You don't really get to become a billionaire in the US without playing well with the establishment, so quite a few people believe that at some point someone pushed him a little too hard to do something he didn't want.
I'm in favour of the leaks, but ultimately none of the surveillance laws that whistle-blowers exposed in the past two decades were actually repealed at a later point. However, the very fact that this causes such huge debate in the US points to a much healthier public discourse in the US than most western societies in my opinion.
I do think that he probably regretted having to actually commit to the sale. This whole thing reminds me a bit to dealing with racist bouncers growing up. I'd leave disappointed thinking to myself that one day "I'll buy a club myself and put high quality bouncers there that judge people by their substance" only to forget about it a few weeks later. Except that in this case there were also a couple million people every day daring him to do it.
Re-posting comment from above because it was good, (not mine).
" The perfect unison of the mainstream news in response is itself an interesting news story. They say it is not newsworthy, and smear the journalists who say it is. How does this unanimous pronouncement of an absurdity arise? What a perfect model of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A few outsider journos point at a monstrous 1984-like mass mind-control operation and all the insider journos nervously cough and change the subject. Hm. "
For those of us with, like, day jobs, can someone summarize what damning discoveries were actually revealed in the "Twitter Files"?
My impression is:
1. These "independent journalists" like numbered lists instead of prose (OK?)
2. I find numbered lists a bit hard to read.
3. There's no headline or lede that suggests...anything? But I keep reading the numbered lists out of morbid curiosity.
4. At some point it's revealed that, shockingly, an American tech company was in contact with American government officials.
5. Those officials spoke to the tech company about known or suspected foreign influence operations that might affect that tech company.
6. The tech company expressed gratitude for those tips.
Like, honestly, isn't the reason the "mainstream media" hasn't reported on this because they're in the business of reporting on things that their viewers would find interesting, and this is a super boring story?
Yes, if you name anything "the [something] files" and label it "suppressed knowledge now come to light", it sounds sexy. But is there anything actually significant here? If so, can someone summarize it for me in a numbered list?
That's exactly it. There is no smoking gun. What we've learned is that, somewhat paradoxically if not surprisingly, is that previous Twitter management had both a leftward bent to it's moderation perspectives (i.e. what to moderate and when) and a general deference to requests from agents of its host nation's government.
Which we basically knew already.
This is like if someone else buys Twitter and published Twitter Files 2.0 and we discover that Musk was sharing conspiracy memes with right wingers. Not much of a shock.
The fact is this behaviour and bias was rejected and ignored as "paranoia" for years until these files were released to confirm it all and worse - US intelligence and law enforcement involvement.
I think Musk’s move is just to get the most profitable people back on the platform. Fire them up. Get them clicking ads for gold, crypto, pillows, and survival gear.
Right wingers never left twitter though. Go look at the comments to basically any partisan comment from any perspective. With only a tiny handful of the most controversial accounts as exceptions, right wing thought leaders are all still there, still tweeting daily. The idea that Twitter somehow drove conservatives away is just a convenient meme. It was never true.
It's a neat theory, but Apple was 4% of Twitter's Q1 ad revenue. I don't think the My Pillow guy has $100M to spend on anything, let alone Twitter ads.
Crypto scams and fake nutrition pills aren't the top advertisements on Infowars because Alex Jones knows more about the media business than Fox or CNN. They're the top advertisements on Infowars because mainstream advertisers won't touch Jones with a ten foot pole.
I don't think the vast majority of people realized to what extent the US government set the boundaries of acceptable opinions/topics and were given free passage and in some cases assistance in conducting psyops.
This will be especially eye-opening for non-US users who may now seriously consider whether to continue using US based platforms at all.
Can you point me to the “Twitter Files” showing the government set the bounds of acceptable topics? Like I said above, I had trouble picking through these long tweet threads.
1. Trust and safety is a hard job, and Twitter was...kinda not great at it, I think? Honestly, not a big surprise.
2. In high-level discussions with government policymakers, policymakers expressed general desires for what kind of misinformation might be of particular concern (like health misinfo, or misinfo leading to hoarding and panic buying).
#2 seems...sorta fine to me? #1 seems like a product problem, to be perfectly clear, but it's hard to connect that to government censorship.
I'm not trying to make light of all the failures in #1. But I find it a bit hard, assuming good faith, to understand if the view of most critics is:
a. There should be zero content filtering or content-related ranking. (I mean, that's fine; Mastodon doesn't have algorithmic ranking, and if you don't want filtering, enjoy the Viagra spam I guess?)
b. There should be content filtering and ranking, but it should rank things the way critics want. (For example, a lot of critics seem concerned not with ranking in general, but with downranking of heterodox views on Covid.)
c. There should be content filtering and ranking, but Twitter just wasn't great at it; we'd like to see them improve their processes (which I am not optimistic about given the headcount story at Twitter).
>it's hard to connect that to government censorship.
Mislabeling as misinfo either intentionally or unintentionally and marking links, tweets, and accounts for suppression just because they dont push a government's view is by definition "government censorship".
Concerning abc: A government that is bound by the 1st amend. should ultimately play no role in policing speech. It's not any more complicated than that.
I mean, hypothetically, what if Twitter said, "We really think it's bad for our brand to be connected to state sponsored info ops, and we'd like help avoiding it. Let's reach out to the FBI for threat intel to help us keep abreast of info ops."
(To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. In particular, Twitter's allowing Pentagon information operations--apparently by accident--on their platform doesn't look great.)
As a hypothetical--is that bad? It seems like it runs afoul of your "government should play no role in policing speech." But that seems like a somewhat oddly absolutist stance to me.
(For another hypothetical: let's say I'm Fox News, and I want to have a commentator on, but first I ping some buddies at the FBI and ask, "Is this commentator known to be an unregistered foreign agent?" Again, is it bad?)
A lot of these things could be bad. We might argue for some sort of firewall between anything involving media and private speech and anyone working in government ever. But that seems like a pretty radical departure from the status quo, and it's not obvious to me that what Twitter did was in bad faith or really different than the above examples.
It's not radical. The idea that an inherently biased 3 letter agency should be given any say in who gets to express an opinion publicly is anti-American at its core.
Good thing newer protocols like Nostr kill these attempts to weaken freedom of speech by mongers.
Even the world's least liked personality can still make valid points. The presentation was crappy, but it was indeed an expose on how Social Media in all varieties works to gaslight users of all kinds... Not just journalists.
Shadowbanning has cost a lot of people incalculable amounts of time and progress in work, while platforms were really made to push their own profit and any agenda that supported their profit.
If a huge platform like Facebook or TikTok were to simply admit the truth, it would basically be - Hey, we don't provide you any ability to chose what you'll see, and we don't even want to help you to succeed in promoting your own business, but struggle on that while we show you all of these ads...
It's bleak, and grim, and now that the world has allowed social media to infect almost every segment of the Internet, logging off means staying off the Internet entirely... Years of secret shadowbanning, covert control, info warfare, and psych manipulation on the Internet have possibly corrupted everything of value online already, but we're still only talking about Twitter... It's not just on Twitter, nothing social online is working right anymore.
It's utterly predictable and depressing how the left (of which I'm increasingly embarrassed to admit I'm one) have moved immediately to dismiss the revelations - which we would not have had without the change in leadership - as a "nothingburger"
Extraordinarily negligent or baleful of the mainstream press to try and bury this as well.
For years right and centrist claims of bias and censorship in the defacto public square were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and warnings that a change in leadership would carry the risk of equal partisanship the other way glibly dismissed.
The US surveillance state, which can surveil the internet at the backbone level, and has violently suppressed left movements at home and abroad under every administration for over a century, continues to do shady things. No shit?
The Propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky has been widely discussed on the left for 35 years, even if those discussions didn't mention it by it's formal name. So yeah it's nothing new. But to sum up:
1) Local media has a far right wing, pro police bias because it's customers are small business owners. Small business owners are pro police because they lose money from shoplifters and "bad" neighborhoods are bad for business. They're anti immigration because immigrants are over-represented among new small business owners and tend to outcompete established businesses. They're opposed to labor laws because they increase costs. They're opposed to estate / property / capitol gains taxes because they tend to have a large amount of family wealth. This is not to say that all small business owners are far right, it's just that they have a lot to gain from right wing policies.
2) Mass media tends to have a center left bias. This is because their customers are large national and multinational corporations, who are more interested in messaging and branding. For many reasons, the ages of 18-55 are considered to be the main focus of advertising, with 18-35 year olds being seen as especially valuable. Also, people who live in urban areas tend to have more disposable income. Finally, since what is progressive 30 years ago is often mainstream today, being left wing on social issues is generally a good idea. Imagine if the US only let 18-55 year olds vote, and gave an extra vote to people who were 18-35, lived in an urban area, or had progressive beliefs. That is the ideal media landscape for large media companies. Now there are limits, because large businesses don't want to promote pro-worker or anti-capitalist ideas. That's why the socially progressive economically centrist point of view dominates mass media.
Twitter is a mass media platform, and it must do something to promote center left tweets if it wants to be a profitable ad supported business. And it's more than happy to work with the government to further that goal.
If Elon wants to make Twitter into a privately owned microtransaction supported site, then we can expect it to boost far right wing positions - which is exactly what's happening.
This is very conspiratorial and generalizing. Everyone paints the right as conspiracy crazy but the left usually gets away with discussing their own conspiracies unchallenged. Marxism (along with all the other anti-capitalist tropes) is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, for instance.
Not to mention you claim that all these small business owners are anti-immigration yet they don't want labor laws? That seems contradictory since labor laws are usually enacted as a protectionist measure. If anything immigration in all of its forms is essential for small and big business alike since it provides cheap labor.
I don't see how it's conspiratorial at all. There are market forces that are influencing these decisions, and there will always be exceptions. It is a generalization, but it's a stochastic generalization based on real life data - not on the assumption that there is a secret cabal of evil suits smoking cigars in a dark room.
I'm not a Marxist, but I don't see how Marxism is a conspiracy theory. There are certainly some conspiracy theories on the left sure, but Marx never assumed that there was a secret conspiracy trying to control things behind the scenes.
Regarding small businesses preferring cheap labor, it depends. Take the transportation industry - if you're a small business owner who works in the transportation industry you're likely to be an owner-operator - in which case you don't really care about cheap labor. Likewise in the hospitality / retail industry you're likely to hire American workers if you're an American and non-American workers if you're non-American. So the cheap labor from immigration only impacts you indirectly. Obviously if you're an immigrant you're going to be more likely to lean to the left, but must small business owners are American.
It's true that the construction industry benefits from cheap labor, but we're talking about general trends here. Someone who owns a Yoga studio is more likely to be left wing. But on the whole, small business owners lean to the right.
The left (not liberals) have been skeptical about twitter since ages ago. Only an idiot would assume that “manufactured consent” wouldn’t apply to the new media.
In that sense, I don’t see anything new on the twitter files. I’m just expecting this to be used by the red team to take power away from the blue team and keep things exactly the same.
>The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.
>Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given access to Twitter for a few days. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited.
Still not clear to me who is doing the searches and why we should trust that this isn't the tip of the iceberg. Matt Taibi says it was a third party. Lee Fang says it was a Twitter attorney.
Not part of the Twitter Files, but Glenn Greenwald's article from yesterday is a nice addition to the story about government involvement in social media. He had a video about Ukraine's Zelensky that was taken down from TikTok (a Chinese company), and he has reason to believe this was because of US government pressure: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/reflecting-new-us-control-o...
30 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 74.0 ms ] threadAlso https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-...
I'm in favour of the leaks, but ultimately none of the surveillance laws that whistle-blowers exposed in the past two decades were actually repealed at a later point. However, the very fact that this causes such huge debate in the US points to a much healthier public discourse in the US than most western societies in my opinion.
I do think that he probably regretted having to actually commit to the sale. This whole thing reminds me a bit to dealing with racist bouncers growing up. I'd leave disappointed thinking to myself that one day "I'll buy a club myself and put high quality bouncers there that judge people by their substance" only to forget about it a few weeks later. Except that in this case there were also a couple million people every day daring him to do it.
Re-posting comment from above because it was good, (not mine).
" The perfect unison of the mainstream news in response is itself an interesting news story. They say it is not newsworthy, and smear the journalists who say it is. How does this unanimous pronouncement of an absurdity arise? What a perfect model of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A few outsider journos point at a monstrous 1984-like mass mind-control operation and all the insider journos nervously cough and change the subject. Hm. "
My impression is:
1. These "independent journalists" like numbered lists instead of prose (OK?)
2. I find numbered lists a bit hard to read.
3. There's no headline or lede that suggests...anything? But I keep reading the numbered lists out of morbid curiosity.
4. At some point it's revealed that, shockingly, an American tech company was in contact with American government officials.
5. Those officials spoke to the tech company about known or suspected foreign influence operations that might affect that tech company.
6. The tech company expressed gratitude for those tips.
Like, honestly, isn't the reason the "mainstream media" hasn't reported on this because they're in the business of reporting on things that their viewers would find interesting, and this is a super boring story?
Yes, if you name anything "the [something] files" and label it "suppressed knowledge now come to light", it sounds sexy. But is there anything actually significant here? If so, can someone summarize it for me in a numbered list?
Which we basically knew already.
This is like if someone else buys Twitter and published Twitter Files 2.0 and we discover that Musk was sharing conspiracy memes with right wingers. Not much of a shock.
More gaslighting.
The fact is this behaviour and bias was rejected and ignored as "paranoia" for years until these files were released to confirm it all and worse - US intelligence and law enforcement involvement.
Shame on them & you.
Crypto scams and fake nutrition pills aren't the top advertisements on Infowars because Alex Jones knows more about the media business than Fox or CNN. They're the top advertisements on Infowars because mainstream advertisers won't touch Jones with a ten foot pole.
Same goes for the Twitter that Musk built.
I disagree.
I don't think the vast majority of people realized to what extent the US government set the boundaries of acceptable opinions/topics and were given free passage and in some cases assistance in conducting psyops.
This will be especially eye-opening for non-US users who may now seriously consider whether to continue using US based platforms at all.
https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607378386338340867
1. Trust and safety is a hard job, and Twitter was...kinda not great at it, I think? Honestly, not a big surprise.
2. In high-level discussions with government policymakers, policymakers expressed general desires for what kind of misinformation might be of particular concern (like health misinfo, or misinfo leading to hoarding and panic buying).
#2 seems...sorta fine to me? #1 seems like a product problem, to be perfectly clear, but it's hard to connect that to government censorship.
I'm not trying to make light of all the failures in #1. But I find it a bit hard, assuming good faith, to understand if the view of most critics is:
a. There should be zero content filtering or content-related ranking. (I mean, that's fine; Mastodon doesn't have algorithmic ranking, and if you don't want filtering, enjoy the Viagra spam I guess?)
b. There should be content filtering and ranking, but it should rank things the way critics want. (For example, a lot of critics seem concerned not with ranking in general, but with downranking of heterodox views on Covid.)
c. There should be content filtering and ranking, but Twitter just wasn't great at it; we'd like to see them improve their processes (which I am not optimistic about given the headcount story at Twitter).
Or something else?
Mislabeling as misinfo either intentionally or unintentionally and marking links, tweets, and accounts for suppression just because they dont push a government's view is by definition "government censorship".
Concerning abc: A government that is bound by the 1st amend. should ultimately play no role in policing speech. It's not any more complicated than that.
(To be clear, I'm not saying this is what happened. In particular, Twitter's allowing Pentagon information operations--apparently by accident--on their platform doesn't look great.)
As a hypothetical--is that bad? It seems like it runs afoul of your "government should play no role in policing speech." But that seems like a somewhat oddly absolutist stance to me.
(For another hypothetical: let's say I'm Fox News, and I want to have a commentator on, but first I ping some buddies at the FBI and ask, "Is this commentator known to be an unregistered foreign agent?" Again, is it bad?)
A lot of these things could be bad. We might argue for some sort of firewall between anything involving media and private speech and anyone working in government ever. But that seems like a pretty radical departure from the status quo, and it's not obvious to me that what Twitter did was in bad faith or really different than the above examples.
Good thing newer protocols like Nostr kill these attempts to weaken freedom of speech by mongers.
Not sure what a "monger" is in this context.
Shadowbanning has cost a lot of people incalculable amounts of time and progress in work, while platforms were really made to push their own profit and any agenda that supported their profit.
If a huge platform like Facebook or TikTok were to simply admit the truth, it would basically be - Hey, we don't provide you any ability to chose what you'll see, and we don't even want to help you to succeed in promoting your own business, but struggle on that while we show you all of these ads...
It's bleak, and grim, and now that the world has allowed social media to infect almost every segment of the Internet, logging off means staying off the Internet entirely... Years of secret shadowbanning, covert control, info warfare, and psych manipulation on the Internet have possibly corrupted everything of value online already, but we're still only talking about Twitter... It's not just on Twitter, nothing social online is working right anymore.
...Twitter ranked tweets? Which they always said they did? (e.g. https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1601019554980761600)
Even stranger, Musk himself seems to be a big fan of this approach? ("Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach"? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864)
Extraordinarily negligent or baleful of the mainstream press to try and bury this as well.
For years right and centrist claims of bias and censorship in the defacto public square were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and warnings that a change in leadership would carry the risk of equal partisanship the other way glibly dismissed.
Depressing.
1) Local media has a far right wing, pro police bias because it's customers are small business owners. Small business owners are pro police because they lose money from shoplifters and "bad" neighborhoods are bad for business. They're anti immigration because immigrants are over-represented among new small business owners and tend to outcompete established businesses. They're opposed to labor laws because they increase costs. They're opposed to estate / property / capitol gains taxes because they tend to have a large amount of family wealth. This is not to say that all small business owners are far right, it's just that they have a lot to gain from right wing policies.
2) Mass media tends to have a center left bias. This is because their customers are large national and multinational corporations, who are more interested in messaging and branding. For many reasons, the ages of 18-55 are considered to be the main focus of advertising, with 18-35 year olds being seen as especially valuable. Also, people who live in urban areas tend to have more disposable income. Finally, since what is progressive 30 years ago is often mainstream today, being left wing on social issues is generally a good idea. Imagine if the US only let 18-55 year olds vote, and gave an extra vote to people who were 18-35, lived in an urban area, or had progressive beliefs. That is the ideal media landscape for large media companies. Now there are limits, because large businesses don't want to promote pro-worker or anti-capitalist ideas. That's why the socially progressive economically centrist point of view dominates mass media.
Twitter is a mass media platform, and it must do something to promote center left tweets if it wants to be a profitable ad supported business. And it's more than happy to work with the government to further that goal.
If Elon wants to make Twitter into a privately owned microtransaction supported site, then we can expect it to boost far right wing positions - which is exactly what's happening.
Not to mention you claim that all these small business owners are anti-immigration yet they don't want labor laws? That seems contradictory since labor laws are usually enacted as a protectionist measure. If anything immigration in all of its forms is essential for small and big business alike since it provides cheap labor.
I'm not a Marxist, but I don't see how Marxism is a conspiracy theory. There are certainly some conspiracy theories on the left sure, but Marx never assumed that there was a secret conspiracy trying to control things behind the scenes.
Regarding small businesses preferring cheap labor, it depends. Take the transportation industry - if you're a small business owner who works in the transportation industry you're likely to be an owner-operator - in which case you don't really care about cheap labor. Likewise in the hospitality / retail industry you're likely to hire American workers if you're an American and non-American workers if you're non-American. So the cheap labor from immigration only impacts you indirectly. Obviously if you're an immigrant you're going to be more likely to lean to the left, but must small business owners are American.
It's true that the construction industry benefits from cheap labor, but we're talking about general trends here. Someone who owns a Yoga studio is more likely to be left wing. But on the whole, small business owners lean to the right.
In that sense, I don’t see anything new on the twitter files. I’m just expecting this to be used by the red team to take power away from the blue team and keep things exactly the same.
>The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.
>https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605304933242343426
>Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given access to Twitter for a few days. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited.
Still not clear to me who is doing the searches and why we should trust that this isn't the tip of the iceberg. Matt Taibi says it was a third party. Lee Fang says it was a Twitter attorney.