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Ask HN: What's the Deal with Twitterfiles?

5 points by sgt ↗ HN
It seems like one side is claiming complete BS, but for the other side it's revolutionary. Taking a completely neutral stance (let's say you don't mind if either Trump is president or Biden is), what's the take here?

9 comments

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theCrowing
To be honest I think it's fluff a piece to keep twitter in the spotlight and to drive user engagement. If they really had something new or better said something that wasn't known before they would release it in a more professional and descriptive manner.
greggarious
It’s absolutely a fluff piece.

I had blocked Elon before he took power, after filling multiple pages with instances where the staff had quite visibly leaked things like DMs or private lists they had no cause to share.

Twitter is run by folks who claim to support free expression but actually just want to spread hate - if you come at them with a tenth of the energy they put out, they melt down and ban your account.

I very purposefully stopped giving a damn about avoiding suspension when it became clear I’d never get the same respect as pedophiles, fascists, and tax cheats.

(I’m completely serious- it was explicitly allowed to use Twitter to say all those things were ok, and I had persistent retaliation for expressing the opposite opinion during my decade ish on The Website.)

sgt
Is this accurate though? I get a lot of Elon hate, and woke crowd stuff in my twitter feed. Now it's mixed with the Elon-crowd as well with a differing view. So right now there seems to be a good mix (not necessarily a healthy mix though, since so much content on Twitter is toxic).
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greggarious
I had to block Elon prior to being suspended from Twitter, which declined to roll out end to end encryption per my request to avoid having my data end up in the hands of somone like Elon Musk.

Why wouldn't I "hate" someone who repeatedly violates my boundaries, and doesn't even to have the common decency to use a zero day instead of just throwing money at the problem?

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suumcuique
Really the most interesting part so far was not the actual releases themselves, but that they discovered some "ex" fed lawyer at Twitter inserting himself into the process to "vet" the material being released to the journalists[0].

Other than that there haven't been any huge revelations, though it's important to note that what we know right now is incomplete. They're gonna be drip-feeding this stuff to us to drive engagement.

Regarding the first release concerning direct political influence, I don't think we will have a smoking gun at the end of this even if it really did happen. Everyone who works a corporate job knows that anything you write down in an e-mail will come back to haunt you eventually. Maybe sketchier things happened in those face to face meetings the Twitter execs were having with intelligence agencies and politicians but I don't think we will know in the end.

The second release about shadowbanning, deboosting etc. was more interesting since they actually have a more complete picture here. This basically confirmed a bunch of manipulation happening behind the scenes that people have been suspecting for a long time. I hope they keep digging on this, I'd be interested to know more about who decided who ends up on these blacklists and why. Maybe even release the raw data so we can come to our own conclusions.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/160024340584166604...

logicalmonster
When it comes to anything contentious, everybody is going to be biased about the interpretation. You're probably better off making your own mind up about these kinds of things.

But I'd say there's a few journalists like Glenn Greenwald who maintain some credibility.

What characteristic makes any journalist credible? One hallmark of credibility for a journalist is that he's actually willing to call out his own idealogical "team" for their bullshit. Here was Glenn's take on this. Your interpretation of this may of course vary.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1601594896594644993

> The weekly meetings @yoyoel and other Twitter censors had with FBI, DHS, etc. constituted a union of state and corporate power to control the flow of information to the citizenry.

> "Fascism" has become abused to the point of meaninglessness but that's a defining hallmark.

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