the path forward. Then, later we know Jack and Yoel and most of the team apologized and admitted it was a mistake.
If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals that apply universally that should make me more concerned.
> the hunter biden laptop story should have been a much bigger story.
Should it? This is the most Barbara Streisanded news story in history; There have been two years of investigations and nothing has come of it. Maybe it was just a nothingburger that also happened to have been handled by Twitter badly. Even Matt taibbi said that the suspression was a bigger story than the original article.
I just don't believe there is anyone that would look at what they are doing and go "yes, that's the right course" only to figure out that maybe manipulating politics using your power in social media company is not a good thing to do.
They got caught doing something that it was public knowledge they were doing and the whole point of them doing it was immediately acknowledged in public?
If you think it's the Twitter's moderation team who's responsible for "to control and influence the conversation itself" on Twitter, I got bad news for you.
Political conversation on twitter is driven by:
1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum
2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain
3) bots amplifying all of the above
Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that, yet somehow we all pretend that Twitter and other such platforms are representative of the population. I mean, if we weren't pretending, there would be very little reason to pay attention to it, yet here we are.
There are two types of platforms that (somewhat!) managed to escape the trap of extremism:
1) Those owned and controlled by billionaires for their own gain (state funded channels, major private news channels, local news stations, etc.)
2) Platforms that are too small / too niche / not used by people for sharing political opinions (niche forums, most people's email, etc.)
I am yet to see any solutions for this.
Everyone's pumping Mastodon as if it can solve extremism / spam / bots. It can't, the extremists, special interests, and their bots will just follow you there... if Mastodon ever becomes big enough to drive political discourse that is. And if it won't, then it's no different from the myriad of niche forums we already have – those are great, but utterly irrelevant to the problems we face with platforms like Twitter.
Neither will government-enforced censorship improve the situation. If you disagree, let's wait until <party-you-hate> is in power, then implement this change. <excuses follow>. Yeah, that's what I thought.
> One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue.
Moderation bias is only a minor issue in practice, compared to the real issues that I mentioned. Twitter is still a cesspool of both left wing and right wing propaganda despite your claim that one side "controls the entire conversation".
> why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party
So...
1) You have an unbiased party in mind, and this party is unbiased because it's magically incorruptible in principle, not because it currently holds no power worth corrupting.
or
2) You claim that no party should control twitter at all (aka free speech absolutism), and have a magical solution to ward off extremism and deliberate attacks and bots.
Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.
Jack was, quite famously, half-assing his leadership of Twitter for years. There was no secret, it was constantly discussed here on HN: how Jack’s inability to lead can be described as an “amazing subplot” rather than an embarrassing stain on Jack is beyond me — I guess because Elon loves Jack, this has to be framed positively?
This part is weird, and it seems like there was an agreement between Musk and Matt not to smear Jack in this process. But if you really think there’s massive corruption at Twitter I don’t know how you think Jack should be absolved.
That part just shows that even explosive news like this is really just PR work. Pretty much every major news story can be reduced to “who is willing to finally talk about X and what do they want to convey?”
And then Taibbi deleted his next tweet where he himself emailed Jack tens days after the NYP story about it which contradicts a lot of what Taibbi is saying.
HN is a weird place. Feels like the loudest political voices are alt-right-adjacent nowadays. Just yesterday I had to wade through Q-level talk about Balenciaga being the true villain in society (one user literally said the Latin translation of Balenciaga had occult meanings).
It's just so surprising to see Tucker Carlson's outrage machine consistently make rounds in HM comments. I guess he recovered from that Jon Stewart skewering just fine amongst the HN crowd?
If multiple users were telling you the same kinds of things on a platform that you typically expect to be reasonable, is it possible that your expectations of the platform were correct after all and they were being more reasonable than you give them credit for? Sometimes coherent theories can seem bizarre or nonsensical if you're not familiar with their core premises
They never said that, but I have to say there's been absolute garbage takes on HN as long as I've been here. Comes with the territory, GP was just lamenting the particular genre of garbage takes they've seen lately.
It's disappointing how there's real stunningly outrageous stuff and you just brush it away under the umbrella of Q.
Epstein was revealed to have an ungodly long list of elites from around the world visiting his island full of minors that were sexually abused and trafficked. Hollywood openly cooperated with Weinstein for decades only for it to all explode. All were liberal, metropolitan social circles that openly admit everyone knew what was going on, it was all an open secret, yadda yadda. Then they do this theatrical routine about starting a movement to shift the culture to be better, even though they were all complicit with the evil for decades.
Now Balenciaga does this photo shoot where children are posed with all these overt satanic references, not to mention a freaking legal document from a child pornography case?
This isn't some harebrained conspiracy theory, it's obvious evil.
It's kind of interesting in the sense that reading internal emails is always kind of interesting...but otherwise, nothing here seems particularly shocking or groundbreaking.
The only real revelation here seems to be that there existed some internal debate whether or not blocking the story was a good idea, which seems...kind of obvious? I'd be more surprised if there wasn't internal debate.
The story is in how anxious they were to fit it into a hacked material case. Because there was no other existing mechanism in which to do it. (They claimed it in the emails Taibbi referenced.) They admit it was not tenable, because first amendment issues were specifically raised by Rep. Mo Khanna.
It wasn't tenable because the hacked materials policy is for doxing not journalism. Many of the biggest stories broken by NYT and WaPo over the decades have come from hacked/leaked materials. The policy was never meant to prevent these kinds of stories.
So we should let NYPost publish nudes of anyone and everyone they want to, just because? And no one is allowed to call them out on that because Free Speech?
Why do people keep citing this tired already easily refuted line? It was not just about nude pictures. Read a little more about the contents of the laptop and his connection to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma as well as Chinese energy execs. If people had a little more curiosity about the stories and not just the headlines, we might not be on the verge of WWWIII right now in Ukraine.
Forgive me if you don't like Tucker Carlson, but very few are even dare to cover it. Or genuinely refute it without personal insults.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCApIZBdu-0
Not sure who the person is that posted this, is this legit? The format on most of those "emails" is just completely off and the grammar/spelling check underlining suggests that this is being viewed in an editor.
> The only real revelation here seems to be that there existed some internal debate whether or not blocking the story was a good idea, which seems...kind of obvious?
You'd think it'd be obvious but so many people seem to be convinced that Twitter was the seat of wokeness and the moderation team sat on the throne. That there was a debate totally contradicts the characterization Matt is running for.
I don’t really see a debate. I see an email listing tweets from “the Biden team” and a response that it’s been taken care of.
Must be very cool to be running for president and have a team with a direct censorship line to one of the biggest news proliferation websites in the world. Just lost a few tweets and BAM!
The tweets in question were naked images of Hunter Biden, which were against Twitter's TOS and would be illegal to circulate in California anyway under the state's revenge porn law. You can literally put the links into archive.org and see for yourself if you want. Taibbi's thread also makes clear that Trump's team had access to the same 'direct censorship line', and that some of their requests were honored too.
It's still kind of odd to think that you can be an in-favor executive at a company, then somebody else can buy your company, fire you, and go back and read all your work emails (many of which would be extremely sensitive) and share it with journalists who then screenshot it and share it with the world on the same platform that employed you!
This was always a possibility (and a probability- my friend was a lawyer who went through senior employee emails at whatever company to find incriminating evidence to fire them... 20 years ago). But it's just odd to see somebody do it in realtime, blatantly, while also claiming they are doing some incredible product work.
Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
> . If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
I don’t think he does, I think he can literally see engagement falling in the days after a stunt and he’s trying to keep it up. Matt seemed to imply there would be another thread following this one so buckle up
There is a story here! Politicians having direct access to social networks to suppress narratives they don't like is interesting. But 1) I don't think it's surprising and 2) it appears it was not politically motivated at least in a bipartisan sense.
A story but one delivered with the kind of panache to drive traffic.
That's flat out false. He clearly claimed in the thread there was clear evidenceof political motivation. For one, he cited the political donations are heavily slanted. Secondly, he mentioned the mass confusion that reigned as they tried to fit it into the hacked material case, even though it was clearly was not. It was a NY Post story about a lost/abandoned laptop. Read the thread.
A lone company acting on its own to suppress a story may not be surprising to you, but collaboration between government and a corporation to suppress speech definitely should be. It's where fascism begins.
You can do whatever you want. However, Taibbi doesn't provide a single email where the Biden campaign asks to suppress a narrative. There is an email where the Biden campaign asks for twitter to take down a few posts that were naked pictures of Hunter. I'm not quite sure that's what I'd call suppressing a narrative. Frankly, given the email, I find it hard to believe that could have been even most of the Hunter nude posts on Twitter. My reasonable assumption is that they were particularly graphic.
None of this news today except that Taibbi has now proven that Twitter actually did have an internal debate about whether to take down the laptop story, which runs contrary to his own narrative.
That's why I think your characterization is ridiculous because there is: a) no suppressing of narratives; b) the "direct connection" is the same thing any other VIP would have. Further to this, the guy was running for President of the united states, I can think of dozens of reasonable reasons why the campaign would want to have quick access to someone at Twitter. Also, your characterization is ridiculous because on top of assuming all that (which are contrary to the facts you are pointing to), you also made all of these assumptions without even bother to inquire what it was that was taken actually taken down.
Your argument is not that they didn't have elevated access to control content on Twitter but that it was a specific type of access and a specific type of content.
And I agree! My point is they had that channel, not a value judgement on whether that was in or out of twitters terms of service.
You may say this was known years ago, and that's also true, but the general public probably doesn't know this.
> If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
Of course people will get excited. If Elon were to flog a "Hunter Biden's laptop" story that turned out to be that its hard drive was 4500 RPM when the SKU was marketed as 5400, and that capacity was measured in gigabytes rather than gibibytes, people would still get excited. Facts have little to do with any of this, it's all a post-modern, post-truth exercise in perceptions.
This isn't about any story that Elon Musk was flogging. It's about a true story that was published in a major tabloid about one of two presidential candidates on the eve of an election that every major media outlet colluded to suppress.
Minimizing it is condescending. Tainting it through associating it with Musk is as cynical as tainting it by associating it with mystery Russians.
It’s pretty clear that the policy was heavily driven by connections and with 97%+ employees donating to the Democrats (edit:of employees who donated), it’s obvious which party had the ear of executives.
What’s even more damning is how their own internal folks are sounding the alarm “how can we possibly defend this decision” and yet the decision stood.
It’s pretty clear that Twitter had a very strong alignment to one political party and that resulted in the deliberate suppression of an important news story right before an election.
97% of Twitter (US?) employees donated to the Democrats? Is it normal for approximately 100% of your staff to donate to a party? This seems quite odd to me.
It surely isn’t 97% of Twitter employees donating to Democrats. It’s 97% of donations by Twitter employees going to Democrats. I’d imagine the actual percentage of Twitter employees who donate to anyone is pretty low.
Plus you’re then drawing a direct line from that to access to execs. IMO that needs specific evidence. Plenty of tech execs are well connected to both parties, because they’re, you know, rich elites.
It is not even slightly odd. Everybody from the lowest pleb working at any company is made very aware that emails, messages, and any communication that goes through company systems or computers or phones are not private, and may be accessed by the company at any time for any reason, or be subject to subpoena by third parties.
> Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
Authoritarians love the idea of corporations subservient to government being used as a tool of the state to crack down on human rights. Lots of people don't see a problem with it.
The argument lefties like to make about free speech is that companies are free to choose who can use and what can be said on their platforms. Free speech only applies to government. Well, looks like government has been a part of it.
Can you provide references to specific parts where elected representatives are doing something you think supports that view, rather than hand waving ‘ah hah’ when it doesn’t seem all that damning?
There's still a few weeks left in 2022. It's not too late for this to be the year when you learn that freedom of speech isn't just a law, it's a value.
Something that doesn't involve the government can still be a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, just like something that doesn't technically break any laws against discrimination can still be unfair or racist.
The tweets requested to be taken down, highlighted in the thread, were tweets requested for review as violating Twitter's terms of service.
Which they did, because they were naked pictures of Hunter Biden, being distributed without his consent.[1] They would also be illegal to distribute under revenge porn laws but were being distributed by Chinese-originating accounts.
> Isn't the problem that the government is doing an end run around the 1st Amendment?
"The Biden team" was not the government in October 2020. (For that matter there is a "Biden team" right now that has no governmental capacity, that is, his re-election team, which is probably engaged in these same kind of activities with many platforms.) I have to wonder if these communications aren't just pretty normal? It might be easier to evaluate how alarmed we should be if any detail were provided by Taibbi at all.
People keep conflating the 1st Amendment with the ideal of free speech. It doesn’t make it moral to suppress people’s speech because you’re legally not on the hook for it.
"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
That nothing in work email is private is well-known (not everyone knows this). That wasn't my point. I place "company looks at employee's email after a credible report of hacking/abuse/whatever" and "rich person purchases major tech platform and uses it to publicize ex-employees email to affect public opinions" in two different categories, especially given the ex-employee was a C-level officer handling some extremely complex and sensitive decisions.
They’re telling people the truth about how the decisions were made. Complaining that this “affects public opinion” and that the emails were “sensitive“ is just a fancy way of saying that what the public was previously told were lies.
What in the emails indicates anything was a lie? You'd think Taibbi would bring that out if there was such a hot example.
Besides, the poster's point was that many of these people are now going to receive death threats from whackjobs, not that their contents were too sensitive.
It doesn't seem that different from the more typical "rich person (or company) sues major tech platform, employee emails become public record as part of the lawsuit and are publicized to affect public opinion". Though it is amusing that both sides are the same company in this case.
> But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
You don't even need this "Twitter Files" thread to know that there is plenty of evidence; I don't really see how you can say with any such confidence that Twitter's policies have been even handed.
This seems like a kind of question where people are going to come to different conclusions based on what echo chamber they are part of (because news of different instances of policy enforcement are going to be promoted by different groups). You could try to get a handle on the objective truth through a quantitative analysis. Otherwise, we’re all just claiming our priors are obviously the truth.
Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time. So if you're going to blame anyone for this, blame the government. Also the owners of Twitter knew that Musk would have access to these messages. That was priced into the deal. Executives and managers at publicly traded companies are very aware of information retention policies and make sure to avoid putting certain things in writing. That's why so many of the emails are along the lines of, "Can you take a look at this?", or "More to review from the Biden team.", instead of being explicit commands. It's just a miraculous coincidence that every single one of those requests results in censorship or banning.
> there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do
Ah yes the old, "It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, they deserved it."
If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.
Biden himself wasn't an elected official at the time, but many others were. One of Taibbi's tweets shows an email from the DNC requesting that certain tweets be censored.
So if the RNC had a hotline to Twitter that they used to censor stuff so their candidates could win more elections, you'd respond in the same manner? They're a private organization.
If people were posting revenge porn of Tiffany Trump on Twitter and RNC staffers contacted Twitter to notify them of the offending tweets, I think that would be commendable.
In fact, there were nudes of Melania Trump shared on social media during the 2016 election. These weren't personal but were instead professional photographs. Everywhere I ever saw them they were taken down very very quickly.
"10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:"
These actions effectively installed Biden as president. There was a poll where an easily-sufficient percentage of respondents said they would have changed their vote if the laptop story hadn’t been suppressed. Someone can probably find it.
> These actions effectively installed Biden as president.
No, the millions of voters who selected him over trump did that.
This hit job using hacked iCloud information to post revenge porn of Hunter Biden was not going to change people's votes, it had nothing to do with Joe Biden. Just another Russian hack job.
The poll showed that 4 out of 5 people who said they had been following the laptop story (i.e., people who already knew about it despite the "censorship") thought that it was "very" or "somewhat" likely that coverage of the story affected the outcome of the election.
That poll of people who closely follow Republican talking points found that they think that more coverage of Republican talking points would help Republicans win elections. It’s not untrue but it’s not telling you anything you didn’t already know.
(Note, for example that the poll numbers you read in the NY Post were based on 437 of the original 1,335 respondents because they literally excluded everyone else to get the numbers they wanted to base this story on.)
Nobody with any realistic sense of reality gives a single shit about Hunter Biden and whatever the hell he did with his life.
People voted Trump out because he utterly gutted our country, even when handed layup after layup. Knock it off with this "Biden was installed" shit, jesus christ.
The country is currently being utterly gutted. Many of the things people accused Trump of doing is happening at this moment, under this administration.
But let's ignore that and repeat all the bad stuff the news told us Trump did, and how Biden is a saint for swooping in and saving our democracy.
>Many of the things people accused Trump of doing is happening at this moment, under this administration.
>
>But let's ignore that
I am not engaging in a discussion where the other party handwaves away with a simple "many of the things". You don't get to pull that junk and then say "let's label everyone willfully ignorant".
Ah yes, Biden the former vice president and 40 year career politician was a political naïf who had no influence whatsoever because he was not in office at the time. Of course.
Biden was a person with considerable influence. But that's not the same as "Twitter and the US government collude." If there is anything most closely matching that phrase, it is the examples of reviews done based on information from the Trump team.
> If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.
in this case the government was run by donald trump, and the censorship was to remove stolen revenge porn
One of the results of the restrictive reporting on that subject, and the self-censorship by journalists on the topic at the time the story broke, is that people think it was only about "stolen revenge porn".
It wasn't "stolen revenge porn". It was information about how Joe Biden used his political power to shield his son from the consequences of his misdeeds. That story was completely censored from Twitter. You couldn't even link to it.
And the US government isn't run by any one person. The president is the most powerful individual, but there are other officials (both elected and appointed), and they are the ones who colluded.
I don't care whether it's the president, or the speaker of the house, or a freshly-trained FBI agent. Nobody in government should be pressuring private companies to prevent people from reading what they want to read.
Do a CTRL+F for the phrase revenge porn in this thread. It's not an honest attempt at an explanation; it's a specific, coordinated tactic to misdirect away from the incredible information that the Bidens were corrupt.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Hunter's ****.
> Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time.
I've heard it phrased this way: never send an email that you wouldn't be happy to read out in court.
But I'm curious, how can this policy be enforced? If I delete some of my work emails, how can a court prove that the emails ever existed and that I deleted them?
If you're subject to an investigation they'll put retention policies on them to stop that. If you're not, sure you can delete them and wait for them to disappear out of the backup windows, but then you'll need everyone who got that email to do the same.
As I was told in my first day of training at a large investment bank, "If you have something sensitive to discuss, pick up the phone".
The golden rule: before sending anything potentially sensitive, ask yourself: if this email/doc/note were to be published on the cover page of NYT, would you be embarrassed by it?
If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.
I don't know why people keep pointing this out- I already knew this when I made my comment. I knew it from the day I joined Google and it was just proved out when I read my own manager's email (from a previous role) on the front page of the NYT.
This is very different from legal discovery and disclosure.
>Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently.
Clearly they were.
>But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
The evidence is not only clear, but overwhelming. But more than favoring a party, they favored the DC blob narrative. See the treatment of Wikileaks vs the treatment of CIA propaganda accounts like PropOrNot or Bellingcat as crystal clear examples.
>I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
This is really the problem and the issue at hand. Many whose perceived political opponents are being silenced and attacked by the unholy cabal of government and big tech don't care (or worse, are happy) because they have no principles. At the end of the day, those they look down upon, or that they think are bad for whatever reason, are getting the shaft, and that is just fine with them. Those of us with principles think that everyone deserves to be treated by the same set of rules, even those people we don't like or who we think are bad. Unfortunately, the schism between the principled and unprincipled is only growing wider as the former group shrinks and the latter group grows daily.
You mean emails the company paid you to write for its benefit? They were never yours. Also, there's the adage about never emailing any statement you wouldn't want on the front page of the NYT for this exact reason.
> But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
"There's no REAL proof that large corporations overwhelmingly favor the left" is the political version of "there's no REAL proof that the earth is round"
Okay, since this is going to get unflagged I guess let me make this as clear as possible. See this tweet [0]? These are example tweets that people are complaining was unfairly censored by the government (despite him later saying there's zero evidence of this [1]).
Now those tweets are still visible. You can go to archive.org and see them right now. What are these 'censored' tweets? They're photos of Hunter Biden's cock, naked or otherwise nonsensical stuff. This is literally one of the major points of this entire 'twitter files' stuff. This is what people are complaining is being suppressed.
I don't believe a picture of his dick is a matter of public affairs. Moreover, it doesn't belong on Twitter for a whole host of reasons entirely irrelevant to the story Taibbi is trying to push. Literally nothing else came out of the Hunter Biden laptop shit because there's nothing there beyond tabloid level nonsense. If this is somehow breaking news on HN then what has this site become?
Incredibly embarrassing that anyone thinks this crap is important.
Hunter Biden is not an elected official! Who gives a shit. If this were about like, Anthony Weiner, maybe it would have the potential to be an interesting story, but this isn't even close.
Politicians should never be able to directly influence the moderation of social media items they find politically unfavorable; I don't care which party does it. I can understand something that involves direct threats/calls to violence, but that's about it. Anyone that has used Twitter for some time knows the moderation was often not all that even, not just by pure political means but also threats of violence etc were always treated differently depending on who they were aimed at.
Exactly. The fact so many don't understand this is discouraging. Just because you support a particular candidate shouldn't mean it is ok, because it could very easily go against you on another occasion. There needs to be a uniform standard and accountability for this.
what does a particular politician have to do with this? the "leak" literally said both the trump white house and the biden campaign lobbied to have posts removed
i think it's kind of funny that the government is lobbying corporation now, rather than the other way around.
It's as if everyone parroting this line stopped reading at the "However":
"10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://t.co/sa1uVRNhuH
12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives."
You do know what this kind of government/corp collaboration is, don't you? It's literally the beginning of a fascist state. This is not hyperbole either, though I wish it was.
IANAL but I believe the law says if the journalist didn't aid in whatever made obtaining it illegal, like hacking the data out, then they are clear to publish it. And that's what one Dem called for Twitter to write in its policy, according to the "Twitter files":
Twitter never shut down Wikileaks or other things in the interest of national security that involved civilians and government officials alike. They have allowed journalists to leak other similar stories from hacks constantly. The Panama Papers, etc were all mostly civilians. Twitter never censored that, except in China at the behest of the CCP. Which comes to the original point. No politician or political arm should have the power or influence to take something down they find unfavorable. I prefer not to live in a CCP like state where the "party" gets an edit button on everyone's thoughts.
But so does dark money in politics, which is worse than influencing twitter.
Dark money flows to high impact mass distribution channels, and who knows what is truth and what is not, and the response is social media should not be asked to take down false or misleading content?
Nude pictures of an individual being distributed without consent isn't politically unfavorable -- its criminal in many places and obscene everywhere.
The "laptop" story is a red herring for Trump's crimes and used to cover them up by making up a load of BS to give cover for Republican whataboutism.
What I find surprising is the defense many HN commentators are giving to this propaganda, especially those that try to say silliness like "Biden was installed!"
I'm neither Republican or Democrat -- I'm an equal opportunity cynic in relation to political parties -- and boy, has the GOP been taking advantage of that opportunity!
The NY Post didn't post any nude photos, and they were banned. So, your talking point is nonsense. If you weren't a part of either party, wouldn't you want to...idk, crackdown on corruption in both parties? Seems that would be the non-partisan thing to do. Instead of saying "well, what Trump did was worse!" Both Trump and Biden should both be held responsible for any corruption. Hunter getting on the board of an energy company with no experience in the field, and then having email chains lending to a possibility of using his father's influence for business...seems like something worth reporting on and looking into. Just as Trump using his hotel chains to collect money from foreign diplomats should also be taken seriously and looked into, among the other terrible things he's done. Having a D or R next to your name shouldn't shield you from anything.
It was already widely criticized at the time(https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-files-blocked-...):
" Twitter subsequently reversed the decision, saying that it had updated its hacked-materials policy and would not retroactively apply it to the New York Post. Other news outlets, including the New York Times, have since reported that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden and the documents on it were authentic. Predictably, Twitter’s blocking of the Post became a rallying point for Republican politicians accusing the social network of censoring conservative viewpoints. "
So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.
The part where they removed tweets because they were asked to or banned accounts because they were asked to is a pretty big deal. And even though everyone knew they did that it wasn't in writing. It's kind of like the Snowden leaks, everyone who thought about the issues involved had a basic idea of what was going on but until it was out in the open people could just deny it.
But that's going to be the narrative. The actual reality doesn't matter, just like the endless gloating these days about the so-called "Russia hoax" - where there was a bunch of shady goings-on between the Trump campaign and the RU gov't who was quite explicit in their desire to work with and assist his campaign. But because it didn't achieve the nigh-impossible feat of a successful impeachment vote by his own party, they act as if the whole thing was a ridiculous put-on when in fact they'd be frothing at the mouth if it was Joe Biden and the CCP.
Narrative is the only thing that matters, especially to these folks, and unfortunately that's why our society is fucked. Because they are definitely going to win that battle. They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here.
This started with the 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' and it hasn't stopped since because it wasn't smacked down hard. Smear campaigns work, the question is if you let them or not and the US seems to firmly believe that smear campaigns (and lots of money) are legal means of achieving political dominance.
> They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here.
I certainly didn't claim that and I have thousands of comments on HN under my real name that you can verify that with. I'd appreciate it if you didn't group me in with whatever "folks" you think I'm affiliated with. For context, the twitter thread said both political parties made requests to remove tweets and ban accounts that were acted upon. And in my own comment I made no reference to specific political parties. Nor am I registered or affiliated with either one.
Do you have any evidence for that? I don't see anywhere where it says what the tweets contain. In either case, the claim I made is that twitter removed tweets and banned accounts at the request of certain parties, which remains true and is what the linked images show.
It’s surprising that the teams around the most powerful political office in the country have communication lines open with media corporations?
That doesn’t strike me as notable or surprising at all, even if it’s new information.
For this to be surprising, I think one would have to implicitly believe one of a few things:
1) Twitter isn’t a meaningful political battleground, 2) politicians don’t know it’s an important political battleground, or 3) Twitter should treat a content report from “newuser18472” the same as a report from a notable organization or individual.
Reasonable things to believe, but IMO not surprising at all to find out they’re false.
I don't know what the contents of the tweets are. What the images show are people affiliated with political campaigns asking twitter employees to remove tweets, which is what I claimed originally.
You can then judge the question of "did the person in the image consent to having their picture shown on Twitter, or is this in violation California penal code 647(j)(4)?"
Thanks. Again, what I claimed was that twitter performed actions at the the request of people affiliated with political parties/campaigns. I didn't make any claims about the content of the tweets or their legality/status under twitter's terms and conditions.
There is an existing flow to report a tweet or account. This sort of backchannel communication is news and good to have documented. It's not about Biden or politics. If you read my comments you'll note that I never referenced the specific political parties involved and in fact the twitter thread says actions were taken on behalf of both parties.
Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like.
This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
1- Biden wasn't in government, he was running for office. Private citizen at the time.
2- They weren't telling, they were asking, and if Twitter feels like they were told, they can sue the government for violating their First Amendment rights.
There are people up and down this thread claiming this is a 1A violation. Parent's sentiment may just be a conceptual one but I am much more concerned with the legal aspect, and everyone understanding that correctly.
Please elaborate on the semantics you're referring to. The comment above seems to make a point about the context in which the tweets were removed. They do seem to allay those concerns you mention.
Okay well, this doesn't feel like a good faith discussion if we're resorting to technicalities like this.
You are correct, technically Joe Biden was not a part of the government at the time that this email was sent. Do you honestly believe that this behavior is keeping with the spirit of the first amendment?
I guess the main question is, are we having a legal or moral conversation? Because when you're discussing law- which I think is the vastly more important aspect here- these aren't technicalities. I don't believe there's a thing called "the spirit of the First Amendment". There's just the First Amendment, and how the courts have enforced it and are likely to continue enforcing it. I don't think it would be a 1A violation if he did it in office- in fact, Taibbi's thread says the Trump admin did the same thing, and I don't think that's a 1A violation (legally) either.
I think you have it exactly backwards. The technicalities of the law are meaningless - morality is what's important. We created the law to codify morals, and, to the extent that it is good to follow the law, it is good only to the extent that the law agrees with morality.
And, of course, it's a moot point anyway because Taibi says requests came, and were honored, from both sides, including the White House. Even if "Joe Biden wasn't President yet" is true, Trump was President and his White House was working with Twitter to suppress speech. I just don't see how it is a question, either legally or morally, that the Federal Government, with Twitter, has been violating the first amendment.
Again, at the end, you conflate things. I don't feel the need to discuss morality, I find that boring. But legally? It's just strictly not a 1A violation with the info we have now. Twitter can take down whatever they want, it's their website. If I ask, it's not a 1A violation. If Joe Biden in 2020 asks, it's not a 1A violation. If Trump in 2020 asked, it's not a 1A violation (unless Twitter feels like they were forced, which they haven't claimed).
Just because you don't feel the need the discuss morality doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't? For some of us the "spirit of the constitution" is just as important. And IMO if you're into this whole liberalism thing and you don't think it's important then you're just being dishonest.
What you see is a non-government person asking a non-government business to censor something. What I see is a former Vice President, Congressman, and Presidential candidate, backed by the DNC, asking a major communications channel to censor something.
>Okay well, this doesn't feel like a good faith discussion if we're resorting to technicalities like this.
Okay and you are assuming that Twitter would just take down the tweets, or that the tweets didn't violate Twitter's policies. Is it not okay for someone in the gov't to hit the report button?
The 1A applies to the government forcing people or companies to restrict their speech. Since Twitter has not alleged they were forced, that means they were asked and complied voluntarily- which means it doesn't matter if the person who asked was an elected official or not, from a 1A perspective.
The First Amendment constrains only the government, so it is the biggest possible deal in this conversation.
If you are talking about the a more general ideal of "open and free speech" - which private companies are never legally required to uphold, but may choose to espouse anyway - then it's clearer to say that instead of conflating it with the First Amendment, which will just distract others from the points you're trying to make.
So on the one hand you're saying it's a big thing that the Biden campaign did ask for things to be taken down and dismiss that they were not part of the government is just a technicality, but on the other hand you are not complaining that the Trump campaign also asked for things to be taken down (it's literally in the same thread) and they actually were part of the government.
If you are worried about the "violation of the 1A spirit " should you not complain first about the government asking for things to be taken down? Or at least display the same level of outrage?
The point is they didn’t complain because they were aligned with the people asking them to handle, and they also handled it real quick, not stand tos report flow for sure.
There are eighteen separate allegations of rape (separate from coerced “consent”)
What a weird thing to try to nitpick. There are plenty of shakier instances of takedowns by Me Too. Weinstein isn’t one of them and they’re not “the entire reason” for the movement.
What are you even on about in terms of this discussion?
Are you saying the metoo movement was about physical aggressive rape of women?
Because it’s not. It’s about those in power exploiting their power for sex. And how is that done? Mostly by soft power, which you can’t say no to. Which is the whole premise of the parent comment.
> Mostly by soft power, which you can’t say no to. Which is the whole premise of the parent comment.
I think the point is that Twitter, a multibillion corporation run by rich, powerful, and well-connected people, isn’t in the same position w.r.t. the government as fledgeling starlets were against Weinstein.
Twitter could have said no, and they would have been fine; they are protected from the government by the Constitution. Twitter has tons of money, and could easily file a lawsuit or defend one as well.
The point isn’t that Twitter felt compelled. Isn’t the point that Twitter happily complied, and even made up reasons to censor the stuff they thought was the most damaging “in order to prevent another 2016”.
The point is that if you don’t like that, take it up with twitter. Framing it as government forcibly censoring twitter is just straight up untrue.
Insofar as the Biden campaign is concerned, it is impossible to violate 1A when you are not imbued with government power. There is no such thing as a private citizen compelling Twitter to take something down, the only possible thing you can be doing is requesting. Both campaigns did this so feel free to draw your own conclusions as to whether the Trump campaign did something wrong, but I will point you to the word “campaign” and note that a campaign is also a private party, so pretty unlikely.
Mate, one of the alleged bits of "censorship" was a request to take down... literally nude photos of Biden's son posted from a Chinese-language account. Anyone can ask for that to be taken down and Twitter will say yes. It's not improper to say yes just because the person asking happens to be running for President. Twitter is not under an obligation to distribute non-consensual nude photos just because the person involved is a celebrity. Imagine if that were the rule.
I would never frame this as Twitter being forced to do anything. I don’t think this is a 1A issue. But I think several things are surprising here.
First, how deeply rooted democratic operatives within Twitter took totally unprecedented action to censor a potentially highly damaging story.
Second, that Twitter publicly lied about their justification for doing so, which itself probably broke laws (at the very least a serious FTC enforcement action). Companies cannot lie that something was done because of a TOS violation. Consumers have a fair and reasonable expectation here that was violated when the company made up reasons for censoring the story - even in DMs!
Third, the chaotic response within Twitter and its internal paralysis in recognizing and “unfucking” the hijacking of their toolset for overly political and nefarious purpose.
Fourth, and this one really just irks me because it was gaslighting on a national scale, that so many channels and people picked up and ran with the “disinformation” and the particularly ridiculous “Russian disinformation” angle in an attempt to discredit the reporting.
Twitter censoring the Hunter story was basically an insider breech of corporate policy. Insider communications seem to indicate that people that could have stopped this were either stunned into submission or asleep at the wheel.
Hey, "democratic operatives" embedded somewhere is conspiratorial. The parsimonious explanation, which is where most people align, is that the content violated the terms of service as determined by Twitter. That's the conclusion supported by the new evidence as well.
It’s not like they were CIA operatives. When people say that, they mean it’s a revolving door. The NYT has repeatedly printed stories about how Google employees who volunteered w/ the DNC were a big part of the reason President Obama was elected. A huge number of people working in the Democrat party are from SV tech circles. At the last company I worked in San Francisco, the company was matching employees who donated to political causes that overwhelmingly favored one political party.
Everyone should support political movements they believe in, but at a certain point when only one point of view is that deeply ingrained in your corporate culture it affects your ability to be impartial. If you look at Twitter it’s pretty obvious that their actions reflected the culture and they kept pushing the boundaries until they eventually crossed a red line.
I think you underestimate the effect 2016 Russian disinformation campaigns had on social media companies. If Twitter's default policy is "it stays on the site", it's inviting hoards of garbage on the site in early November every cycle. That's pretty bad for its usability and its future, especially since the people who are running in those elections play a key role in regulating it.
Your post works really hard to characterize Twitter employees as "nefarious" "[D]emocratic operatives" who "publicly lied", "broke laws", and engaged in "gaslighting on a national scale", which frankly I think is baseless and unproductive. But putting that aside, it seems to me that the nature of running a communications platform like Twitter is that there's always someone who thinks this about you. The stakes are pretty high, especially around elections. I'm not a fan of social media, in particular I think Twitter on balance has been pretty bad for humanity, but my reasoning isn't that it's particularly good or bad for a given viewpoint (which seems to be yours). I think what they're trying to do is impossible, they will always fail, and there will always be big negative consequences.
For example, Twitter could've let this story ride. But it's not about Joe Biden, it's about Hunter Biden, and there's no vetted evidence of JB wrongdoing. But if JB loses the election because of this, well that's a huge failure for Twitter also. Or they can build a huge investigative unit that competes with all the disinformation bureaus of all the worlds' governments, but that's clearly a losing proposition.
We get a lot of kicks from armchair quarterbacking and our "I would fix Twitter in two shakes with my enlightened moderation policies" (at least one of us got pretty carried away with this and spent $44B to take a swing) wind-bagging, or alleging some mix of corruption and incompetence. They're a pretty good punching bag. But it's worth saying some reasonably smart people have dedicated their professional lives to solving these problems, and pretty clearly they failed. I think this is probably because what they were trying to do, while noble, is impossible. You can't make a global, public communications platform that all the world's dignitaries use that is (reasonably) free of disinformation and acceptable to all major participating parties. Hell you probably can't even do it for just the Republican and Democratic parties, let alone Germany + China.
What you can do is sell out to them over and over again, which is probably what EM will do. Twitter will become a wasteland of propaganda and banal marketing, trading whatever bona fides it has left for exposure on its platform. It's essentially a private equity buyout of Twitter's attention capital. I think the previous leadership team was wise to this, I'm pretty sure EM still isn't (he burned a lot of their attention capital in a 2 day bonfire), but give it a few weeks.
To be fair, I think giving 10 to the “big man”, a unverifiable email but which was vouched to by another recipient of the email (do they have a copy with a DKIM signature? I never saw that asked/answered), was the more relevant claim than the son with nudity.
If you mean that some(all?) the particular tweets mentioned as censored by Tabibbi were about frontal nudity and thus reasonably censored I am not arguing.
There was not a second of doubt that the emails were legitimate. Here's proof: the Biden campaign and Hunter himself never denied they were real. As well, while nobody in the mainstream bothered calling any of the people in the emails, Taibbi DID. They were obviously real the moment there was no denial. Because if they were just fabricated, denial would be the first public response.
I mean, so what? They can do what they want. We already knew what they did. The leaked communication conforms pretty well to their public explanation. You just don't like it. Go try Truth Social then.
He left the Senate in 2009 when he became vice president. He left the VP office in 2016 after Obama's second term ended. He was private citizen when this was happening. Powerful person? Sure. An agent of the government? No.
The Biden Team had the entire DNC behind them, which also means a vast majority of sitting Democrats. I'm confused by the effort to separate Biden's election team from the appendages of the government that were aligned by party and committee.
Yes, it is implied when a person who is running for president has their team reach out to a social media company to ask them to take down content.
That happening, ever, at all, implies a non zero chance that if you refuse, they will be upset and do something about it.
Something does not have to be 100% certain for it to have a huge chilling effect on speech.
The best kinds of threats are the ones that don't have to be spoken aloud, or even referenced in anyway.
Merely asking for content to be removed, is the threat, in and of itself, when you are the election team for a former vice president, who is running for president.
I don’t understand. Wasn’t the President himself constantly asking the media to do as he liked? If Twitter felt compelled by the Democratic campign, why wouldn’t they have felt compelled by the GOP too? Did Twitter somehow foresee that the election, which was so narrow that it took until the weekend to call it, would be won by the Dems and not the GOP, and that therefore they should comply with the Dems’ requests and not the President’s?
Trump did the same for four years. (“Failing New York Times” etc. if you remember?) If Twitter acted because of coercion by the government, violating 1A, why were they not also corerced by Trump?
Nobody, including Twitter, had a crystal ball that told them that Trump was going to lose the election. Trump was in government and Biden wasn’t.
So you do not disagree with the following statement at all then: "The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform."
You could have just said "yes, I agree with you. Thats what happened."
Actually I am saying this : "The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform.".
And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
At no point did I say that the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Biden to be arrested for life for 1st amendment violations, or whatever other strawman that I did not say.
So, once again. You could have just said "Yes, you are correct. Biden's team did reach out to a platform to have content removed. "
> And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
See, I don’t agree with this. Trump tried to achieve the exact opposite. He and many in the GOP made it clear that they wanted the Hunter story to be kept on the agenda. If Twitter was pushed leftward by the Biden team, they were also pushed rightward by Trump and the GOP who wanted Twitter to do the exact opposite.
The outcome is at best a net zero chilling effect.
There is no logical reason to believe that a candidate has a greater chilling effect than the sitting President and the Senate majority. You have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
> u have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
I am saying that an action has a chilling effect.
No matter how many times you bring up other actions, it remains the case that the action that I brought up has a chilling effect.
What you are doing is engaging in bad faith, by using a tactic called "whataboutism". No matter what your opinions are, on other politicians, my original point stands.
A former president, who is running for president, having their team reach to to a social media platform to have content removed, has a chilling effect, regardless of anything else that other politicians are doing.
If you are a bad faith actor, then you can continue to engage in whataboutism, without directly engaging with this point, I guess.
I’m sorry, the reason that I’m bringing up Trump is not whataboutism. But to point out that Biden was not in government, there was no clear expectation that he would ever be in government again, and that if Twitter made its decisions about those tweets based on political leverage, then they would have left the tweets up instead of removing them.
> But to point out that Biden was not in government
Things can still have a chilling effect even if someone is not literally in government right now.
Such as, for example, if the team making the requests is the political campaign of a former vice president, who is currently running for president.
No matter what bad things you think other people have done, it does not invalidate this point.
If your next statement is something of the effect of "Well what about this other thing that this other politician did!" in any way or reference what so ever, I am just going to take that as you admitting that you are acting in bad faith.
Presidents and members of Congress constantly try to pressure the media to cover things differently, cover things less, or more. This happens every day, sometimes in the obvious form of yelling from a podium publicly or blasting out tweets, but also just as much through direct conversations you and I will never be privy to.
Both political parties do this, and have full time press relations people whose whole job is to do this. We might feel that is unhealthy, but crucially, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same as jailing those who defy the requests, or compelling their speech at gunpoint, or seizing the means of broadcast.
> Presidents and members of Congress constantly try to pressure the media to cover things differently, cover things less, or more. This happens every day
Ok, so then you could have just said "yes. I agree with you completely that they were trying to pressure them to remove the content.
You are completely correct in everything that you said!"
You just agreed with me.
> Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same
A chilling effect on speech can still exist. And chilling effects on speech, from government/politicians, is something we aught avoid.
Trump's running for president again. If something comes out in October 2024 that looks bad for Trump, and Elon's Twitter censors the story at the request of Trump's team, will it please you to hear that Trump isn't (yet) in government?
Biden was Vice President at the time the Hunter Biden emails selling access to him were sent, which is exactly what the story was about. "10% for the Big Guy" while he was VP should definitely be a story when that same former VP was then running for President. Especially now that he has delivered on that access, by funneling billions to those same Ukrainian powerbrokers in the form of military aid and infrastructure spending.
i'd have to go back again and reread, but was the term "handle" used at all? i remember them asking to "review" some tweets and to measure them against the tos. i very easily could have missed them asking to "handle" it though...
i think those semantics matter, which is why i ask.
They did not ask to handle it, the person from Twitter replied "handled" (to another person at Twitter, for the record). It's in the screenshot of the email with the request.
All Twitter users have the power to report tweets.
It seems like at minimum they are bypassing the reported tweet queue.
It feels likely that these report judgements disproportionately had the outcome desired by the requester. If not all requested tweets got taken down/suspended until deleted that will look a lot better than if this channel effectively allowed unchecked censorship.
I think it's a blatant first amendment violation. Twitter are acting as agents to state to silence individuals. The federal government cannot pick and choose who gets to speak.
Joe Biden was a lifelong U.S. Senator, Vice President and a Presidential candidate. They were providing lists of people to silence, just weeks before he was elected as President. And you're arguing that because he was TECHNICALLY a private citizen at the time while the highest levels of Twitter was working at his campaign's behest to make sure he got elected President, that is somehow NOT a first amendment violation?
I would not be surprised to find out sometime that there are judges who might disagree with you on that point.
The 1st amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech. You just admitted he was not part of the government. Therefore it’s not a 1st amendment violation.
It may be morally wrong, or violating “free speech”, but I don’t see a 1st amendment violation.
Dunno why you're being downvoted here. "The Law" under "The US Constitution" is not a "technicality" here- it is the guiding document dictating how this conversation should be directed. Biden's role as a private citizen in 2020 is clear, in that light.
Could you describe what authority Joe Biden (or team Biden) had within the federal government in October 2020?
I'm not going to claim that it isn't an issue that VIPs have excessive influence on social media companies and there operations. People with lots of followers have certainly been able to pull strings to craft the message at twitter in the past. Joe Biden and his campaign team c. Oct 2020 are certainly to be counted in that number. Things like banning certain accounts ( https://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-parody-twitter-acc... ) or getting your account unblocked ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45953747 ).
I am going to ask specifically how this is a first amendment issue when none of the people involved had any role within the government at the time this took place.
Either Biden was already effectively able to employ government power against Twitter or Twitter had the ability to affect whether he got elected, but arguing both makes no sense.
Perhaps accounts apparently created only to disseminate the leak are what poster means by “people”. We’re left to speculate whether bots count as people and would be covered by the poster’s 1A.
Do you understand that if it is a First Amendment violation (which I don't think it is), the party with standing to sue over it would be Twitter, who has not claimed they were coerced/forced by the government and has not sued or announced intention to?
Agreed, but that would require acting parties within Twitter to claim they were coerced or forced to act. Knowing who the acting parties were, that's highly unlikely. So I don't think the counter-argument holds much water.
If I understand you correctly, your argument asserts bad faith- that the people involved will lie. So I don't think your counter-counter-argument holds much water, either. And I'm not sure you're even strictly correct- having the employees testify against the argument would hurt, but I could still see Twitter being able to prove they were coerced, or at least try.
You've misunderstood. I don't believe the people who acted felt they were being coerced - I believe they felt they were doing the right thing and were happy to oblige.
Nah, just misunderstood and somewhat continue to misunderstand their point. I don't see how the offered info is relevant to whether this is a 1A violation.
The 1st amendment doesn't come into play unless Twitter is being coerced by the government against their will. There's no legal prohibition against Twitter moderating their platform in a way that also pleases certain people associated with the government.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
To be clear, first amendment doesn't say the gov't shouldn't (let alone can't) ask you to do (or not do) something. It states that the legislative body of the federal government cannot make a law abridging the freedom of speech.
The text doesn’t just say make no law but also prohibiting the free exercise thereof. If the government makes some kind of implicit threat, for example that regulators might not look at a private company the same way if it doesn’t choose to comply with a request to censor someone, that’s clearly an infringement. The legislature doesn’t need to specifically pass a law banning speech for the actions of the government to be unconstitutional.
The text clearly means that the law cannot prohibit the free exercise thereof. It's not saying the law can only not establish a religion, and then, the government, in general cannot prohibit the free exercise. It says congress cannot make a law abridging the free exercise of speech.
So you are saying the Trump team asking (as documented in the twitter thread) for things to be taken down was a 1A violation? Because only the government can violate the 1A the Biden campaign wasn't the government.
What was asked was "More to review from the Biden team". I suppose having some sort of access to request reviews of specific tweets is concerning, but this alone does not demonstrate the degree of influence they had over Twitter's moderation decisions to me. But, it's telling that more damning emails weren't shared...
So ok, there was some new information (from which it's hard to confidently extrapolate much, I would say). But mostly it's a rehash of a known story, right?
Did you bother looking over the content of those tweets? You can go to archive.org right now and see what was 'censored', but I recommend not doing so at work. Or you can look at my prior posts instead for an explanation.
It should come at no surprise that high profile users of twitter (government, celebs etc) can make requests to have content that clearly violates the twitter ToS removed and are served with higher priority.
Nah, they just post death to America, recruitment videos, torture, beheadings. Ya know. The chill stuff that twitter doesn't seem to think is as big of a deal as some blurred nudes.
"Handle" could be "take down tweets on request of the Biden team without review" or "handle this request by the Biden team by considering our current policies and making an independent decision".
Neither would be terribly surprising to me, although for sure the first is more damning. But Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another.
If it is just "prioritize this support request by a VIP" it's not particularly damning or even scandalous, I would assume that would be the case at any social media company.
> Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another
The tweets in that citation are mostly available on the Wayback Machine, and 100% of those accessible ones contained frontal nudity: https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752. So they would have been taken down as a clear ToS violation no matter what.
I like all of these comments because they each contain a grain of truth.
Biden wasn't in office at the time of communications, yet was clearly a figure of influence in government.
"Handle" is an okay word to describe the scenario via an internet comment, yet also not a literal quote.
I wish we could get back to trusted parties coming to reasonable conclusions while citing sources. It seems we're stuck in a cycle of gaming SEO and piecemeal info via social media.
I guess us "citizen journalists" are learning just how challenging it can be to relate a story accurately and with minimal bias.
Resisting temptation to insert bias is rare/hard when you can acquire 1,000 more clicks/followers for tweaking the story or headline just a bit. People have bills to pay and not every story sells. Journalism isn't just about knowing how to write and investigate, you also need to know how to get your stuff out there, otherwise you're dead in the water.
How is “influence” relevant here? Also, does that make Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel “influential on government”. Can these people now not ask a social media company to remove non consensual nude photos of their family members because they are “influential on government“?
First of all, what I think is a subjective measure. It's my opinion, and you don't need to agree with it. So if you're saying "WTF are you saying" as if you cannot imagine someone would believe Biden's influence has bearing here, then we don't see eye to eye.
Second, Tucker and Thiel are influential but I probably wouldn't say government, I'd say they're influential media figures. Third, yes I imagine Tucker and Thiel do have a greater ability to influence in some areas than your average Joe.
Finally, if your next response contains another WTF-type comment, you'll have the last word.
Saying WTF is fine. My point was if there's still incredulity about where I was coming from after two clarifying comments in an already long chain then I have nothing more to say. Same goes for you.
The notion that campaign messaging can indicate what the candidate might do while in office should not be surprising.
Calls for censorship coming from individuals or groups who later assume positions within government are worth reviewing because it may inform how they operate while in office. Calls that come after taking office may be punishable. Therefore, any influence exerted during campaigns of private citizens, while unpunishable, is still interesting to follow. An incumbent up for re-election is not free to exert such influence, though I imagine it still happens on their behalf, and I'd say those unpunishable actions are worth following too.
All private messages aren't interesting, but these ones are because they called for censorship. Also, censorship just means suppression of content. It doesn't have to be done by a government.
What messages “called for censorship“ and what did they ask to censor? I haven’t seen any such messages outside of asking to remove non consensual sexual images of a family member that was against twitters TOS and probably illegal.
Let’s stop being vague, what messages are you talking about?
Everyone knows the Hunter Biden story [1] was censored. Ro Khanna (D-CA 17th) thought Twitter should've allowed it [2].
Here is a US representative, a Democrat no less, arguing that the story should be allowed to remain on the basis that even if it was hacked material, journalists are not responsible for the illegal actions of a source, and because the story is of national interest. On the other hand, the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story. Regardless of what that removed content was, the suppression of the story has itself been national news for awhile and it's worth clearing the air with facts to understand what occurred. One of them was a blurred image of Hunter Biden [5].
So again, it's interesting because these are calls for censorship, and campaign messaging can indicate what the candidate might do while in office.
None of this, by the way, should be construed to be limited to the Biden campaign or Democrats. Groups have been censoring each other for eons. Communists censored everyone but their own messaging, McCarthy censored them, Anthony Comstock did it, religions and dictators do it, and on and on.
Notice that you didn’t show any message from Biden asking them to do that. This is what was so dishonest about Tiabi’s thread. He conflated two different events. You are saying that Twitter suppressed a story, which they did, on their own!!!
Now Twitter can suppress whatever they want, and we can disagree or agree with it, but there was NO evidence presented that anyone asked them to do that.
> Notice that you didn’t show any message from Biden asking them to do that.
From my comment above,
> the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story.
If it isn't true, the Biden team and DNC can publicly deny what's presented in those messages.
The Atlantic article you cite makes a different case than you do. They're saying no violation of the first amendment occurred, and I agree with that. I've always found the released communications interesting nonetheless.
> you know where there were direct messages from a campaign and officials while in government? It was from the Trump team and Fox. Tons of them.
Where is the message? What are those tweets? It’s perfectly reasonable to ask Twitter to remove things if they are illegal or violations of twitters TOS. You’ve shown no evidence that it was improper in any way.
I said the comms were interesting. Without seeing them, yet knowing they happened, people might imagine more improper things than actually transpired. Transparency is a good thing in this case.
This is the end of the conversation for me. I've got other things to do.
So there is no evidence of anything improper. I can’t imagine Elon didn’t release the worst ones, so have no reason to believe anything worse is there, and they also said that the Trump team made requests to remove tweets but didn’t release those for some reason.
Gotcha, so there’s nothing here to be concerned about unless they release something new.
That is a concerning statement yeah. However, even if I were only interested in one thing or the other, the general public can certainly address more than one thing at once. So I don't see the point in trying to shut down conversation about one thing just because something else is going on.
Finally, even if I or the public could only focus on one thing, Trump's statement appeared after the Twitter Files release.
Is it really so problematic for you that I, a person distant from you on this planet, express interest here about Twitter's comms with DNC or Biden team?
I haven’t seen any evidence of anything concerning between the DNC and twitter. It’s all conjecture at this point. I’m asking you if you apply these same standards you espouse to the other side. That’s perfectly reasonable.
I think any indication that there were comms between a presidential candidate's team or a political party and Twitter are interesting for reasons already stated.
It's not reasonable to repeatedly ask me to convince you to change your mind. You've seen the same things as me, I think it's interesting, you think it's not. This is end of convo for me.
I don’t think it matters ftw. But I will say I voted for Biden and one of the big reasons is he’s well connected across the aisle due to four decades of crunching out policy. Few politicians have his influence.
I just double checked whether or not Joe Biden was a Vice President and it turns out I'm not crazy and that he was. So looks like my Civics education is fine thanks. What is your point?
So he can’t make a request to remove non consensual sexual images of a family member based on the TOS of Twitter? Honestly, what are you all complaining about?
Biden was Vice President at the time of the emails in question, which is what the Hunter Biden story was always about. That the story was suppressed by Twitter while Trump was in office isn't relevant. The suppression of the story is what matters, since if those emails were reported as accurate it would have wide ranging impact on the election. In fact if the story had been allowed to come out in a timely matter, the Democrats likely would have put forth a better candidate in the primary.
Lol that’s not true at all. There’s no retroactive interpretation of the first amendment. Twitter was not asked by the current government to do anything. They’re a private company and are allowed their free speech. If you’re not just some Russian droid living in a shit hole maybe go back to school. This is embarrassing for you.
Allow me. The tweets violated Twitter's hacked items policy and they removed them. The internal staff had a debate as to whether it fell under the policy and they came to the agreement that it did. They later agreed to update the policy and not remove tweets that referenced it. I don't understand what is so problematic here.
That policy was never used to remove content published by NY Times, WaPo etc. that had originated from hacks or stolen material. In fact, this was the only time they used this policy in that manner to restrict content published by legitimate investigative journalists. That's the entire crux of their argument, selective enforcement when it fit their political desires.
Also, the emails weren't hacked. The laptop was abandoned at a repair shop and they tried to turn it over to the FBI twice but the FBI declined. That's when they turned it over to Giuliani who sent them to the NY Post.
> tried to turn it over to the FBI twice but the FBI declined. That's when they turned it over to Giuliani who sent them to the NY Post.
This is not quite accurate. The FBI did take the laptop, but Isaac (the repairman) made a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani as some sort so assurance because he feared the laptop would be black holed by the FBI.
“Hacked” nowadays could include impersonations like deep fakes. The modifications made between Isaac and Giuliani need to be explained before we can use the word legitimate.
The Biden team never asked Twitter staff to “handle” anything. They forwarded tweets that [violated twitter’s ToS][1], a Twitter staff member forwarded them for review, and at that point the reviewer said they “handled these.”
With today’s revelations, Twitter was acting as the government, under the direction of government employees, fulfilling traditionally government-roles, often for particular political wings of said government
Favored to win and assume power in 3 months, yes. Trump was president at the time. Current, guaranteed threat, with a track record of doing exactly that.
Biden has a long public history, without abuse of power.
A political campaign isn’t an order from the government. Until recently, intentionally misunderstanding the situation was an ineffective court strategy.
You’ve seen the Senate anti-trust investigation of tech?
Pretty sure “playing ball” helps build goodwill with the people who decide whether to break your company up or not.
The Taibbi tweets clearly indicate that "connections" buy influence within Twitter. So clearly Twitter sees some benefit to "helping" those in power.
Edit: It's specifically called out in Taibbi's tweets. "NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point,""
I tried to follow, but this idea makes a record for logical leaps. For those of us not as adept at parsing prognostication via tea leaves, can you connect a senate investigation to moderation actions at Twitter?
Twitter definitely removed pornography which wasn’t labeled or which was posted without the consent of the people involved.
As for CSAM, whoever told you that is blatantly lying to you. There are annual reports showing thousands of reports to NCMEC and accounts getting banned - here’s last year:
> Infamously, Twitter did not even remove reported CSAM until after Musk purchased the company and fired the director of Trust and Safety
Source on this?
Anecdotally, the reaction of everyone I know working in law enforcement to the Musk purchase and subsequent layoffs was "this is going to make it infinitely more difficult to get CSAM taken down from Twitter".
There was no Biden administration at the time! In fact, there was not conversation with "the government." Twitter were exercising their freedom of speech (or non speech!)
Or, like, Twitter? I mean it's interesting to see the white hot outrage and political concern burning everywhere over 'rich billionaire owns social media platform.'
I mean Zuck must be the devil himself by now then... Or is it Musk's ideological views creating such consternation? In which case, also interesting to see the federal interest.
What about the hundreds of pics of Hunter smoking crack in a bathrobe? What about the emails wherein Hunter describes in some detail his influence peddling operation? "10% for the big guy." Everyone focusing on Hunter's nudes are eliding the real story that Twitter buried. That is, the hard evidence that Biden is corrupt.
That is not any hard evidence of Joe Bide . The only thing it’s hard evidence of is his drug addict son saying things to try and get ahead. It’s like you need to go back to school.
People aren't focusing on Hunter's nudes - that's what Matt Taibbi shared as an example of the requests made by the Biden campaign. If you actually look at the request, again, specifically chosen by Matt Taibbi as an example of a problematic conversation between the political campaign and Twitter, it was a request to remove Hunter Biden nudes. That's what Matt Taibbi specifically decided to share, despite presumably having access to all of this supposedly problematic interactions. That's pretty strong evidence that not much else was going on - if the Biden campaign was trying to suppress more problematic narratives that had to do with corruption, why wasn't this evidence presented?
You fools looking for a mole in a rabbit hole I smell traitors yo the constitution a violation of American vote values the rest of us follow except dump
Ok fools you don’t get it there was nothing out of the ordinary here but you all want yo get your jollies while s sitting president allowed traitors into the white house with no security and his daughter profited on china deals his son don jr took dark money from putin I’ll wait for your response with sone sort of Fox News reality retort . Ok
It most certainly does violate their terms of service: the main terms require you to have copyright permission & any other rights for everything you post and there’s an entire policy specifically banning non-consensual content:
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
I was referring to the laptop tweets. The official reason for censoring then was that they referred to hacked materials, but that was untrue as was admitted internally.
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
The hacked content in general is covered by this. Given the contents, it doesn’t appear that the news exemption covers most of the material:
If I were to report something on Twitter, I would click the "Report" button in the UI and I doubt that Twitter employees would internally refer to my reports as "More to review from the olalonde team.". It appears that those reports were submitted outside of the standard reporting process that regular users utilize and were treated preferentially.
Yeah I'm sure nobody at Twitter ever cares about olalonde or me roland35 for that matter, but I'm sure if any famous person like Beyonce or Joe Rogan had a request it's going to the top of the pile!
This doesn't seem to be the original meaning of the term "revenge porn". This is a dude who willingly took pictures of his hog in various situations, and then later those pictures were accessed by various unrelated parties. "Revenge porn" is more the situation in which an innocent woman is pressured by her creepy boyfriend to take videos or pictures that he later personally posts to public sites in response to his disappointment with their relationship. In the latter situation it's clear who is taking "revenge" on whom.
I mean, I guess it's ok to expand the definition, but let's be clear that's what we're doing here. Also, it isn't particularly rhetorically effective.
I think it's a good thing that we're having a discussion on when the Whitehouse is applying pressure for tweets to be removed, and how nicely asking is or isn't pressure. I actually think that these actions were entirely legal. The Biden campaign and the Trump administration can and should be allowed to ask for posts to be reviewed.
But I think we'd damn well take a close look at when and why they do choose to do so.
Did you miss [the part][1] in this revelation where “in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored”?
Removing blatantly violating content isn’t controversial, nor is a member of the concerning party’s staff emailing Twitter asking for a prompt review.
During the 2016 election I knew some people who shared nude photos of Melania Trump (taken consensually) on Facebook. These photos were swiftly taken down.
I just find it difficult to believe that 4 weeks before the election if Donald Jr’s laptop was found with the same stuff, that the NYT and WAPO wouldn’t be obsessively analyzing it and posting about its “Russian Collusion”.
Let the news come out and let everyone decide for themselves what the value is. Censoring it is the issue
They just removed 7 tweets or do you mean removed the story about a presidential candidate's ties to shady business deals in China and Ukraine, while in office as VP? What was and is "all so stupid" is this perception that it's all about Hunter, you know, your everyday broken down drug addict.
> removed the story about a presidential candidate's ties to shady business deals in China and Ukraine, while in office as VP
It’s been years since the “Hunter Biden laptop” non story, and the vague unsubstantiated accusations are still flying. Zero work seems to have been done since then to substantiate any of the claims, which says a lot about how much those making them care that what they’re saying is true or accurate. The vague claims and conspiracy theories do the job just as well it seems.
You’re right after all; the only reason anyone cares about the Hunter Biden laptop is because they think it will take down a different Biden.
The problem is it actually doesn’t. Despite your innuendo, the shadiest thing that can be pointed out is vague notions of influence peddling, which has been effectively normalized after the last administration’s blatant and gratuitous influence peddling. It’s hard to get people fired up about something you’ve been claiming is totally cool and legal for the past 6 years. So no surprise that no one cares to hear about influence peddling and shady deals from the team that brought us Jared Kushner’s $2billion Saudi fund and Trump’s first impeachment.
The laptop story is a dud. Republicans will spend years investigating it and find nothing. Maybe they’ll find something like an affair or a violation of IT policy and try to make it into a huge scandal, but after living through Whitewater and Benghazi, we all know the drill. They most recently tried it with Durham and that failed miserably. It’s a long tradition in Republican politics.
The faster you get over and move past the laptop, the better (for you that is… the longer Republicans cry about this non issue, the better it is for Democrats politically, because only the most rabid partisan Republicans care about this at all).
Funny how popular this story is despite your "non story" assertion.
You can argue it is minor in comparison to, say, impeachment proceedings re: Burisma, but did Twitter do the right thing in suppressing the laptop story? Probably not. I don't think most people want private citizens like Gadde tampering with elections in the future.
There's no evidence that Twitter removing stories about Hunter Biden (as opposed to the dick pics) was something that was either requested by the Biden campaign or even preferred. If anything, the only Democratic politician that shows up in his story told Twitter that he doesn't like the way Twitter decided to handle the story. It seems clear that the general political pressure was in the opposite direction as is claimed - Twitter had internally decided that these are against their own policy, but legislators on both sides (though for different reasons) thought Twitter should not done this.
> I wonder if … they self-reported their own ToS violations.
Sorry, what “own violations?”
And the original sarcasm: you are upset that an employee is reporting violating content that concerns their employer? I didn’t realize that if you click the report button on the post, you must have 10 degrees of separation from it, otherwise it’s untoward.
Are you aware of how almost all content moderation on the public-facing web works?
And wait, “throughout the whole internet”? I missed the part when Twitter became the sole TLD and its vast expanse meant any violating content found must surely have been discovered by time-consuming and pain-staking methods. Or maybe a reverse image search and a few interns can find some violating content that hadn’t been flagged yet on one single website.
Enough with the indignation and false accusations.
"The conservative radio host Wayne Root claimed without evidence in a tweet shared tens of thousands of times that Hunter Biden's laptop contains videos of him sexually abusing Chinese children."
That's just one article, I remember seeing many YouTube comments and 4chan posts about it, which could suggest they were bots pushing a narrative.
That was one blogger and a handful of commenters on 4chan, by your own admission. Could you edit your comment to remove the word "everyone" since that is clearly not accurate?
The Hunter Biden story is, and has always been, about him selling access to his father to Ukrainian powerbrokers so that what we're seeing unfold now over there would be possible. His claims to be saving "10% for the Big Guy" clearly allude to money being kicked back to his dad the Vice President at the time, and current man in charge of delivering billions of dollars to those same powerbrokers in Ukraine now.
This is what the investigation is about. Nobody cares if Hunter was a drug addict or a douchebag it's always been about the above.
"Hunter Biden had sex with his niece Natalie. His dead brother's underage daughter - he was also banging her Mom. Will they manage to keep this video secret forever? Lots of people have seen it including me."
"Hunter had sex with underage girls and used his dad to broker deals against America’s best interest, “ what’s the big heal lolz” congratulations you’re dumb and pathetic enough to be Biden’s next diversity hire"
But it was though, the laptop had its chain of custody broken, evidence of tampering was later found and most of the emails on it couldn't be verified. No criminal activity by the Bidens was ever found. It should be impossible to look at this objectively and conclude that this wasn't a carefully timed misinformation campaign.
It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
This post too is arguably misinformation, selectively reporting the findings that would cause you to distrust the laptop and not reporting the reasons to trust various things on the laptop.
You could also summarize the findings as “no evidence of tampered emails or hacking was found on the laptop”. But you didn’t (and I wouldn’t) as that too would be disingenuous.
Neither summary is a fair framing, particularly for techies.
I don’t follow this closely, but the Wikipedia article is way more biased and selective in its summary/presentation of facts than the Washington Post article I linked to. It’s a shame. Wikipedia like real news is only as good as the effort and values put into it.
This isn't a primary source (there are no links to the raw data for analysis) here so this post too is arguably misinformation, as it's selectively reporting findings.
> But it was though, the laptop had its chain of custody broken, evidence of tampering was later found and most of the emails on it couldn't be verified.
Third parties on the emails have come forward to verify some of the emails.
> No criminal activity by the Bidens was ever found.
Hunter Biden is guilty of lying on a federal firearms application. For starters they should throw the book at him for that since Democrats are “tough on guns” right?
The corruption angle has never been fully investigated either. The whole Ukraine do nothing job was clearly payment for access to his father. We’ll see what comes up when they finally look into it next Congress.
> It should be impossible to look at this objectively and conclude that this wasn't a carefully timed misinformation campaign.
Just because something has a political angle doesn’t mean it’s immediately false.
> It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
The blinders worn by the half the left, and forced onto the eyes of the other half, are a much worse problem.
Innocent until proven guilty. And again, the laptop is meaningless.
Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess. But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
> Innocent until proven guilty. And again, the laptop is meaningless.
Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t mean the public cannot discuss the matter or present it’s opinion on the legality.
The laptop isn’t meaningless. It’s a data dump of evidence of guilt. Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm while under the influence of narcotics to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
> Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess.
The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
> But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now. They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
Then you go on to list a bunch of meaningless things to me. Hunter Biden brandishing firearms and taking drugs is meaningless. He’s a private citizen. His problems are well known. The brandishing of the firearm thing is especially hilarious, because the people who are most concerned about taking down Hunter Biden wouldn’t even consider that a crime.
Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
> the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done
And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself. People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that. Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?
With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.
> Then you go on to list a bunch of meaningless things to me. Hunter Biden brandishing firearms and taking drugs is meaningless. He’s a private citizen. His problems are well known. The brandishing of the firearm thing is especially hilarious, because the people who are most concerned about taking down Hunter Biden wouldn’t even consider that a crime.
That's completely bullshit. Legal gun owners are the number of advocates for actually enforcing gun laws on the books. Not creating cockamamie new ones that go after cosmetic features or make criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.
Being a drug addict and purchasing or even being in possession of a firearm is a serious crime and it should be investigated. I guarantee you that 100/100 legal gun owners would endorse prosecuting drug addicts illegally in possession of firearms.
The true hypocrisy is that while the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms. They want to throw the book at legal gun owners for some newly created minutiae, but won't endorse charging a literal meth addict brandishing a firearm with a felony.
> Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
> How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy? You don't see anything worthy of investigation in the $250K/month deal he was getting from that Ukraine gas company for his "expertise"?
> That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
> And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
> But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. It's just the same, "Can't you see it! It's everywhere!!" over and over again. Show some actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
> Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself.
Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.
> People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that.
Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is dis...
> That's completely bullshit. Legal gun owners are the number of advocates for actually enforcing gun laws on the books.
I don't know who you've been talking to, but my family members who are very mad about this Hunter Biden laptop also believe there's no such thing as an illegal firearm, and anything labeled as such is a violation of the 2nd amendment. That's the basis for my amusement.
> the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms.
Again, don't know who you've been talking to, but I'd challenge you to actually produce an instance of someone on the left who would defend Hunter Biden's guns. The general line I've seen is that if he did something wrong, Hunter Biden should go to jail. No one on the left (that I've seen) is defending him like the right is imagining. Again, show me. I'm not seeing it.
> Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
There have been charges in jurisdictions. The first charges landing so far are that his namesake company is actually a front for massive fraud. The trial for that is currently under way. Trump was also named as an unindicted co conspirator on a crime someone else went to jail for. The only reason Trump himself wasn't indicted was, again, because he was President and his Justice Department couldn't do anything to indict him. In fact, political appointees in the DoJ worked to scrub Trump's fingerprints on the Cohen case as much as possible. Really all you're saying is that the other shoe hasn't dropped yet, and we should take that as evidence it never will.
> You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy?
Sure, investigate the hell out of this claim. But no one has been able to show that any of what you say is even remotely true, and in fact the opposite is true. The biggest claim made I've seen so far is that Hunter somehow influenced Biden to go after a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son. But this claim completely falls flat on its face when you realize that Joe Biden's actions were supported by the entire government, including Republicans. Why does Hunter Biden need to use back channels with his father to get him to do something that literally everyone agrees needs to be done?
No one can answer that without the entire narrative collapsing, so all these other unrelated conspiracy theories are added onto the pile about child porn and other nonsense. No matter what the results of this investigation are, they're already tainted to the point that no one will listen. So investigate all you want, but it's so partisan now that no one who doesn't care already will be paying attention.
> Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
I wonder if you were just as concerned with Whitewater and Benghazi and Durham. I wonder if you will be disappointed yet again when Republicans fail to deliver on their claims, and they resort to "well no laws were technically broken but we feel it was improper!"
> You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
Yes, I mean the FBI that is traditionally staffed by very conservative people, and has always been run exclusively by conservatives. Indeed that one. They've shown evidence, and given Jan 6 and recent events, I'm inclined to believe them.
> I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
Okay, the first and most obvious would by Trump's charity, which was found to be a self-dealing grift instead of a non-profit and was directed to be shut down by New York. So there's no question Trump and his entire family (they were ...
> The laptop isn’t meaningless. It’s a data dump of evidence of guilt.
Chain of custody is a problem.
> Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm
Conservatives supporting denying American's their right to bear arms. Gotcha.
> while under the influence of narcotics
So?
> to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
Private citizen not in government.
> The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
Gotcha. The FBI and Trump never took this seriously.
> The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
Private citizens vs Government officials. Conservatives and their big government overreach and policies and their anti-1A stance.
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
So Clinton wasn't corrupt. Gotcha.
Also, the investigations are still ongoing. See Taxes, for example. And all the previous charges filed against him and case after case he lost.
But sure, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn, Stone, and Cohen are nobody related to Trump.
> They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
They've found evidence they could charge, but not enough they want to risk a trial on as it's not a "slam dunk" case.
But hey, the Clintons are not corrupt, and the elections weren't stolen! Those are interesting points of view for you.
throughout the replies here people are making this argument but it still seems insane to me. like if you got photographed with prostitutes and someone tweeted that out would you expect the DNC to lobby directly w Twitter to get those down or would you just report the tweets in the app
You’d use the best connections you have available which, if you’re a major corporate or political entity, are way better than the Report button. Obviously.
How many times do we see someone turning to HN as a side channel into big tech because the official channels aren’t as responsive? It’s normal and expected for people to use any methods available in their wider social network to achieve an objective. If there’s no law against it (as there isn’t here) then what’s the problem?
And like virtually every system on the planet, there are false negatives. So external groups might send over things and say "hey, I think you missed this."
That’s alright, but when the tweet doesn’t actually violate the ToS, it’s a true negative that requires no intervention by interested political parties.
Sure. Are any of the linked cases tweets that didn't actually violate the ToS? Is there any evidence that twitter took down tweets without reviewing them further?
A consistent content moderation policy would accept reports of problematic content regardless of the source of the report.
To me, the bigger issue is the white glove treatment, and the appearance of preferential moderation.
But I think that’s where political realities come into play. I don’t doubt that these companies feel the need to make lawmakers feel heard or risk legislation/regulation that will harm the platforms.
I think this is touching on something much bigger, in that these kinds of government/company relationships are everywhere, and have been for decades.
The difference with the Twitter situation is one of public visibility and direct impact on individuals trying to do something as seemingly innocuous as post and share links on social media.
Which is absolutely not to excuse the behavior. If anything, I hope this wakes up more average Americans to the kinds of quid pro quo and shady handshake deals that have been going on forever.
When Twitter tried to just apply consistent content moderation policies and right-wing politicians ended up being banned for repeated violations of Twitter ToS, there was a ton of outrage, among much of the exact same group of people that are talking about how bad it is that politicians appear to have a direct line of communication with Twitter policy teams.
This was not a government request. No one who asked Twitter to remove these tweets on behalf of Biden was in government. Biden was not in government at the time.
> This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government.
I mean, why is government control such a big deal when private citizens (like the Biden campaign, or this other guy who seems to have a lot of control over Twitter all of a sudden) can get the same favors? Either it matters or it doesn't, right?
It's weirder to use the false equivalence to equate Biden with a typical private citizen. The typical private citizen does not have the same power to suppress stories on Twitter.
The typical private citizen can click the “Report” button. They just can’t email a list of tweets to report directly to the review team. Apparently this private citizen could do that, as could the sitting president.
Do people here not believe that it’s normal for powerful, connected people to have “red phone” access to people high-up in corporations, media, etc? There are entire industries that exist to get you that access (if you don’t have it).
e.g. I believe Tim Cook could probably contact someone at Twitter and get an answer. Do we really believe he would go in the same queue as a “regular” citizen?
To me this is a shocking revelation to anyone who doesn’t actually understand how the world works. Which, to be fair, I didn’t either for a good while, and empathize.
The real hilarious thing to me scrolling this sometime later is everyone is focused on Biden when the thread says the Trump team were doing the same thing and he was the President at the time! But crickets over that much stronger claim that it could be a first amendment violation.
Are people just being partisan or easily manipulated here?
So? Even if that’s true we’re talking about accusations of violating the first amendment. If people accuse Biden of that when he wasn’t even in government surely it’s much worse that the sitting President at the time Trump did the same thing.
The fact that you bring up something tangential instead pretty much shows how people don’t want to treat this rationally.
Was Twitter biased, is Fox biased etc. doesn’t seem particularly relevant.
I wonder what it would look like if we strongly regulated news carriers to affect a particular partisan balance. If we had panels approve content-killing rules like terms of service. If the President could close down Twitter that way.
The first link shared multiple pictures including Hunter Biden nude and engaging in sexual activity. Another picture shows a bag white powder. Twitter took it down because it violated their hacked material policy. Sharing nude pictures without the person's consent is also against Twitter policy.
Why not? It was a request not a demand. After 2016, I really hope politicians are asking social media companies to review dangerous bullshit, twitter is free to look at the content and deny politician's requests. And I mean for any country's politicians. Civil wars and genocides have started and happened on and as a result of twitter and fb's lack of moderation relating to political content.
> Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
Nonsense.
First of all, "government" is not an "in" or an "out". They represent their constituency; those are people, and in this case, they are the representatives of the workers at twitter (judging by the donations).
Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a newspaper that prints nothing but personals[1]. All day long. The owners make a decision every day to keep printing that newspaper with everything that's in it[2].
With that firmly in mind, let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, the people working at that newspaper saw the people working at another newspaper do something to their estimation illegal and unethical[3], and decided to use the tool at their disposal to stop it. And management backed them. It happens.
Then a rich person who thought to their estimation it wasn't, bought the newspaper and set policy that the people working at the newspaper were not allowed to use their estimation of legality or ethics.
> Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a newspaper that prints nothing but personals[1]. All day long. The owners make a decision every day to keep printing that newspaper with everything that's in it[2].
Third, that wasn't the government because Biden wasn't president at the time. Presidential campaigns are not the government.
…And fourth, all the posts they reported were Hunter's nudes, meaning the posts they were getting taken down were likely illegal already (under revenge porn laws) and certainly against ToS.
Curtis Pub. Co. v. Butts is irrelevant in the case of an entity like Twitter due to the CDA. 47 USC section 230 C1: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Some valuable context from an insider. Twitter, FB and others were given an explicit warning of a pending disinformation campaign by law enforcement ahead the laptop story breaking.
Right to speech doesn't mean write to publish that speech on any platform or outlet. Twitter, like a newspaper, also has freedom of speech to counterbalance your own.
High level officials employed by the US government criminally conspired against the United States to work with a private company and deprive US citizens of their right to freedom of speech for political gain.
Members of the FBI abused their position as law enforcement to collude with a political campaign and censor social media against damning information for their preferred candidate.
Does it though? I don't think a campaign staff pointing out tweets that might violate the TOS counts as collusion. That's just a campaign interfacing with Twitter the same way everyone else does. If it was collusion, then every white house press briefing in history would be too. Which, sure, might be Chomsky's point of view, but I don't think anarchists need to be convinced that Joe Biden is bad.
Stuff like that gets removed all the time. It's a meme that posting certain Islamic songs can get you banned on Twitter. They might not get them all, especially with a reduced moderation team, but tons of Islamic terrorist tweets are removed every day.
(You may have been using the "historical present tense"[1], in which case what you said is technically correct, but potentially misleading to some readers.)
It's not "the same way everyone else does". We use the Twitter web UI's Report button. We don't have contacts in Twitter's Orwellian "trust and safety'"division. I can't tell if this is bad faith or ignorance.
Alex Berenson was unsuspended after he sued Twitter (unbannings were unprecedented, as this was before Musk's takeover), after he proved that Biden staffers had demanded his suspension. Government employees and legislators are not legally allowed to pressure companies to remove speech, as the Supreme Court ruled that it goes against the 1st Amendment.
It makes sense for them to have expedited handling for ToS violations that affect a public or political figure. Otherwise a very easy exploit would be to simply have people keep reposting them, relying on there always being a few that haven't been taken down yet.
It shows that politicians asked. Which should be pretty obvious. Anyone can ask. Speaking of collusion, why is this getting so much hype right now coming on that heels of the new GOP House majority announcing that they're going to make it a focus of next term? That seems extremely well timed to me. And the underlying story behind the whole thing is still fishy and not interesting.
Collusion implies coordinating on something illegal or worth hiding from the public - what exactly is the alleged wrongdoing? That Twitter had people that worked with both presidential campaigns to expedite the review of moderation requests? I mean, by this definition, what interaction between private institutions and politicians doesn't qualify as collusion? Like what principles are even being violated here?
You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't".
This is quite obviously about substantial influence on election news cycle; and of course pointing the finger at the other side is already contained in the friend-enemy distinction.
You are more scandalized about the campaign of a private citizen emailing Twitter to ask that dick pics of his son remove, than about the White House emailing Twitter to have tweets removed?
The difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.
This is a huge tell,. Matt Taibbi (or Elon Musk via him) is trying to paint a picture that this was heavily tilted in favor of Democrats. But he has access to the actual data - why not just publish that if he feels it's damning? Whatever mechanism he used to find these emails and also to conclude that both campaigns had access, could also have been used to determine the bias statistically. And the raw data could even have been shared for public consumption.
Instead, he talks about campaign contributions, which isn't even circumstantial evidence of bias. You don't have to contribute to a political campaign to process moderation requests from them. There's no plausible mechanism by which the volume of requests that can be processed is related the amount of money donated by Twitter employees. You just need one contact and again, no evidence exists - and not even clear accusations have been made - that Twitter employees involved were reluctant to process requests made by the Trump team.
If anything the fact that Matt Taibbi is dishonestly trying to make this connection is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that they couldn't find anything even remotely damning. Because if they could find something actually damning, they would've used that instead. Resorting to, ugh, Twitter employees are liberal, so I'm sure they weren't entirely being fair in processing requests from the Trump team and ugh, more contributions to the Democrats so like, must be able to process more requests, which is a complete non-sequitur, is highly damaging to whatever narrative that he's trying to push.
It sounds like what he has is a dump of emails, not necessarily a database of moderation actions.
Even if he had a database like that, it's unlikely it's easily classified in a way you could actually correlate individual actions to specific sources. I highly doubt there's a database column for "as commanded by the dark Democratic conspiracy."
Sure but you can turn a dump of emails into statistics easily. Or alternatively, you can release the dump of emails.
> This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.
Yet the fact that there's absolutely no attempt to even analyze the data for signs of bias, but have to resort to a complete non-sequitur, is quite telling. It likely means that the raw data doesn't support their narrative. You can also share a sample of tweets that were requested to reviewed by both parties and which ones got removed and which ones did not. If the Trump administration's requests were not honored despite the tweets clearly being in violation or the Biden campaign's requests being honored despite the tweets clearly not being in violation, well that would be something if there was a clear pattern, or internal discussions that explicitly suggest that they are making decisions like that specifically to favor one candidate. It still has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, but it would at least corroborate the claim that Twitter was biased.
Again, the standards need to be high because they are the party with all the information. This type of insinuation can be persuasive if you're the outside party that suspects bias and the other party controls the information. But claiming that there might be some bias, look at all this external information as to why it might have happened, tells the exact opposite story, when they are the ones that control the information. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi literally have all this information at their disposal and clearly want to spread this narrative that Twitter was biased in the Democrats' favor. But they can't prove it - it seems ridiculous for them not to have looked into this, but they thought it was best not to release that information. Why not? Almost certainly because it detracts from the narrative.
> The difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.
Hold on the second does not follow from the first. They might have send more request because they had a more savy social media team, they might have send more request because much more ToS violating content was posted about Biden.
If there is a massive difference in percentages of honored requests that could _maybe_ indicate bias (but that's still a bi maybe).
Uh-uh. 98.47% of $$ went to Dems in 2020. But _obviously_ magnitude of dollars has nothing to do with number of people, influence, or power. Or rather, you're saying, there's no way to know, so we should just move along right?
Hypothetically, if Acme had 100 people and one person donated $100 to a Democrat while another person donated $1 to a Republican would it be correct to say that 99% of Acme donated to Democratic causes?
If not, would you please restate "98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems" to be more representative of what the numbers say.
"98.47% of Twitter contributions" is a totally valid statement. The percentage of the dollars contributed is 98.47%.
Your argument is totally dishonest. It's infuriating. What are you saying? That because it's possible 14,137 Twitter employees donated $1 each to the republicans and 1 person donated the other 900K, we can ignore this 98.47% figure entirely?
Second of all, the dollar measurement is not a useless one. It is a measure of wealth, influence, and conviction in the cause. Those Republicans donating $1 probably aren't in charge of censorship. The guy who donated $900K though...
Third, this is Twitter we're talking about. They are headquartered in San Francisco, a very blue city in a very blue state. Their employees are young educated techies. I have friends who work there and have visited their office several times.
Point is, you're not fooling anybody but yourself. Enjoy your motivated reasoning.
So much pent up anger that your response to a calmly worded good-faith question is a title-cased bad-faith accusation. Get some sleep and drink some water, maybe.
If you switched the characters here, we all know that this would be the biggest story ever about social media. "Trump Campaign coordinates with Twitter to rig the election" would be the headlines. 2016 really and truly broke so many people's brains.
The person you're responding to literally wrote that both campaigns requested tweets to be reviewed and for both parties twitter honoured the requests. So he actually knew about the opposite side doing the same thing and contrary to your assertion he is not outraged.
These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.
I agree, nothing we didn't know. Like I suspect the further findings alluded to at the end of the thread. But it's kind of like the Snowden revelations. Anyone a bit tech savvy strongly suspected what the NSA was up to, and would have been surprised of the contrary. But it's interesting nevertheless to see the proof. And to see how political viewpoints are censored at the request of politicians.
I've consistently been called a conspiracy theorist since the whole covid story started. I got insider info and knew exactly how the timeline'd play out for years to come.
at this point a "conspiracy" is just a "spoiler alert"
A) Got vaccine and got infected right after second dose (1 week)
B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
At this point Deus Ex was a credible prophetic game, where a "vaccine" that doesn't cure but postpones symptoms is seen as a miracle cure, which is eerily similar to "we'll need to be vaccinated every few months" that was present in media at some point. That's pretty much every pharma's wet dream.
Edit: As someone outside of USA, I find it remarkable how people seem to associate vaccine skepticism, despite pharma in US having strong motivation to push novel drugs that don't solve the issue, just treat the symptoms.
> so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
That's not the result that can be inferred from seeing unvaccinated people having no symptoms. In other words, people having no symptoms without vaccine or even having side effects from the vaccine itself does not disprove the statistic of vaccinated people having lesser symptoms on average.
When testing and during early phases of deployment you'd track a sample of different cohorts more closely. Either explicitly by retesting a selected group, or analysing data from groups sampled anyway (many emergency doctors got a weekly test).
So as Usual in studies - through data collection, statistics, and correcting for bias in cohorts.
> afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors
There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant. I would recommend reading some to understand it better than your summary.
> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”
This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.
So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?
When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
The point was to reduce hospitalizations, which was a measured outcome. You can't let everyone get infected if the hospitals won't be able to handle it.
The flu vaccine also does not grant long term immunity, but it has the same utility for public health.
That was the point of isolation, to control the spread of the virus to not impact our hospitals. Vaccinations were first meant to eradicate, then when that didn’t happen it was to reduce transmission, then when that didn’t work it was to reduce the symptoms (which still doesn’t work).
The measured outcomes in the initial vaccine trials were over 90% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths. That is what was known for sure at the time vaccines were rolled out. A reduction in transmission would have been a nice additional benefit, but the trials were not set up to measure if it had happened.
Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.
Unbelievable huge win for humanity! And all that glory could have and should have been worn by the Trump administration. 90% reduction in deaths!!! Amazing! What a collosal stupid species we humans are to complain about this result.
Who’s complaining about the result? I’m specifically complaining about the forced vaccination. I’m a big boy and can isolate myself to avoid illness. Why force it on me?
If you were isolated, who was there to force vaccination on you? The point of society is that if you live with other people, you get to benefit from hospitals and schools, but you must also submit to the rules of society to let you access those benefits, including vaccination to not overrun the hospitals and taxes to fund the schools. If you live by yourself, nobody is going to bother you, but you don't get the benefits either.
My job forced me, again I explained and like many other in tech I even worked from home. That still didn’t stop the mandates. And you’re still ignoring the many others that have lost their jobs. NY was forced to reinstate police officers recently.
Also you do realize you’re contradicting yourself? You’re saying nobody forced anything but if you want to live in society you must follow the rules. There were no laws forcing me, it was my desire to keep my job. My job created the mandate, not society.
Regarding your new argument, which doesn't seem to be pointing out a perceived contradiction in any interpretation I can make of it, your job created the requirement because society said it didn't want age discrimination in employment. If your employer forced only older employees to get the vaccine in order to keep its insurance costs low, there would have been lawsuits. Forcing all employees to get vaccinated has well-established legal precedent and has the benefit of reducing insurance costs slightly more.
> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
Which works for some diseases. Others are only effective for shorter periods of time and/or against specific variants. The flu vaccine should be a familiar example to most people, needing periodic refreshers that are most effective against certain variants and not others.
It's also worth noting that the diseases that are treated as a "one and done" are generally those where you're unlikely to be exposed in day to day life for a variety of reasons.
Yes but in general we don’t force the flu vaccine. Reports came out it cause heart issues and the guidance didn’t even change for the affected age group.
And guidance hasn’t changed because the benefits still outweighed the risks, though more studies are warranted and are in process in light of updated vaccines and mutating variants.
We actually force a few, and there certainly was an attempt for COVID. How many people lost their jobs for not taking the shot? Why didn’t we wait until the studies could be complete? Isolate until then?
There’s more ways to force than arrest and jail, how many people can do without eating or paying rent cause they lost their job? Many many companies forced workers to get the vaccines if they wanted to keep their jobs.
The risk of myocarditis is substantially higher in COVID infections than COVID vaccinations.
Yes, it's unfortunate that the vaccine has side effects. But if you're seriously concerned about the risk of heart problems the vaccine is the safer bet.
See I wasn’t concerned at all, until I got the vaccine and started having minor chest pains immediately after. Now I’m definitely concerned but the fact remains, my heart may have been damaged from a rushed vaccine that was forced on me. All most have to offer is “yea there’s some side effects”
Or from stress of that day, or from asymptomatic covid you didn't realise you had, or from unrelated heart issues you didn't realise you had, or from...
The question is only: did you want higher or lower chances of survival? Cherry picking a situating you think you may have experienced and worrying about it is not useful. Attribution is hard. In single cases close to impossible.
> Or from stress of that day, or from asymptomatic covid you didn't realise you had, or from unrelated heart issues you didn't realise you had, or from...
The day I had issues I was camping. Given the testing I certainly didn’t have COVID unless the tests are wrong. No unrelated heart issues prior to this, EKGs everything prior showed normal.
I’d rather not have heart issues to help someone else feel safe. And if my chances are lower, then how come after taking the first dose and having issues, then ceasing further doses at my Drs request, how come I never got it? You see you can isolate yourself and invalidate the need for increased survival rates. Bonus, you don’t have heart issues either!
Really all this shows me is its “every man for themselves”. All anybody cares about is if they survive or if they get a hospital bed if needed. And they’ll force, or attempt to force, others to do things to give them an extra level of safety. Because of this, you’ve created a “new vaccine” antivaxer
> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
Please double check yours. There's a few common vaccines that people assume are "life long" but actually have a recommendation for boosters when you're an adult.
But yeah, in general the length of immunity differs, some vaccines work forever, some not. It's a limitation of what we can produce.
> So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated?
Multiple reasons. Prevent many deaths, lower symptoms, make recover easier, lower emergency departments load, lower transmission, etc. None of those were going to be perfect or work independently of people's behaviours.
> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all: this is because making vaccines is hard, not because we aren’t trying.
Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.)
Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.
> what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated
The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives.
Easy, you recognize that with infectious viruses some people will get infected and not show symptoms, and some percentage of people will get sick even though they are vaccinated. This is well known in medicine and in everyday popular culture.
The confusion here is your own misunderstanding.
- previously deleted this content because it was too aggressive and condescending but adding back since another replied before I could modify -
> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.
> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.
The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.
> Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.
Why do you find this puzzling? What countries haven’t adopted mRNA vaccines and what do you mean by “adopted”?
> The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
And Johnson&Johnson is still available now in the US. They pulled it out of an abundance of caution and because there were other vaccines on the market. If Johnson & Johnson was the only vaccine on the market it wouldn’t have been pulled because of the risk of clotting.
-edit-
This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
> It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Why would this be puzzling? Can you share some scientific resources that describe the differences in using a “whole virus” versus “part of a virus” and how that affects vaccine effectiveness? I’d like to read the same materials you did.
> This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?
In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle.
The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
> There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?
We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.
> In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle
Alternatively I’ve been vaccinated, and boosted twice, and maintain a health lifestyle and haven’t contracted COVID-19 that I’m aware of while living in a city, interacting with other people, and traveling. These are just anecdotes and don’t generalize. There are also people who are “perfectly healthy” who get severely ill, some people who didn’t know they had an underlying medical condition who died, and people who were otherwise healthy suffering from long COVID. I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
“It’s ok for me to smoke cigarettes because so and so smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100”
> The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
It seems pretty straightforward. You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID, or if you do the severity of the virus is typically not as bad as it could be, or you don’t get the vaccine and you roll the dice for no real reason.
> We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.
mRNA vaccines? Most of the vaccines widely in use prior to 2021 were quite old.
> I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
Are you more likely to get a disease being in contact with 500 people a day or 5?
> You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID,
In my personal circle I know two people who didn't contract covid. One was vaccinated and one was not. The sheer numbers infected make me highly skeptical it did anything at all to stop transmission. mRNA vaccines never worked in the past, but suddenly they work under an emergency situation.
I'm not aware of any study comparing the vaccine vs lower mortality of new variants. Vaccine proponents say mRNA vaccination shows lower mortality and the numbers all things being equal make it seem it does. However there are new variants. Maybe the vaccine did nothing at all, but launder billions of tax payer dollars? Maybe it's just the new variants being less deadly we have to thank? Or maybe it's a little of both.
> Ok but what is puzzling about this?
The fact they chose mRNA, never widely used and even downplayed the immunity gained by contracting covid naturally. To the point people with prior infection were fired if they refused the vaccine.
> Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
This is just flat-out wrong, and shows stunning ignorance of how clinical trials and medical research is done, which is probably why you were accused of spreading conspiracy theories.
There’s an enormous body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines minimizing symptom severity.
> B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
What. This isn't how reasoning works. "My friend wasn't wearing a seatbelt when they got in a car accident and they didn't die but this other person was wearing a seatbelt and did die, so it's not like seatbelts have a provable positive impact on collision safety."
Maybe the point is people continue to be labelled 'conspiracy theorists' regardless of being actually, factually proven correct. Makes the arguing so much easier when you can just keep dismissing the 'other' rather than say sorry.
devalued in the sense that it's easy to trip over some low bar for the new definition and be assigned that label. not devalued all that much in the sense of the negative effect that label has on the labelled person's argument or reputation. which is, of course, very convenient for people who want to throw those words around online.
So true but I don't think the gaslighting aspect will be forgotten so easily. First, we were gaslit about our understanding of the facts, then we were gaslit about having being gaslit. Many public figures have lost all credibility.
I don't understand why this is a story to begin with. Twitter is a private company that does what it wants. It can boot or block whoever or whatever story they want to for whatever reason. Obviously if the people running the site lean towards one political direction, that's going to affect their moderation policies. Why don't we analyze Fox News's decision to run or not run certain stories.
People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter. This is not a free speech issue. If you are interested in the Hunter Biden story there are about 300 other sources you could find information about it within about 1/2 a second, it was one of the most widely reported stories in 2020 if I remember correctly.
I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?
> It can boot or block whoever or whatever story they want to for whatever reason.
We discussed this years ago when it first started. When you’re the defacto town square then no, you shouldn’t be able to kick people out for whatever reason.
> Why don't we analyze Fox News's decision to run or not run certain stories.
How do you justify the left ignoring stories in their media? For instance the story about Chase Staub.
> People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter.
There’s always an assumption it’s Fox. Try WSJ.
> This is not a free speech issue.
Very much disagree. Ask yourself why you’re so upset at this information. Or if you’re not upset, ask why there is so much anxiety around this story. Clearly some the left are concerned about what this will result in.
> I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?
Yes and that’s a problem when they use their political viewpoints to control the conversation.
I’m not upset, I’m just amused. It’s always amazing to me when “free market” conservatives complain about private companies making private decisions that they don’t like. I go on Twitter maybe 5 minutes a month. There are dozens of other “town squares” and if you think twitter is the only one you’re on there way too much.
Has anyone been arrested or imprisoned for running the Hunter Biden laptop story? Has any government authority threatened anyone with arrest for running the Hunter Biden story? No? Then not a free speech issue. Twitter is not a government agency. Don’t like their moderation practices? Start your own twitter which is exactly what Trump did and is the correct response. He can then push or censor whatever stories he wants and people decide whether or not they want to traffic on that site. That is the beauty of the free market we play in.
If Fox wants to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party while masquerading as news, good for them. If Elon wants to unban everyone on Twitter and let everything go unfettered with no moderation, good for him. There are lots of other choices out there.
None of this is new or interesting. This seems like more of a school cafeteria food fight than any kind of “free speech” issue.
On the other hand, we could just stop trying to control speech and understand the implications of one side having a defacto town square that the other isn’t invited to. We can also understand that while there’s no legal protection, having companies run around as pseudo dictators removing rights for their own political beliefs undermines the spirit of 1A
You seem pro echo chamber and I still cannot for the life of me understand why you want to control speech so much. It’s almost like you’re scared a second voice in the room because it’s harder dispense misinformation that leads to support.
It is actually the opposite, you are the one advocating for controlling speech. Telling Twitter or any other private organization that they have to spread information on their private platform that they consider harmful or damaging to themselves or their business is a violation of their speech.
If I host a comment section on my blog and someone starts posting nazi propaganda I should have the right to remove those posts. Or any other posts I don’t like. Twitter is just a bigger version of that.
If you don’t like twitter’s moderation policies don’t use twitter, use truth social or Parler or 4chan or whatever.
> How do you justify the left ignoring stories in their media? For instance the story about Chase Staub.
I'm guessing that "the premier media source for LGBTQ Georgia"[1] is probably left-leaning and they've covered it. Same for "a central part of Washington, DC’s gay and lesbian community"[2]. Reasonably sure that [3] lean left.
It actually showed up in apple news the other day under fox, perhaps it was moved. either way I can’t find a link on it on the main site. the question still remains as to why the other news orgs didn’t pick up something this serious and at least mention it.
No, my point is more the left self censors, at least the major papers. They focus more on building narratives than reporting news. That’s my point. If you want a better example I’d have to dig one up.
> Why don't we analyze Fox News's decision to run or not run certain stories.
There is clear distinction between content producers (like TV or newspapers) and platforms (like social networks, Youtube, and others). Content producers produce content with some bias, their consumers have (hopefully) similar bias and everyone is happy. Bias is here, it is editorial policy and nobody is understand it. It has some disadvantages in contrast to unbiased producers, but that is probably unreachable ideal.
With platforms, you have matching content producers and consumers (or just parties trying to communicate) and then you have third party (platform) who 'moderates' the content regardless of whether communicating parties are interested or not. Because it is not supposed to be editorial, it tries to dress it as rule enforcement. But biased rule enforcement is just much less acceptable than biased editorial policy.
Then quickly realized the libs were paying twitter’s bills. While this story is good for engagement on Twitter, it’s not exactly pushing advertisers to run back to Twitter. I doubt Twitter is worth even $4B now
So, to recap, the left tried to create a left only town square, and now someone comes in and makes it neutral again, and we’re angry enough to hope this guy wasted $44bil?
No. To recap, Twitter was never actually a left only town square, that was always a right-wing conspiracy theory. Elon Musk didn't make it neutral, nor did he intend to, rather he seems to want to turn Twitter into a right-wing platform. We don't have to hope he wasted $44 billion, he definitely, objectively has done so. And we're not angry, we're mocking him and his sycophantic cohort.
Did you read the featured Twitter thread? Denial is strong when it comes to both the left and rights concern about human rights in the digital age. Don’t let emphemeral politics blind you to long term trends. Be more deontological wrt freedom. Your ancestors died for it. Don’t let it slip away cause you didn’t like trump.
I did read it. I don't believe it to be the smoking gun so many others around here do, nor do I find the conspiracy narrative it is purported to prove to be credible. I don't expect anyone who has bought into that narrative to question it for a moment, however.
Dorsey wanted it to be a town square. Corporate decision makers with activist leanings applied a policy in this case that didn’t really fit the situation because they needed an established company policy to justify the activism and election interference by this censorship that they were doing here on behalf of the political campaign they supported. After it was exposed, they updated the policy but refused to apply it backward in this case, because of their activism. They couldn’t, because there was enough polarization in the country that it could have tipped the scales.
If it was done at this scale, it’s likely similar censorship happened at the company on a smaller scale as well.
Because of this it’s accurate to say that Twitter’s leadership team created the optics that it was a town square that only supported a specifically political philosophy and was hostile to other political philosophies.
Can you honestly and truly say that if a laptop was abandoned at a repair shop with similarly explosive revelations about Donald Trump jr that this story would have been censored to the same degree on Twitter using the same policy excuse? I can’t.
>Can you honestly and truly say that if a laptop was abandoned at a repair shop with similarly explosive revelations about Donald Trump jr that this story would have been censored to the same degree on Twitter using the same policy excuse? I can’t.
No, because Donald Trump and his family's dealings are already well documented, and because he was the one who created the atmosphere of misinformation which led to the censorship to begin with, in order to undermine and subvert the peaceful transfer of power.
But if we're going to ignore context entirely for the sake of hypotheticals, who knows? Donald Trump censored environmental data from government websites and banned government employees from discussing climate change on social media, he declared the press enemies of the state and had reporters he disagreed with barred from the White House, and allegedly assaulted and arrested, he wanted TikTok banned because someone was mean to him, he wanted to send the military in against political protestors. He, like Musk, seems like a charlatan and authoritarian who only cares about what serves his own interests. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which Trump would want to silence a story, but he's so corrupt, and no one cares when a Republican does it, so he wouldn't bother.
Also, what "explosive revelations?" Like Trump's hotel businesses being used to launder money for the Russian mob and Iranian military? Ivanka being involved in policymaking despite having no qualifications? Tax fraud disguising gifts as "consultant fees" to avoid estate taxes? Accepting gifts from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause? Numerous sexual assault lawsuits? Jared Kushner selling visas to Chinese investors? Something like that? Anything that even rises to the level of "Just another Tuesday at Mar-A-Lago?"
I mean, if nothing else, even conceding there is a story here, it isn't the story people want it to be, and the sheer mass of hypocrisy behind the outrage is threatening to collapse into a singularity.
> Like Trump's hotel businesses being used to launder money for the Russian mob and Iranian military? Ivanka being involved in policymaking despite having no qualifications? Tax fraud disguising gifts as "consultant fees" to avoid estate taxes? Accepting gifts from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause? Numerous sexual assault lawsuits? Jared Kushner selling visas to Chinese investors? Something like that? Anything that even rises to the level of "Just another Tuesday at Mar-A-Lago?"
Ahh yes, whatabousism. You realize of course that the fact that you can easily repeat this list just underscores that there was literally no media censorship of these stories, even GOP friendly media covered them. Even if there was an attempt by the Trump campaign and presidency to request and suppress these stories the media and social media companies specifically didn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldnt censor them. That alone makes this an apples to oranges example.
> No, because Donald Trump and his family's dealings are already well documented, and because he was the one who created the atmosphere of misinformation which led to the censorship to begin with, in order to undermine and subvert the peaceful transfer of power.
I stopped reading here. This is a blatant lie. DT didn’t create the “atmosphere of misinformation”. This is blatant, biased, emotional response. You are the problem with this country.
But if you believe the story, Muskhead was ... correct about Twitter "moderation"/"censorship"?
Taibbi is about as muckracking-leftwing as it gets.
Now, I'm not saying Muskovite won't take cash for "moderation" from the political parties.... this is going to be a MASSIVE cash spend presidential cycle.
What I'm shocked about is that there isn't a "moderation" bidding system. Democrats give twitter 10 million to suppress this story... does the RNC want to up it to 15 million to not suppress, or 20 million to PUSH it?
> citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied
Here's a better example: the Canadian trucker protests. GiveSendGo was hacked, and the names of people who had donated to the protests were made public - and Twitter had no problem with those "hacked materials" being shared on its platform.
I'd think that if there was ever a reason to block the publication of hacked materials, it would be to prevent private individuals from being doxxed, not to protect the political interests of the worlds' most powerful people.
(People, please don't reply to tell me why you didn't like the Canadian truckers' political views, it's not relevant.)
There was no hacking material and no evidence that it could be based on such material.
You repeat what they intentionally used as "reason" fully aware that it isn't.
Heck even if the new articles about the topic would have used hacked material as source it dint not include that material itself and thus wound not fall under that policy anyway.
Not even articles about a confirmed hacks fall under this policy even if the hack is confirmed with the hacked material itself.
Sharing hacked materials isn't against the TOS? Twitter explicitly said that they were suppressing the Hunter Biden story because it violated their policy against sharing hacked materials.
Snowden didn't hack the CIA, he obtained the information legally and chose to disclose it (which was probably illegal, but widely regarded as moral). Hacking a 3rd party to obtain information and then disseminate it is a different matter.
"Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; ..."
It's definitely possible to imagine a situation in which Snowden "knowingly ... sells ... any record ... or thing of value of the United States" to Russia, namely a copy of the information he had available to him while working for the NSA.
I'm not sure how courts have interpreted "record ... or thing", and whether (for example) a copy of a page from an internal government wiki would count, but let's assume that digital information is a "thing" and that copies of it are still "of the United States".
I'll further grant, for the sake of argument, that the US government has secret evidence that such a selling did take place (perhaps witnessed by a double agent working at the Kremlin, who could be called upon to give a witness statement at a trial held in secret), although I don't actually believe such selling occurred.
My main point, though, was that I don't know of any court interpreting "steals" in a statute to mean "making an unauthorized copy of" or "leaking". You're right, though, that there are other laws that cover what Snowden did.
So-called "intellectual property" is neither intellectual nor property. If I randomly mash the keyboard for a few minutes, the resulting jumble of letters can have its redistribution restricted by copyright law, despite not requiring any intellectual feat to produce. It is also not property, since I cannot own ideas that exist within your head or the sound waves that emanate from your mouth when you whistle a tune I wrote.
> You can steal them.
No you can't. The legal definition of "stealing" requires that the perpetrator takes someone else's property (which an idea isn't) without permission with the intent to deprive them of the property. You can't deprive someone of an idea by making more copies of that idea, much less is that the intent behind copying, so the label of "stealing" is completely inapplicable.
This actually makes sense. A leaker is someone you've specifically disclosed info to, not just a random adversary. If you can't keep your own team from leaking, greater chance the info you're hiding is in the public interest.
A hacker doesn't even know what the information is before the attack and is likely an adversary who will use any information to damage, regardless of public interest.
I’m pretty sure the emails about Hunter’s interactions with the Ukraine government are relevant to the “public interest”? Maybe they show corruption, maybe they don't. But if the article is censored, I guess the public won't get the chance to make a decision for themselves?
And as as the Twitter files show and the Democratic rep (Ro Khanna) highlighted, they were banning a “news article” about hacked materials, no hacked materials themselves. Are we prepared to even ban the media from talking about hacked materials?
>(People, please don't reply to tell me why you didn't like the Canadian truckers' political views, it's not relevant.)
Oh but it is. You see, for the people who encourage this behavior, the hacking of the Canadian Truckers' protesters never happened and it was good that it did.
>Twitter subsequently reversed the decision, saying that it had updated its hacked-materials policy and would not retroactively apply it to the New York Post.
It’s a set of rules selectively applied depending on whether or not your political allies or opponents are on the receiving end.
Taibbi leans left and I don’t but I like reading his articles (despite premises I may not agree with) because he’s at least honest in his arguments and doesn’t try to bury or twist inconvenient facts.
This statement is basically true. I always enjoyed Taibbi at least in part because he was pretty hard to pin down politically. But lately his substack has been nonstop Trump apologia. I just couldn't take it anymore and unsubscribed.
My suspicion is that his grey-tribeism is genuine, but the red-tribe content is what pays the bills at substack.
I still don't see the bias? In this case it's clearly that the left has had far more saying in what's allowed on social media than the right, so if you have any integrity you'd stand on the side of the right to create some equality/justice. TDS is a real thing, I was subject to that myself for years. I still think he's a narcissistic shitbag but a lot of stuff was just completely overblown. See, now I'm being Trump apologetic as well even though I've been clearly left-leaning for most of my life.
I've been sober all my life, I was a teetotaller until 2016 when I developed a 4-drinks-a-day habit which persists to this day. I've been clearly sober dor most of my life though.
Left leaning isn’t “the left”. I skimmed the writing. It was about the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party and many Dems believe in liberalism and are within reach of being a moderate. The party leans left socially. No more than that.
TDS was never a real thing amongst the left. It was and is generally a thing amongst liberal Dems and some Repubs. The Lincoln Project is a propaganda PAC attacking TDS and is a great example. It’s by establishment Republicans who have close to the same policies as Trump but want control of the GOP back. A lot of liberal and/or moderate Democrats approve of the Lincoln Project. Too many times have friends been gleeful over their propaganda.
The left did not and is not going to be part of any TDS BS. I consider myself far left and have far more Trump apologetics to say than TDS is overblown.
> the left has had far more saying in what's allowed on social media than the right, so if you have any integrity you'd stand on the side of the right to create some equality/justice
If I may, this is a centrist point of view. Since the left isn’t in the picture, it’s moderates vs the right. How can a call for integrity be to stand with the right when it isn’t binary?
Why not stand with the left? Or even just left leaning American politics like Bernie and the squad. Who are Democratic Socialists. Not even on the left economically. They believe in the Nordic capitalist system. This is one option to stand with and we still haven’t gotten to the left yet. Any one could also stand with the left in these circumstances. Right off the bat we have four options to choose from. With those options, in my humble opinion 99% of the time it takes no integrity to side with the right if youre a left leaning.
> In this case it's clearly that the left has had far more saying in what's allowed on social media than the right.
How so? In my eyes this is a case for a corrupt businessman that uses political ties for his gains. That’s pretty right wing isn’t it. At the very least there is no critique of capitalism, quite the contrary.
Only if you look at it in a vacuum. Given that most of Silicon Valley (esp. Twitter moderators) supported democrats, bringing in Musk mostly balances the equation rather tilting it from neutral to the right.
I also find it interesting that freedom of speech has seemingly become a right-wing talking point.
> bringing in Musk mostly balances the equation rather tilting it from neutral to the right
This is ignoring voter manipulation which was a big part of the 2016 election (as proven by the Cambridge Analytica leaks among other) tilting the voter to the right (see also e.g. brexit’s leave campaign illegal campaign financing and other dodgy behavior).
Compared to these—often flat out illegal—actions by the right, moderating hate speech is nothing.
> so if you have any integrity you'd stand on the side of the right to create some equality/justice
On the one hand, the leading Presidential candidate on the right has within the last 24 hours said he wants to suspend the Constitution and be reinstated President by dictate on social media. On the other hand, some people were constantly posting he was saying mean things, and some executives at a social media company tried to handle some things.
People like Taibbi and Greenwald have not changed their principles one iota. The rest of the left was driven so crazy by the MAGA movement that principles went out the window in 2016. Trump got down in the mud, no surprise, but the left got right down there with him by denying the results of the 2016 election and using US intelligence apparatus to push a conspiracy theory (among other things). Meanwhile, the sensible people are just looking around at each other shaking their heads wishing you all would just stop.
Can you tell me what you mean by “the left [...] denying the results of the 2016 election”?
Are you talking about the theory of Russian interference? If so, that is not the same as denying the results, that is questioning the integrity. The difference is huge. The later calls into question bad actors and asks for reforms going forward, the former calls into action the removal of the elected president in favor of the looser.
Now as for the conspiracy of meddling with the election. I thought that was pretty well documented fact. We have stuff like the Cambridge Analytica leaks that show actual manipulation of voters.
There is no difference when the end result is destroying people's trust in elections. You are clearly biased.
Maybe you should look into how the US meddles in foreign elections. It is something countries do to each other. Russia has always done that and so have we. There was nothing special about 2016. These complaints about CA are the left's equivalent of when the right says there is mass voter fraud because of one or two minor instances of election fraud.
I don’t understand, do you think we should have blind trust in election, that there shouldn’t be partisan and independent observers, that security measures shouldn’t be scrutinized? And if we find a fault, we shouldn’t call for reforms. We should just “trust” the system?
No, this is not the same as denying the results without evidence. There is no equivalence here.
He’s not a Trump apologist. He hates Trump and criticizes him to no end.
But he’s not so tribal that he pushes fabrications and half-truths.
If you think a left-wing person who says “whoa, Trump is terrible but lying about him only makes the left look bad” means someone is no longer left wing, we have some serious problems.
The same would be true of Chomsky, if it were true. But it’s not. Supporting Biden is not something a leftist would do. Sorry, but you need to zoom out and read some history.
I think it’s more accurate to say he doesn’t lean as left as he used to…relatively speaking. He is pretty much consistent, it’s just the left has pushed further left and this has made him seem to move right.
Yes…just like the comic Elon tweeted describing his views.
Glenn Greenwald really moved away from the left. Taibbi did too. Neither lean left any more and if anything lean the other way now. Both of them see what pays the bills now.
There's "left" (or right) as a set of policy preferences or philosophies, and then there's left or right as a matter of tribal loyalty and the news cycle of the week.
Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.
They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
> and then there's left or right as a matter of tribal loyalty and the news cycle of the week.
I don't know what this means. How many people are included in this? Are you on the left or right under this specifications? Is everyone? If someone is defending Hunter Biden and the Dems, are they on the left here? Why would the left be the status quo? What about someone on the left who believes Hunter is not good, nor his family, nor the Dem party^^. How can both of these examples be on the left?
> Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.
> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
I find this hard to believe. Taibbi didn't need to begin the Twitter thread by writing the left then Dems in parenthesis. No need to muddy the waters by incorrectly using left when he knows what the left means and knows it does not mean the Dems. Meanwhile using that language is sure to stoke up the right.
> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
There's actual people doing this. That are picking apart both Dem and Repub inconsistencies and showing both establishments are not good. This contrasts Taibbi and Greenwald. Greenwald specifically has clearly been moving more and more to the right. At least publicly. Who knows how much of a grift all of this is. I can always check Fox News (which is just as bad as regularly going on CNN) next week and see Greenwald on again
You can’t love libsoftiktok and not be on the right.
—
I’m highlighting them being some level of propaganda mouth pieces (probably for their own fatter check sizes) for the right. Highlighting Dem stuff repeatedly makes that clear. Mixing the left and Dems makes it even worse. They know what they are talking about. They know blurring the left and Dems helps the right. That’s one of the main right wing GOP cornerstones. Pretend Biden or Harris are on the left. That moves the Overton window to the right or doesn’t let it budge.
This is also another conservative policy. Policy being —- make liberals, Dem voters/politicians, and the left into one bogeyman. Which provides multiple benefits to the right.
Yeah, they and I just don't see the "propaganda" thing like you do.
You seem to view it as a zero-sum, with us or against us thing. And there may be some validity to that with the realities of politics. But if someone had never once said "I like conservatives" or supported a single conservative policy plank, it's wrong to call them conservative.
You could call them insufficiently loyal and I think they'd agree with that. But on stuff that matters for longer than a 24h news cycle they're consistently liberal.
Taibbi, for example, wrote an entire book about Eric Garner's killing, documenting a ton of NYPD corruption in the process.. and has also spent a bunch of time making fun of embarrassing weepy SJWs on Twitter.
I'm pretty sure both of them voted Bernie and then Biden based on how they talked about candidates. So you kind or are on the same side at the end of the day, Twitter drama notwithstanding.
Can we agree on the far more important issue of libsoftiktok being a right wing conservative account that is loved by Greenwald? Spreading bigotry and hatred. Smh.
The thing that Bernie understood and most libs don't is that we can be united on class issues or divided on culture war issues. We lose with the latter.
I've never seen libsoftiktok and I don't read a lot of Greenwald lately. I like Taibbi and subscribe to him.
I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to contest things. Once I nailed down Greenwald down you hand waved it away. I wouldn’t remain friends or defensive of someone who publicly supports a hate account/community. That says enough to me about Taibbi and how he sees Greenwald.
I'm just not greatly affected by a snarky and oblique tweet from years ago. Sorry. Greenwald published the intercept for years, it's not a conservative outlet. He published Snowden.
I don't think libsoftiktok would self-identify as a "hate account" and I'm positive taibbi and Greenwald wouldn't self-identify as conservative.
Maybe none of us are good enough for you and you'll have to be content with green party candidates
Of course bad people or orgs don’t self identify as such. That makes no logical sense in the real world. And in other cases people do things for political reasons.
Your responses remind me of Joe Rogan saying people like Ron DeSantis are good people trying to give people freedom because that’s what Desantis told Joe to his face.
You’ve shown your true colors wrt libsoftiktok. This is one of countless examples of the hate libsoftiktok spews. It’s not hard to come by:
https://god.dailydot.com/libsoftiktok-facebook-account-banne.... I should not have kept holding out hope you came in good faith.
No thinking person cares about "libs of tiktok". Either the account itself, or the "libs" the account "exposes". Stop being distracted by ephemeral personalities. Care more about real things. "Hate", and far less the pale imitation of hate you claim to care about, is not a real thing.
The account re-posts what other people voluntarily put on the internet. I'm not aware of any self produced content.
You can question if its ethically appropriate to re-post these stuff as it frequently seems to be from people with severe mental problems. The claim however that people get death threats because of that account is silly. If something causes people to send death threats then if more people see it it would result in more death threats but that is not the fault of whoever made it visible. If this is the hill you want to die on then you should advocate for total censorship of everything since everything could trigger some unstable or evil person to send out death threats.
So then then question here is why do you write comments on HN? It's dangerous! Your posts and the posts you help push could increase the number of death threats being send. I'm sure you dont care about that at all. You write and post whatever you want and feel zero responsibility for other peoples irrational (re)actions. Obviously that is how it should be.
Libsoftiktok pushes narratives. Spins stories. It lies. It does not just forward messages. All your arguments are based on the false premise that libsoftiktok is some innocent reposter. Which then is what all your attacks on me hinge on.
> if this is the hill you want to do die on…
> So then then question here is why do you write comments…
To make it clear. People have gotten threats because of the way libsoftiktok has editorialized stories. The moral bankruptcy is squarely on the account.
The pseudo-intellectual attacks you’re doing are weird. Changing the argument to pretend I’m upset that any one can be triggered by anything is weird. Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.
I can simply go look what that account posts and I did exactly that and it is in fact re-posts of stupid tiktoks form deranged people. No one questions that they have a bias or push a narrative by selecting what they re-post. That is literally what every person on the internet does. Yet they are not in any way responsible legally or ethically for any threats someone else sends out "because" of them.
Just like if someone would send a threats to libsoftiktok because of what you wrote here. Clearly you would not be responsible for that.
>Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.
I never said any of that. You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.
I could not care less what they are anti about. My whole point was that they are not responsible for the action of others. There is no incitement for such actions.
I dont support hatred I support logic. Blaming someone for the action of others is illogical and probably a result of your emotional involvement rather than rational thought. You can only blame that account for what that account actually did. I highly doubt it is sending out threats because then it would have been deleted.
Taylor Lorenz wrote an article. I assumed whomever I was speaking with has also read it or knows of it. Only going off the article isn’t zero evidence.
> Clearly you would not be responsible for that.
Because I am not an influential propaganda mouth piece. Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.
> You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.
Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…
I have no clue what you want to say here. I see no argument or evidence.
Taylor Lorenz isn't a source for evidence nor is Wikipedia or any other place that puts labels on thing and citates others as the source. Evidence is if you can point to the action in question not if you can point to someones else agreeing with you.
>Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.
Sure you didn't but neither did libsoftiktok. You write this as if this separates you from what that account did and thus indirectly accuse them of doing these things. But where is the proof?
Why cant you just link to the "offense". Why is here not a single tweet that encourages people do do any kind of harmful action to anyone?
>Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…
You aren't replying in good faith if you make stuff up. I'm calling you out and obviously this is not a good faith argument and its not meant to be one. Its meant to give you an opportunity to self-reflect instead of doubling down on accusation that you can not provide any evidence for.
It seems reasonable to assume the accusation originated in emotional coping because that is how it reads like. If you have a different reason why you made these accusations then feel free to tell me but I'd much rather had evidence for the claims than debate about why you lie to me, fully aware that I can and did look into what the account posts and its none of the things you accuse them of.
You just dislike them which is fine. I dislike what FlatEarthZone posts on twitter. But I'm not gonna accuse them of hurting people trough the extended hypothetical harmful action of their followers, that would be silly.
Since you wont provide any evidence let me post some.
Libsoftiktok was put on hidden black list[1] by twitter because they where unable to ban the account as it did not break the twitter rules. (The rules obviously include the stuff you accuse them of.)
They repeatedly temporary suspended the account[2] and accused them of "hateful conduct"[3] similar to your accusation. Then later the highest "authority" on twitter internal confirmed "[they have] not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy."[4]
The suspensions where then justified by a variation of your bogus accusations for "encouraging harassment"[5] while if that would have been the case they would have simply terminated the account.
And while not relevant to the content the account posted its still quite interesting that when Libsoftiktok got doxed, which is actually against twitter rules, they did nothing.[6]
Not to mention the propublica / Parler Jan 6th story when they posted all that hacked information. On Twitter the story was spread wide. I always thought that was suspect
Some of us did know, that's true, but we were labeled as conspiracy theorists and the like. And when the truth came out in the open those calling us conspiracy theorists of course that embraced the "that has always been a known fact! What are you on about?". Rinse and repeat.
See I don't even know what the truth of the matter is because all the moderate voices on the subject were silenced so the only ones who persevered in their effort to be heard were the fringe lunatics.
None of that stuff is against the rules. New York Times articles and overly optimistic predictions do not constitute private information or misinformation. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they violate the TOS.
Also, nothing that Snowden released was publicly available, but Biden's staffers were using tools that were available to the general public in the way they were intended. They're completely unrelated.
Since Guccifer 2.0 I've come to be at least a little suspicious of any leaks that seem one-sided. The timing too only heightens my radar (so to speak).
Isn’t the revelatory part that both parties had bat phones to the moderation teams, and that the team working with the Trump admin was intentionally sandbagging violations by “The Left”?
The whole point of the NSA is that it does the things that Snowden revealed. They were tremendously annoyed by it not because he revealed they were doing it in the abstract but because he revealed details that got people to change their practices, forced the NSA to change their practice, and reduced their effectiveness.
Some of those changes should have happened anyway. Snowden's revelations pushed people to use https ubiquitously. It doesn't just protect against NSA spying but other countries do stuff like that too as well as non state actors. (There was that time I switched on wireshark on WiFi for 5 minutes and was like damn... I've got a lot of email passwords.)
Like it or not, driving from DC to the airport in Baltimore you drive past the puzzle palace at Fort Mead and it's got a huge parking lot and one of the worst traffic jams in America when the quitting bell rings at the end of the work day. If they weren't spying on people but instead spending the money on ski chalets or beautifying the inner city or something, that would be a real scandal.
It exposed that the public was being misled by powerful communications company. One that deemed itself influential enough to politics as to introduce rafts of policies and tools to remain fair and factual.
The scandal is that these very same policies and tools were being lent to the rich and powerful to distort the publics perception. The very thing Twitter wanted us to trust it was not doing, was exactly what it was doing.
It raises important questions on ethics and no amount of “we already know” makes this ethical.
Corrections and retractions published on page D-12 never make up for the days of A-1 news that turns out to be incorrect. The new information is the turmoil that was going on withing twitter as they knowingly applied their suppression mechanisms.
There's nothing really new in your post either, since it misses the whole point. All your post does is restate the obvious. It was obvious the story was true and that Twitter covered it up.
The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended.
In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech?
The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.
Just a note for other readers who are not quite so far down the rabbit hole: no, it wasn’t obvious that all or even most or even just the “relevant” bits of the laptop contents are authentic, and it’s still not known today.
Some emails have been verified, many others have not been, and we still don’t know the origin of the laptop itself. Allegedly Hunter handed it to a blind computer repair man (no video!) and said “I am Hunter Biden.”
> doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs.
The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics.
What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON.
This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together.
We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.
I think the thrust of your argument is really the only meaningful story here, but I don’t think it’s an especially good example of it. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that influential people and orgs have more direct lines into channels of influence.
Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.
> So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
Yes, most of this was known…but the big (ugly) revelation is that it confirmed something that was suspected—Primarily the direct coordination with the Biden campaign to suppress the story and lock specific accounts that referred to it.
FWIW, by saying “we updated our hacked materials policy but we will not retroactively apply it to the event that required the update”, I think Twitter rubbed salt into a wound they created. It basically underscored that they were content to play a part in the current election manipulation (likely because of the big baddie they opposed) even though they knew it was wrong enough to change the policy.
There was no evidence that any of the information was hacked, specifically no evidence that any foreign govt was involved in procuring the information either. So Twitter wasn't following their own policy/justification about "hacked" materials. Taibbi states this in tweet number 22.
1,695 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 489 ms ] threadThe conspiracy was real.
Did you miss that?
The honest truth: I don't think twitter is useful enough to truly care, definitely not anywhere near as much as some people in this thread seem to. So i'll write a comment or two, but then i'll go back to woodworking or whatever and it will not reenter my mind till the next story pops up on the frontpage.
As for my views:
I believed twitter is a serious net negative for society before this story, and it hasn't changed that view.
If it went away tomorrow, i would not shed a single tear.
As for my politics - while it's really none of your business, since you seem to care a lot:
Being in DC for a long time drove any desire to identify with any particular party well out of my mind.
Georgia thankfully does not have registered party affiliation.
There is some politically active Daniel Berlin in NY that donates a bunch, but it ain't me.
I find it hard to believe that 97% of people at twitter donated to _anyone_.
I think your misinterpreting the data, the data says that 97% of donations were to democrats not that 97% of the employees donated to the democrats.
So what’s the principle here? What’s the plan. Which companies should have to disclose the political contributions of their employees and what should they do if it’s unbalanced at more than say 60-40, randomly fire employees until it’s back in line?
Looking at the donation ratio as proof of the very obvious bias that everyone who cared to look already know about, is good for... what, playing "I told you so"?
I lived and worked in DC for 10+ years. I watched this sort of thing happen live just sitting in coffee shops and restaurants near K street or the capitol, or just walking the halls in the office buildings.
This is not driven by political donations at the 500-1000 level that employees are doing. No one gives a crap about those. Sorry. they just don't. Maybe you get invited to a dinner with 10000 other people and sit 1000 feet away from a candidate.
The people who have "connections" to a place like twitter exist on both sides, aren't getting them from small donations to candidates, and believing otherwise is pretty far out there.
If you want to use the donation number to paint this as "twitter has a liberal censorship bent because it's employees are democrats", the problem is that despite matt's anecdote, actual research doesn't back this up:
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives...
https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
etc
I'm also incredibly curious what you think should happen that would actually be better?
Everything that involves humans is biased in some way by humans.
You ban them from donating - well, if your problem is really they are democrats, this will fix nothing, of course.
You force them to hire equal numbers of people from various political ideologies - There's a lot of them!
You hold them criminally liable for something or other - good luck defining what "wrong" means. Or getting something other than robots to be good at it.
Unless you are going to sequester people in a room, without access to anything outside, and somehow suppress all their lived experiences, you are going to end up with biased people moderating content.
But here's the thing: If you want the platform to be useful in any meaningful way, you need to moderate content anyway, and live with the fact that it's always going to be biased. Free speech absolutism is not actually a highly useful thing for society in the end, despite the dangers of everything else. That's humans for you.
All of our systems and all of the things we build are biased by the people who create and run them. That's true of justice systems, governments, your friend groups, everything.
Trying to remove all the bias from decision making in something as large as twitter is like trying to kill all the ants in your backyard.
Let me break it down:
- Influence over Twitter policy is mostly through connections with politicians
- At least using donations as a metric, 97%+ of Twitter employees support the Democrats
- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy
- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform.
Which is kind of the key point of the story?
I mean the banning of Trump while President kind of makes sense. There was nobody (or maybe 3% of employees) who who leaned Republican who could actually argue their point.
Though given that you've made this mistaken point multiple times now I don't think you actually care and are just pushing a narrative here.
You sure it’s me pushing an agenda?
This is a literal quote from the post I was just responding to.
It doesn’t say that.
Here: "- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy"
No, this does not follow, even a little. The donations are to politicians, not from politicians.
So you seem to be trying to argue "because some of the employees donate to democrats, all employees therefore accept influence from democrats overwhelmingly". But this is not logical in any way, shape or form.
First, as pointed out numerous times, you don't know who the donations are from, and what population at twitter they represent. For all you know, the entire policy team is republican or whatever and didn't donate at all!
Using the small percent who did donate somewhere as a proxy smear of the entire population of twitter employees is beyond silly.
Second, you have established zero connection between donation and influence of the donatee, because none can exist.
If i donate to say the ACLU, it doesn't mean the ACLU has influence over me. It may (or may not!) mean we share some views, but that's not the same as them being able to influence me at all.
I donated a bunch to toys to toys for tots and the salvation army this season. By your argument, apparently they have a massive amount of influence on me through some unknown, unproven connection!
Yes, I think it is naive to believe otherwise, and that most of your argument is incredibly biased and naive, so i did call you naive for believing so.
Third, using donations of employees as a proxy metric for who has influence on employees is not backed up by any research, which i explicitly gave you, shows exactly the opposite of what you are claiming, and you just ignored.
"- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform."
Except the evidence shows when anyone expressed concern, they were fast to censor it.
It even says that!
So your whole point here, where it's about some twitter = democrat conspiracy, is nonsense.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/kayleigh-mcenany-locked-out-of...
Twitter admitted it was a wrong decision and reverted it. So it’s more "here we were" than "here we are".
Edit: It seems to have been unflagged manually.
Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)
None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)
edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698592
edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang: I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.
edit: here's dang himself on how the dupe detector ignores things that haven't had their chance in the sun yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33824482
It'll be really interesting tomorrow to see how much tech and media end up suppressing this story too.
Presumably, just like with the story this is all about, they'll just ban all mention of it and delete everybody's accounts because of "safety" or something.
I'm actively watching a variety of mainstream press to see if any of them cover the story, but honestly I doubt they will, other than maybe to have an AP fact check that says that the whole thing is false and that Elon made it all up.
My suggestion is that instead of thinking about the moderating preventing certain topics being discussed, understand that it's trying to discourage things that engender certain styles of discussions. @dang talks consistently and clearly about wanting posts that satisfy intellectual curiosity. There are other sites for that.
As one example to hopefully demonstrate this isn't some political bias: while other sites seem forever covered with articles and threads about negative Musk/Twitter stories, they very rarely make it from New to Front here, because I'd say moderators have little confidence they ever lead to HN-style discussions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Seems pretty silly to cherry-pick one comment as if it's a gotcha when I've posted such things a thousand times or more and none of it is secret. HN is a moderated/curated site—it always has been, and no one has ever claimed otherwise.
You're allowed to reply to me just fine. Your account is rate-limited because you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. That's against the rules for good reason: it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, and you know what else? despite every ideologue's passionate perception, we do so regardless of which ideology they're wedded to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618426 (Nov 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267514 (Oct 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976185 (Sept 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32505278 (Aug 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31873013 (June 2022)
Normally I'd take the rate limit off, at least temporarily, since there's nothing you're saying that doesn't have a straightforward refutation, and I like answering criticisms and trusting readers to make up their own minds. However, I have to meet a friend for dinner in 5 minutes and probably won't be able to look in on this thread for a few hours. Since you've already posted a bunch of false and/or misleading things (starting with "Every effort will be taken to suppress this story" and downhill from there), I think it prudent to wait until I'm free to respond.
[1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896
I don't think we need to read between the lines here. There were people in Twitter that felt they were overstepping things and emails from various people in the US government, but the communications team were very careful to ensure that they pointed towards their policy about hacked materials and to give themselves leeway by claiming that they were just applying an abundance of caution to the situation.
Twitter's grounds for suppressing it were kinda bullshit, but they rightly suspected they were being used as the launchpad for a PR campaign and and didn't want to find themselves in a Cambridge Analytica-type situation and decided not to touch the hot potato.
At least put more effort into naming your throwaway account next time.
At best, this is a story of Twitter being over-cautious about handling potential misinformation - which is a valid criticism to make and a conversation worth having - but the narrative that the government and Twitter collaborated to suppress "the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop" in order to manipulate the election is plain BS.
But as far as is known, the laptop contained nothing of the sort. Hunter Biden being a drug-using fuckup who trades on his father's fame isn't a scandal, it's basic rich kid behavior.
As I recall, the entire media world had to weigh in, telling many more folks about the story than would have heard about it without the controversy over the tweet.
In fact, I don't use Twitter and generally don't read the NY Post. Yet I heard about the tweet and the story based on the uproar that the tweet had been removed. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have heard much about it unless there were actual indictments.
And AFAIK, at no time was the NY Post website impeded from serving the story.
If censorship was the goal, it was completely misdirected and, unsurprisingly, ineffective.
I don't doubt there are some individuals who acted too politically at Twitter, but of course many people are going to insist this should be the only thing discussed in the media and should invalidate Biden and make everything anyone has ever said in the media false.
Why suppress a story if you believe it to be false and you did nothing wrong?
Correct me if I got that wrong.
But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.
Many in the community now fully support censorship as long as it's of the opposing team.
This would be unheard of 20 years ago.
But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story).
I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space.
(And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)
If you don't like something, ignore it and move on. Someone else may find it interesting. It's not your duty to prevent the rest of the community from reading something you don't like.
"Of course we knew the NSA was reading our emails, who cares?"
Seeing how the sausage gets made is critically important to stopping it in the future.
What is the difference between the government providing unique information, because of its potential Intelligence insights, and what is the government trying to get things taken down that are not against twitters policies
Twitter's policies being the basis of credibility in this question?
If this story showed us anything it's clear they were censoring at the whims of the moderators feelings, not based on some predefined set of rules or conditions. Even when multiple people brought up the fact the hacking angle was mere speculation, the Twitter execs glossed over it and said to say it's true in public communiqués anyway (until they have time to find out if it is true).
As long as there's a strong culture of censorship, all that matters is who has influence on the gatekeepers. Not what arbitrary rules they set for themselves.
It took almost a year to find out it wasn’t hacked and it was bullshit like everyone thought it might be from day 1 (including we found out today even Twitter employees). Plenty of time to deliberate I guess.
What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?
But I bet you the majority of people who saw this item on the front page aren’t interested in comments and this is a form of news. To be aware that this is a thing.
It's pretty impressive. It wasn't always this good! Back during Snowdonia, the whole front page would be 11 different flavors of NSA stories.
It was surprising to me to see that the various political parties are in direct contact with people at Twitter to remove stuff, and I consider myself fairly well informed.
As another "VIP contact" example, look at Musk supposedly directly contacting Kanye regarding his ban. The average user just sees a block screen. That seems fairly unremarkable to me.
I think people on the left have a blind spot here, that the more suppression they use, the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the right grow to resent them. I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely.
At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.
I find the tweetstorm format to be not particularly coherent, and I haven’t followed the story closely enough to know who the actors are, but Ro Khanna (a Democrat) is one of the names I recognize and he seems to be against the censoring.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
The government is not supposed to be censoring people's speech, however they are effectively doing just that using a layer of indirection.
(Matt himself acknowledges that both parties had tweets taken down, his evidence for bias is apparently that Twitter employees donated more to democrats https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&...)
Surely Twitter still has the data in an archive somewhere, but it’s not clear from the thread that Matt knows what the content of these tweets was.
overview of 2022 mid terms for technology: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=B&Bkd...
Twitter specifically: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/recipients?toprecip...
FTX: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D00007369...
I don't know what anybody expects, though. Tech workers tend to be young, affluent, educated city-dwellers, and that demographic is strongly and increasingly inclined toward supporting Democrats. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, a liberal city in a heavily Democratic state. There's no conspiracy at work here. Republicans could choose to try to appeal to tech workers if they wanted.
The Biden campaign, which became the government, perhaps in part due to the assistance provided, requested and received assistance. If the campaign wasn't the government and didn't have the power to compel assistance, why did Twitter help?
Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.
More than one smoking gun here and yes this is a huge story. I doubt we'll hear much out of it on CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC oligopolists.
https://khanna.house.gov/
Thinking that this isn't happening, particularly by parties during an election is massively naive. How Twitter responds to it, and whether there was any undue pressure made by those parties would be a scandal, but "VIP account has a direct line to higher ups" is nothing.
If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?
If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of Trump's executive direction, does that not count as some kind of 1A violation?
If that's the metric when why isn't Fox News and all the right wing media, and online Republican commenters not in-kind donations?
if this is our metric (and it very well could be) then every industry ever needs to be investigated--i guarantee you religions are massively guilty of this. we don't have to look far at all to see churches loudly preaching for one party right now. i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states. and i guarantee you countless other industries will be as well.
im sure elon himself has direct lines to many politicians. honestly i think this is a path we should explore with all monied/influential folks and politicians. lets mitigate quid pro quo with these people.
>i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states.
This is a dangerous subject, but KSA obviously does this all the time and it's not any different than Russian tomfoolery on social media, or what all these people did with Twitter, but we all just sort of let it happen because reasons. It's honestly disgusting.
and i think we’d all win.
direct lines of communications, closed door meetings, etc… between religious leaders and candidates are widely known and id love for us to scandalize this and insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.
direct lines of communication, meetings etc… between oil execs and politicians is also widely known. i’d love to insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.
same with elon too. since the immediate realm we’re in surrounds twitter execs, i absolutely think we need to know which political influencers, politicians, and aspiring politicians he’s been in touch with and what exactly they’ve been discussing. this is absolutely 100% relevant to this exact tweet thread. twitter execs communicating with politically active people.
i can almost guarantee we will uncover all kinds of shady things happening across the board. we all can win here.
If so, what Biden's team did is not an issue.
That's not illegal election interference in the slightest.
I thought that was the smoking gun.
All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.
I think it’s also perilous to collapse “Americans” into zero dimensions by speaking as if they’re one entity with one perspective. I would bet my house that a frighteningly many millions of Americans DO see it as one dimensional tribalism.
The problem is "good" is subjective. It was big news when the 2016 election was decided by as few as 78,000 votes, yet the 2020 election was now decided by as few as 45,000 votes [1]. The one thing everybody would agree on is that the country (and world) would look radically different today had the US election in 2020 gone differently.
And so we're living in a boat that keeps getting increasingly violently rocked back and forth, all based on who wins a coin flip. A bit of dysfunction to cool things (and people) down doesn't seem so bad.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...
In 2020, the popular vote difference was slightly over 7 million votes, and it went the same direction as the electoral college.
> It was big news when the 2016 election was decided by as few as 78,000 votes,
It was big news, because the electoral college vote went against the popular vote, which had 2.8 million more voting for Hillary Clinton.
> A bit of dysfunction to cool things (and people) down doesn't seem so bad
Yep!
Heck, I think even some other planets might be affected. Perhaps the very Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way would shed a tear or two.
Yes, but herein lies the issue with any "downvote" mechanic. How it should be used compared to how it actually used is quite different.
The discussion on HN in general does not follow the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
And on and on, the amount of comments in this thread alone that don't stick to the guidelines is too high, but I think the moderation team is very small (just dang?)
It's not working in the US at present.
During a majority government where a single party has enough votes, I generally agree with you.
Canada has essentially the same two party system as the US, with one of the two major parties winning literally every election in the last 100 years, and all but one election since the country's inception.
Occasional minority governments gave us some nice things, but that was decades ago, in a whole other world.
Canadian elections are cursed by FPTP much like the US is, and much unlike all the other developed countries that have true multi-party governance with some form of proportional representation.
Justin Trudeau made a campaign promise a few elections ago about replacing FPTP for a multi turn system and after being elected, promptly setup a sham study, which unsurprisingly found out that Canadian voters would be oh so confused if FPTP was to be replaced by a multi turn election system.
I wouldn't say Canada fares much better, in the long term. At least the Liberals are pretty benign.
Really we probably need to fix all censorship issues first somehow.
Most of the disenchanted voters from the Democratic/Republican parties can agree on policies that the libertarians abhor. For example, many of us would support foreign aid to Ukraine, but the LP takes an isolationist stance.
On the other hand, where Republicans have political power, they are using it restrict speech and rights, by law.
"Both sides" are not the same.
I'm not here to claim that people working at Twitter are unbiased. Everyone has bias. But also, there's extrinsic bias in what they're dealing with, in the sense that "both sides" aren't doing the same things. One trick is to behave egregiously and then when called out for it, claim bias.
These people keep blaming some vague magical power for the reason Hunter stories never went anywhere, but the real reason no one talks about them isn't censorship, it's because they're literally non-stories. It's just revenge porn videos of a known drug abuser.
To call this "authoritarian censorship" is honestly mind boggling.
So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney, his forbidding of speech in schools, etc.? He's not passing literal anti press and anti speech laws to piss off the MAGA base.
It's remarkable to me he so badly wanted props for punishing Disney for exercising free speech he forgot he's supposed to be pro business and anti big government regulation.
Suppression of speech has to push you away from far left and far right, so that should cancel out. Then, if you're really prefering all the other policies as you say, you could vote center left ...
Or -- vote Forward:
"Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system."
"The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters."
-- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-former-republican...
It's amazing how things change. In the past the left would have been happy to see the removal of subsidies to mega corporations.
When Orlando papers did the math, they showed it will cost the tax jurisdictions more to provide the services than it cost to waive the taxes and let Disney provide them to itself. Further, Disney is far from the only private town with the same arrangement; it's how Florida does it all over the state any time there's a big enough planned development, because that saves the government money.
Republicans should love this, because it proves government services privatized can cost the tax payer less.
That narrative was inconvenient to "the right" so didn't get talked about much because then the entire thing would just look astonishingly petty. And "the left" didn't really want to have to talk about how it saves towns money to privatize services. So that whole angle, swept under the rug by 'both sides'.
UPDATE
After posting this, I just saw this in Financial Times:
> Florida prepares U-turn on Disney's 'Don't Say Gay' punishment -- Lawmakers seek compromise preserving theme park operator's right to run private government
> By Christopher Grimes in Orlando, Florida (yesterday)
Since FT is paywall, found a Reason link: https://reason.com/2022/12/02/is-florida-giving-up-its-fight...
> In other words, this looks like it was never much more than a pissing match between DeSantis and Chapek, who drew the governor's ire when he sharply criticized Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law that censored discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. DeSantis signed the bill into law in March.
> Florida has hundreds of special tax districts like Reedy Creek, but DeSantis seized on Chapek's criticism and framed the whole thing as a culture war fight against a corporation that had received special privileges from the state. Chapek's criticism of the new law amounted to "provocation, and we're going to fight back," DeSantis said in April as he signed the law undoing Disney's special status.
> But most of that was a wild exaggeration. As Reason's Scott Shackford wrote in April, the special tax and governing status granted to Disney in 1967 aren't so much privileges for the corporation as they are gifts to the local governments surrounding the Walt Disney World resort. If the special status were revoked, Orange and Osceola counties would become responsible for providing mandatory public services—including basic infrastructure like water supplies and emergency services like fire departments, all of which Disney currently self-operates and self-funds within Reedy Creek—to the massive resort. It would effectively put local taxpayers on the hook for essential services that Disney used to pay for itself.
> "Any contention that DeSantis is eliminating some sort of 'special treatment' for Disney comes with it the perhaps mistaken assumption that the two counties suddenly in charge of all of this infrastructure will somehow make the park better and not worse. In reality, putting Disney parks at the mercy of two different counties with different laws will be a huge mess for everybody involved, and that's the point," Shackford wrote. "It's not about what's fair or what's best for the citizens in the area. It's about punishing political foes and centralizing government power (a very nonconservative approach) to do so."
> Friday's report that lawmakers are preparing to back down from those proposals only seems to confirm that conclusion.
Imagine a scenario where a corporation was talking anti-left stuff in a blue state. E.g. immigration, unions, etc. Would the people not be entitled to revoke their special privileges because they don't like what they are saying? This is the real test.
I'm actually not sure, but its interesting to flip the actors political affiliation to check for fairness.
As if a coffee company HQ'ed in Seattle, WA was going about and trying to do union busting.
Or how about a large logistics and e-commerce company HQ'ed in the Seattle and its union busting attempts.
Many of DeSantis’ politically motivated actions target counties/municipalities that overwhelmingly voted for a different candidate. The majority of “South Florida” is made up of diverse, densely populated, areas that lean slightly left of center. “North Florida” by comparison is sparsely populated and leans heavily right. Yet, for some reason the state government feels the need to consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities. Repeatedly overriding the will of the people in those areas.
In this case, it's clearly only an issue a state could deal with.
> consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities
Do you have some examples?
That's why school should focus on teaching skills and not interpersonal issues. Overloading children with 50 genders is just nonsense and confuses them.
The same applies to Disney movies for minors.
> that because his statements were made pursuant to his position as a public employee, rather than as a private citizen, his speech had no First Amendment protection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcetti_v._Ceballos
You're just arguing that he doesn't really believe what he says. Why communicate in words at that point?
Everything bad in politics has come from the downward cycle of political parties censoring each other.
It takes a lot of courage because the defenders of free speech, to also defend the right for those to campaign for the destruction of free speech. Things become really bad when exceptions are made to restrict the free speech of those campaigning against it.
You can see how easily people can fall into the trap though, because humans can only take so much abuse while being attacked by people they are inadvertently helping.
Now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, you start to see them take more interest in free speech and the importance of it.
> his forbidding of speech in schools
Garcetti 2006 - legal free speech only applies to private citizens not public employees.
The will of the people of the state should democratically determine what should be taught and what should not.
If creationism was to be taught in schools, I would certainly want the right as a private citizen to campaign against my children having to listen to that crap, without being impeded by "free speech" (a good way to evaluate free speech is to think about things you agree with and disagree with and see if you are happy with the law both cases).
> DeSantis approach to Disney
This is a interesting case indeed. Hacker News at its best when I have an excuse to dive into a case I'm not familiar with.
Personally, I think their speech is not being restricted by the new law. And the law is the will of the people.
As a voting citizen, would I really want to be denied being able to enact a law because a company complains about it's free speech rights? Probably not. I don't relate as much to a corporation than I do to an actual person - regardless of what the law says.
The retaliatory aspect is interesting though - and I would defer to the supreme court for this.
This feels like a universal to me that applies to both parties.
And I’m sorry, “authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas” is pure propaganda. No mainstream left leaning politician is actually perusing such an idea, it’s a boogeyman created by the right and by the looks of things it’s working great.
Of course, that commonly ends up mostly meaning "speech I hate".
There are extremes in every political movement, no doubt. I don’t deny that there are people on the left out there protesting against “hate speech”. There are also people on the right that are out and out racist. I think choosing whether to vote Democrat or Republican based on either of those extremes is a poor choice.
OP said:
> I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression
So we’re not talking about vague “leftists” here, we’re specifically talking about the Democratic Party. You’re going to have a rough time arguing they are campaigning on authoritarianism.
Saying this as someone who is progressive. It’s definitely a relatively progressive field, but maybe not as much as you’d think!
This is a good time to plug 3rd parties and candidates. Organised pressure to make the situation better is more important than winning elections - even if they don't get voted in they may force change for the better. At some point the best options amongst two evils is still too evil to tolerate.
The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.
Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.
Over the last few years the rail companies have furloughed ~30% of their staff to the point where covering sick staff is a real problem. They've so far made $20 billion on profits this year. The excess profits have routinely been used in share buybacks and dividends.
Biden, who claims to be pro-labor, has sided with the rail companies in directing Congress to use an old law to rob these workers of their right to industrial action and mandate a contract. With no paid sick leave.
How can anyone with a straight face in good faith argue there is any leftist power in politics when Democrats side with capital and routinely go out of their way to eviscerate labor and the progressive elements of their party?
> I think people on the left have a blind spot here
So you've made two false premises here:
1. There are peeople on the left in politics. As I noted above, this is a falsehood; and
2. The "left" is a monolith and wanted to suppress the Hunter Biden story. This is right-wing propaganda because conservatives treat Trump like a cult leader who is above the law.
Speaking as a leftist (FWIW), I don't care about Hunter Biden. Throw in jail. Hilary too. I don't think Twitter should've blocked the NY Post story but ultimately it's a nothing burger because there's nothing of substance on this laptop. If there was it would've been passed on to law enforcement instead of being passed raround right-wing operatives (to the point of destroying any chain of custody) in an effort to smear the administration and nothing came of it, which is why they just fell back to the old playbook of pedo allegations.
> ... people on the right grow to resent them
People on the right already call people on the left groomers, pedos and criminals.
> ... this authoritarian suppression of speech
What suppression? Everyone knows about this story. The only "suppression" (which, again, I personally disagree with) is you couldn't share a link to one post on one site (Twitter). to believe this is "authoritarian suppression" belies successful right-wing propaganda.
> ... both sides ...
Bothsidesing American politics does nothing more than show how normalized right-wing ideas have become (and how far right the Overton window has swung). You have the former president espousing QAnon conspiracies, election denialism at every level of government and white supremacy (which is a core tenet of the Republican Party and America's founding and history) spilling over to where the likes of Kanye are saying the quiet part out loud, Elon Musk tweeted (then retracted) a conspiracy about Paul Pelosi and his attacker and the #1 "news" program in US openly pushing Nazi propaganda (ie Tucker Carlson and the Great Replacement Theory).
Bothsidesing this doesn't make one enlightened or "above the fray".
You don't have to agree with it.
The current Administration is the one forcing rail workers to accept a deal that doesn't give them what they want and forces them not to strike.
This is something Europeans have been saying online since at least the early 00s. It might be worth splitting it up into "social" policies and "economic" policies.
Democrats are a socially very left (dissenting views are not allowed), economically right party. republicans are a socially right, economically very right (taxation is theft) party.
I understand that inclination but you cannot separate economic and social policy.
Example: consider post-WWII development in the US. The GI Bill gave cheap loans and college education to returning servicement but not if you're black. The rise of the automobile lead to the explosion in suburbs, which became completely car-dependent. These suburbs and the required infrastructure (eg roads) were government subsidized. This allowed some to build up generational wealth.
In building those roads (and the Interstate system) these tended to divide communities along racial lines and in many cases wiped out minority communities.
Further you had redlining.
Once segregation was officially outlawed you had a bunch of communities that became effectively segregated because black people couldn not afford to live there (because restrictive zoning drove up prices) but black people had been denied the ability to build up wealth.
That's an example of what people mean by systemic racism.
Likewise, economic policy creates over-policing and mass incarceration that predominantly affects the poor and economic policy has made sure that black people are disproportionately affected.
> Democrats are a socially very left
I disagree. Biden was the architect of Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill that ushered in mass incarceration and over-policing shows where Democrats stand: in the same place Republicans are, which is protecting capital and capital owners.
Literally the only reason people accuse Democrats of being very far left is the support of trans people. I would urge people to really examine their feelings here and really ask themselves why they think not being transphobic is an extreme position.
Democratic politicians generally lean substantially farther right than their voters.
"Centrists" typically take the position that Democratic politicians are too left-leaning. This puts them very far to the right of the Democratic voter. It puts them much closer to... Republicans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/ratcliffe...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-limit-sharing-...
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hunter-joe-biden-ema...
When the Washington Post finally looked at it, it was pretty tainted, and about the only conclusion you can draw is that there are some authentic emails on it, but that doesn't make the device authentic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/12/now-warni...
Yea, Democrats are annoying sometimes, but the situation we're in has consequences for a lot of people.
> At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.
I wish I could say that. For a lot of us, we can't say that. The Democratic party might be pissing you off, but the Republican party is truly harming millions of Americans. The Republican party is no longer John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have my issues with them, but both seem to genuinely care for people and want to make America a better place. Today, so many seem to want to weaponize hate.
I guess I'd ask you what you think the Democrats should do differently while protecting women, Black people, LGBT people, and other minorities. I guess I don't completely know what you mean by the Democrats having an "authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas". In most of my experience, it's been pushing for more inclusive language and not being mean to people while Republicans are forcefully trying to censor a lot of topics as they ban books and pass "don't say gay" bills. Is it that Democrats think Ye (Kanye West) shouldn't be given a massive platform to hate on Jews? Is it that Democrats think places like Netflix and SNL shouldn't pay Dave Chapelle millions to hate on Jews and trans people? I'd note about this is that the instant anyone says something bad about White people or men, Republicans all line up to say that they shouldn't have a platform to say that. Republicans try to "cancel" people just as much as Democrats do.
I think it's also important to note that there are differences between government restriction on speech and social condemnation of speech. People use speech to organize. Sometimes that's great and other times you get Nazis. There is a pretty big concern in many communities over the increase in violent attacks from right-wing groups. These are groups that are pushed forward by many main-stream Republican commentators and many Republican politicians. Sure, they'll say it should stop just short of violence, but it's an effective strategy.
I'm not arguing that the government should control speech, but any respectable person or organization should probably not promote Nazis. Would you hire a Nazi to give a speech at your company about their ideology? If you owned a newspaper, would you hire a Nazi to do your editorials? If you didn't, are you suppressing their speech? If you published a letter from a Nazi and put a big warning alongside it that your newspaper condemned the views expressed by the letter, are you suppressing that speech?
I'd also note that speech has real-world consequences. People used speech to create the political will to suppress Italian and Irish immigrants. People used speech to build coalitions to keep Black people enslaved. Nazis used speech to get the power to murder two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Bad ideas should be fought against. Not all ideas are equal or equally good. Some ideas are evil and we need to make it know...
Reorient the gun control efforts around the statistical realities of how guns are actually killing the most people. Throwing away all their political capital on banning semiautomatic rifles, in a ‘maximum success’ outcome, would prevent something like 2% of all firearm related deaths. I did some napkin math a couple months ago and children are more likely to die of leukemia than in a school shooting. No doubt school shootings indicate a moral failure in our society, but if you wanna budget out your political capital to do the most good, that’s not the place to look.
Drop the attacks on 2A and watch how much wind you take out of Republican sails. Dems love talking about how racist the Republicans are, but stick an AR15 in a Black woman’s hands for a photo op and boom she’s elected. Have someone run on a slogan “tax the rich and don’t take my fucking guns”. See what happens.
Disclosure: I don’t own guns, have never owned guns, and don’t really expect to.
Understanding the perspective and desires of those voters (rather than just the impression one hears from social media and the news) is important to then figure out how to appeal to prevent them being alienated.
I sometimes lurk in a far(!) right internet forum and even there the vast majority also want to protect women, black people and LGBTQ people and think their policies will improve things.
I mean every individual has different concepts… plenty who aren’t racist but super homophobic. And plenty of religious folks doing good community work and hot hurting anyone (assuming no one came out to them in the church!) So while conservatives vary a lot, it just doesn’t seem the party itself tries to reflect that.
Just realize you bee-lined straight into partisan politics. Speech policies need to be above that.
Of course cynicism is non-falsifiable, and there is no coherent notion of a moderate or independent in American politics, because there exists no coherent political position between democratic and republican policy. Anyone claiming to exist in this middle space is in practice a republican, just without the conviction that's typical to that party's base.
So it's basically, "If you're not with us, you're against us?"
It's so absurd as a statement, no one does a 180 "because free speech".
Both parties are so clearly distinct that if you claim to be something in the middle you'd better explain what you mean. But I'm not an american, I could be wrong, I just watch the show from the outside and sometimes it's sad.
They won't necessarily switch from D -> R or R -> D. They will often switch to a 3rd party or Independent. Over time they may eventually find their way into supporting the opposite major party. Occasionally they will switch directly from one major party to the other. Just depends on the issues and where people are at in their lives.
Single issue voters, like those who only vote for/against abortion, are literally throwing aside every other issue. It’s a disservice to themselves and a disservice to others who have to live with their decision.
In fact, I would argue those least likely to switch parties are the single issue voters (esp. gun control or abortion) since the parties have not shifted on those issues. Whereas blue collar whites have been abandoning the Democratic party in droves lately despite that being their home for a century. It started after Clinton signed NAFTA, but has really excelled over the last 5-10 years.
Also, a lot of people vote a split ticket where they support people form different parties depending on local/state/federal or even if they just don't like a candidate in their preferred party (see the difference in votes for Walker and Kemp in Georgia for instance).
I've almost completely detached from all news because none of it passes even the stuffiest nose in a sniff test.
My two favorite realizations: - Data is the best liar. - You can get -one- expert to say literally anything.
You can always find one expert with an opinion that matches what you want to say.
One can hope.
Fox News is the most watched news channel on the continent.
All tech companies at the very least are pro-capitalist, it's often a choice of whether they're outwardly more pro-market or more technocratic, which has nothing to do with political lefts and rights.
They have high viewership in spite of the fact that liberals have complete dominance over so-called "official" news media & centers of cultural production, as well as universities. Conservatives don't control government or anything else in any meaningful sense. Just look at American govt over the course of the 20th & 21st century to see that progressives squarely won in terms of shaping the size, scope & spending of govt.
> has nothing to do with political lefts and rights
You're supposing a True Scotsman that "liberals" aren't true left or something, that's complete nonsense. You may as well be regretting that a horse isn't a unicorn.
Tech companies are overwhelmingly biased towards liberals. Don't play dumb.
6/3 conservative Supreme Court and the House. That’s half of the federal government.
The conservative Supreme Court just unilaterally gutted fundamental human rights for everyone in the country. That’s serious power that not even the President has. It’s a joke to pretend conservatives have no political power in the face of that.
The third highest government official is the Speaker of the House, who will be a Republican in January, so it’s pretty hard to say Republicans have no power when they control the Speaker. It’s crazy how much power that is.
But to call the media a branch of government and to assign “control” of media to Democrats is really a stretch. Pretty hard to make that case with Fox News around.
That conservatives have any power at all is a testament to progressives ability to catastrophically & embarrassingly mismanage themselves and fail to deliver.
But really progressives are just complaining that things aren't changing fast enough, it's inarguable that govt as it exists today is nothing remotely like limited govt.
Political violence was pioneered by far-left terrorists, famously when they bombed Congress.
More recently, Rand Paul got violently attacked. And a Bernie supporter committed a mass shooting & shot a Republican congressman. Of course you can't ignore there was the pervasive political violence throughout 2020 during BLM rioting.
Remember the guy who mowed down a Christmas parade?
Really the worst was when Hilary Clinton was the first to go all-in on election denial in 2016. And then spawned an entire 4 years of conspiracy theories surrounding Russia. Liberals largely failed to call her out & hold her accountable. They just project all of their worst crimes on their opponents.
You whatabout this with several examples that aren’t even political violence. Rand Paul’s neighborhood spat isn’t political violence. How is the Waukesha attack political violence, I just don’t see it.
Republicans have shown us exactly what political violence looks like. Thousands of people, flying the banner of a political party, organizing to attack the government. Seditious conspiracy is coming from the right, and nothing even approaching that severity is seen on the left. The FBI director is right to draw a distinction between left- and righ-wing violence.
The age of small-scale lone wolf attacks being the worst of political violence in the US are over thanks to the right. Now the biggest problems are homegrown terror cells like the oath keepers, and terror attacks instigated by media and the high ranking government officials, as the former President did on Jan 6.
> 4 years of conspiracy theories surrounding Russia
You need to catch up; the only ones still denying Trump’s collusion with Russia are Trump and Russia. Even Trump’s campaign manager has admitted to his role of coordinating campaign strategy with a Russian intel officer, which is a fact reported by Senate Republicans in their investigation.
The Trump tower meeting with the Russian spy is known by all and admitted to by all participants. The Trump Tower Moscow deal is known by all and admitted to by Trump. We know Russia hacked the DNC and Trump admits to welcoming that help, as shown in the Mueller report. Hillary Clinton was largely vindicated.
Liberals almost never fail to be utterly unlikeable & unrelatable.
This is because progressism is associated with the left. The tech space lives on the edge of innovation, so of course it leans toward progressism.
so minorities should be abused?
Even worse that you're apparently ableist saying that it's better if it's on the basis of skill rather than race.
What you're seeing here is the "left" learning to not take everything the right screams about at face value. They watched Hillary get dragged through the mud with Benghazi over absolutely nothing of substance, including months of Congressional hearings. Thus this new "Hunter Biden Laptop" story smells like the same exact ratfucking playbook.
Complaining that Twitter didn't amplify an unproven story isn't bias. It's successful pattern recognition.
What do you mean by “didn’t amplify”? They actively suppressed/banned the story (based on a policy that didn’t even apply in this case) instead of “not amplifying it”, these are two totally separate things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/z3isaw/whats_...
You'll have to do your own digging around to build up your own opinion if you want more info. From my digging, it still seems like pretty much nothing we didn't already know.
Joe Biden denied any involvement with his son's business but there is evidence that he was involved from witnesses (including attending business meetings) and emails on the laptop to indicate he was involved but they were conscious of the need to publicly at least, keep his name out of it.
It's the kind of thing for which, if it was Trump, we would have seen 24/7 media meltdown for years but because its a Biden well "media companies are privately owned and can do what they want".
Parent asked for an unbiased summary. Right off the bat you’re providing the right wing narrative. There is nothing in the laptop or elsewhere to show that:
- the “big guy” referenced in the email is in fact Joe Biden
- that even if it is, Joe Biden was aware of the e-mail
- that even if he was, that Joe was actually taking a cut.
The evidence before you is so far off from the narrative you’re spouting that you might as well be making it all up. But sadly you’re not, you’re just regurgitating the leaps of logic that have been fed to you.
> they were conscious of the need to publicly at least, keep his name out of it.
The lack of evidence of a crime is evidence of how well the crime was covered up. Classic conspiratorial thinking.
> if it was Trump, we would have seen 24/7 media meltdown
Here’s the thing. If it weren’t for Trump, this would be a bigger deal because Trump normalized government corruption during his presidency. Even the worst case scenario imagined by Republicans about Biden is mild compared to Trump’s least concerning corruption.
Conservatives can’t get any traction with their “Biden’s corrupt!” narrative as long as they ignore and excuse Trump’s corruption. It’s impossible to convince the world that Joe Biden who takes the train to work from Delaware is corrupt, while Trump who flies around in a jet with his name on it is squeaky clean. As dumb as people are, there appears to be a limit to what they will accept.
Secondly just because something reflects badly on the Democrat party doesn't mean it's a "right-wing narrative". If one team does something bad, then of course they are going to try to cover it up, and it's up to the opposing team to hold them to account. This is human nature, and this is what democracy is designed to compensate for.
One of Hunter Biden's business partners confirmed Joe Biden was the "Big Guy".
I believe also there was some discussion in the emails on Hunters laptop of the need distance themselves from Joe Biden at least publically.
Trump is not relevant to whether Joe Biden is corrupt is or not. He is also not relevant as to whether the media should cover important stories that aren't about Trump.
Need to get away from this idea that the Dems can do whatever they want "because Trump".
Then just stick to the facts.
> Secondly just because something reflects badly on the Democrat party doesn't mean it's a "right-wing narrative"
It’s a narrative precisely because the story you presented is ahead of the facts. You’re telling the story you want to tell and backfilling it in with facts as necessary when they become available, making omissions as necessary. The problem with this is you’ll keep telling this story like the facts support it even if they never come.
> One of Hunter Biden's business partners confirmed Joe Biden was the "Big Guy".
I wasn’t aware this was confirmed, but unfortunately all this proves is that someone was trying to gain access to Joe Biden. Not exactly surprising. Showing Joe Biden was receptive to the overture is much harder to prove.
> Trump is not relevant to whether Joe Biden is corrupt is or not.
One thing I have said and I will keep saying is that if Hunter did something wrong he should be investigated and prosecuted. If Joe Biden did something wrong he should be investigated and prosecuted as well. I haven’t met a single left leaning person who disagrees with me there. (And believe me, I’m no fan of Joe Biden, he was like my 6th choice). In that sense you’re right, it doesn’t matter what Trump has done.
But not all corruption is equal, and Republicans have spent the last 7 years excusing and equivocating some of the most egregious examples of corruption I’ve ever seen.
So now they are out there saying we should all be very concerned about Joe Biden’s corruption. Their problem is that we can pull up any number of sound bytes from the same people excusing Trump’s corruption.
Hell, we just have to use Trump’s own impeachment argument against them: if the executive believes what he is doing is for the benefit of the country, then his motives cannot be corrupt, even in the case of extorting a bribe as Trump did. Republicans bought that argument and in doing so set a precedent.
To me, this shows the outrage is all just political theatre, on the order of Benghazi, election denial, Whitewater/Clinton impeachment, or the Hillary Clinton emails.
> Need to get away from this idea that the Dems can do whatever they want "because Trump".
I believe in equal justice under the law, one of the foundational pillars of democracy. If Trump can get away with crimes but Biden is prosecuted for the same, this is actually a miscarriage of justice and a danger to democracy. Either the law is applied equally to everyone, or it is applied to no one.
I've always considered the Dems to be incredibly corrupt. I dont really know what Trump has or hasn't done because my only sources are the media and the media is garbage.
But for me the Democrats politicizing/weaponizing the FBI/Justice system for example, is way more corrupt than whatever stupid real-estate developer BS Trump has done (if he has in fact, done something). The long-term impact of this kind of behaviour is incredibly corrosive to democracy.
Outsourcing your breaches of the constitution to private enterprise (suppressing free speech totally legal!!) would be another.
I know, more "right-wing narratives blah blah etc".
Okay, then stick to primary sources who are Republican.
The Mueller Report was authored by Republican Robert Mueller, was authorized and overseen by Republican Rod Rosenstein and was signed off by Republican Bill Barr. It details that Russia hacked the Democrats in 2016, attacked the 2016 election, and Trump obstructed the investigation into said hacking.
Or read the Senate Intel report on Russia, authored by the Republican senate and chaired by Republican Marco Rubio. It shows that Trump’s campaign collaborated with a Russian Intel officer to exchange day during the 2016 election.
Or look at primary sources like court filings. When you say the Dems have politicized the Doj and FBI, I’m assuming you’re talking about the recent raids on Trump’s home. But wouldn’t you agree that if the raid was properly authorized by a judge based on the facts, that wouldn’t be politicization?
Since the raid, the DOJ has won in court over and over again as Trump has challenged the basis of the raid. The only wins he has gotten have been overturned on appeal, with those decisions saying that Judge Aileen Cannon (who Trump appointed and forum shopped to hear his case) abused her power in deciding for Trump.
Or take the January 6 insurrection. If you don’t trust Democrats about that day, just listen to Republicans. The 1/6 hearings had testimony from 90% Republicans — from Republican staffers to Republican political operatives to life-long Republican politicians (maybe some you’ve voted for). Their testimony shows Trump planned and was responsible for that day.
At this point if you don’t know who Trump is and what he’s done, that’s not on the Dems or the media. That’s on you for not paying attention.
> Outsourcing your breaches of the constitution to private enterprise (suppressing free speech totally legal!!) would be another.
You do realize Matt Tiabbi says in his story the Trump admin was doing the same thing as the Biden Campaign. If you think what Biden did was violating the constitution by outsourcing, you must think the same of Trump and Republicans. Anything less and you’re being intellectually dishonest with yourself.
Remarkable to see the "it wasn't him, and if it was... and if he did, he didn't... and if it is..." play out in earnest.
The idea is to show just how far one is from properly supporting the assertion. You can’t claim Joe Biden is corrupt because someone was trying to solicit a deal from a family member. In order to make a convincing case, the parent would have had to show Biden not only knew of the communication but also was receptive to it. The mere existence of an inbound solicitation is not evidence of corruption.
It was an uncharitable characterization, my apologies.
>The mere existence of an inbound solicitation is not evidence of corruption.
This is true. The counterpoint is that there's a lot of evidence that people found solicitation of Hunter Biden worthwhile (illustrated by the fact that they kept paying him).
A healthy skepticism suggests those payments were not made on the basis of his business acumen, in the same way we can suspect purchases of his paintings were not made on the basis of his artistic skill.
https://www.amazon.com/Laptop-Hell-Hunter-Secrets-President/...
I have, in the course of my travels, been told many times that I need to read such-and-such a book on a topic before I can "really have an opinion". I get the taste in my mouth that such books tend to serve a defensive role in conversations (like barbed wire, with a machine gun pointed at it) instead of an educational one, and put the recommendee on the back foot where they're refusing to read a source as offered.
It works because--going back to point 1--there's so many books out there that reading them all doesn't scale and never will. They take far, far more than they give. The youtube videos of the genre "three hours of some guy talking into the camera" occupy a similar niche.
There are plenty of smart people on the right, and lots of bad behaviour on the left that needs highlighting (and vice versa). And of course it's only people in opposition that will do this.
We can't rely on the media because they are clearly partisan, so to dismiss anything beyond the media leaves you in an information desert basically.
Oh no I'm accused of being anti-intellectual. Wait, see:
>put the recommendee on the back foot where they're refusing to read a source as offered
Let's circle back--did you honestly expect people to buy and read a 224 page book that you couldn't be bothered to summarize (besides touting the Amazon reviews?)? What's the conversion rate on that? Or is it more that you can recommend a book, people don't read it (surprise), and then it's their fault for not finding out the facts?
Ok to summarise...(you really have to read the book to get the detail so this is just a skim)
Joe Biden home is in Delaware, the US geographical center for businesses that like doing things privately. Joe has operated firmly in the center of this milieu of financially sophisticated elite for decades. Joe Biden likes to pretend he's a man of the people and not interested in financial wealth. I'm "middle-class Joe", "don't fault me because I don't own a single stock or bond" etc.. you get the get the drift.
However he lives in a large mansion in Brandywine Valley (home of rich elite), is worth millions of dollars and has a remarkable history of incredibly good real estate investments. Usually buying directly from business people and donors.
Note: this is a very typical way for corruption to be completely above board.
"I'II give you a million bucks discount on a nice bit of property and you repay the favour when my business needs it". And of course the presented optics are just that Joe is a "really good real estate investor". Circumstantial I guess? But not really to anyone with a bit of commonsense. The rich elite in Delaware are financially sophisticated and used to dealing with power. They know how to move money around and still maintain plausible deniability. I'm sure this kind of "deniable" corruption is common across parties, so I'm not suggesting Joe is unique in this. I am suggesting though that Joe is more than likely just as corrupt as Trump or anyone else.
Hunter Biden's career is 100% pure nepotism at every level. His entire history in terms of schools, consecutive board positions etc is due to Joe pulling strings with business people and donors.
The Biden family structure has typically been Joe and Hunter's brother Beau (now deceased) sought power and influence whilst it was Hunter's role to "monetise" the influence whilst maintaining a wall of plausible deniability back to the family. Hunter Biden is on record complaining about having to give 50% of his income (millions) to Joe Biden. So this would mean things like Hunter paying for all the upkeep of Joe's mansions etc. There is also evidence of them sharing co-mingled bank accounts.
So it seems what happened is that they took their approach they'd been using for decades in Delaware and just went global with their influence-peddling schemes. And Hunter was playing the same role except now on a global scale. This means, for example, forming a business partnership with a Chinese company connected to CCP intelligence for which they were hoping to get 100's of millions. This fell through in the end.
I recommend reading a book called "Red-Handed" by Peter Schweizer (yes another "right-wing culture war book"!) where he talks about the well-documented Chinese "elite capture" program where they ensnare foreign elites (business, govt, academia) in lucrative business deals (millions of dollars) to ensure they remain pro-China's interests. Clearly Hunter Biden was a target for this, he has zero relevant experience or track record to justify his involvement in anything beyond organising a drug deal.
Hunter Biden's laptop provided clear and direct evidence of the stuff I'm talking about however the story has been suppressed (did I mention the media is garbage?)
Hunter Biden's business partner, Tony Bobulinski, has stated that Joe Biden was the effective chairman of the enterprise (just not on paper). Joe was present at multiple meetings (Joe Biden lied about this). Tony Bobulinski also mentioned to Jim Biden (Joe's brother) he was concerned about some of the things they were doing. In reply Jim smirked and commented about "plausible deniability". Tony also took all his evidence to the FBI but they also suppressed the story.
Whate...
Did you read my comments before you showed up and started shooting holes in the floor? Specifically:
>A healthy skepticism suggests those payments [made to Hunter Biden] were not made on the basis of his business acumen, in the same way we can suspect purchases of his paintings were not made on the basis of his artistic skill.
I don't think you are very good at debating.
This sort of skepticism would make sense in a court of law, but on an online forum it is risible. Hunter knows nothing about Ukrainian energy, nor does he speak any Slavic languages. Also he is an unstable drug addict. There is only one possible explanation for his lucrative employment by Burisma. There certainly was an attempt to influence Joe, and that was the topic considered by that email. Your other caveats might well be correct; one suspects Hunter may be too much of a fuck-up to successfully convey an attempted bribe to its intended target.
And of course, read the user reviews for some insight on the book.
This line of thinking is so weird to me. When I tweet that’s me speaking. If the story turns out to be false I should feel guilty about that, and apologize to my followers. Twitter has little to do with it.
To me Twitter e.g. censoring direct messages feels like the postal service reading letters and filtering those that they deem untrue. Absolutely dystopian. Who would want this…?
1. If a law was passed that said twitter cannot moderate user content, Twitter would be ecstatic. It is a tremendous cost to them to do so, and not having to do so would largely be a win in their books (they'd still probably have to generate tools to allows users to moderate their own content, so not a total win)
2. If UPS shipped your products for free, but there were ads on the boxes, and they examined the contents to make sure there wasn't any content that they didn't want to ship, I'm guessing it would be a pretty popular service!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497772
Those are some very strong claims. What specifically in this thread supports them? For example, we know that Twitter received these requests from both campaigns, whereas deliberate collusion would only have been with one, and the most hyped up claims are a handful of tweets which contained non-consensual nudity, which doesn’t exactly seem like it would shift the election.
The comments discussing process (was this appropriate moderation?) are much more in line with my experience in the community.
If you can see the scam, great.
If you cannot then I cannot help you.
So I guess, yeah, what do you propose gets done about it? What is the core principal here that should get applied equally across the political spectrum. If you misapply your moderation policies you should be hanged?
It's often actually written into their policies. There are certainly corporations that say the opposite, or require the board to be notified, or whatever, but it would not be that uncommon for the head of legal to respond to something and then inform the CEO after doing it.
As for suppressing stories - it seems they suppressed stories from pretty much anyone who asked - Matt says explicitly they did it for "both sides".
That does not seem like an abuse of power. It may be a crappy policy, but despite all the hand-wringing, Twitter is just a platform, not anything special. So maybe it's a platform with a crappy policy.
Believing that 7.8 billion people talking at each other directly (where if 99% of people agree, you are still arguing with 78 million people) is somehow advancing anything useful is, honestly, crazy or highly ignorant of why we moved towards representative systems of (government, et al) in the first place.
It wasn't because we couldn't get all the people in the room.
Seeing it as a place to shoot the shit, awesome.
Seeing it as a foundational block of democracy - uh, no. Or at least, if it ever became that, democracy is doomed. Thankfully, it isn't, really.
So then the problems were even worse than people thought!
You have just described how the issue of story suppression is an even bigger problem!
It's not some larger problem for society or whatever nonsense is being pushed today.
This is why companies have leadership, with diversified duties. So the CEO doesn't have to have knowledge.
You can absolutely, and fairly, argue that is the wrong call, that the team acted too swiftly, but it's weird to look at what has been reported so far and say it was "abuse of power".
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15988307309638451...
This one specifically is pretty strong IMO (Biden team telling Twitter to manipulate speech): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Yes yes, someone has already said something about one of them being a dick pic, remove that one, whatever. But do you think they are ALL dick picks? This email is one out of many.
That was from October 2020. Biden was not in government then.
So tell me, how is that anti free speech?
Nah. The point of this is right-wing propaganda.
For example, banning spambots should basically only need overall statistics on the bans, whereas bans/suspensions of news or public figures should require detailed insight into what happened. As a side effect it might force platforms to have some insight into automated bans instead of relying on people managing to stir up enough of a ruckus on another platform to get in touch with a human.
Maybe something about transparency would be workable? Even if the policy that whichever site is being transparent about is "all decisions are arbitrary", at least people would know that that's the policy.
“ Dear TK Readers:
Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.
The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.
Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.”
In other words, Musk made him do it.
Aside: I really enjoyed Taibbi's few books, but haven't respected his online opinions since around 2016. I'm not surprised Elon chose Taibbi to 'break this story' considering what 'side' Taibbi's been on -- he's had a pretty clear bias, but I'm willing to check out more of his reporting here in long form.
Edit : just listened to the podcast episode he linked at the end of the tweet thread and it appears from what he's saying there that he might only write about it on twitter. (Perhaps for legal indemnity reasons?)
But the Left bias in Social media is extremely concerning, its so apparent from the type of people who work in tech, especially in Silicon valley, that they have a Leftist bias, whether the Left or the Right are correct doesn’t matter.
The issue is Social media in our time is it’s where a lot of people form opinions, follow news coverage, and basically inform themselves about the world.
Instead of it just being a impartial medium, it actively controls and narrates the conversation.
before Social media (IMO) no conversational medium strived to control and influence the conversation itself.
the coffee shop didn’t really pay attention to what you said(with exceptions of course) they just cared that you ordered something.
In a family gathering the medium itself doesn’t influence the conversation, your family members do.
And when People go to complain about this, Left-leaning tech workers will just say “don’t be mean”, or don’t break the rules, I doubt their reaction would be the same if Social media was more right leaning, heck Left-leaning journalists are already trying to dismiss the story as nothing important, while it’s the first known proof of political leaning affecting moderation by going beyond the rules.
the Hunter Biden laptop story should’ve been much bigger, and downplaying the affect social media censorship had on it, is just lying.
Its a problem and I don’t know the solution either, is it creating a new type of classification that forces Social networks to act as an impartial communication medium? Is it creating a public social media for each country?, almost nobody knows, but acknowledging the problem is a first step.
(Please don’t go into a flame war about American politics, this is a conversations about Social media political leanings, not American politics)
(As I said I am not an avid american politics follower, I would remove the "should've been a bigger story" line if that's an issue)
If these people were all conservatives and I saw this interaction I would say the same thing. So tell me a story about principals that apply universally that should make me more concerned.
> the hunter biden laptop story should have been a much bigger story.
Should it? This is the most Barbara Streisanded news story in history; There have been two years of investigations and nothing has come of it. Maybe it was just a nothingburger that also happened to have been handled by Twitter badly. Even Matt taibbi said that the suspression was a bigger story than the original article.
Sound more like "we're sorry we got caught"
One perspective is that the medium IS the message.
Political conversation on twitter is driven by:
1) loud extremists on all sides of the political spectrum
2) domestic and foreign agents working to destabilize society for their gain
3) bots amplifying all of the above
Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that, yet somehow we all pretend that Twitter and other such platforms are representative of the population. I mean, if we weren't pretending, there would be very little reason to pay attention to it, yet here we are.
There are two types of platforms that (somewhat!) managed to escape the trap of extremism:
1) Those owned and controlled by billionaires for their own gain (state funded channels, major private news channels, local news stations, etc.)
2) Platforms that are too small / too niche / not used by people for sharing political opinions (niche forums, most people's email, etc.)
I am yet to see any solutions for this.
Everyone's pumping Mastodon as if it can solve extremism / spam / bots. It can't, the extremists, special interests, and their bots will just follow you there... if Mastodon ever becomes big enough to drive political discourse that is. And if it won't, then it's no different from the myriad of niche forums we already have – those are great, but utterly irrelevant to the problems we face with platforms like Twitter.
Neither will government-enforced censorship improve the situation. If you disagree, let's wait until <party-you-hate> is in power, then implement this change. <excuses follow>. Yeah, that's what I thought.
One side controls and puts rules for the entire conversation, that's the issue.
> Regular people, the majority of them with bland moderate opinions, are largely absent from all of that
Yet they consume that content, that's why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party.
Moderation bias is only a minor issue in practice, compared to the real issues that I mentioned. Twitter is still a cesspool of both left wing and right wing propaganda despite your claim that one side "controls the entire conversation".
> why it shouldn't be controlled by a biased party
So...
1) You have an unbiased party in mind, and this party is unbiased because it's magically incorruptible in principle, not because it currently holds no power worth corrupting.
or
2) You claim that no party should control twitter at all (aka free speech absolutism), and have a magical solution to ward off extremism and deliberate attacks and bots.
Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.
Maybe, maybe not, but my comment solely focuses on that, and nothing else.
> Either way, it's irresponsible to keep such groundbreaking discoveries from the world, please do share.
> > Its a problem and I don’t know the solution either,
Jack was, quite famously, half-assing his leadership of Twitter for years. There was no secret, it was constantly discussed here on HN: how Jack’s inability to lead can be described as an “amazing subplot” rather than an embarrassing stain on Jack is beyond me — I guess because Elon loves Jack, this has to be framed positively?
Jack is still a part-owner of Twitter. https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-...
It's just so surprising to see Tucker Carlson's outrage machine consistently make rounds in HM comments. I guess he recovered from that Jon Stewart skewering just fine amongst the HN crowd?
They never said that, but I have to say there's been absolute garbage takes on HN as long as I've been here. Comes with the territory, GP was just lamenting the particular genre of garbage takes they've seen lately.
> Sometimes coherent theories can seem bizarre
Yes, yes, bozo the clown and all that.
It's disappointing how there's real stunningly outrageous stuff and you just brush it away under the umbrella of Q.
Epstein was revealed to have an ungodly long list of elites from around the world visiting his island full of minors that were sexually abused and trafficked. Hollywood openly cooperated with Weinstein for decades only for it to all explode. All were liberal, metropolitan social circles that openly admit everyone knew what was going on, it was all an open secret, yadda yadda. Then they do this theatrical routine about starting a movement to shift the culture to be better, even though they were all complicit with the evil for decades.
Now Balenciaga does this photo shoot where children are posed with all these overt satanic references, not to mention a freaking legal document from a child pornography case?
This isn't some harebrained conspiracy theory, it's obvious evil.
Please clarify because absolutelutes are too easily disproven.
The only real revelation here seems to be that there existed some internal debate whether or not blocking the story was a good idea, which seems...kind of obvious? I'd be more surprised if there wasn't internal debate.
Forgive me if you don't like Tucker Carlson, but very few are even dare to cover it. Or genuinely refute it without personal insults. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCApIZBdu-0
You'd think it'd be obvious but so many people seem to be convinced that Twitter was the seat of wokeness and the moderation team sat on the throne. That there was a debate totally contradicts the characterization Matt is running for.
Must be very cool to be running for president and have a team with a direct censorship line to one of the biggest news proliferation websites in the world. Just lost a few tweets and BAM!
This was always a possibility (and a probability- my friend was a lawyer who went through senior employee emails at whatever company to find incriminating evidence to fire them... 20 years ago). But it's just odd to see somebody do it in realtime, blatantly, while also claiming they are doing some incredible product work.
Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
I don’t think he does, I think he can literally see engagement falling in the days after a stunt and he’s trying to keep it up. Matt seemed to imply there would be another thread following this one so buckle up
There is a story here! Politicians having direct access to social networks to suppress narratives they don't like is interesting. But 1) I don't think it's surprising and 2) it appears it was not politically motivated at least in a bipartisan sense.
A story but one delivered with the kind of panache to drive traffic.
A lone company acting on its own to suppress a story may not be surprising to you, but collaboration between government and a corporation to suppress speech definitely should be. It's where fascism begins.
That's not even remotely news. This came out years ago. Still, your characterization is a bit ridiculous.
None of this news today except that Taibbi has now proven that Twitter actually did have an internal debate about whether to take down the laptop story, which runs contrary to his own narrative.
That's why I think your characterization is ridiculous because there is: a) no suppressing of narratives; b) the "direct connection" is the same thing any other VIP would have. Further to this, the guy was running for President of the united states, I can think of dozens of reasonable reasons why the campaign would want to have quick access to someone at Twitter. Also, your characterization is ridiculous because on top of assuming all that (which are contrary to the facts you are pointing to), you also made all of these assumptions without even bother to inquire what it was that was taken actually taken down.
And I agree! My point is they had that channel, not a value judgement on whether that was in or out of twitters terms of service.
You may say this was known years ago, and that's also true, but the general public probably doesn't know this.
If you can't handle the scrutiny, then don't accept a high powered job, at a multi-billion dollar company.
Of course people will get excited. If Elon were to flog a "Hunter Biden's laptop" story that turned out to be that its hard drive was 4500 RPM when the SKU was marketed as 5400, and that capacity was measured in gigabytes rather than gibibytes, people would still get excited. Facts have little to do with any of this, it's all a post-modern, post-truth exercise in perceptions.
Minimizing it is condescending. Tainting it through associating it with Musk is as cynical as tainting it by associating it with mystery Russians.
What’s even more damning is how their own internal folks are sounding the alarm “how can we possibly defend this decision” and yet the decision stood.
It’s pretty clear that Twitter had a very strong alignment to one political party and that resulted in the deliberate suppression of an important news story right before an election.
It’s pretty scandalous.
97% of Twitter (US?) employees donated to the Democrats? Is it normal for approximately 100% of your staff to donate to a party? This seems quite odd to me.
It surely isn’t 97% of Twitter employees donating to Democrats. It’s 97% of donations by Twitter employees going to Democrats. I’d imagine the actual percentage of Twitter employees who donate to anyone is pretty low.
Plus you’re then drawing a direct line from that to access to execs. IMO that needs specific evidence. Plenty of tech execs are well connected to both parties, because they’re, you know, rich elites.
> Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
Authoritarians love the idea of corporations subservient to government being used as a tool of the state to crack down on human rights. Lots of people don't see a problem with it.
If you don't think so now, you might in 2024. So it's time to care now.
Buddy, it's called the first amendment. It isn't a hard read.
Something that doesn't involve the government can still be a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, just like something that doesn't technically break any laws against discrimination can still be unfair or racist.
Which they did, because they were naked pictures of Hunter Biden, being distributed without his consent.[1] They would also be illegal to distribute under revenge porn laws but were being distributed by Chinese-originating accounts.
[1] https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/159883024902577356...
"The Biden team" was not the government in October 2020. (For that matter there is a "Biden team" right now that has no governmental capacity, that is, his re-election team, which is probably engaged in these same kind of activities with many platforms.) I have to wonder if these communications aren't just pretty normal? It might be easier to evaluate how alarmed we should be if any detail were provided by Taibbi at all.
"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
Besides, the poster's point was that many of these people are now going to receive death threats from whackjobs, not that their contents were too sensitive.
You don't even need this "Twitter Files" thread to know that there is plenty of evidence; I don't really see how you can say with any such confidence that Twitter's policies have been even handed.
> there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do
Ah yes the old, "It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, they deserved it."
If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.
I see everyone saying this while ignoring the timeline. This happened before the 2020 elections. Biden was not president back then.
"10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:"
No, the millions of voters who selected him over trump did that.
This hit job using hacked iCloud information to post revenge porn of Hunter Biden was not going to change people's votes, it had nothing to do with Joe Biden. Just another Russian hack job.
(Note, for example that the poll numbers you read in the NY Post were based on 437 of the original 1,335 respondents because they literally excluded everyone else to get the numbers they wanted to base this story on.)
People voted Trump out because he utterly gutted our country, even when handed layup after layup. Knock it off with this "Biden was installed" shit, jesus christ.
But let's ignore that and repeat all the bad stuff the news told us Trump did, and how Biden is a saint for swooping in and saving our democracy.
Like what?
I am not engaging in a discussion where the other party handwaves away with a simple "many of the things". You don't get to pull that junk and then say "let's label everyone willfully ignorant".
in this case the government was run by donald trump, and the censorship was to remove stolen revenge porn
And the US government isn't run by any one person. The president is the most powerful individual, but there are other officials (both elected and appointed), and they are the ones who colluded.
I don't care whether it's the president, or the speaker of the house, or a freshly-trained FBI agent. Nobody in government should be pressuring private companies to prevent people from reading what they want to read.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Hunter's ****.
I've heard it phrased this way: never send an email that you wouldn't be happy to read out in court.
But I'm curious, how can this policy be enforced? If I delete some of my work emails, how can a court prove that the emails ever existed and that I deleted them?
As I was told in my first day of training at a large investment bank, "If you have something sensitive to discuss, pick up the phone".
If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.
Clearly they were.
>But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
The evidence is not only clear, but overwhelming. But more than favoring a party, they favored the DC blob narrative. See the treatment of Wikileaks vs the treatment of CIA propaganda accounts like PropOrNot or Bellingcat as crystal clear examples.
>I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
This is really the problem and the issue at hand. Many whose perceived political opponents are being silenced and attacked by the unholy cabal of government and big tech don't care (or worse, are happy) because they have no principles. At the end of the day, those they look down upon, or that they think are bad for whatever reason, are getting the shaft, and that is just fine with them. Those of us with principles think that everyone deserves to be treated by the same set of rules, even those people we don't like or who we think are bad. Unfortunately, the schism between the principled and unprincipled is only growing wider as the former group shrinks and the latter group grows daily.
You mean emails the company paid you to write for its benefit? They were never yours. Also, there's the adage about never emailing any statement you wouldn't want on the front page of the NYT for this exact reason.
"There's no REAL proof that large corporations overwhelmingly favor the left" is the political version of "there's no REAL proof that the earth is round"
Now those tweets are still visible. You can go to archive.org and see them right now. What are these 'censored' tweets? They're photos of Hunter Biden's cock, naked or otherwise nonsensical stuff. This is literally one of the major points of this entire 'twitter files' stuff. This is what people are complaining is being suppressed.
I don't believe a picture of his dick is a matter of public affairs. Moreover, it doesn't belong on Twitter for a whole host of reasons entirely irrelevant to the story Taibbi is trying to push. Literally nothing else came out of the Hunter Biden laptop shit because there's nothing there beyond tabloid level nonsense. If this is somehow breaking news on HN then what has this site become?
[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064?s=20&...
[1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744?s=20&...
Hunter Biden is not an elected official! Who gives a shit. If this were about like, Anthony Weiner, maybe it would have the potential to be an interesting story, but this isn't even close.
i think it's kind of funny that the government is lobbying corporation now, rather than the other way around.
"10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://t.co/sa1uVRNhuH
12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives."
This is a lie, you should reconsider consuming information from wherever you picked this "fact" up.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598838041371516929/photo...
Dark money flows to high impact mass distribution channels, and who knows what is truth and what is not, and the response is social media should not be asked to take down false or misleading content?
The "laptop" story is a red herring for Trump's crimes and used to cover them up by making up a load of BS to give cover for Republican whataboutism.
What I find surprising is the defense many HN commentators are giving to this propaganda, especially those that try to say silliness like "Biden was installed!"
I'm neither Republican or Democrat -- I'm an equal opportunity cynic in relation to political parties -- and boy, has the GOP been taking advantage of that opportunity!
It was already widely criticized at the time(https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-files-blocked-...): " Twitter subsequently reversed the decision, saying that it had updated its hacked-materials policy and would not retroactively apply it to the New York Post. Other news outlets, including the New York Times, have since reported that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden and the documents on it were authentic. Predictably, Twitter’s blocking of the Post became a rallying point for Republican politicians accusing the social network of censoring conservative viewpoints. "
So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
Twitter publicly attempted to justify
I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.
Narrative is the only thing that matters, especially to these folks, and unfortunately that's why our society is fucked. Because they are definitely going to win that battle. They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here.
I certainly didn't claim that and I have thousands of comments on HN under my real name that you can verify that with. I'd appreciate it if you didn't group me in with whatever "folks" you think I'm affiliated with. For context, the twitter thread said both political parties made requests to remove tweets and ban accounts that were acted upon. And in my own comment I made no reference to specific political parties. Nor am I registered or affiliated with either one.
You’ve been duped.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201025002626/https://twitter.c... - yes, it's a dick pick. Do not click that link if you don't want to see it.
That doesn’t strike me as notable or surprising at all, even if it’s new information.
For this to be surprising, I think one would have to implicitly believe one of a few things:
1) Twitter isn’t a meaningful political battleground, 2) politicians don’t know it’s an important political battleground, or 3) Twitter should treat a content report from “newuser18472” the same as a report from a notable organization or individual.
Reasonable things to believe, but IMO not surprising at all to find out they’re false.
If you want to see one, https://web.archive.org/web/20201024235823/https://twitter.c...
You can then judge the question of "did the person in the image consent to having their picture shown on Twitter, or is this in violation California penal code 647(j)(4)?"
Other than timeliness, would you expect any different resolution if they were reported by a private citizen unrelated to the Biden campaign?
If the answer to both of these question is 'no', what is the big deal?
Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
2- They weren't telling, they were asking, and if Twitter feels like they were told, they can sue the government for violating their First Amendment rights.
You are correct, technically Joe Biden was not a part of the government at the time that this email was sent. Do you honestly believe that this behavior is keeping with the spirit of the first amendment?
His team, and the DNC (here's one that's very similar, except that its from the DNC instead of the Biden team https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjAuD6eWAAEFiXY.jpg)
are enormous and very powerful, and effectively a part of the government.
Do you think this kind of emailing Twitter and asking them to "handle" tweets they don't like, stopped on the day that Biden was inaugurated?
And, of course, it's a moot point anyway because Taibi says requests came, and were honored, from both sides, including the White House. Even if "Joe Biden wasn't President yet" is true, Trump was President and his White House was working with Twitter to suppress speech. I just don't see how it is a question, either legally or morally, that the Federal Government, with Twitter, has been violating the first amendment.
What you see is a non-government person asking a non-government business to censor something. What I see is a former Vice President, Congressman, and Presidential candidate, backed by the DNC, asking a major communications channel to censor something.
The former sounds like sophistry to me.
Okay and you are assuming that Twitter would just take down the tweets, or that the tweets didn't violate Twitter's policies. Is it not okay for someone in the gov't to hit the report button?
Being president or not seems like kind of a big deal to me.
I guess people's argument then would be that the govt (or whatever) indirectly limited Twitter user's speech.
If you are talking about the a more general ideal of "open and free speech" - which private companies are never legally required to uphold, but may choose to espouse anyway - then it's clearer to say that instead of conflating it with the First Amendment, which will just distract others from the points you're trying to make.
If you are worried about the "violation of the 1A spirit " should you not complain first about the government asking for things to be taken down? Or at least display the same level of outrage?
So no, it’s not “the entire reason.”
For the other 2000 or more women, it was exactly what you say, he asked, and they had to say yes (to get anywhere)
What a weird thing to try to nitpick. There are plenty of shakier instances of takedowns by Me Too. Weinstein isn’t one of them and they’re not “the entire reason” for the movement.
Are you saying the metoo movement was about physical aggressive rape of women?
Because it’s not. It’s about those in power exploiting their power for sex. And how is that done? Mostly by soft power, which you can’t say no to. Which is the whole premise of the parent comment.
I think the point is that Twitter, a multibillion corporation run by rich, powerful, and well-connected people, isn’t in the same position w.r.t. the government as fledgeling starlets were against Weinstein.
Twitter could have said no, and they would have been fine; they are protected from the government by the Constitution. Twitter has tons of money, and could easily file a lawsuit or defend one as well.
Insofar as the Biden campaign is concerned, it is impossible to violate 1A when you are not imbued with government power. There is no such thing as a private citizen compelling Twitter to take something down, the only possible thing you can be doing is requesting. Both campaigns did this so feel free to draw your own conclusions as to whether the Trump campaign did something wrong, but I will point you to the word “campaign” and note that a campaign is also a private party, so pretty unlikely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Js2Qk7hpg
First, how deeply rooted democratic operatives within Twitter took totally unprecedented action to censor a potentially highly damaging story.
Second, that Twitter publicly lied about their justification for doing so, which itself probably broke laws (at the very least a serious FTC enforcement action). Companies cannot lie that something was done because of a TOS violation. Consumers have a fair and reasonable expectation here that was violated when the company made up reasons for censoring the story - even in DMs!
Third, the chaotic response within Twitter and its internal paralysis in recognizing and “unfucking” the hijacking of their toolset for overly political and nefarious purpose.
Fourth, and this one really just irks me because it was gaslighting on a national scale, that so many channels and people picked up and ran with the “disinformation” and the particularly ridiculous “Russian disinformation” angle in an attempt to discredit the reporting.
Twitter censoring the Hunter story was basically an insider breech of corporate policy. Insider communications seem to indicate that people that could have stopped this were either stunned into submission or asleep at the wheel.
Good luck out there.
Everyone should support political movements they believe in, but at a certain point when only one point of view is that deeply ingrained in your corporate culture it affects your ability to be impartial. If you look at Twitter it’s pretty obvious that their actions reflected the culture and they kept pushing the boundaries until they eventually crossed a red line.
Your post works really hard to characterize Twitter employees as "nefarious" "[D]emocratic operatives" who "publicly lied", "broke laws", and engaged in "gaslighting on a national scale", which frankly I think is baseless and unproductive. But putting that aside, it seems to me that the nature of running a communications platform like Twitter is that there's always someone who thinks this about you. The stakes are pretty high, especially around elections. I'm not a fan of social media, in particular I think Twitter on balance has been pretty bad for humanity, but my reasoning isn't that it's particularly good or bad for a given viewpoint (which seems to be yours). I think what they're trying to do is impossible, they will always fail, and there will always be big negative consequences.
For example, Twitter could've let this story ride. But it's not about Joe Biden, it's about Hunter Biden, and there's no vetted evidence of JB wrongdoing. But if JB loses the election because of this, well that's a huge failure for Twitter also. Or they can build a huge investigative unit that competes with all the disinformation bureaus of all the worlds' governments, but that's clearly a losing proposition.
We get a lot of kicks from armchair quarterbacking and our "I would fix Twitter in two shakes with my enlightened moderation policies" (at least one of us got pretty carried away with this and spent $44B to take a swing) wind-bagging, or alleging some mix of corruption and incompetence. They're a pretty good punching bag. But it's worth saying some reasonably smart people have dedicated their professional lives to solving these problems, and pretty clearly they failed. I think this is probably because what they were trying to do, while noble, is impossible. You can't make a global, public communications platform that all the world's dignitaries use that is (reasonably) free of disinformation and acceptable to all major participating parties. Hell you probably can't even do it for just the Republican and Democratic parties, let alone Germany + China.
What you can do is sell out to them over and over again, which is probably what EM will do. Twitter will become a wasteland of propaganda and banal marketing, trading whatever bona fides it has left for exposure on its platform. It's essentially a private equity buyout of Twitter's attention capital. I think the previous leadership team was wise to this, I'm pretty sure EM still isn't (he burned a lot of their attention capital in a 2 day bonfire), but give it a few weeks.
If you mean that some(all?) the particular tweets mentioned as censored by Tabibbi were about frontal nudity and thus reasonably censored I am not arguing.
They can just as much suppress speech, by using the implied threat of future government action.
And this is basically just as bad.
Can you point to the emails/comms where this was implied?
That happening, ever, at all, implies a non zero chance that if you refuse, they will be upset and do something about it.
Something does not have to be 100% certain for it to have a huge chilling effect on speech.
The best kinds of threats are the ones that don't have to be spoken aloud, or even referenced in anyway.
Merely asking for content to be removed, is the threat, in and of itself, when you are the election team for a former vice president, who is running for president.
Ok. Well let me explained.
The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform.
Trump did the same for four years. (“Failing New York Times” etc. if you remember?) If Twitter acted because of coercion by the government, violating 1A, why were they not also corerced by Trump?
Nobody, including Twitter, had a crystal ball that told them that Trump was going to lose the election. Trump was in government and Biden wasn’t.
You could have just said "yes, I agree with you. Thats what happened."
And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
At no point did I say that the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Biden to be arrested for life for 1st amendment violations, or whatever other strawman that I did not say.
So, once again. You could have just said "Yes, you are correct. Biden's team did reach out to a platform to have content removed. "
See, I don’t agree with this. Trump tried to achieve the exact opposite. He and many in the GOP made it clear that they wanted the Hunter story to be kept on the agenda. If Twitter was pushed leftward by the Biden team, they were also pushed rightward by Trump and the GOP who wanted Twitter to do the exact opposite.
The outcome is at best a net zero chilling effect.
There is no logical reason to believe that a candidate has a greater chilling effect than the sitting President and the Senate majority. You have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
I am saying that an action has a chilling effect.
No matter how many times you bring up other actions, it remains the case that the action that I brought up has a chilling effect.
What you are doing is engaging in bad faith, by using a tactic called "whataboutism". No matter what your opinions are, on other politicians, my original point stands.
A former president, who is running for president, having their team reach to to a social media platform to have content removed, has a chilling effect, regardless of anything else that other politicians are doing.
If you are a bad faith actor, then you can continue to engage in whataboutism, without directly engaging with this point, I guess.
Things can still have a chilling effect even if someone is not literally in government right now.
Such as, for example, if the team making the requests is the political campaign of a former vice president, who is currently running for president.
No matter what bad things you think other people have done, it does not invalidate this point.
If your next statement is something of the effect of "Well what about this other thing that this other politician did!" in any way or reference what so ever, I am just going to take that as you admitting that you are acting in bad faith.
Both political parties do this, and have full time press relations people whose whole job is to do this. We might feel that is unhealthy, but crucially, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same as jailing those who defy the requests, or compelling their speech at gunpoint, or seizing the means of broadcast.
Ok, so then you could have just said "yes. I agree with you completely that they were trying to pressure them to remove the content.
You are completely correct in everything that you said!"
You just agreed with me.
> Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same
A chilling effect on speech can still exist. And chilling effects on speech, from government/politicians, is something we aught avoid.
I want to know more about what 'handling' tweets means, whether all 'handle' requests were accepted or in which instances did twitter push back, etc.
i think those semantics matter, which is why i ask.
no outside person asked twitter to “handle” anything. they asked them to review it.
It seems like at minimum they are bypassing the reported tweet queue.
It feels likely that these report judgements disproportionately had the outcome desired by the requester. If not all requested tweets got taken down/suspended until deleted that will look a lot better than if this channel effectively allowed unchecked censorship.
It's not a hard outcome to achieve. Only report things blatantly violating the ToS and you get that outcome.
I would not be surprised to find out sometime that there are judges who might disagree with you on that point.
The 1st amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech. You just admitted he was not part of the government. Therefore it’s not a 1st amendment violation.
It may be morally wrong, or violating “free speech”, but I don’t see a 1st amendment violation.
I'm not going to claim that it isn't an issue that VIPs have excessive influence on social media companies and there operations. People with lots of followers have certainly been able to pull strings to craft the message at twitter in the past. Joe Biden and his campaign team c. Oct 2020 are certainly to be counted in that number. Things like banning certain accounts ( https://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-parody-twitter-acc... ) or getting your account unblocked ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45953747 ).
I am going to ask specifically how this is a first amendment issue when none of the people involved had any role within the government at the time this took place.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? Are you talking about the tweets with nudity they emailed about?
To be clear, first amendment doesn't say the gov't shouldn't (let alone can't) ask you to do (or not do) something. It states that the legislative body of the federal government cannot make a law abridging the freedom of speech.
So ok, there was some new information (from which it's hard to confidently extrapolate much, I would say). But mostly it's a rehash of a known story, right?
It should come at no surprise that high profile users of twitter (government, celebs etc) can make requests to have content that clearly violates the twitter ToS removed and are served with higher priority.
[1] https://ischool.umd.edu/news/how-taliban-used-twitter-to-tak...
Neither would be terribly surprising to me, although for sure the first is more damning. But Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another.
If it is just "prioritize this support request by a VIP" it's not particularly damning or even scandalous, I would assume that would be the case at any social media company.
The tweets in that citation are mostly available on the Wayback Machine, and 100% of those accessible ones contained frontal nudity: https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752. So they would have been taken down as a clear ToS violation no matter what.
Does it still rub you the wrong way that Trump was "the government" telling Twitter to remove speech?
Biden wasn't in office at the time of communications, yet was clearly a figure of influence in government.
"Handle" is an okay word to describe the scenario via an internet comment, yet also not a literal quote.
I wish we could get back to trusted parties coming to reasonable conclusions while citing sources. It seems we're stuck in a cycle of gaming SEO and piecemeal info via social media.
I guess us "citizen journalists" are learning just how challenging it can be to relate a story accurately and with minimal bias.
What in the world are you saying here? What exactly is a “figure of influence in government“, and how does that matter?
Setup, WTF are you saying?
Second, Tucker and Thiel are influential but I probably wouldn't say government, I'd say they're influential media figures. Third, yes I imagine Tucker and Thiel do have a greater ability to influence in some areas than your average Joe.
Finally, if your next response contains another WTF-type comment, you'll have the last word.
Calls for censorship coming from individuals or groups who later assume positions within government are worth reviewing because it may inform how they operate while in office. Calls that come after taking office may be punishable. Therefore, any influence exerted during campaigns of private citizens, while unpunishable, is still interesting to follow. An incumbent up for re-election is not free to exert such influence, though I imagine it still happens on their behalf, and I'd say those unpunishable actions are worth following too.
All private messages aren't interesting, but these ones are because they called for censorship. Also, censorship just means suppression of content. It doesn't have to be done by a government.
Let’s stop being vague, what messages are you talking about?
Here is a US representative, a Democrat no less, arguing that the story should be allowed to remain on the basis that even if it was hacked material, journalists are not responsible for the illegal actions of a source, and because the story is of national interest. On the other hand, the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story. Regardless of what that removed content was, the suppression of the story has itself been national news for awhile and it's worth clearing the air with facts to understand what occurred. One of them was a blurred image of Hunter Biden [5].
So again, it's interesting because these are calls for censorship, and campaign messaging can indicate what the candidate might do while in office.
None of this, by the way, should be construed to be limited to the Biden campaign or Democrats. Groups have been censoring each other for eons. Communists censored everyone but their own messaging, McCarthy censored them, Anthony Comstock did it, religions and dictators do it, and on and on.
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
[2] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598838041371516929
[3] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760
[4] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
[5] https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1598837329250045953
Now Twitter can suppress whatever they want, and we can disagree or agree with it, but there was NO evidence presented that anyone asked them to do that.
Edit: this explains it better than I did. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-...
Edit: you know where there were direct messages from a campaign and officials while in government? It was from the Trump team and Fox. Tons of them.
From my comment above,
> the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story.
If it isn't true, the Biden team and DNC can publicly deny what's presented in those messages.
The Atlantic article you cite makes a different case than you do. They're saying no violation of the first amendment occurred, and I agree with that. I've always found the released communications interesting nonetheless.
> you know where there were direct messages from a campaign and officials while in government? It was from the Trump team and Fox. Tons of them.
All are concerning regardless of party. Sen. Hawley has been probing the same of this admin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJZ2MTDEWY
This is the end of the conversation for me. I've got other things to do.
Gotcha, so there’s nothing here to be concerned about unless they release something new.
https://twitter.com/greggnunziata/status/1599295288081948673...
And the GOP supports him while he calls for suspending the constitution https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/trump-lot-things-itll-...
Finally, even if I or the public could only focus on one thing, Trump's statement appeared after the Twitter Files release.
Is it really so problematic for you that I, a person distant from you on this planet, express interest here about Twitter's comms with DNC or Biden team?
It's not reasonable to repeatedly ask me to convince you to change your mind. You've seen the same things as me, I think it's interesting, you think it's not. This is end of convo for me.
David French explains this well https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-...
Also, the emails weren't hacked. The laptop was abandoned at a repair shop and they tried to turn it over to the FBI twice but the FBI declined. That's when they turned it over to Giuliani who sent them to the NY Post.
This is not quite accurate. The FBI did take the laptop, but Isaac (the repairman) made a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani as some sort so assurance because he feared the laptop would be black holed by the FBI.
The Biden team never asked Twitter staff to “handle” anything. They forwarded tweets that [violated twitter’s ToS][1], a Twitter staff member forwarded them for review, and at that point the reviewer said they “handled these.”
That’s what content moderation is supposed to do!
[1]: https://twitter.com/parkebench/status/1598841731763810304
The analogy falls flat.
230
Twitter was supposed to fear Biden?
Biden has a long public history, without abuse of power.
It's not comparable.
Thank God.
Pretty sure “playing ball” helps build goodwill with the people who decide whether to break your company up or not.
The Taibbi tweets clearly indicate that "connections" buy influence within Twitter. So clearly Twitter sees some benefit to "helping" those in power.
Edit: It's specifically called out in Taibbi's tweets. "NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point,""
[1] The tweets referenced by the biden team were Hunter Biden dick pics, you can check yourself in the Wayback Machine
Twitter definitely removed pornography which wasn’t labeled or which was posted without the consent of the people involved.
As for CSAM, whoever told you that is blatantly lying to you. There are annual reports showing thousands of reports to NCMEC and accounts getting banned - here’s last year:
https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/202...
Source on this?
Anecdotally, the reaction of everyone I know working in law enforcement to the Musk purchase and subsequent layoffs was "this is going to make it infinitely more difficult to get CSAM taken down from Twitter".
Yeah, that’s gonna need a reputable citation.
I mean Zuck must be the devil himself by now then... Or is it Musk's ideological views creating such consternation? In which case, also interesting to see the federal interest.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/intimate-medi...
This page goes back to 2018, too, so it’s hardly new: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103200035/https://help.twit...
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.
The hacked content in general is covered by this. Given the contents, it doesn’t appear that the news exemption covers most of the material:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
Here’s the history on the above quote for those that missed the allusion: https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/will-no-one-rid-me-of...
I mean, I guess it's ok to expand the definition, but let's be clear that's what we're doing here. Also, it isn't particularly rhetorically effective.
I think it's a good thing that we're having a discussion on when the Whitehouse is applying pressure for tweets to be removed, and how nicely asking is or isn't pressure. I actually think that these actions were entirely legal. The Biden campaign and the Trump administration can and should be allowed to ask for posts to be reviewed.
But I think we'd damn well take a close look at when and why they do choose to do so.
Removing blatantly violating content isn’t controversial, nor is a member of the concerning party’s staff emailing Twitter asking for a prompt review.
[1]: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
What is the news story regarding photos of Hunter Biden? That he's naked like the rest of us under his clothes?
Let the news come out and let everyone decide for themselves what the value is. Censoring it is the issue
It’s been years since the “Hunter Biden laptop” non story, and the vague unsubstantiated accusations are still flying. Zero work seems to have been done since then to substantiate any of the claims, which says a lot about how much those making them care that what they’re saying is true or accurate. The vague claims and conspiracy theories do the job just as well it seems.
You’re right after all; the only reason anyone cares about the Hunter Biden laptop is because they think it will take down a different Biden.
The problem is it actually doesn’t. Despite your innuendo, the shadiest thing that can be pointed out is vague notions of influence peddling, which has been effectively normalized after the last administration’s blatant and gratuitous influence peddling. It’s hard to get people fired up about something you’ve been claiming is totally cool and legal for the past 6 years. So no surprise that no one cares to hear about influence peddling and shady deals from the team that brought us Jared Kushner’s $2billion Saudi fund and Trump’s first impeachment.
The laptop story is a dud. Republicans will spend years investigating it and find nothing. Maybe they’ll find something like an affair or a violation of IT policy and try to make it into a huge scandal, but after living through Whitewater and Benghazi, we all know the drill. They most recently tried it with Durham and that failed miserably. It’s a long tradition in Republican politics.
The faster you get over and move past the laptop, the better (for you that is… the longer Republicans cry about this non issue, the better it is for Democrats politically, because only the most rabid partisan Republicans care about this at all).
You can argue it is minor in comparison to, say, impeachment proceedings re: Burisma, but did Twitter do the right thing in suppressing the laptop story? Probably not. I don't think most people want private citizens like Gadde tampering with elections in the future.
Campaign staff reporting tweets that made him look bad seems… fairly pedestrian?
There’s far more egregious examples of bad behavior out there than this.
Sorry, what “own violations?”
And the original sarcasm: you are upset that an employee is reporting violating content that concerns their employer? I didn’t realize that if you click the report button on the post, you must have 10 degrees of separation from it, otherwise it’s untoward.
Are you aware of how almost all content moderation on the public-facing web works?
And wait, “throughout the whole internet”? I missed the part when Twitter became the sole TLD and its vast expanse meant any violating content found must surely have been discovered by time-consuming and pain-staking methods. Or maybe a reverse image search and a few interns can find some violating content that hadn’t been flagged yet on one single website.
Enough with the indignation and false accusations.
EDIT: In fact, let's not rely on our memories. Here's the original NY Post story, the one which you weren't allowed to share on Twitter:
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
This article doesn't make any kind of allegations about CP. Why are you making things up?
"The conservative radio host Wayne Root claimed without evidence in a tweet shared tens of thousands of times that Hunter Biden's laptop contains videos of him sexually abusing Chinese children."
That's just one article, I remember seeing many YouTube comments and 4chan posts about it, which could suggest they were bots pushing a narrative.
The Hunter Biden story is, and has always been, about him selling access to his father to Ukrainian powerbrokers so that what we're seeing unfold now over there would be possible. His claims to be saving "10% for the Big Guy" clearly allude to money being kicked back to his dad the Vice President at the time, and current man in charge of delivering billions of dollars to those same powerbrokers in Ukraine now.
This is what the investigation is about. Nobody cares if Hunter was a drug addict or a douchebag it's always been about the above.
Posted today:
https://twitter.com/JoanneRansing/status/1598963377984135183
"Hunter Biden had sex with his niece Natalie. His dead brother's underage daughter - he was also banging her Mom. Will they manage to keep this video secret forever? Lots of people have seen it including me."
https://twitter.com/kuckieman/status/1598895748636372992
"One question, Are you ok with the pictures of Hunter Biden and clearly underage girls? You and Hunter are the problem."
https://twitter.com/wokeantag0nist/status/159901527380973568...
"Hunter had sex with underage girls and used his dad to broker deals against America’s best interest, “ what’s the big heal lolz” congratulations you’re dumb and pathetic enough to be Biden’s next diversity hire"
Me: shows credible proof demonstrating that's not the case
You: feigns confusion
Why are you playing dumb?, sure seems like you get "confused" a lot.
Well, I think we've identified the issue. Please don't look up flat earth tweets, it will break you heart.
It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
You could also summarize the findings as “no evidence of tampered emails or hacking was found on the laptop”. But you didn’t (and I wouldn’t) as that too would be disingenuous.
Neither summary is a fair framing, particularly for techies.
For at least some of the details, see the march 2022 Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... or https://archive.ph/b1Ser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
But let me guess Wikipedia is also part of the fake news media?
Third parties on the emails have come forward to verify some of the emails.
> No criminal activity by the Bidens was ever found.
Hunter Biden is guilty of lying on a federal firearms application. For starters they should throw the book at him for that since Democrats are “tough on guns” right?
The corruption angle has never been fully investigated either. The whole Ukraine do nothing job was clearly payment for access to his father. We’ll see what comes up when they finally look into it next Congress.
> It should be impossible to look at this objectively and conclude that this wasn't a carefully timed misinformation campaign.
Just because something has a political angle doesn’t mean it’s immediately false.
> It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.
The blinders worn by the half the left, and forced onto the eyes of the other half, are a much worse problem.
Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess. But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t mean the public cannot discuss the matter or present it’s opinion on the legality.
The laptop isn’t meaningless. It’s a data dump of evidence of guilt. Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm while under the influence of narcotics to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
> Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess.
The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
> But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.
The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now. They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
Then you go on to list a bunch of meaningless things to me. Hunter Biden brandishing firearms and taking drugs is meaningless. He’s a private citizen. His problems are well known. The brandishing of the firearm thing is especially hilarious, because the people who are most concerned about taking down Hunter Biden wouldn’t even consider that a crime.
Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
> the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done
And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself. People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that. Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?
With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.
That's completely bullshit. Legal gun owners are the number of advocates for actually enforcing gun laws on the books. Not creating cockamamie new ones that go after cosmetic features or make criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.
Being a drug addict and purchasing or even being in possession of a firearm is a serious crime and it should be investigated. I guarantee you that 100/100 legal gun owners would endorse prosecuting drug addicts illegally in possession of firearms.
The true hypocrisy is that while the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms. They want to throw the book at legal gun owners for some newly created minutiae, but won't endorse charging a literal meth addict brandishing a firearm with a felony.
> Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.
Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
> How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.
You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy? You don't see anything worthy of investigation in the $250K/month deal he was getting from that Ukraine gas company for his "expertise"?
> That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.
Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
> And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.
You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
> But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?
I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. It's just the same, "Can't you see it! It's everywhere!!" over and over again. Show some actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
> Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself.
Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.
> People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that.
Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is dis...
I don't know who you've been talking to, but my family members who are very mad about this Hunter Biden laptop also believe there's no such thing as an illegal firearm, and anything labeled as such is a violation of the 2nd amendment. That's the basis for my amusement.
> the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms.
Again, don't know who you've been talking to, but I'd challenge you to actually produce an instance of someone on the left who would defend Hunter Biden's guns. The general line I've seen is that if he did something wrong, Hunter Biden should go to jail. No one on the left (that I've seen) is defending him like the right is imagining. Again, show me. I'm not seeing it.
> Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.
There have been charges in jurisdictions. The first charges landing so far are that his namesake company is actually a front for massive fraud. The trial for that is currently under way. Trump was also named as an unindicted co conspirator on a crime someone else went to jail for. The only reason Trump himself wasn't indicted was, again, because he was President and his Justice Department couldn't do anything to indict him. In fact, political appointees in the DoJ worked to scrub Trump's fingerprints on the Cohen case as much as possible. Really all you're saying is that the other shoe hasn't dropped yet, and we should take that as evidence it never will.
> You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy?
Sure, investigate the hell out of this claim. But no one has been able to show that any of what you say is even remotely true, and in fact the opposite is true. The biggest claim made I've seen so far is that Hunter somehow influenced Biden to go after a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son. But this claim completely falls flat on its face when you realize that Joe Biden's actions were supported by the entire government, including Republicans. Why does Hunter Biden need to use back channels with his father to get him to do something that literally everyone agrees needs to be done?
No one can answer that without the entire narrative collapsing, so all these other unrelated conspiracy theories are added onto the pile about child porn and other nonsense. No matter what the results of this investigation are, they're already tainted to the point that no one will listen. So investigate all you want, but it's so partisan now that no one who doesn't care already will be paying attention.
> Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.
I wonder if you were just as concerned with Whitewater and Benghazi and Durham. I wonder if you will be disappointed yet again when Republicans fail to deliver on their claims, and they resort to "well no laws were technically broken but we feel it was improper!"
> You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?
Yes, I mean the FBI that is traditionally staffed by very conservative people, and has always been run exclusively by conservatives. Indeed that one. They've shown evidence, and given Jan 6 and recent events, I'm inclined to believe them.
> I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.
Okay, the first and most obvious would by Trump's charity, which was found to be a self-dealing grift instead of a non-profit and was directed to be shut down by New York. So there's no question Trump and his entire family (they were ...
Trump's FBI.
Chain of custody is a problem.
> Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm
Conservatives supporting denying American's their right to bear arms. Gotcha.
> while under the influence of narcotics
So?
> to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).
Private citizen not in government.
> The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.
Gotcha. The FBI and Trump never took this seriously.
> The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.
Private citizens vs Government officials. Conservatives and their big government overreach and policies and their anti-1A stance.
> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.
So Clinton wasn't corrupt. Gotcha.
Also, the investigations are still ongoing. See Taxes, for example. And all the previous charges filed against him and case after case he lost.
But sure, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn, Stone, and Cohen are nobody related to Trump.
> They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.
They've found evidence they could charge, but not enough they want to risk a trial on as it's not a "slam dunk" case.
But hey, the Clintons are not corrupt, and the elections weren't stolen! Those are interesting points of view for you.
Moderating content isn't the goal. Moderating behavior is.
To me, the bigger issue is the white glove treatment, and the appearance of preferential moderation.
But I think that’s where political realities come into play. I don’t doubt that these companies feel the need to make lawmakers feel heard or risk legislation/regulation that will harm the platforms.
I think this is touching on something much bigger, in that these kinds of government/company relationships are everywhere, and have been for decades.
The difference with the Twitter situation is one of public visibility and direct impact on individuals trying to do something as seemingly innocuous as post and share links on social media.
Which is absolutely not to excuse the behavior. If anything, I hope this wakes up more average Americans to the kinds of quid pro quo and shady handshake deals that have been going on forever.
Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government.
I mean, why is government control such a big deal when private citizens (like the Biden campaign, or this other guy who seems to have a lot of control over Twitter all of a sudden) can get the same favors? Either it matters or it doesn't, right?
It doesn't cover someone (regardless of influence or position) asking a company to review content against their own terms of service and policies.
e.g. I believe Tim Cook could probably contact someone at Twitter and get an answer. Do we really believe he would go in the same queue as a “regular” citizen?
To me this is a shocking revelation to anyone who doesn’t actually understand how the world works. Which, to be fair, I didn’t either for a good while, and empathize.
Are people just being partisan or easily manipulated here?
The fact that you bring up something tangential instead pretty much shows how people don’t want to treat this rationally.
Was Twitter biased, is Fox biased etc. doesn’t seem particularly relevant.
Nonsense.
First of all, "government" is not an "in" or an "out". They represent their constituency; those are people, and in this case, they are the representatives of the workers at twitter (judging by the donations).
Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a newspaper that prints nothing but personals[1]. All day long. The owners make a decision every day to keep printing that newspaper with everything that's in it[2].
With that firmly in mind, let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, the people working at that newspaper saw the people working at another newspaper do something to their estimation illegal and unethical[3], and decided to use the tool at their disposal to stop it. And management backed them. It happens.
Then a rich person who thought to their estimation it wasn't, bought the newspaper and set policy that the people working at the newspaper were not allowed to use their estimation of legality or ethics.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_advertisement
[2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/1...
[3]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/130/
Third, that wasn't the government because Biden wasn't president at the time. Presidential campaigns are not the government.
…And fourth, all the posts they reported were Hunter's nudes, meaning the posts they were getting taken down were likely illegal already (under revenge porn laws) and certainly against ToS.
And then I remember the number of people around me who got jobs because they "knew" someone.
I'm not even nearly shocked by this. And if you are, you don't recognize human nature.
Should it happen? No.
But it's a private company. They can do wtf they like. Just like Elon is doing now.
Should it be regulated? Maybe.
Quoted email: "Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 8:28 PM"
You: "government"
You may wish do double-check who was "in government", because checking my notes, it was not Biden.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Joe_Biden
https://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717...
Members of the FBI abused their position as law enforcement to collude with a political campaign and censor social media against damning information for their preferred candidate.
This is all fact.
This is a narrative for people with no domain experience, and a desire to see conspiracies.
im sorry? rogue elements? conspired?
what is even happening in this comment section?
(You may have been using the "historical present tense"[1], in which case what you said is technically correct, but potentially misleading to some readers.)
[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/twitter-unbans-donald-trump-truth-...
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/historical-present-verb-tense-1690...
Alex Berenson was unsuspended after he sued Twitter (unbannings were unprecedented, as this was before Musk's takeover), after he proved that Biden staffers had demanded his suspension. Government employees and legislators are not legally allowed to pressure companies to remove speech, as the Supreme Court ruled that it goes against the 1st Amendment.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1597663153739169794
not an argument
You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't".
Friend-Enemy is all it is.
"In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."
The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
There's an implication based on the political donations of Twitter employees that that was likely the case.
Instead, he talks about campaign contributions, which isn't even circumstantial evidence of bias. You don't have to contribute to a political campaign to process moderation requests from them. There's no plausible mechanism by which the volume of requests that can be processed is related the amount of money donated by Twitter employees. You just need one contact and again, no evidence exists - and not even clear accusations have been made - that Twitter employees involved were reluctant to process requests made by the Trump team.
If anything the fact that Matt Taibbi is dishonestly trying to make this connection is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that they couldn't find anything even remotely damning. Because if they could find something actually damning, they would've used that instead. Resorting to, ugh, Twitter employees are liberal, so I'm sure they weren't entirely being fair in processing requests from the Trump team and ugh, more contributions to the Democrats so like, must be able to process more requests, which is a complete non-sequitur, is highly damaging to whatever narrative that he's trying to push.
Even if he had a database like that, it's unlikely it's easily classified in a way you could actually correlate individual actions to specific sources. I highly doubt there's a database column for "as commanded by the dark Democratic conspiracy."
> This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.
Yet the fact that there's absolutely no attempt to even analyze the data for signs of bias, but have to resort to a complete non-sequitur, is quite telling. It likely means that the raw data doesn't support their narrative. You can also share a sample of tweets that were requested to reviewed by both parties and which ones got removed and which ones did not. If the Trump administration's requests were not honored despite the tweets clearly being in violation or the Biden campaign's requests being honored despite the tweets clearly not being in violation, well that would be something if there was a clear pattern, or internal discussions that explicitly suggest that they are making decisions like that specifically to favor one candidate. It still has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, but it would at least corroborate the claim that Twitter was biased.
Again, the standards need to be high because they are the party with all the information. This type of insinuation can be persuasive if you're the outside party that suspects bias and the other party controls the information. But claiming that there might be some bias, look at all this external information as to why it might have happened, tells the exact opposite story, when they are the ones that control the information. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi literally have all this information at their disposal and clearly want to spread this narrative that Twitter was biased in the Democrats' favor. But they can't prove it - it seems ridiculous for them not to have looked into this, but they thought it was best not to release that information. Why not? Almost certainly because it detracts from the narrative.
Hold on the second does not follow from the first. They might have send more request because they had a more savy social media team, they might have send more request because much more ToS violating content was posted about Biden.
If there is a massive difference in percentages of honored requests that could _maybe_ indicate bias (but that's still a bi maybe).
https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/159882999626439065...
It does not say "98.47% of Twitter donated to Dems".
Rather it says: "Of the $968,749 contributions made by employees of Twitter, 98.47% of those contributions went to Dems."
It says nothing about the number of people making those donations and thus nothing about the percent of the employees that made those contributions.
(edit)
It is also fun to extend that table to 2016 and before:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...
If not, would you please restate "98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems" to be more representative of what the numbers say.
Your argument is totally dishonest. It's infuriating. What are you saying? That because it's possible 14,137 Twitter employees donated $1 each to the republicans and 1 person donated the other 900K, we can ignore this 98.47% figure entirely?
Second of all, the dollar measurement is not a useless one. It is a measure of wealth, influence, and conviction in the cause. Those Republicans donating $1 probably aren't in charge of censorship. The guy who donated $900K though...
Third, this is Twitter we're talking about. They are headquartered in San Francisco, a very blue city in a very blue state. Their employees are young educated techies. I have friends who work there and have visited their office several times.
Point is, you're not fooling anybody but yourself. Enjoy your motivated reasoning.
If you switched the characters here, we all know that this would be the biggest story ever about social media. "Trump Campaign coordinates with Twitter to rig the election" would be the headlines. 2016 really and truly broke so many people's brains.
I think you’re replying to the wrong comment
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-sa...
I agree, nothing we didn't know. Like I suspect the further findings alluded to at the end of the thread. But it's kind of like the Snowden revelations. Anyone a bit tech savvy strongly suspected what the NSA was up to, and would have been surprised of the contrary. But it's interesting nevertheless to see the proof. And to see how political viewpoints are censored at the request of politicians.
1. it's conspiracy theory
2. it was obvious to everyone
3. forgotten
Makes me wonder, if conspiracy theorists might have a point.
I just said that:
A) Got vaccine and got infected right after second dose (1 week)
B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
At this point Deus Ex was a credible prophetic game, where a "vaccine" that doesn't cure but postpones symptoms is seen as a miracle cure, which is eerily similar to "we'll need to be vaccinated every few months" that was present in media at some point. That's pretty much every pharma's wet dream.
Edit: As someone outside of USA, I find it remarkable how people seem to associate vaccine skepticism, despite pharma in US having strong motivation to push novel drugs that don't solve the issue, just treat the symptoms.
That's not the result that can be inferred from seeing unvaccinated people having no symptoms. In other words, people having no symptoms without vaccine or even having side effects from the vaccine itself does not disprove the statistic of vaccinated people having lesser symptoms on average.
And afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors.
So as Usual in studies - through data collection, statistics, and correcting for bias in cohorts.
> afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors
There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant. I would recommend reading some to understand it better than your summary.
I just read this: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...
> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”
This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.
So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?
When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
The flu vaccine also does not grant long term immunity, but it has the same utility for public health.
Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.
Also you do realize you’re contradicting yourself? You’re saying nobody forced anything but if you want to live in society you must follow the rules. There were no laws forcing me, it was my desire to keep my job. My job created the mandate, not society.
Regarding your new argument, which doesn't seem to be pointing out a perceived contradiction in any interpretation I can make of it, your job created the requirement because society said it didn't want age discrimination in employment. If your employer forced only older employees to get the vaccine in order to keep its insurance costs low, there would have been lawsuits. Forcing all employees to get vaccinated has well-established legal precedent and has the benefit of reducing insurance costs slightly more.
Yea I’m not sure my job has many older people, nor would they care about their insurance costs.
Which works for some diseases. Others are only effective for shorter periods of time and/or against specific variants. The flu vaccine should be a familiar example to most people, needing periodic refreshers that are most effective against certain variants and not others.
It's also worth noting that the diseases that are treated as a "one and done" are generally those where you're unlikely to be exposed in day to day life for a variety of reasons.
Even the flu vaccine has known potential side effects
And guidance hasn’t changed because the benefits still outweighed the risks, though more studies are warranted and are in process in light of updated vaccines and mutating variants.
We didn’t wait until the studies could be completed because we had enough data.
Yes, it's unfortunate that the vaccine has side effects. But if you're seriously concerned about the risk of heart problems the vaccine is the safer bet.
The question is only: did you want higher or lower chances of survival? Cherry picking a situating you think you may have experienced and worrying about it is not useful. Attribution is hard. In single cases close to impossible.
The day I had issues I was camping. Given the testing I certainly didn’t have COVID unless the tests are wrong. No unrelated heart issues prior to this, EKGs everything prior showed normal.
I’d rather not have heart issues to help someone else feel safe. And if my chances are lower, then how come after taking the first dose and having issues, then ceasing further doses at my Drs request, how come I never got it? You see you can isolate yourself and invalidate the need for increased survival rates. Bonus, you don’t have heart issues either!
Really all this shows me is its “every man for themselves”. All anybody cares about is if they survive or if they get a hospital bed if needed. And they’ll force, or attempt to force, others to do things to give them an extra level of safety. Because of this, you’ve created a “new vaccine” antivaxer
Please double check yours. There's a few common vaccines that people assume are "life long" but actually have a recommendation for boosters when you're an adult.
But yeah, in general the length of immunity differs, some vaccines work forever, some not. It's a limitation of what we can produce.
> So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated?
Multiple reasons. Prevent many deaths, lower symptoms, make recover easier, lower emergency departments load, lower transmission, etc. None of those were going to be perfect or work independently of people's behaviours.
Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all: this is because making vaccines is hard, not because we aren’t trying.
Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.)
Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.
> what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated
The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives.
The confusion here is your own misunderstanding.
- previously deleted this content because it was too aggressive and condescending but adding back since another replied before I could modify -
> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.
The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.
Why do you find this puzzling? What countries haven’t adopted mRNA vaccines and what do you mean by “adopted”?
> The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
And Johnson&Johnson is still available now in the US. They pulled it out of an abundance of caution and because there were other vaccines on the market. If Johnson & Johnson was the only vaccine on the market it wouldn’t have been pulled because of the risk of clotting.
-edit-
This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
> It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Why would this be puzzling? Can you share some scientific resources that describe the differences in using a “whole virus” versus “part of a virus” and how that affects vaccine effectiveness? I’d like to read the same materials you did.
> This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?
In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle.
The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.
> In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle
Alternatively I’ve been vaccinated, and boosted twice, and maintain a health lifestyle and haven’t contracted COVID-19 that I’m aware of while living in a city, interacting with other people, and traveling. These are just anecdotes and don’t generalize. There are also people who are “perfectly healthy” who get severely ill, some people who didn’t know they had an underlying medical condition who died, and people who were otherwise healthy suffering from long COVID. I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
“It’s ok for me to smoke cigarettes because so and so smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100”
> The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
It seems pretty straightforward. You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID, or if you do the severity of the virus is typically not as bad as it could be, or you don’t get the vaccine and you roll the dice for no real reason.
> https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-key-differences-i...
Ok but what is puzzling about this?
mRNA vaccines? Most of the vaccines widely in use prior to 2021 were quite old.
> I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
Are you more likely to get a disease being in contact with 500 people a day or 5?
> You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID,
In my personal circle I know two people who didn't contract covid. One was vaccinated and one was not. The sheer numbers infected make me highly skeptical it did anything at all to stop transmission. mRNA vaccines never worked in the past, but suddenly they work under an emergency situation.
I'm not aware of any study comparing the vaccine vs lower mortality of new variants. Vaccine proponents say mRNA vaccination shows lower mortality and the numbers all things being equal make it seem it does. However there are new variants. Maybe the vaccine did nothing at all, but launder billions of tax payer dollars? Maybe it's just the new variants being less deadly we have to thank? Or maybe it's a little of both.
> Ok but what is puzzling about this?
The fact they chose mRNA, never widely used and even downplayed the immunity gained by contracting covid naturally. To the point people with prior infection were fired if they refused the vaccine.
This is just flat-out wrong, and shows stunning ignorance of how clinical trials and medical research is done, which is probably why you were accused of spreading conspiracy theories.
There’s an enormous body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines minimizing symptom severity.
What. This isn't how reasoning works. "My friend wasn't wearing a seatbelt when they got in a car accident and they didn't die but this other person was wearing a seatbelt and did die, so it's not like seatbelts have a provable positive impact on collision safety."
People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter. This is not a free speech issue. If you are interested in the Hunter Biden story there are about 300 other sources you could find information about it within about 1/2 a second, it was one of the most widely reported stories in 2020 if I remember correctly.
I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?
We discussed this years ago when it first started. When you’re the defacto town square then no, you shouldn’t be able to kick people out for whatever reason.
> Why don't we analyze Fox News's decision to run or not run certain stories.
How do you justify the left ignoring stories in their media? For instance the story about Chase Staub.
> People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter.
There’s always an assumption it’s Fox. Try WSJ.
> This is not a free speech issue.
Very much disagree. Ask yourself why you’re so upset at this information. Or if you’re not upset, ask why there is so much anxiety around this story. Clearly some the left are concerned about what this will result in.
> I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?
Yes and that’s a problem when they use their political viewpoints to control the conversation.
Has anyone been arrested or imprisoned for running the Hunter Biden laptop story? Has any government authority threatened anyone with arrest for running the Hunter Biden story? No? Then not a free speech issue. Twitter is not a government agency. Don’t like their moderation practices? Start your own twitter which is exactly what Trump did and is the correct response. He can then push or censor whatever stories he wants and people decide whether or not they want to traffic on that site. That is the beauty of the free market we play in.
If Fox wants to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party while masquerading as news, good for them. If Elon wants to unban everyone on Twitter and let everything go unfettered with no moderation, good for him. There are lots of other choices out there.
None of this is new or interesting. This seems like more of a school cafeteria food fight than any kind of “free speech” issue.
You seem pro echo chamber and I still cannot for the life of me understand why you want to control speech so much. It’s almost like you’re scared a second voice in the room because it’s harder dispense misinformation that leads to support.
If I host a comment section on my blog and someone starts posting nazi propaganda I should have the right to remove those posts. Or any other posts I don’t like. Twitter is just a bigger version of that.
If you don’t like twitter’s moderation policies don’t use twitter, use truth social or Parler or 4chan or whatever.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/retired-navy-seal-made-famous-com...
While CNN has many many articles on the individual, they’re missing this one.
I'm guessing that "the premier media source for LGBTQ Georgia"[1] is probably left-leaning and they've covered it. Same for "a central part of Washington, DC’s gay and lesbian community"[2]. Reasonably sure that [3] lean left.
[1] https://thegavoice.com/today-in-gay-atlanta/police-arrest-ch...
[2] https://www.metroweekly.com/2022/12/atlanta-man-arrested-for...
[3] https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/11/28/chase-staub-arrest-ma...
> Your search - "chase staub" site:foxnews.com - did not match any documents.
I guess if CNN, WaPo, etc. had Atlanta local affiliates, they'd probably have covered it locally as well.
[1] https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/atlanta-police-charge-perso...
But some did. You just disagree that they count even though at least one of them (PinkNews) has more reach than WAGA-TV (Fox5Atlanta).
There is clear distinction between content producers (like TV or newspapers) and platforms (like social networks, Youtube, and others). Content producers produce content with some bias, their consumers have (hopefully) similar bias and everyone is happy. Bias is here, it is editorial policy and nobody is understand it. It has some disadvantages in contrast to unbiased producers, but that is probably unreachable ideal.
With platforms, you have matching content producers and consumers (or just parties trying to communicate) and then you have third party (platform) who 'moderates' the content regardless of whether communicating parties are interested or not. Because it is not supposed to be editorial, it tries to dress it as rule enforcement. But biased rule enforcement is just much less acceptable than biased editorial policy.
...
I don't understand why this is a story to begin with.
So we're now at stage 2.
Effortless.
I hope that clears things up.
If it was done at this scale, it’s likely similar censorship happened at the company on a smaller scale as well.
Because of this it’s accurate to say that Twitter’s leadership team created the optics that it was a town square that only supported a specifically political philosophy and was hostile to other political philosophies.
Can you honestly and truly say that if a laptop was abandoned at a repair shop with similarly explosive revelations about Donald Trump jr that this story would have been censored to the same degree on Twitter using the same policy excuse? I can’t.
No, because Donald Trump and his family's dealings are already well documented, and because he was the one who created the atmosphere of misinformation which led to the censorship to begin with, in order to undermine and subvert the peaceful transfer of power.
But if we're going to ignore context entirely for the sake of hypotheticals, who knows? Donald Trump censored environmental data from government websites and banned government employees from discussing climate change on social media, he declared the press enemies of the state and had reporters he disagreed with barred from the White House, and allegedly assaulted and arrested, he wanted TikTok banned because someone was mean to him, he wanted to send the military in against political protestors. He, like Musk, seems like a charlatan and authoritarian who only cares about what serves his own interests. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which Trump would want to silence a story, but he's so corrupt, and no one cares when a Republican does it, so he wouldn't bother.
Also, what "explosive revelations?" Like Trump's hotel businesses being used to launder money for the Russian mob and Iranian military? Ivanka being involved in policymaking despite having no qualifications? Tax fraud disguising gifts as "consultant fees" to avoid estate taxes? Accepting gifts from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause? Numerous sexual assault lawsuits? Jared Kushner selling visas to Chinese investors? Something like that? Anything that even rises to the level of "Just another Tuesday at Mar-A-Lago?"
I mean, if nothing else, even conceding there is a story here, it isn't the story people want it to be, and the sheer mass of hypocrisy behind the outrage is threatening to collapse into a singularity.
Ahh yes, whatabousism. You realize of course that the fact that you can easily repeat this list just underscores that there was literally no media censorship of these stories, even GOP friendly media covered them. Even if there was an attempt by the Trump campaign and presidency to request and suppress these stories the media and social media companies specifically didn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldnt censor them. That alone makes this an apples to oranges example.
I stopped reading here. This is a blatant lie. DT didn’t create the “atmosphere of misinformation”. This is blatant, biased, emotional response. You are the problem with this country.
Taibbi is about as muckracking-leftwing as it gets.
Now, I'm not saying Muskovite won't take cash for "moderation" from the political parties.... this is going to be a MASSIVE cash spend presidential cycle.
What I'm shocked about is that there isn't a "moderation" bidding system. Democrats give twitter 10 million to suppress this story... does the RNC want to up it to 15 million to not suppress, or 20 million to PUSH it?
Maybe Elon will make a profit after all.
Here's a better example: the Canadian trucker protests. GiveSendGo was hacked, and the names of people who had donated to the protests were made public - and Twitter had no problem with those "hacked materials" being shared on its platform.
I'd think that if there was ever a reason to block the publication of hacked materials, it would be to prevent private individuals from being doxxed, not to protect the political interests of the worlds' most powerful people.
(People, please don't reply to tell me why you didn't like the Canadian truckers' political views, it's not relevant.)
Names are explicitly listed as exceptions to the ban in sharing personal information.
Heck even if the new articles about the topic would have used hacked material as source it dint not include that material itself and thus wound not fall under that policy anyway. Not even articles about a confirmed hacks fall under this policy even if the hack is confirmed with the hacked material itself.
This is and was a excuse from the very start.
https://sgp.fas.org/jud/snowden/complaint.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/641
"Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; ..."
It's definitely possible to imagine a situation in which Snowden "knowingly ... sells ... any record ... or thing of value of the United States" to Russia, namely a copy of the information he had available to him while working for the NSA.
I'm not sure how courts have interpreted "record ... or thing", and whether (for example) a copy of a page from an internal government wiki would count, but let's assume that digital information is a "thing" and that copies of it are still "of the United States".
I'll further grant, for the sake of argument, that the US government has secret evidence that such a selling did take place (perhaps witnessed by a double agent working at the Kremlin, who could be called upon to give a witness statement at a trial held in secret), although I don't actually believe such selling occurred.
My main point, though, was that I don't know of any court interpreting "steals" in a statute to mean "making an unauthorized copy of" or "leaking". You're right, though, that there are other laws that cover what Snowden did.
Is there some reason you would know this? Intellectual property and classified information are things. You can steal them.
So-called "intellectual property" is neither intellectual nor property. If I randomly mash the keyboard for a few minutes, the resulting jumble of letters can have its redistribution restricted by copyright law, despite not requiring any intellectual feat to produce. It is also not property, since I cannot own ideas that exist within your head or the sound waves that emanate from your mouth when you whistle a tune I wrote.
> You can steal them.
No you can't. The legal definition of "stealing" requires that the perpetrator takes someone else's property (which an idea isn't) without permission with the intent to deprive them of the property. You can't deprive someone of an idea by making more copies of that idea, much less is that the intent behind copying, so the label of "stealing" is completely inapplicable.
If, for example, some hacker found out the President is a spy for China they’d suppress it but if a CIA agent breaks the law and leaks it’s fine?
A hacker doesn't even know what the information is before the attack and is likely an adversary who will use any information to damage, regardless of public interest.
And as as the Twitter files show and the Democratic rep (Ro Khanna) highlighted, they were banning a “news article” about hacked materials, no hacked materials themselves. Are we prepared to even ban the media from talking about hacked materials?
Access is not the same as authorization.
Oh but it is. You see, for the people who encourage this behavior, the hacking of the Canadian Truckers' protesters never happened and it was good that it did.
It’s a set of rules selectively applied depending on whether or not your political allies or opponents are on the receiving end.
Taibbi leans left and I don’t but I like reading his articles (despite premises I may not agree with) because he’s at least honest in his arguments and doesn’t try to bury or twist inconvenient facts.
My suspicion is that his grey-tribeism is genuine, but the red-tribe content is what pays the bills at substack.
I've been sober all my life, I was a teetotaller until 2016 when I developed a 4-drinks-a-day habit which persists to this day. I've been clearly sober dor most of my life though.
TDS was never a real thing amongst the left. It was and is generally a thing amongst liberal Dems and some Repubs. The Lincoln Project is a propaganda PAC attacking TDS and is a great example. It’s by establishment Republicans who have close to the same policies as Trump but want control of the GOP back. A lot of liberal and/or moderate Democrats approve of the Lincoln Project. Too many times have friends been gleeful over their propaganda.
The left did not and is not going to be part of any TDS BS. I consider myself far left and have far more Trump apologetics to say than TDS is overblown.
> the left has had far more saying in what's allowed on social media than the right, so if you have any integrity you'd stand on the side of the right to create some equality/justice
If I may, this is a centrist point of view. Since the left isn’t in the picture, it’s moderates vs the right. How can a call for integrity be to stand with the right when it isn’t binary?
Why not stand with the left? Or even just left leaning American politics like Bernie and the squad. Who are Democratic Socialists. Not even on the left economically. They believe in the Nordic capitalist system. This is one option to stand with and we still haven’t gotten to the left yet. Any one could also stand with the left in these circumstances. Right off the bat we have four options to choose from. With those options, in my humble opinion 99% of the time it takes no integrity to side with the right if youre a left leaning.
How so? In my eyes this is a case for a corrupt businessman that uses political ties for his gains. That’s pretty right wing isn’t it. At the very least there is no critique of capitalism, quite the contrary.
I also find it interesting that freedom of speech has seemingly become a right-wing talking point.
Because hate speech and misinformation is part of the right wing platform...
This is ignoring voter manipulation which was a big part of the 2016 election (as proven by the Cambridge Analytica leaks among other) tilting the voter to the right (see also e.g. brexit’s leave campaign illegal campaign financing and other dodgy behavior).
Compared to these—often flat out illegal—actions by the right, moderating hate speech is nothing.
Stop demonizing.
On the one hand, the leading Presidential candidate on the right has within the last 24 hours said he wants to suspend the Constitution and be reinstated President by dictate on social media. On the other hand, some people were constantly posting he was saying mean things, and some executives at a social media company tried to handle some things.
Totally gotta stand on the side of balance!
Are you talking about the theory of Russian interference? If so, that is not the same as denying the results, that is questioning the integrity. The difference is huge. The later calls into question bad actors and asks for reforms going forward, the former calls into action the removal of the elected president in favor of the looser.
Now as for the conspiracy of meddling with the election. I thought that was pretty well documented fact. We have stuff like the Cambridge Analytica leaks that show actual manipulation of voters.
Maybe you should look into how the US meddles in foreign elections. It is something countries do to each other. Russia has always done that and so have we. There was nothing special about 2016. These complaints about CA are the left's equivalent of when the right says there is mass voter fraud because of one or two minor instances of election fraud.
I don’t understand, do you think we should have blind trust in election, that there shouldn’t be partisan and independent observers, that security measures shouldn’t be scrutinized? And if we find a fault, we shouldn’t call for reforms. We should just “trust” the system?
No, this is not the same as denying the results without evidence. There is no equivalence here.
But he’s not so tribal that he pushes fabrications and half-truths.
If you think a left-wing person who says “whoa, Trump is terrible but lying about him only makes the left look bad” means someone is no longer left wing, we have some serious problems.
Yes…just like the comic Elon tweeted describing his views.
He’s still left, I still disagree with him but at least he’s intellectually honest (which appears to be the problem you have with him).
Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.
They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
I don't know what this means. How many people are included in this? Are you on the left or right under this specifications? Is everyone? If someone is defending Hunter Biden and the Dems, are they on the left here? Why would the left be the status quo? What about someone on the left who believes Hunter is not good, nor his family, nor the Dem party^^. How can both of these examples be on the left?
> Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.
> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
I find this hard to believe. Taibbi didn't need to begin the Twitter thread by writing the left then Dems in parenthesis. No need to muddy the waters by incorrectly using left when he knows what the left means and knows it does not mean the Dems. Meanwhile using that language is sure to stoke up the right.
> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.
There's actual people doing this. That are picking apart both Dem and Repub inconsistencies and showing both establishments are not good. This contrasts Taibbi and Greenwald. Greenwald specifically has clearly been moving more and more to the right. At least publicly. Who knows how much of a grift all of this is. I can always check Fox News (which is just as bad as regularly going on CNN) next week and see Greenwald on again
^^This could be considered being a contrarian.
You're highlighting them needling the democratic line on "news cycle of the week" type things, and I agree they do that.
Re: "the left" vs democrats, I think taibbi was writing for a general audience who doesn't make a distinction there.
They aren’t politicians. They don’t have policies. Right wing agitprop can be done by non policy journos.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1414595359368691712
You can’t love libsoftiktok and not be on the right.
—
I’m highlighting them being some level of propaganda mouth pieces (probably for their own fatter check sizes) for the right. Highlighting Dem stuff repeatedly makes that clear. Mixing the left and Dems makes it even worse. They know what they are talking about. They know blurring the left and Dems helps the right. That’s one of the main right wing GOP cornerstones. Pretend Biden or Harris are on the left. That moves the Overton window to the right or doesn’t let it budge.
This is also another conservative policy. Policy being —- make liberals, Dem voters/politicians, and the left into one bogeyman. Which provides multiple benefits to the right.
You seem to view it as a zero-sum, with us or against us thing. And there may be some validity to that with the realities of politics. But if someone had never once said "I like conservatives" or supported a single conservative policy plank, it's wrong to call them conservative.
You could call them insufficiently loyal and I think they'd agree with that. But on stuff that matters for longer than a 24h news cycle they're consistently liberal.
Taibbi, for example, wrote an entire book about Eric Garner's killing, documenting a ton of NYPD corruption in the process.. and has also spent a bunch of time making fun of embarrassing weepy SJWs on Twitter.
Who is us? I was never on the same side as either of these people. Even 5 or 10 years ago.
> wrong to call them conservative
Libsoftiktok is literally a right wing HATE account/community. Greenwald loves it.
> insufficiently loyal
Loyal to what? I don’t like Democrats…they don’t either.
(Unless you voted green)
Can we agree on the far more important issue of libsoftiktok being a right wing conservative account that is loved by Greenwald? Spreading bigotry and hatred. Smh.
The thing that Bernie understood and most libs don't is that we can be united on class issues or divided on culture war issues. We lose with the latter.
I've never seen libsoftiktok and I don't read a lot of Greenwald lately. I like Taibbi and subscribe to him.
I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to contest things. Once I nailed down Greenwald down you hand waved it away. I wouldn’t remain friends or defensive of someone who publicly supports a hate account/community. That says enough to me about Taibbi and how he sees Greenwald.
I don't think libsoftiktok would self-identify as a "hate account" and I'm positive taibbi and Greenwald wouldn't self-identify as conservative.
Maybe none of us are good enough for you and you'll have to be content with green party candidates
Your responses remind me of Joe Rogan saying people like Ron DeSantis are good people trying to give people freedom because that’s what Desantis told Joe to his face.
You’ve shown your true colors wrt libsoftiktok. This is one of countless examples of the hate libsoftiktok spews. It’s not hard to come by: https://god.dailydot.com/libsoftiktok-facebook-account-banne.... I should not have kept holding out hope you came in good faith.
I’ll let my transgender friends know they shouldn’t worry about the hate that comes their way because it isn’t real.
I suspect the people who have had death threats and such thrown at them because of the account don’t feel the same way you do.
You can question if its ethically appropriate to re-post these stuff as it frequently seems to be from people with severe mental problems. The claim however that people get death threats because of that account is silly. If something causes people to send death threats then if more people see it it would result in more death threats but that is not the fault of whoever made it visible. If this is the hill you want to die on then you should advocate for total censorship of everything since everything could trigger some unstable or evil person to send out death threats.
So then then question here is why do you write comments on HN? It's dangerous! Your posts and the posts you help push could increase the number of death threats being send. I'm sure you dont care about that at all. You write and post whatever you want and feel zero responsibility for other peoples irrational (re)actions. Obviously that is how it should be.
> if this is the hill you want to do die on…
> So then then question here is why do you write comments…
To make it clear. People have gotten threats because of the way libsoftiktok has editorialized stories. The moral bankruptcy is squarely on the account.
The pseudo-intellectual attacks you’re doing are weird. Changing the argument to pretend I’m upset that any one can be triggered by anything is weird. Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.
I can simply go look what that account posts and I did exactly that and it is in fact re-posts of stupid tiktoks form deranged people. No one questions that they have a bias or push a narrative by selecting what they re-post. That is literally what every person on the internet does. Yet they are not in any way responsible legally or ethically for any threats someone else sends out "because" of them. Just like if someone would send a threats to libsoftiktok because of what you wrote here. Clearly you would not be responsible for that.
>Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.
I never said any of that. You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.
I could not care less what they are anti about. My whole point was that they are not responsible for the action of others. There is no incitement for such actions. I dont support hatred I support logic. Blaming someone for the action of others is illogical and probably a result of your emotional involvement rather than rational thought. You can only blame that account for what that account actually did. I highly doubt it is sending out threats because then it would have been deleted.
> Clearly you would not be responsible for that.
Because I am not an influential propaganda mouth piece. Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.
> You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.
Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…
>Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.
Sure you didn't but neither did libsoftiktok. You write this as if this separates you from what that account did and thus indirectly accuse them of doing these things. But where is the proof? Why cant you just link to the "offense". Why is here not a single tweet that encourages people do do any kind of harmful action to anyone?
>Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…
You aren't replying in good faith if you make stuff up. I'm calling you out and obviously this is not a good faith argument and its not meant to be one. Its meant to give you an opportunity to self-reflect instead of doubling down on accusation that you can not provide any evidence for.
It seems reasonable to assume the accusation originated in emotional coping because that is how it reads like. If you have a different reason why you made these accusations then feel free to tell me but I'd much rather had evidence for the claims than debate about why you lie to me, fully aware that I can and did look into what the account posts and its none of the things you accuse them of. You just dislike them which is fine. I dislike what FlatEarthZone posts on twitter. But I'm not gonna accuse them of hurting people trough the extended hypothetical harmful action of their followers, that would be silly.
Libsoftiktok was put on hidden black list[1] by twitter because they where unable to ban the account as it did not break the twitter rules. (The rules obviously include the stuff you accuse them of.)
They repeatedly temporary suspended the account[2] and accused them of "hateful conduct"[3] similar to your accusation. Then later the highest "authority" on twitter internal confirmed "[they have] not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy."[4]
The suspensions where then justified by a variation of your bogus accusations for "encouraging harassment"[5] while if that would have been the case they would have simply terminated the account.
And while not relevant to the content the account posted its still quite interesting that when Libsoftiktok got doxed, which is actually against twitter rules, they did nothing.[6]
[1] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601018810495995904#m [2] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601019593606107136#m [3] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601019900071288833#m [4] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601020845224128512#m [5] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601021201815457793#m [6] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601022887556571136#m
Some of us did know, that's true, but we were labeled as conspiracy theorists and the like. And when the truth came out in the open those calling us conspiracy theorists of course that embraced the "that has always been a known fact! What are you on about?". Rinse and repeat.
Jack Dorsey and Rho Khanna. That’s who benefitted the most.
Amazingly the democrats are upset about this. It tells me what I need to know about those people.
Also, nothing that Snowden released was publicly available, but Biden's staffers were using tools that were available to the general public in the way they were intended. They're completely unrelated.
Some of those changes should have happened anyway. Snowden's revelations pushed people to use https ubiquitously. It doesn't just protect against NSA spying but other countries do stuff like that too as well as non state actors. (There was that time I switched on wireshark on WiFi for 5 minutes and was like damn... I've got a lot of email passwords.)
Like it or not, driving from DC to the airport in Baltimore you drive past the puzzle palace at Fort Mead and it's got a huge parking lot and one of the worst traffic jams in America when the quitting bell rings at the end of the work day. If they weren't spying on people but instead spending the money on ski chalets or beautifying the inner city or something, that would be a real scandal.
The scandal is that these very same policies and tools were being lent to the rich and powerful to distort the publics perception. The very thing Twitter wanted us to trust it was not doing, was exactly what it was doing.
It raises important questions on ethics and no amount of “we already know” makes this ethical.
The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended.
In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech?
The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.
Some emails have been verified, many others have not been, and we still don’t know the origin of the laptop itself. Allegedly Hunter handed it to a blind computer repair man (no video!) and said “I am Hunter Biden.”
This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs.
The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics.
What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON.
This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together.
We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.
Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.
Yes, most of this was known…but the big (ugly) revelation is that it confirmed something that was suspected—Primarily the direct coordination with the Biden campaign to suppress the story and lock specific accounts that referred to it.
FWIW, by saying “we updated our hacked materials policy but we will not retroactively apply it to the event that required the update”, I think Twitter rubbed salt into a wound they created. It basically underscored that they were content to play a part in the current election manipulation (likely because of the big baddie they opposed) even though they knew it was wrong enough to change the policy.