The Twitter Files
twitter.com
twitter.com
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.
> Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?
Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment. Read up on Occam's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
> 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.
They've had all kinds of investigations for years. The truth, or I guess "sad truth" for you, is that there's nothing there to actually charge him with.
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 guilty of the charity fraud too) are not above committing fraud to enrich themselves. Republicans cheered this behavior enthusiastically.
If you want to talk about Trump's government corruption, look no further than his grift with the Secret Service, where he charged them astronomical rates to stay at his own properties, while telling the public that he was only charging them at cost. Or take Trump's lease of the post office, which was found by the GSA Inspector General to have violated the Constitution's emoluments clause. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I don't want to be here all day.
All of these instances were met by yawns and shrugs by conservatives. That's how they normalized it. If they had pushed back against Trump's grift, they would have more of a sympathetic ear from me today when they complain about a supposed Biden grift. But they didn't then, so I can't take their outrage seriously now.
> 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.
The Republican-lead Senate Intel Committee investigated his campaign for colluding with Russia, and found that his campaign manager was coordinating strategy with a Russian intelligence officer. The Mueller report found that Russia attacked the 2016 election and Trump welcomed their help. They also found Trump obstructed justice into this investigation 11 times. Further it was found by the House that Trump extorted a bribe from Ukraine, but although the Senate didn't disagree, Senators from his party were swayed by Trump's argument that he did so for the good of the country. Which... okay, sure. Then the House found that Trump incited insurrection, and while the Senate agreed with the facts, they didn't agree they had the power to impeach.
Notably the investigations that got the furthest were mostly beyond Trump's reach to impede. Also notably, none of the investigations have come up as empty as Whitewater, Benghazi, and the Durham probe. For every single investigation into Trump, where there was smoke there was fire. Republicans don't have the same track record.
> Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.
Kindly, I noted the former President was corrupting the system he was supposed to run, as a tumor might. If you don't care for my analogy, move past it. No need to police my tone. I didn't claim to be unbiased, and I'm not pretending to be. Although I'm curious now if you think you're behaving in an unbiased way, because that's clearly not the case.
> Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment.
Trump's untoward influence on the DoJ and the lengths went to to protect him are not hypotheticals. Read the Mueller report, it sells it out. Read the accounts of the USAGs who resigned under political pressure from Trump and Barr. I mean, the whole fact that Barr was appointed in the first place is evidence of this. The whole fact there was a need for a Special Counsel after Comey was fired is evidence of this.
> They've had all kinds of investigations for years.
I don't know why you keep harping on this point. "For years" the investigations have been in the hands of Trump's political allies. Until "recently" i.e. the last two years, during which said investigations have rapidly progressed after political influence was lifted. Since then Trump's company has been in court and looks about to receive a death sentence, and his home has been raided by the FBI, where they found clear evidence of a crime. But despite these recent developments, because some arbitrary time has elapsed, by your estimation he's squeaky clean?
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...
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://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717...
(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.
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.
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...
Contributions by Party of Recipient
Cycle Total Democrats % to Dems Republicans % to Repubs
2022 $185,267 $165,969 99.73% $451 0.27%
2020 $968,749 $909,431 98.47% $14,137 1.53%
2018 $309,394 $295,722 96.38% $11,100 3.62%
2016 $858,596 $589,301 69.07% $263,945 30.93%
2014 $41,300 $23,300 88.59% $3,000 11.41%
2012 $35,529 $34,279 99.28% $250 0.72%
2008 $3,000 $3,000 100.00% $0 0.00%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.
"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.
Since this is true, then where else are political parties trying to get unflattering speech suppressed that we don't even know of yet?
Of course those requests can and will be made in a biased manner, and it's naive to assume that the nature of the request isn't going to influence how Twitter responds to it, but it's definitely a murky grey area at that point.
The wording probably matters too. The Biden team asked Twitter to "review" certain tweets instead of "remove" certain tweets. So technically they're not suppressing speech explicitly but implicitly we (and twitter employees) all know what they mean by "review".
I referenced the Biden team's verbiage because that's the only verbiage that was posted with the implied intent on getting tweets removed (besides the DNC). I'd love to see the email's from the White House asking for tweets to be removed.
Oh wait, it’s because clearly this information from a “Twitter source” (aka Elon) is disseminated with a viewpoint and is hardly impartial.
All of this should be viewed with extreme skepticism, and so far none of this seems damning in any way. I haven’t seen anything that says Elon is remotely operating in good faith.
The only solution is to not provide the power in the first place instead of trying to fix it with layers of easily bypassed rules. You can’t have easy censorship if there isn’t an established censorship system already in place.
A system that is limited by law and very fundamental policies is much less prone to abuse (ie, a constitutional republic with transparent but limited policy making power vs monarchical systems with backroom dealing by elites). The minute it became about broadly policing speech via backroom dealing was the minute it became wide open to abuse.
This creates a new kind of abuse. If Twitter has no way of removing illegal content from its platform, then your opponent can use that fact to post illegal content about you (i.e. hacked pictures of your naked body), and you have no recourse.
government used to be weary of any appearance of impropriety, lest people believe they are acting improperly -being slimy. That seems to have gone by the wayside.
two, if the requests were to suppress sensitive government information --secrets, ok, I might lend a sympathetic ear, if they could prove it was so (not because they said "take our word". But this is "don't make us look bad" --sorry, but no, it stays.
And now we are hearing the gov wants to amp up domestic surveillance. The ACLU and EFF, etc should get off their butts and perform their claimed duty. We're not China in that sense yet, but if we let them, we'll get there.
Voters used to punish politicians that seemed improper. They don't anymore. The Trump administration was the capstone on this, obviously, but the trend has been developing for decades.
The white house in this case was the Trump white house so it could have been received positively by the media that twitter is standing up to Trump by suing.
Could you elaborate on why you dont think it would be a free speech violation? Is internet communication not considered speech?
If Twitter decided to remove Hunter Biden content completely on their own, that would be legal. If Twitter decided to remove that content because someone asked nicely- regardless of who that person is, whether they are President or not- that would be legal. It's only a legal issue if the government forces Twitter to remove the content, which is not something Twitter has asserted.
https://twitter.com/aclu/status/1587198479608303622
The government pressuring private companies to censor is a First Amendment violation.
Otherwise what happens when the party in power changes?
"What happens when the party in power changes?" Twitter, like every other company, gets to decide whether or not they want to support or oppose the party in power, and if Twitter feels the government is violating their 1A rights, Twitter can sue them
You do understand that they can collude? It's funny we have spent countless hours hearing about Trump Russia collusion. Now suddenly people can't seem to figure out there is a thing called collusion.
Censorship of this story doesn't exist in vaccum. There is a legitimate argument why this shouldn't be investigated as election interference when we've spent countless hours based on Steele dossier, which turned out to be a political ploy.
There is nothing illegal about requesting review of tweets even through special channels. If Twitter actually has evidence of an illegal act to coerce the review then they should probably rehire whoever was coerced and file suit.
Collusion with a domestically owned bird app re revenge porn of your crackhead son: Worst scandal in US history
Got it.
Where is this information coming from?
The chart displays a breakdown of total employee contributions to the two political parties. As you can see, the "% to democrats" column contains 95%+ for the last 4 years. It would be safe to assume that this metric is a reasonable proxy for Twitter staff's political leanings.
Just to be safe I recommend you review the suite guidelines, specifically about assuming good faith when replying to comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No it wouldn't be because it doesn't way what percent of employees donate at all. I assume the percentage is pretty low because it's <$200,000 going to Democrats from the entire company.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...
Consider https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dscc-ads-ga - go through the pay with card and stop before you actual enter in any details.
The page will look like https://imgur.com/sNJFkjS
https://www.quora.com/U-S-Presidential-Campaign-Donations-wh...
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/keeping-r...
> For each contribution that exceeds $200, either by itself or when added to the contributor’s previous contributions made during the same calendar year, records must identify that contribution by:
Amount; Date of receipt; and Contributor’s full name and mailing address, occupation and employer. If a person has already contributed an aggregate amount of over $200 during a calendar year, each subsequent contribution, regardless of amount, must be identified in the same way.
Please note that contributions to authorized committees are aggregated on a calendar-year basis for recordkeeping purposes, but are aggregated on a per-election basis for purposes of monitoring contribution limits, and on an election-cycle basis for reporting purposes.
---
And thus open secrets is getting the aggregate data that and releasing that.
Please don't post this type of advice here or elsewhere. Don't think that if you are paying with a credit card in your name, that your employer information can't be easily determined if there is an FEC investigation of a candidate receiving a large number of contributions from "unemployed" people. You are telling people not only to break the law, but to do so in a very public way that is impossible for them to hide.
Always tell the truth in all legally required financial disclosures, especially when this is touching campaign financing.
Congress passed no laws in this regard. Whether or not this was illegal activity on the part of the Executive Branch is another question entirely -- and a good one.
The government "asking" a private entity to take some action is inherently coercive due to the power imbalance.
The executive branch can violate the first amendment…
But by this reasoning it sounds like the president could just create an executive order limiting free speech and that would be just fine? Is the president really aloud to create an executive order saying "anyone with red hair is no longer aloud to speak in public" (obviously silly example)?
Initiate a policy or order, mitigating the immediate damage. Then, days, months or years later, a court will decide you didn't have that power and will reverse it. But the threat or problem was already dealt with and there are no repurcussions except political capital spent.
They are instructions from the head of the executive branch (be it President or a state's governor) for an agency in the executive branch to do a certain thing.
For example: Executive Order 14087 of October 14, 2022 https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/19/2022-22...
> HHS Actions. In furtherance of the policy set forth in section 1 of this order, the Secretary shall, consistent with the criteria set out in 42 U.S.C. 1315a(b)(2), consider whether to select for testing by the Innovation Center new health care payment and delivery models that would lower drug costs and promote access to innovative drug therapies for beneficiaries enrolled in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, including models that may lead to lower cost-sharing for commonly used drugs and support value-based payment that promotes high-quality care. The Secretary shall, not later than 90 days after the date of this order, submit a report to the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy enumerating and describing any models that the Secretary has selected. The report shall also include the Secretary's plan and timeline to test any such models. Following the submission of the report, the Secretary shall take appropriate actions to test any health care payment and delivery models discussed in the report.
This directs the Department of Health and Human Services (under the executive branch) to do certain things.
---
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
> Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the executive branch to:
> (a) secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism;
> ...
> (d) Except as otherwise noted, “the Secretary” shall refer to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
> Sec. 4. Physical Security of the Southern Border of the United States. The Secretary shall immediately take the following steps to obtain complete operational control, as determined by the Secretary, of the southern border:
Note again, the Department of Homeland Security is under the executive branch.
---
And so, the "could you create an executive order ordering {department} to arrest someone with red hair speaking in public?" The answer is "no" because the ability to arrest someone is under the Judicial branch - not the executive branch.
Secondly, you will note that all of the executive orders are citing the law under which the president (or governor) is given that authority from congress. To arrest a red head for speaking congress would need to have a law (First Amendment!) that allows the executive branch to silence someone.
---
I will also point out gag orders which are, well, fairly straight forward censorship. Except that the gag order is from the judicial branch - not the legislative branch.
https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/when-silence-isnt-g...
> The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference. It prohibits any laws that establish a national religion, impede the free exercise of religion, abridge the freedom of speech, infringe upon the freedom of the press, interfere with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibit citizens from petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted into the Bill of Rights in 1791. The Supreme Court interprets the extent of the protection afforded to these rights. The First Amendment has been interpreted by the Court as applying to the entire federal government even though it is only expressly applicable to Congress. Furthermore, the Court has interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting the rights in the First Amendment from interference by state governments.
This is because the Constitution only authorizes Congress to make any laws in the first place, so only Congress could be guilty of making a law impacting speech. Taking all of the document in the narrow sense you’re taking it would mean the executive branch couldn’t limit speech either because they couldn’t do 99.9% of the things they do today in the first place.
The mainstream test just looks for a "state actor" but even if you want to go textualist, things probably break down like this: if a law empowers the executive to do an act that violates the First Amendment, the law itself is a violation of the First Amendment. If no law empowers the executive to do the action at issue, then the action is illegal by virtue of being in excess of the executive's authority.
Take the state actor doctrine in combination with the fact that the First Amendment is incorporated against the states, and you get the reality that it even applies to, for example, state colleges and universities disciplining students and teachers, despite them not being "Congress," a "law," or even an agent of the federal government at all.
Twitter officers conspired with rogue elements of the US government to defraud US citizens of their constitutionally protected rights.
This is not a game. The people involved should be facing 30 year prison sentences.
If twitter bans me for spamming, do you think I can sue them?
Do we know what they contained? Were they threats? Spam? Copyright infringing? Disagreements about tax policy?
United States citizens have explicit rights, and corporate employees colluding with government officials to “voluntarily” nullify those rights are guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States
The government represents us, a collusion to defeat our rights is conspiracy against us and subject to civil and criminal action
It actually can not.
The dude behind you with a pipe in his hand asks for your car keys in the parking lot.
Is that ok? He just asked is all…
Could you describe the government at the time this action was taken? What relationship did the people asking Twitter to do things with the government? Did the people making the requests have any authority to direct any department of the Federal Government to take any action?
They committed conspiracy to defraud the United States, and will in due time be charged as such by the Department of Justice.
State employees who participated are traitors.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
They abused technology designed to prevent the spread of child pornography to censor information harmful to their preferred political candidate at the behest of government officials.
Would be curious on your take of what DeSantis was trying to do to Disney in FL? 30 years in prison for threatening Disney about its speech?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ron-desantiss-military...
For what crime, specifically?
> The general conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, creates an offense "[i]f two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
"The intent required for a conspiracy to defraud the government is that the defendant possessed the intent (a) to defraud, (b) to make false statements or representations to the government or its agencies in order to obtain property of the government, or that the defendant performed acts or made statements that he/she knew to be false, fraudulent or deceitful to a government agency, which disrupted the functions of the agency or of the government."
What false statements/representations were made, by anyone?
In addition, they had to in some way "defraud the United States" which is: "They cheat the government out of money or property; They interfere or obstruct legitimate Government activity; or They make wrongful use of a governmental instrumentality." - None of which apply.
For example, a teacher hired at a school cannot argue that they could not be expected to teach.
Much in the same way, a government employee cannot in good faith argue that they cannot be expected to uphold the constitution.
By secretly colluding with private companies (that the government has failed to regulate, I might add) to suppress otherwise constitutionally protected activity government employees are criminally liable
Bigly constitutional
Now, if there's lawmaking/regulation/rulemaking/enforcement aimed at Twitter by the executive branch, that's a very different thing.
But in this particualr case it's also sorta nonsensical. The stuff released today is about the Biden campaign, which was a private entity. Biden himself held no government position at all, so the point gets pretty strained.
But I think it is wrong for the white house to do anything that gifts the impropriety of restricting speech.
Given Elon Musk handling of other tweets, I doubt he was being transparent. That swastika post just gave him an excuse to remove Kayne.
In the daily business there is much less transparency.
Just look at the accounts that got suspended since Musk's takeover.
I saw an article about a bunch of antifa accounts, but they were posting how to disrupt protests with violence which seems like a pretty clear violation.
Of course mainstream TV and print "news" has been doing this for decades, but for some strange reason people assume they're somehow "better".
I personally think it's great all this is coming out, because it shows how dangerous and manipulative large media (in all forms) really is.
They say if you don't like it you can just start your own Twitter - but when Parler tried to do exactly that, Big Tech colluded to destroy it.
Might is doing a LOT of work in that statement. You know as well as I do stories get buried all over.
> If Twitter decides you're not allowed to read something, where else can you go?
Twitter is insignificant compared to Facebook, YouTube, Fox, CNN, and other global news outlets controlled by a handful of billionaires.
The much more important question is where do you go when THEY bury a story.
Now that we know the laptop is real, what do you think will come of it?
I suppose Musk is saving the real bombshell for... later?
Matt said that the Trump administration also participated in the censoring, yet he did not provide one single example.
People get things resolved via Hacker News when people comment on CEO account comments (Stripe comes to mind).
Nearly every company probably has direct lines of access for resolutions for VIPs, politicians not excluded.
Politicians should be excluded from what you're talking about IMO.
They're elected to serve the people and stand for our American beliefs including the freedom of speech. A political party (the DNC in this case) getting tweets removed probably isn't a 1st amendment violation. But it's really shady and anyone from government (the white house in this case) getting tweets removed is likely violating the first amendment (or coming REALLY close to it).
Can I kick you out of my hours if I disagree with your view?
Can I kick you out of my bar if I disagree with your views?
Can I kick you out of my platform if I disagree with you?
Wealthy people in America have access?
Nobody reached out to me but I think even a statistician skeptic would have to entertain the idea that there's some "red phone" style back channel between them mods that occasionally is triggered.
I pulled the article and replaced it with a description of what happened because out of sincerity I felt compelled to follow in whatever footsteps those were. I never got an explanation about it.
Kind of a pity. I had been working on a book on tech and mental health but I abandoned it. Seems like it's an obvious topic these days
Having "stuff they dislike" removed would be one thing, but using the direct line at Twitter for reporting explicit ToS violations isn't a big deal.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed by people pointing to those removed tweets as a smoking gun while being completely unaware that we know the contents of said tweet and said tweets can easily be interpreted as violating Twitter's ToS at minimum and actively violating California law at worst.
The pornographic images, to what extent they were shown in the NY Post, were redacted. The main function they played is in showing that the laptop contents couldn't have been fake.
Just because they want to offer up 10% to the big guy doesn't mean he took it.
If he was guilty he should have been prosecuted (and would have been). Would you be willing to say the same about Trump?
Then there was a NY Post story blocked by Twitter - that move is much harder to defend, but crucially it seems Twitter took it upon themselves to remove that story, with no evidence presented that the Biden campaign had anything to do with it.
A lot of the debate here seems to be conflating those two things.
So many people seem to conflate the requests for review of ToS violating messages with some kind of power the Democrats had to get Twitter to block the story.
If the Democrats had that kind of power and it was visible in the info available, no doubt this would be shown upfront. Instead we get pretty loaded (lying?) mentions of "requests from connected actors to delete tweets" when the message clearly mentions tweets to review.
In fact the answer "handled" doesn't even imply anything was deleted. Also this so called journalist didn't even try to see what had been deleted in the end to see if it wasn't just blattant ToS violations and worse, material that had really nothing much to do with the campaign in the first place. I fail to see how the right of some tweets of revenge porn to survive a few hours longer because they had to go through the regular queue of moderation was of any import.
It's easy to paint a team as having excessive influence on Twitter. Just have your own team post a lot of ToS abusing materials then later on show the stats of deleted tweets to show the "bias"
It was interesting when they banned Trump that they cited "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a notable incitement of violence. Someone who can put that up and think of it as a serious interpretation is not working from the same reality as most people.
EDIT It is hard to find, here is the link to the reasoning. It is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the Twitter executives: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
Can anyone square this? It seems indefensible.
Regardless, I dont see any sense in it. I wonder if anywhere he can defend it.
I don’t support this as a grounds. It’s so flexible that you can see or not see it at will, so, you can give a charitable read to someone you like or a threatening read to someone you don’t. It also relies on mind reading.
Nevertheless a lot of people can read it that way.
No police were killed on that day, contrary to initial reports - but one protester was.
Trump never specifically called for violence but remarked to show protest “peacefully at the capitol” on Twitter. For the lack of evidence, the Jan 6 committee has been running in circles begging for people to step forward.
I don’t have to like Trump or support him to know this claim is asinine.
Also, I think any explainations from Twitter, considering who was running them, are one-sided and should not be taken on face value. That still is the case for who is running it now. I do not trust either for a remotely unbiased assessment.
Especially given that in the "pee tapes" trump is clothed while the women are nude and unknown individuals
The only point of the laptop saga is to cast doubt on Biden's integrity and to counter any sort of similar questions about Trump's.
This was yet another October surprise -- a spiced up rendition of Buttery Males v2.
Mueller also made a point of declaring that his report did not exonerate Trump: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-crime-po...
> the likelihood of some sort of kompromat on Trump is possible and probable.
What "kompromat" could possibly be a big enough deal to compromise Trump at this point? His enemies are trying to persuade the world that he attempted to overthrow the US government and he is still a top-10 candidate for the presidency in the next election.
How are foreigners meant to compete with that?
So often they'll reach for "it's different when my party does it because the other party are nazis/communists/russians/pedophiles/etc." It's just so tiresome and anyone outside the circus can see how unproductive it all is, but people in the thick of it really do see it as Marvel vs Thanos.
Seriously, Rudy Giuliani spent most of 2020 in Ukraine trying to dig up dirt on Biden. He would send his findings to the DoJ, and they were so out there that Barr had to set up a to quarantine the noise he was generating.
Then all of a sudden in a classic October surprise, a blind computer repairman finds out what he is in possession of, and instead of calling the FBI he calls none other than Rudy Giuliani.
And wouldn’t you know, what he has found is exactly the kind of bullshit Giuliani had been trying to dredge up in Ukraine for a year but couldn’t get past the DoJ.
So no, the provenance of this thing is in deep question.
Have some perspective man or woman, you're acting like we're supposed to treat you like some babe in the woods and pretend this is genuinely shocking to you? Please. Yes, powerful governments influence actors within their nations. We get it. Let's all feign surprise for a few hours online.
But that's not what bothers me. The most frustrating thing is that your perspective fails to acknowledge how this is so painfully, hilariously, boringly mild compared to the corruption and abuses of power that are the baseline norm. It's like when people treat "gig workers" like they're the new 10-year-olds in a coal mine. Yes, all abuses of power are bad, we agree. But do you really expect us to pretend this is anything other than an extremely mild, boring footnote in the grand legacy of abused power?
Equally nonsensical point.
These same people that are "censoring speech" be removing some pictures from Twitter, create wars - ukraine the latest - risk nuclear war, print money at will disrupting huge numbers of people and plant narratives about "the economy needs to cool down", and this is somehow the biggest issue of the day. You can call it whataboutism, but if you're worrying about drops of water on the floor while there's a raging fire in the living room, and someone mentions the raging fire, is it really whataboutism?
A nobel prize awaits discovery of the scale equation for when the law begins to exert force, theorizing anti-hypocrisy particles.
Both are slimy and abusive but the latter is a violation of constitutional rights.
> It [the system] was based on contacts.
This reminds me of past "you have to know an employee to get you ban fixed" discussions about not-Twitter here.
I'm now wondering about a general - as in not specific to any one company - "favors for friends" culture at the brand-name tech places, over what I guess would be called a "rule of law" culture.
How is that not directly helping people you know?
I looked at the tweets mentioned by Taibbi in the Wayback Machine, and they didn't actually appear to be unflattering speech or even speech at all but rather photos. The first tweet, for example, was some explicit photos (which I assume would violate Twitter's rules whether or not they were of Hunter Biden).
Completely reasonable to have them removed.
https://www.cronisraelsandstark.com/revenge-porn-california-...
Twitter HQ is in California.
>Is it the fact that the person did not intend on those images being released? Do they have a claim if those images were no longer their property given the terms of service of the repair shop where the laptop was abandoned?
I can understand the repair shop owning the hardware and being able to wipe the data and resell it. But do those terms also give the repair shop the right to login to bank accounts via saved passwords and transfer money? Or use the SSNs to apply for loans? Where is the line drawn?
If your company HR's data including your SSN and bank account numbers were on a laptop they abandoned at a repair shop, does the repair shop get to post them on their website?
Are you arguing that it would be ok to post intimate pictures of you or someone in your family, or anybody, basically, without them explicitly agreeing to?
Are you seriously saying that a repair shop could take your personal data and publish it online as they wished because they just got access to your laptop (however they got it)?
In what world does a laptop repair shop has terms of services that would explicitly allow that?
Absolutely everywhere.
I'll bet most big corporations advertising on Twitter have one too.
The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story.
The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.
People say it’s a hard problem to define the limits of content moderation, but when you have politicians and influence groups sending lists of tweets to silence and the only response is “thanks we handled it” then obviously the limits have gone out the window.
We don’t have to have a free-for-all to massively reduce the risks in the current system.
Limitations and transparency are what defines a good system of governance. Bias in administrations will always exist, but honesty and shining sunlight on it is the only thing that will stop it from turning into a cancer.
The “White House” was trump at the time.
I would say its not a huge leap to think that.
I would even say its more than just other social media platforms. I would say it goes into main stream media on BOTH sides, Hollywood, sports, etc including global corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI&ab_channel=Shoot...
> political parties... have a direct line to Twitter to get stuff they dislike removed
...to:
> in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online
Twitter is not the internet. It's a tiny part of the internet. You can say whatever you want on many, many platforms. In fact, people can't stop talking about some of this stuff on HN and Reddit.
It's the whole internet in terms of journalist and politician communications.
The story was still up on the NY Post website.
Most people outside of your (and my) bubble don't read the news, don't pay much attention to politics, aren't particularly well educated, don't think very hard about who they're going to vote for (if they even vote), and if they use Twitter at all it's to post cat videos and keep up with the Kardashians.
You might not cross paths with this kind of person much in your daily life, but I promise you they're everywhere - and most of them would struggle to tell you what Joe Biden's son's name is, let alone what controversies he's been involved in.
But it's not there! All Taibbi has is some bland emails pointing out that the Biden administration requested Twitter look at a handful of tweets. That's it! Were they bad tweets? Was there salacious content censored? Did Twitter even remove them? We don't know! But Taibbi and Musk clearly want us to think this is bad, and most of the posters here seem to be on board.
Someone point me to the smoking gun here? Where's the actual censorship? Who said what that Biden managed to suppress? Where was the unfair moderation by Twitter?
I'm... a little stunned actually. This isn't just a non-story, it's almost a smear job.
Snippets of email conversations with the context removed. Why not share the whole email? If it’s this weak with this much context removal, the context must be pretty detrimental to the smear job.
What Biden administration? What government? This was in the summer of 2020.
I repeat: if that happened, it would be bad. The government, indeed, shouldn't be doing that. But Taibbi doesn't have the story! The evidence doesn't exist. He pushed this thing out, with Musk's backing, implying strongly (strongly enough to fool you) that he had evidence for this. But he doesn't.
You get that, right? It really feels like we're being played. They have Twitter emails from two years back but nothing incriminating from a month ago? That argues strongly that they don't have it.
I suspect your answer is going to rely, as I point out, on facts not in evidence. You are just assuming that (1) Twitter did as the Biden campaign demanded for political reasons and (2) the tweets were valid and should have been left up. And if those facts are true, you're right! That's not OK.
So now let's go back to the Taibbi article and see if you're right. And... you're not. He doesn't have that evidence. He just wants you to believe it, so he (and Musk) are pretending that the article says things it doesn't.
we've known about the business world having direct lines to governmental agencies for decades.
many have been screaming at the tops of their lungs for decades to remove these communication lines between religious leaders/industries and the government.
to add some very relevant context to this, we just saw texts between elon and kanye yesterday. kanye is running for president in 2024. all week long has been doing interviews attacking jewish people, praising hitler, and posting swastikas. again, elon has been texting directly with him as recently as yesterday.
this communication between political figures and industry seems to be entirely commonplace. is it right? i don't personally think so. i think its problematic as hell. but the problem is significantly larger than twitter. significantly larger. religions, extractive industries, transportation companies, etc.. etc... etc...
while some may personally have a problem with it, i'll believe elon thinks its a problem when he ceases communication with all political figures, including for business related reasons.
The only things that I'd be concerned about are (a) why is it informal? and (b) what did Twitter do about the requests?
Re (a): This should not be an informal process based upon personal contacts. This should have been a well documented procedure, if for not other reason than to remove the appearance of bias. Sure, Twitter could have assigned a "case-manager" type of contact for each group. But the process for requesting such access should have been formalized (and reviewable).
Re (b): Having a direct line to flag to request review/removal of posts is fine. You can request all you want. It's only an issue if Twitter felt like they couldn't reject the request. Again, because it was an informal process, it's not possible to have any sort of comprehensive statistics on who requested what, how often, and how many requests were approved. And again, the biggest benefit would have been to avoid the appearance of any bias.
Many people (at least on Twitter currently) are conflating a "request" with a "demand". Just because some tweets were flagged doesn't mean they were removed. If they were removed, they might have been against the Twitter ToS and this back channel operated as a batch "report tweet" button.
I "request" Twitter to remove Tweets all the time. Normally it's a spam message... sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't.
My point is that as an informal mechanism, there is no way to know what was happening. We have no idea how many requests were made, and of those, how many were approved/denied/etc...
That is an issue, but the request itself isn't...
(Now, if any of these parties had unrestricted, automatic "veto" power over tweets they didn't like, then that would be a major issue. But thus far, I haven't seen that... but I'm still reading)
Trying to say censorship is fine as long as the current party in power also gets it like the last guy isn’t a persuasive argument.
You can’t abuse power you don’t have. We stopped letting monarchs control things via backroom dealings with their elite friends back in the 1700s for a good reason.
Creating a system with zero transparency that’s at the whims of whoever currently has power and influence is not a healthy way to build a system of governance.
Having a limited set of publicly defined powers + transparency is the only way to prevent abuse and biases. Neither an anarchist free-for-all nor a system directly controlled by elites and influence groups. Bias and power will always exist, all you can do is create systems that reduce those inherent risks in the most optimal way possible.
But backchannels can certainly be helpful. Twitter is the backchannel for customer service for many companies. But let's take HN as another case.
How many times has HN been used as an informal mechanism to get Google to fix something? There are few formal methods to contact Google customer support, so having an informal method (HN) has been quite helpful.
Is this an optimal method? Certainly not, but the existence of an informal communication method to request a review of a tweet is not an issue.
Google fixing broken things in the products? Sure I guess that’s good absent alternatives.
A whale type customer getting a backchanel to the CEO is also good for business.
Twitter using backchannels to censor what the influential parties want? I don’t see who that is valuable to. It doesn’t help Twitters business and I doubt it’s how the public expects their speech to be censored. So only really their friends at Twitter benefit? Or anoint themselves gatekeeper and public benefactor.
Idk why you keep bringing up “both sides do it” as some excuse. Of course both sides have power/influence over big tech employees. Even unelected ones. It is entirely natural for established institutions and powerful individuals to have influence.
That’s why you should build in protections and processes to prevent that from happening. And if you do end up doing it then be transparent… have a public list of times you censored tweets at the request of public servants and powerful individuals.
It’s for the public’s good right? It’s not just about their own personal gain…right?
It is well-known that Hannity among many others are in direct communication with republicans and directly coordinate their messages. Nobody bats an eye because nobody is surprised that Fox/Murdoch are conservative media despite an explicit mission to be "fair and balanced" news. Yet somehow reading emails from Democrats makes Twitter a complete traitor to their mission.
(c) The lack of transparency around this process.
A brief perusal of Twitter would reveal that, yes, you totally can, and people totally do, and you're making much ado over not much at all.
What if there was, say a spy, that was being outted?
Government and politics has an interest here because statecraft has a need to veto things if they want to be effective.
This is the historical norm not anything new. This is very true about Fox News, CNN, and especially all the other "old media" major (alphabet soup) networks
Speaking internationally, there's no stronger propaganda force than the US. Americans very often fail to acknowledge this when criticizing "foreign election meddlers" (which the US has BY FAR the longest and most egregious record of doing)
They lost anyway, but we have no idea what kind of effect they had and what stories were suppressed.
Algorithms, Shmalgorithms - in the end it's just some guy in the backroom who is takimg phone calls from the political commissars, just like in the old Soviet Union and nowadays China...
Zuckerberg said it himself on Joe Rogan, it's been common knowledge for years now, only contrarians and stubborn shills claimed otherwise
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.
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.
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 known that they're evil ideas. Again, I'm not saying that the government should control speech, but I do expect good politicians to speak out against evil ideas and to call the people promoting those ideas bad. Hitler was a very bad person and Ye is a bad person for promoting Hitler as good. That's not suppression of speech. That's noting that Ye is supporting evil that should be opposed.
I genuinely understand that it's difficult to know where the line should be, but I'd also note that the past was never a bastion of free speech. You needed to be wealthy to publish things in the past. Most people didn't have free speech beyond who could hear them at the pub. In the 21st century where our communication is often less in-person, what does that mean for platforms like Facebook or Twitter which are kinda like newspapers, but also kinda masquerade as a personal communication device (or a common carrier as some people argue they should be)? What did it mean when newspapers controlled information and only some ideas were pushed by the newspapers with the biggest circulation? What does it mean if the in-person communication of yore is replaced by the Facebook of today?
I'd also note that speech always had consequences. People have always been "canceled" when a powerful person or their community decided that their speech was wrong - Senator Sumner argued against slavery and was beaten half to death on the Senate floor by pro-slavery Senators. During the American Revolution, lots of people faced dire consequences if they said something that might have sounded too loyalist. People have always lost jobs because they said something a higher-up didn't like - or something a third party didn't like who had power with one of their higher-ups. People have been fired for coming out as gay. Are we talking about the same consequences that have always existed and have often been wielded (and continue to be wielded) by the right?
If you have constructive ways the Democrats could be better, I'm open to hearing them. I guess I'll close with hoping that you'll think of the LGBT people, women, Black people, and others in your life that will be harmed by today's Republican party. I hope you'll value us more than you're pissed off by Democrats. I want my life to be worth more than your resentment. I don't mean that as any kind of slight against you or anyone else - I understand how hard it is to vote for someone who genuinely pisses you off. I just truly hope that you'll choose me. I don't really know how else to say it. I like my life, I want to continue living it, I want to be protected by my government with the same rights as everyone else and not persecuted by it. Please choose me.
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.
I'm a moderate
Democrat ... authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas
both sides suck
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.
> But I'm not an american, I could be wrong
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.
In this particular case, the information revealed in the “get-your-popcorn” tweet storm was generally already public. So I’m surprised by all the outrage and excitement.
Call me dismissive, but I think this mob mindset around “free speech” and its “anti-far-left” hysteria is not in touch with reality. It complains and whines a lot, constantly outraged, and never clear on its actual ideological position.
A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome. Anecdotal, sensational stories (like this Twitter Hunter Biden laptop cover-up) are exactly that: misleading anecdotes. They aren’t useful, and being caught up in them is not healthy.
Honest question: would you be similarly dismissive if it turned out that it’s secretly mostly the right who “shapes the flow of information” in order to influence public’s opinion and has already used that power during the past election cycles?
Remember - we’re not talking about some minor news outlet here. We are talking about social media platforms that are so pervasive basically every single person knows about them and is in one way or another exposed to the information that’s presented on them. To have the power to shape the flow of information on these kind of platforms is to have power to shape whole societies.
> A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome. Anecdotal, sensational stories (like this Twitter Hunter Biden laptop cover-up) are exactly that: misleading anecdotes. They aren’t useful, and being caught up in them is not healthy.
This is the key takeaway in OPs post for me. I don’t think it matters if this is the right, left, up or down it’s about finding better ways to communicate that doesn’t depend on centralized organizations that are prone to corruption of this sort.
This keeps happening and we keep using centralized authorities, even when we start building systems that start off decentralized, they somehow end up being centralized. There's something wrong in the way we organize and think about things. We need to find a better way.
This indeed happens, The [Sinclair Broadcast Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group) being one of the most prominent examples. They're a huge nationwide TV station operator known for pushing conservative narratives nationwide and for supporting Donald Trump during his campaign.
One of Sinclair's assets is its reach and influence, and they are very transparent about that. If you're in the US and this is news to you, you might want to check if your local Fox or NBC (or CBS, ABC, etc) network is affiliated: https://sbgi.net/tv-stations/
I mostly agree with this, but the rest of your comment reads to me as "everybody else does it so it's fine", which is exactly the mindset that leads to this conversation not being had. A sensationalist story might lean the narrative one way and might be "out of touch with reality" but it's a much better starting point than nothing.
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!
It goes to show what we already knew. Every media outlet (or blogger, or influencer) has an audience, caters to that audience, grows that audience, monetizes that audience.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if The Verge employs high-minded journalists, or just wants to hock a Z Fold 4 referral link in time for Christmas. Perhaps subscriptions will save us all, but then if your audience is more Twitter employees than Twitter owners, you'll certainly tend to bias your coverage accordingly.
It seems business model is not the solution alone. I think all we can hope for is diversity and choice. I just hope quality can work its way through the algorithm.
[Edit: The Verge did just post their first article on this just now, calling it "a flop."]
And these are journalists making these titles? A quick Google search reveals that his Gmail address is everywhere. In fact, he tweeted his personal Gmail address a while ago: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/802758241570541568?s=20&...
I don't think people realize how desperate these news orgs are.
> I don't think people realize how desperate these news orgs are.
This is why the Verge hasn't moved off of Twitter and had to grift their readers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday affiliate links littered everywhere on the homepage and advertised on Twitter.
The desperation is there, and they are very good at hiding it.
Perhaps with some investigatory reporting The Verge could have broken this story themselves a year ago -- "the right way."
1. Governments and public figures ask social media company to review posts that may violate ToS and/or law.
2. Social media company reviews posts with some internal debate and comes to conclusion.
Big deal.
The only thing that's really concerning in this is how much importance Twitter has when it comes to US politics and that it's now owned by one billionaire who's openly political (and spreads conspiracy theories). I can't imagine much debate happening in these content reviews anymore when the boss openly fires people who have the nerve to disagree with him.
I mean it makes sense, the tweets where they mention Elon or sources from Twitter have waaaay more interaction than any other articles they wrote. Like orders of magnitude different.
I personally don't like them. 90% of the things they said about Twitter never happened and not a single word from them about that. Oh and Platformer is kinda ex-Verge people so there's that.
When working class gets affected by illegal immigration then they are racists. When the white collar class gets affected by jobs getting outsourced then it's the corporate greed.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/10/05/a...
What new information would you, as a journalist, find salient and worthy of a brand new post today?
>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.
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"
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."
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!
The story itself, though, was a nothingburger IMO. Which is why the censorship of the story became the story. I hear a lot of people complain about the censorship of the story, which may be a legit complaint, but I haven't heard a good argument of why Hunter Biden should have been a crucial factor in deciding how to vote in 2020, when there were a ton of other vastly more important issues.
Well, it seems more like they were trying to apply their moderation policies to another website, which isn't the same as applying their moderation policies to their own website.
Anyway, moderation is censorship. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying that's what it is.
Your reply is based on a mistaken assumption.
The content in question was not hosted on Twitter, it was hosted on the NY Post website. Twitter moderates the content hosted on Twitter, the NY Post moderates the content hosted by the NY Post. But when Twitter censored links to the NY Post, Twitter was attempting to apply its own moderation policy to content hosted outside of Twitter.
Again, I'm not claiming that blocking links is inherently bad. For example, it may be reasonable to block links to malware, phishing, misleading URL shorteners, etc. I'm just saying that this is censorship. "Moderation" is a euphemism for censorship.
That isn't moderating the NY Post or attempting to extend their moderation policies beyond the border of their own systems.
Never make moderation mistakes can’t be the standard.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
Indeed, numerous articles written explicitly from hacked sources (unlike the Biden laptop, which was only [faslely] rumored to be "hacked") were published and advertised on Twitter. These articles were never suppressed. How can it be argued Twitter was merely neutrally enforcing their policy when the only articles suppressed were clearly done to benefit their preferred political partisans?
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1598855600083177472
Personally I am (and have never been) neither a Republican or a Trump supporter, but what I (and many other like me) am is someone who supports free speech, open discourse and rational thinking. This is only part 1 of the "Twitter files", with many more revelations to come, and it is already incredibly damning. It is stunning to me that so many otherwise intelligent people do not see the problem with big tech colluding with government officials and intelligence agencies to brazenly attempt to distort and censor public discourse - especially right before an election. The ability of people to willfully delude themselves is astounding.
You took a giant leap from maybe people at Twitter were acting with bias. You’d need a lot more information to justify this assertion, and who is saying this wouldnt be a problem? I al saying this didn’t happen, not it wouldn’t be a problemZ
A bipartisan group of 50 CIA agents and various spooks released a letter falsely labeling the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation" at the exact same time the story was being censored by Facebook and Twitter at the behest of the Biden campaign. It is unfortunate that so many are willing (and able) to willfully delude themselves into denying reality.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
>Hang them all, put social media in the hands of the government, ban moderation?
If Twitter had unilaterally decided to act as political partisans without direction from political campaigns, elected officials and intelligence agencies it would be an entirely different issue - this isn't the case as clearly illustrated by part one of the Taibbi series. I have little doubt when it comes to the Covid chapter you will see even more direct censorship coordination between Twitter and government officials, which will also be downplayed (if not supported) by those who believe it was "good" or "necessary". The fact is that The Constitution is the foundational document of our country. It isn't some sort of optional set of guidelines that can be ignored when inconvenient. The 1st Amendment is the most important part of this foundational document, the bedrock of a free society. All of our elected leaders, including the president, swear an oath of office to protect and uphold The Constitution. The legitimate authority of the government is derived from The Constitution. A government acting outside of the Constitution is not a legitimate government.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Deny reality of what?
I don’t really understand the rest of your post, I guess your alleging they government violated the first amendment. Ok, what’s the next steps then?
Same thing happened with Andrew Cuomo. It was an elaborate play designed to make Dem voterbase to believe how amazing Dems are at handling COVID. Meanwhile dilligent citizens knew what Cuomo had done with the nrusing homes. The moment Biden took office Cuomo was thrown under bus because Dems knew due to his nursing home scandal he has become a liability. The longer he stays in the office the more it'll draw attention to Dems' creafully written PR plot.
Lesser-known domains will indeed suffer from draconian moderation policies of today's largest social media sites. Case in point, my domain appears to be shadowbanned. This Tweet [1] only appears when directly linked. It does not appear beneath its parent [2] for anyone but me. That leads me to believe that tweets mentioning my .win domain [3] are all shadowbanned. I don't know for sure what's going on. I know it wasn't the parent author's action that hid my content because Twitter is auditable for when that happens.
[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136
[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553
[3] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
While the latter may be more damning, it’s also pretty common.
Context matters. They didn’t fail to hide the story, that wasn’t the goal.
They succeeded in their goal of preventing the story from harming their candidate a few days before the election.
This is everything the left says they care about, a mega corp colluding with powerful connected political interests to determine the outcome of an election
Did they? Of course Joe Biden was elected, but there's no evidence that this was the cause. I said "I haven't heard a good argument of why Hunter Biden should have been a crucial factor in deciding how to vote in 2020, when there were a ton of other vastly more important issues." And I still haven't heard one.
In any case, the censorship seems to have backfired somewhat and raised the profile of the story. People won't shut up about it even now, two years later.
“Prove our massive illegal censorship campaign was effective!”
You can not in good faith argue that this was acceptable.
This is obvious because your only argument at this point is that sure it was wrong, but it didn’t work.
That’s not going to save everyone on these email lists from prison.
Whoever, being a person employed in any administrative position by the United States, or by any department or agency thereof, or by the District of Columbia or any agency or instrumentality thereof, or by any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States, or any political subdivision, municipality, or agency thereof, or agency of such political subdivision or municipality (including any corporation owned or controlled by any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States or by any such political subdivision, municipality, or agency), in connection with any activity which is financed in whole or in part by loans or grants made by the United States, or any department or agency thereof, uses his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both
I don’t think you understand, Jail time is only acceptable non-violent outcome for these officials
A very quick search led me to that.
> A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.
So, if you were following the (as described) scandal, you the majority believes that "truthful" coverage would have changed things.
The same percentage believes that the computer is real.
So... the people who believe that there is something to the scandal also believe that if there was "truthful" coverage of the scandal, things would have been different.
I'm not sure that this is as convincing of a statistic as the numbers by themselves would lead one to believe.
It is real, even the most stanch Biden partisans have admitted that
>I will say that it's very odd that the polling firm apparently decided to republish a story from The Epoch Times of all outlets to analyze their poll. I generally don't think of TIPP as being overly biased, but uncritically regurgitating The Epoch Times is a bit much for me.
>Edit: Never mind. Went to the home page of their site and found Fox News on steroids, wow. I guess I'll only look at the IBD/TIPP polls from now on.
>Edit 2: It was an online poll, conducted among people 'following' the story? Gee, I'm shocked.
>Edit 3: I dug up the original poll (which you can only get by subscribing to their spammy newsletter) and it looks like they polled 1335 people and threw out everyone but the 437 people who said they were following the story. Literally, after the 'how closely are you following it' question, there's no data for the other 898 people. Needless to say, the headline '79%' figure is in no way representative of the general population, and appears to consist of people who already viewed the laptop as a dealbreaker. Also, just a weird thing I noticed, the races listed in crosstabs [0] are white and Hispanic, there are no black or Asian people listed at all.
"Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll."
"And an even higher number — 81% — said US Attorney General Merrick Garland should appoint a special counsel to investigate matters related to the first son’s infamous laptop, the existence of which was exclusively revealed by The Post in October 2020."
Needless to say, this poll is not representative in any way. Junk.
So Elon posted today he would drop important inside info about the Hunter Biden story the right wing loves so much. And they seemed thrilled and are now debating the “new” info.
That’s an interesting turn from yesterday when that same group was pissed at him for going back on his free speech/no censorship claims when he kicked Kanye off.
How surprisingly lucky for him he did something that made him popular again just 24 hours after his new fans had turned on him.
And there was tons of new important info in the thread too. It wasn’t just stuff from months ago repackaged.
(Narrator: it largely was)
This seems like nothing more than a big redirection to get people to move on from the last story.
I find government comms with social media to be interesting. Do you not? I'm not sure if there's a bombshell there or not. I believe all public servants since Nixon understand about their actions being reviewable. Not that they shouldn't be able to have private conversations, of course. That's a whole 'nother issue.
Here it seems they alerted Twitter to a few tweets containing nudes of someone posted without their consent. That was against the TOS and likely against the law in the 48 (?) states with anti-revenge porn laws.
They didn’t try to stifle debate. They didn’t try to hide news articles.
There has been tons of Hunter Biden tweets they did nothing about.
This doesn’t seem like anything shady at all. So I’m not worried.
Show me political game playing, I’ll be on your side.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598838041371516929
"Exposed" is your word, not mine.
Also, Biden's been a lifelong politician. I guess we disagree that his team's comms during candidacy were not "governmental" in nature.
> I guess we disagree that his team's comms during candidacy were not "governmental" in nature.
This isn't like a disagreeing on a judgment call sort of thing; it is factually not the case that the Biden campaign was governmental in nature. It was, in an objective legal sense, a private entity, and not a government entity. The US Constitution simply does not apply to a private entity that is not part of the US government.
I never claimed it was, and yes I think he nailed what should have been said at that moment.
You're assuming that I'm arguing there were government misdeeds exposed by this release, but if you reread the chain above you'll find that I (1) felt this is not merely a "big redirection", (2) find government comms interesting, and (3) only speculated about a potential bombshell, which need not be a legal issue. (3) is based on us not having all of the data.
Musk is probably trolling us all per usual. He's got an even bigger megaphone now than before, so I'm interested to hear what he is saying.
> This isn't like a disagreeing on a judgment call sort of thing; it is factually not the case that the Biden campaign was governmental in nature.
Is Trump still influential within the Republican party? It's fine if you don't think so.
Again I'm not saying that whoever wrote the "Biden team" email should be investigated as if they were a government official in 2020. I don't even know if the content of the messages would merit action if they were a government official.
I'm saying, Biden was influential, and that makes these conversations interesting, particularly in light of what Josh Hawley has been sharing regarding this admin's communications with Facebook [1]. Plus, one of the government agencies, CISA, was established under Trump, so it's not even like this is a partisan issue.
Both democrats and republicans will censor you if given the chance. We need to represent ourselves on the free speech issue. They are simply not incentivized to support the first amendment as written. Government officials regularly openly state that they want the private sector to voluntarily censor constitutionally protected speech [2], and the reason they do that is because they can't legally force private entities to censor protected speech.
Per jurisprudence (I don't know which case, sorry), it is also illegal for the government to get around the limits of the first amendment by compelling private entities to limit speech. I guess that would be hard to prove, but that's the other shoe that everyone in free-speech land seems to be expecting to drop at some point. Reason being, when you censor a little, it tends to grow and grow until you're censoring criticism of your censorship, and it starts to consume everything.
But then you seem to lose the thread later, talking about the first amendment, which just is not implicated at all by the emails from the Biden campaign.
> Biden was influential, and that makes these conversations interesting, particularly in light of what Josh Hawley has been sharing regarding this admin's communications with Facebook.
Perhaps you don't see the connection because you're unfamiliar with what Senator Hawley's been up to. If that's the case, I'd recommend checking out that video, his questioning of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas during a hearing on threats to national security. Here is the full video of the hearing [1] [2].
Otherwise, if you already knew about that, the connection is clear from where I stand. Political candidates seek to influence social media's moderation policies and/or actions both before and after taking office. Both Trump and Biden are on the record commenting on this stuff, and I think it's up for debate whether anyone in either of their administrations is punishably culpable for indirectly abridging the first amendment via their efforts. We haven't seen all of the evidence.
Again, public officials are on the record almost every day cheering on the private sector for removing constitutionally protected speech that politicians are legally restricted from removing. Here is a particularly revealing admission from former CIA analyst and now House Representative (D-MI 8th District) Elissa Slotkin,
> "We had all kinds of exploration into this on a bipartisan basis and couldn't manage what the private cable companies in the united states did in one week after the invasion. The Russians go into Ukraine and all these private cable companies decided, you know what, I'm not going to be responsible for peddling this stuff, and they cut them off and now you can't see that R.T. on Howard Johnson's, you know on the TV. So I think the other super interesting thing about what's going on between Russia and Ukraine is the role of the private sector and how that's affecting national security right when visa and Paypal and McDonald's willingly without any guidance or or push from the white house shut down operations in Russia that has more daily effect on the lives of a Russian citizen than probably at this point anything we're doing in sanctions so i think that is just it's an aside that the private sector is in this space with us and i think has a growing role in playing a part in national security for us." [3]
See also comments from Emma Llanso, Director of Free Expression at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) at 29:00 in the Tech Policy Podcast #331: Section 230’s Long Path to SCOTUS,
> "So when we think about the big picture and systemic role that section 230 plays, understanding those dynamics, that the whole reason Cox and Wyden framed the whole section for Section 230 as the 'Good Samaritan' protection for blocking and filtering of content, it was some of this recognition that there is a job here that we want to see these intermediaries do, and that job is taking down or restricting access to other people's constitutionally protected speech. And that is not something Congress can do directly. That is not a law that Congress can pass, to require intermediaries to take action against lawful speech. That's not to say Congress has not considered passing some such laws, the whole duty of (care?) concept is another podcast, but at the core of it, we're talking about, is there illegal speech at issue, and so much of the abuse that we want to see addressed by intermediaries, we need them to basically voluntarily take action against." [4]
Such voluntary censorship can help politicians get elected, and if they support the private sector's removal of things that might cast them in a bad light, both before and after taking office, then I find that concerning. Actions that come after taking office may or may not be punishable, and that is why similar influence exerted during campaigns is interesting to follow.
Time for USA vs. Netherlands!
[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?524139-1/senate-homeland-secur...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaMzQddu8xc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxZ0EGLDDaM&t=8329s
[4] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/331-section-230s-long-...
It's worth reviewing calls for censorship coming from private citizens who later assume positions of influence within government: calls that come after taking office may or may not be punishable. Therefore, any influence exerted during campaigns is interesting to follow. It may or may not be a warning signal for how they operate while in office.
Taibbi also revealed:
"34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point," complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”"
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598839971451838465
And on that one posts a screenshot that it was a "tipping point" for Republicans. Meaning they didn't like a moderation action (a curation decision: part of free speech unless Twitter is a gov't utility or something, the government doesn't tell newspapers who they have to publish in the opinion section) and were going to use government threats of regulation to punish it.
What's Elon done here that's inconsistent or hypocritical? He's never claimed to be a free speech absolutist (no-one is a free speech absolutist), nor did he say he was going to turn Twitter into a free-for-all for anyone can post anything with no moderation. Kanye posted literal Nazi content; he clearly violated Twitter's stated policies against hate speech and earned the ban.
E.g. most free speech "absolutists" would agree that there should still be some kinds of laws against defamation, targeted harassment, and direct incitement to violence. That's my position.
You are talking about the loud minority, but majority of people think that what Kanye said is horrible (as a half jewish European I have felt enough of what happened with my own family to make sure that I do everything in my power to make sure it is not happening again).
At the same time corruption has to be fought with transparency, that's where freedom of speech gets important for all of us.
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-...
1. important entities like American government administrators and political candidates can report Twitter ToS violation for review via a dedicated line with a fast expected turnaround
2. the Biden laptop story was treated as misinformation for 24 hours before being corrected
The 11th tweet supposes to "release the kraken" here:
> 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.
TBH I would be happy to see an argument for this. As always I am left disappointed. The thread continues on to contradict this point by showing a number of Republicans complaining via exactly such contacts. In 24 hours the situation is corrected.
In any case if you know how campaigns work, #1 is not shocking at all - I'd assume at a minimum the safety teams for each candidate have and use direct lines to Twitter's moderators. No evidence is shown that submitting things for review equates to an expectation on either side of an order being carried out (by the non-governing Biden team, nonetheless). Finally I don't think this is the best evidence of an imbalance - the situation was corrected and reversed...
This does seem to be peak American politics "leap to any conclusions your reality supports". We cannot make arguments in good faith any more, because we do not agree on or even look at the facts on their merits, but rather just assume the "other side" is an idiot. So, big letdown. I'll wait for thread #2, maybe we will see more tangible evidence.
It is (was) reality. Have you met average big-tech non-coder?
> *This system wasn't balanced.* It was based on contacts. ... there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.
I can certainly agree with the fact that 90+% of Big Tech employees vote Democrat (I'm not sure what "non-coder" has to do with it). 100% true.
I have worked at large corporations for a long time, so I know a second fact: corporate employees do not make any controversial decisions you will hear about as an outsider. At best we get to present feedback to our boss.
Here we see an employee making such a decision by themself; now let's make an assumption and say this was done to promote their leftist agenda. Within 24 hours, the decision is overridden and it is made clear who the real agenda-setters are at most Big Tech. I'll give you a hint: it's not the employees, and it was only 2% Jack.
In my experience, engineers are more likely to be pragmatic people, which is more of a right-wing/libertarian trait. This is not a constant.
> Within 24 hours, the decision is overridden and it is made clear who the real agenda-setters are at most Big Tech.
It is overridden quietly, with no apology or acknowledgement of the harm they did. If this was something anyone in leadership actually cared about, we'd see the typical PR response. Instead, crickets.
If you listen carefully, behind the crickets, you can hear the goalposts moving.
Just looking at the comments - it’s pretty obvious that ppl didn’t bother to read the entire thing, talk out of their ass based on what they’ve heard at some point in the past and don’t want to actually debate.
They want to just echo their voice, stay in the amplification room and bicker and argue.
Like what’s the point of even sharing this data if we are not gonna go through it?!? What’s the point of not saying okay let’s see what’s actually here? We are supposed to be engineers and ppl of science- we should accept that if new data is presented it’s our soft obligation to examine it and change our theories and hypothesis to comply with or reconcile the newly observed data.
To me the lesson is that most likely I do the same so I need to pay more attention internally when it comes to something I care about.
If ppl are offended by my comment - don’t be that wasn’t my intention. I just hold everyone on HN to a much higher standard than the general public.
1) It's not true
2) It's true, but it's not important
3) It's true and it's important, but we already knew it
Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not
a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from
the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial
review, is
> acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is
One way of interpreting that might be that Elon thinks former Twitter execs were guilty of collusion. Yet, unless there is some really nefarious smoking gun where both parties were grinning about screwing over the public, I believe the most likely guilty party, if such events are found to have occurred, would be the government, not former Twitter employees.
I'm not sure if that's what Elon meant to imply though.
It seems like this is basically coming from Elon Musk through someone he chose.
What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter
Is Elon Musk now "sources at Twitter"?
There might be some interesting bits in here, but I think it's important to note that this is Musk pushing his agenda. Is this just propaganda? It's being presented as a revelation by an outside reporter who got access to previously secret Twitter Files from "sources". Instead, is it just Musk's agenda being told by another person?
Imagine if Zuckerberg hired a PR firm to put out revelations that showed him in a positive light. We'd mock it mercilessly. This seems like basically the same thing, but he grabbed a Substack writer looking who will get paid through subscribers and notoriety rather than by Musk. "I won't pay you, but I'll send everyone to your tweets, Substack, and book where you can make millions," just sounds like hiring a PR firm with extra steps.
This story is about political operatives influencing what social media companies allow on their platform.
You’d have to be hopelessly naive to think that twitter wasn’t already ridiculously left leaning without getting messages from political operatives. The change of owner simply inverted that?
I'm not sure what is meant by the "change of owner" comment, since I think everyone knew that Twitter was left leaning since forever.
Totally agree...
> Not every story is about Elon Musk's ego.
BUT! I can't help thinking about how Elon might have a grudge against Biden and $44B might be FU money.
The multiple and obvious snubs from the Biden administration against Tesla might certainly be enough to tick him off enough to do something this crazy. While it has been rumored that the reason that Tesla was repeatedly left out of the mix (despite their clear lead in EVs and being an American car company) was due to Tesla not being unionized. Today's events related to the railworkers leave me doubtful.
This sounds like a "you" problem. For whatever reason you have imagined that Musk hates Biden, despite his DoD giving his company billions in guaranteed contracts for space access.
If a source reaching out to and sharing documents and hearsay with a reporter is grounds for dismissing a story - because of imagined personal/ideological/PR alignment - then you would be dismissing 95% of the "Democracy Dies In Darkness" reporting by the Washington Post and New York Times.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598864377750306816
Probably.
I suppose the bigger point to note is, along with all the other right wing internet celebrities Elon's been talking to we get to see Taibbi's silliness boosted.
Next up Greenwald explaining how Russians are truly quite nice.
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,
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.
Whatever you think of this story, there is certainly enough evidence to justify further investigation and hopefully this will happen next year.
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.
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?)
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15988307309638451...
Why are all these brand new people to the internet trying to tell websites they have to allow things that they don't want? As much as I hate censorship, the fact is it's THEIR website and they can do whatever they want with it. I don't have to go there. I can make my own website if I don't like a particular site.
As a user of the internet since 1995, I don't find anything in these "twitter files" interesting. Now Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden's books on NSA surveillance on the internet? I find those much more interesting and much more serious than this swill.
If I came to your house and before I got there, the president called you and told you NOT to let me in, you may or may not do it. It's up to you. It's still YOUR HOUSE and you have the ultimate choice. That's all a website is.
With that kind of power delta, there's always an implied "or else", I believe.
Untill actual laws are passed they can choose to comply or not as they see fit.
Since I had a webpage in 1994, can I reject this authority? b^)
Twitter is dumb and more avoidable than G or FB, but it does seem to have some effect on the chattering class. If it is problematic when "bad" facebook moderation affects elections (I'm not saying that has ever happened, nor that it would in fact be problematic), it seems possibly problematic when "bad" twitter moderation affects elections.
Greenwald and Snowden seem to care about this? Although of course they care more about our ongoing persecution of Assange.
Murray has claimed[1] that traffic from Twitter and Facebook to his blog had dropped to 1.5%, and that posts including links to it could be seen as having been posted by the poster, but could be verified to be invisible to others.
[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...
If I owned a message board, and started deleting users post at random, or because of personal taste, would that be a 1A violation? I may or may not be an asshole, but it’s my message board.
There are other parallels I can draw, but these are honest questions.
So yes. Your example easily doesn't violate the 1A.
I know this might sound pretty idealistic but for anyone who thinks otherwise please entertain the possibility that such control could one day turn against you, your political candidate or your personal beliefs and suddenly it will be you who finds themselves in the crosshairs of censorship when there’s a story you believe should be brought up. It’s an ugly timeline that I don’t want to live in.
You could make a similar argument for news, another non-utility. They seem to have a model where outlets have a distinct pov that guides a variety of informal and formal censorship. Right wing doesn’t write stuff that looks bad for them, left wing too, local news follow local interests, etc.
And there's now been this complete role reversal where Democrats (the "great defenders of democracy") are arguing that private media companies can do whatever they like.
And conservatives are arguing that there needs to be a govt intervention with these companies.
What was the role of the people making the requests in state or federal government at the time of the requests (October 2020)?
I will amend this to further ask "are people employed in the public sector prevented from click the 'report' or 'flag' button on social media sites?"
Truly the smoking gun. The irony is the misdirection worked, people in this thread are frothing at their mouths unable to tell who even was in government in 2020.
I don't have any particularly strong feelings about Matt Taibbi, I just want to read through these files myself and form my own opinions instead of having reality mediated to me by an Approved Professional
There’s nothing in that thread that shows this. We only see a moderation team discussing about a report from someone in the Biden team about some dick picks posted on Twitter.
Comparatively the CCP is a well-oiled machine when it comes to censorship.
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.
Like wtf?
Telle est la politique en Amérique
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.
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.
Twitter admitted it was a wrong decision and reverted it. So it’s more "here we were" than "here we are".
> Yes, the FBI is being excused, and it's being claimed that there was just a breakdown at Twitter, rather than deliberate suppression.
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=402164
Tyrants outsource the speech suppression to private industry so they can turn the screws while doing victory laps about supporting the First Amendment.
What a mess.
I think in a year or two Twitter might end up a better-governed org and a better product, unless a newcomer splits the market - I am 100% convinced Mastodon ain't it, but maybe Dorsey's new idea...
Anyone else share this sentiment?
Okay, ELON, "handle" it for us would you now? Let's see which advertiser would love their ad appear right below Hunter Biden's hog. This is unreal stupidity. This is what Elon Musk's time is consumed by? Investigating routine moderation at Twitter and discovering the "secret" 30% Apple App Store tax. Dear Lord.
It's my first remark on this subject. I'm not even a Republican nor have a Twitter account - but I'm really considering creating one now. I know that I will be downvoted but I don't care. It just got impossible to ignore: Sam Bankman-Fried has better press than him.
All have had negative impact on Musk's personal brand. Viewpoints regarding worker (mis)treatment depend on people's beliefs about classism, which doesn't map cleanly onto political tribalism. The botched features get flak because many people are just like Elon and (wrongly) think they could run Twitter better than everyone else.
Here we get to see the unhealthy intermingling of political agents with a supposed social media platform.
The end result of that has been detrimental to users, free speech and public debate.
I always thought Elon was "too much", but his handling of Twitter is absolutely perfect.
> Don’t miss what’s happening
> People on Twitter are the first to know.
> [Log in]
> [Sign up]
Great way to share long essays /s
The government has as much right to report ToS violations as any other user.
Having VIP lanes isn't a great look but it isn't surprising.
The government are in a position were they can force legal changes if it feels corporations are abusing their power. Moderation is important but of course that has to be balanced against the risks of censorship. Of course neither are desirable but we are essentially talking about the reporting of individual tweets, not requests for systemic changes to the platform.
If this story pointed to something more serious like requests to access to the moderation platform or keyword manipulation, of course this would be breaching an entirely different red line.
Public shock about government involvement in speech is par for the course, in the US anyway.
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.
Instead, what you see is a lot of people, acting in good faith, trying to make decisions and appease a lot divergent concerns in the middle of a developing story. With a lot of internal disagreement and debate.
I know Tailbi has said there are "bigger revelations to come", but so far, this is utterly banal internal policy coordination and decision making.
“ 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.
This is the default position. Your classifier would be better suited as "if you're susceptible to right-wing propaganda and disinformation" versus not.
Keep calm and carry on.
only if you need it to be.
I think for a lot of other people, the son of a president peddling influence to foreign powers (including the CCP) and the president denied being involved but evidence (emails on laptop and witness statements) saying otherwise.
Then on top of this you have the current govt working in collusion with big tech to censor this story. And just prior to an election where the impact could be significant.
All of these things would be considered the opposite of a "weak sauce nothingburger".
It is very easy with hindsight here to be absolutely certain of things such as the authenticity of the laptop; Twitter cannot have known that at the time and they were simply scared to promote information that was being leaked to smear political opponents. I would probably have made similar decisions if I was Facebook, Google and Bing etc. and as it turned out they also made the same call. To make this into a conspiracy, one Trump using to try to have the constitution changed (let me guess, term limits will be removed), is proven to be completely fabricated in my opinion.
Hunter Biden's business partner, Tony Bobulinski, has stated that Joe Biden was the effective chairman of the enterprise and 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".
To try and pretend the son of a US president can do this and this is not significant or not deserving of any further investigation is absurd.
I think you've just been getting your news from particular sources and have a very limited understanding of the situation. (As I've said before, the media is garbage).
This is literally moderation, "the twitter files" my ass. They pretext political contributions and falsley connect legitimate moderation to that. Of course they should have blocked that story and still should. Oh, but get this, it's their platform they get to do what they want. They are not an impartial government agency.
In this case there is no evidence of political bias, they saw danger and erred on the side of caution.
What I'm dumbfounded by is why there are so many upvotes and comments of all places on HN.
now it's Musk's platform and he gets to do whatever he wants
you're cool with that, right?
Yes. Just as I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t read Twitter now
And it’s not because they are just biased. It’s because instead of the essence, and discussing using logical arguments, they care more about “owning the libs”.
Plenty of left wing media do this too, not as successfully, and I tend to avoid those as well.
What I’m not cool with are people that idolize corrupted, divisive, self centered, entitled folks like Musk. But I guess HN has many wanna-be-Musks.
In Twitter’s previous incarnation as a NASDAQ-listed company, Republicans were asking for more government control over it and other social media. Now that it’s a private company, that seems to have stopped.
We're all human, we probably agree on far more than we disagree on. Let's all be a little kinder to each other
from what I’ve noticed in the states (and other places) it’s much easier making money when everyone’s mean.
> it's their platform they get to do what they want
And so is HN.
Maybe it's gotten better over the last 2 years, but in 2020 the top-10 pages by engagement were consistently Dan Bongino, Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, and various unofficial Trump fan accounts.
The other somewhat unspoken bit about Hacker News in recent years is that it shifted from "people who want to build cool things" to "people who want to complain about everything".
It's pretty much every thread now, from politics to Rust to... throw a stone, it's the same tone and tired mindset. The HN I remember from years ago was tons of founders and people who actually wanted to do something interesting.
Particularly, a congressman requested tweets to be removed through special channel is interesting.
Twitter determined that the article from an established news outlet is a hacked material, even though that should have been determined by law enforcement is interesting.
If you don't like it, you can just skip the post.
I'm sure there are hundreds of posts on front-page that you are not interested.
Like I will keep mentioning: This whole drama is partially based off the fact that people are complaining Twitter removed dick pics from twitter as a form of 'censorship'. I don't think dick pics belong anywhere on HN, but apparently people here disagree.
Every aspect of US political life is cleanly split into two halves.
Such a mess and totally un-representative of people that vote the govt. to power.
Sure, some may argue that more parties means more chaos, but better there be a 100 small chaotic situations tempered by mutual interest and compromise, rather than two very dangerous chaotic situations with each having enough weight to cause long term damage.
Just because there are more parties magic won't just happen, voters will be better represented, people will be less divided. Countries with dozens of parties in parliament have gone to civil war.
1. Section 230 becoming overruled and obsolete as both GOP and DEMs want to eliminate it and yet despite debates over years no plans for a smooth transition.
Picture it say section 230 is outlawed in 2024. That would mean despite the noise here on this forum about non-factual things one would even have to do content moderation on the HN News forum.
Or in short words we get more of the same under section 230 going away despite the noisy claim that we get less as then it would be legal open season for every forum and social platform.
Also interesting about sex trafficking, i.e. the last paragraph about not being liable for state laws on sex trafficking, oh nice.
[0] https://www.mediaite.com/online/the-twenty-seven-most-embarr...
Color me surprised.
This particular “Surprise” was actually just a rehash of a conspiracy theory that Republicans were trying to manufacture evidence for. Trump was impeached the first time for extorting a bribe from Ukraine’s Zelenskyy which would allege wrongdoing by Biden.
What he had hoped for was an official announcement of an investigation into Biden from Zelenskyy. But Trump failed to actually corrupt Zelenskyy, so he had nothing to go on come election time.
Cue the October Surprise. This laptop magically appears which appears contain evidence to support the conspiracy theory about Biden. It’s a GOP miracle! But the laptop’s provenance is shady as fuck and the contents still can’t be fully authenticated. So no one really trusts this thing except the most hardcore conservatives. Everyone else can see right through this thing for what it was.
This includes Twitter and the media, many in the media, who had been used by Conservatives in 2016 to distribute hacked materials from the DNC, and didn’t want to be used again in a similar way, so they didn’t play along like clueless idiots this time.
Conservatives were pissed off royally, and decided then to go on a holy war against Twitter, which had been brewing for a while as violent and hateful conservative voices were being pushed off the platform. But the laptop issue was the final straw it seems. Maybe Trump’s ban was the final final straw. These events happened in quick succession so it’s hard to tell.
That brings us to today. Since the laptop itself is a political dud that no one except GOP faithful trusts, Conservatives have decided to reframe the narrative as one of Democrats and Biden having untoward control over social media with the ability to oppress free speech through Twitter, which is not true.
So now we see more manufactured outrage. It turns out that despite what Conservatives say, Democrats don’t actually control Twitter. Quite the opposite is true now actually. But even with a conservative like Musk owning all of the evidence, he can’t prove anything close to the allegation that Democrats suppressed free speech on Twitter, so they pushed out these “Twitter Files” filled with cherry picked quotes and misleading statistics. Obviously this will help Musk to make further inroads with Conservatives since it’s clear he’s given up all pretext of being a neutral steward of Twitter who protects free speech.
This whole thing is a very twisted, so if you take it at face value, you’re really just buying into the narrative being sold by Conservatives. It doesn’t matter that nothing was actually blocked or censored or suppressed. The fact is the laptop is the GOP’s only strategy for winning in 2024, so whatever it is they need. their voters to be very very mad over it.
How can you trust anything else in the thread if the author really believes this? IRC was more than 20 years old when Twitter was founded!
IRC is mean to chat within communities; It’s just forums over chat. It’s not the same thing as instant mass communication.
This really comes across as party partisans, or party stooges, just flooding the conversation trying to massage the consensus. To people who are die-hard members of this political tribe, it's apparently impossible for them to see how vastly illiberal this situation was to regular people, and how uncomfortable it makes true political independents (never mind people on the opposite political tribe, where all it does is to further inflame their belief of being targeted unfairly all the time).
You censor, mute, cancel all dissent for years. You turn homes to prisons and enforce inhumane conditions for people to just be able to "get back to normalcy". You turn voluntary to compulsory. You deprive people of individuality by defacing them with masks. You school their obedience with barefaced surveillance. You edit the hell out of living language with bullshit like replacing "he/she" with "they", infesting it with newspeak, you make up 100500 new gender identifications that all camouflage the same psychic disorder, you deluge all the key platforms with hordes of shills, trendsetters and discourse steersmen. You start senseless wars with the only goal of reducing as many human beings to dust as possible. You implant terms like "tin-foil hat" and "conspiracy theorist" as a prefabricated gag, you discredit by associating all independent thinking with lunacies like Flat Earth. All in all, you do your best to make this society a hell to live in for everyone having the guts to tell a spade a spade, or at least to recognize the underlying roots of one's cognitive dissonance. You boil it until it all but blows up.
Then you start moving the queen, that is, the so-called "self-made man" who invented PayPal (not), personally developed the blueprints of Falcons and Teslas (not) and has now been saving the world (not) from the oppression of all things mentioned above by jail-breaking Twitter from the tentacles of censorship, thus winning himself an army of supporters, especially among young, idealistic and geeky. Then you probably make him a key figure in exposing the medical fascism of Corona Era and stopping all the bloodshed stirred up by the "incompetent national governments" of the world.
Then, one day, "ladies and gentlemen (sic!), meet the first President of the World!"
Screenshot this comment when it's almost faded to ivory, with all the cavils replied, to prove that the gist of it wasn't that obvious for everyone back in the day - or maybe that I was wrong, hopefully.
I stopped reading after that.
There may or may not be some important stuff here, but I'm not going to read it through that lens.
What was/may still be happening is unacceptable regardless of who did it. Quit cheerleading
Poor Hunter, that's gotta hit the ego.
One can hope.
The conspiracy was real.
Did you miss that?
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...
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.
This is grandiose sounding rubbish.
The moment when I experienced real-time global conversation was when I compiled an IRC client on a Unix box in maybe 1992 or 1993, joined some channel, and it turned out the person chatting with me there was in Australia.
In between that and Twitter (as well as before), there were instant messengers and public chatrooms and what have you. Services like AOL and CompuServe.
So much for 'Democracy'
Is the hunter Biden story on the same level as child porn? Is that the moral equivalence you want to draw?
https://rumble.com/v1yjc4a-secret-twitter-files-on-censorshi...
(Show starts at 19:55; lots of weird noise before then)
- CNN - CNBC - New York Times - LA Times
However, stories about how people are "fleeing" Twitter, Twitter is losing more advertising revenue, and Kanye are readily on the front pages?
The mainstream media are more interested in spreading outrage or their own narrative that reinforces their confirmation bias to grift their readers for ad clicks and affiliate links than to uncover the truth.
As soon as one narrative is being constantly peddled by multiple sources, it makes it highly suspicious and likely that something else is going on that is not being reported.
Most of these ‘news sources’ don’t even question or correct each other and just parrot and relay their own articles as the truth.
"Moderators at Twitter made a rash call, chaos ensued, and reversed course" was already wildly known.
this bit from the latest Cormac McCarthy seems fitting:
"The horrors of the past lose their edge and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.
It’s sure to be interesting.
When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.
It should be quite a spectacle. However brief."
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".
its a dud platform. tbh, ALL of the Social Media platforms are dud to me.
I deleted this app.
sums up the story
> there’s no evidence - that I’ve seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story.
Really curious why those who are using this story as evidence of government overreach fail to acknowledge this line.
People just need to move on. Twitter is such a waste of your time.
do we think politicians don’t have direct lines to religious leaders?
do we think high profile government officials aren’t in contact with industry leaders in all different kinds of industries?
do we think these things aren’t abused constantly in both directions?
kanye, who is running for president in 2024 — just in the past week has posted swastikas, done multiple interviews attacking jewish people, and praised hitler — he was posting direct text messages between him and elon (the owner of twitter) just yesterday.
this is nothing new. this isn’t even shocking. this is entirely business as usual in the US.
we need a separation of money and politics just like we have a separation of church and state and _both_ of them need to be enforced with bare sharp teeth.
A rules-based world. A gigantic joke, more likely, hopefully people have started to realise what it's all about, slowly but surely.
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.