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Comment by ibeckermayer | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are giving too much credit to Twitter and an ex manager from it. Shaping the civilization? Oh come on, the whole saga is just a part of a billionaire’s clash in the culture war. Could have played out entirely differently had he bought it for cheaper.

Yes, Twitter is a key platform where political ideas are exchanged, particularly for politically active / elite, and Roth was responsible for censoring it on the basis of his own political bias and on behalf of the FBI, CIA, and other federal government agencies

There's no evidence he acted on personal bias, and the US government never asked or told Twitter to do anything.

Other than that, your knowledge of current events is spot on.

You sarcastically accuse me of not being up to speed on current events, but clearly you haven’t read (or at least haven’t comprehended) the multi part “Twitter Files” releases that indeed show that

1) Twitter censorship often took place at the discretion of employees, including Yoel Roth

2) The FBI was in consistent contact with Roth and co, directing them on which topics and individuals to censor

3) the CIA also had representatives who met with Twitter to help arrange censorship.

Best to catch up on the latest breaking news before wading into these discussions. Im sure you’d agree that mis, dis, and malinformation are extremely dangerous to our democracy!

1. Ultimately people employed by Twitter had to make calls on what content violated their rules, which they did so in a deliberate manner. Is this surprising to you, did you assume machines did this?

2. There was no direction. FBI pointed out content that filed Twitter's rules (NOT its rules), and Twitter sometimes took action and sometimes didn't, at their own discretion. There as no direction, no instruction, no ordering of any kind.

3. Communications yes, "arrange censorship" no. See above.

I get that the "Twitter Files" is a perfectly engineered PR campaign to convince conservatives of the one thing they believed all along "they are censoring us!". Well, you are half right. "They" meaning Twitter did take repeated actions against right wing accounts for breaking its rules against harassment, election/public health misinfo, and general awfulness. That's true. But the US government never demanded or received any action.

If you need a reminder about what free speech actually protects (hint: it's not the consequences of being an awful person online). https://xkcd.com/1357/

The US government does tell Twitter to do things, the same way they tell you to do things, by passing laws saying not to murder people or have CSAM on your website. That is what happened here.

Sometimes individual government employees report posts, the same way you can; this doesn’t have the force of law and you can ignore them.

Huh? This is not asking or telling? Is it suggesting at least?

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid...

Of all the "revelations" of the Twitter Files (mostly recapping the interactions that were already publicly known), preventing DoD run accounts from being marked as spam is the closest thing to an actual scandal. But

1. These accounts weren't promoted, they were just protected from being "deranked".

2. Twitter and Meta suspended most of these accounts, and made public that they had done so. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-soci...

So the entirely of this "scandal" is that Twitter agreed to shield these accounts from being attacked themselves (mass labeled as spam) - which as it turns out wasn't needed because according to their own records, these accounts received 1-2 impressions per post. In other words, no one even saw them.

Then Twitter banned them and pubicaly fingered them.

Should Twitter have done this? No. Is it proof of an engine of Twitter/US Gov cooperation to promote certain things and silence others? No.

You seem to have no idea what Yoel Roth's job was.

could you detail a bit who Yoel Roth is and that example? (I see he is/was some guy at twitter, in the/some Safety group.) what's his woke view that he forced/attempted-to-force on twitter?)

He was head of the government censorship wing of Twitter, carrying out censorship on behalf of his preferred political ideology as well as the FBI, CIA, and other politically aligned federal government agencies

Note the posts being censored here were child porn and pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis. I agree the US government wants you to censor that.

Sounds like you’ve been mislead about both the relevant contents of Hunters’ laptop (“10% for the big guy”) as well as the content that the FBI and CIA were directing Twitter employees to censor. The best way to get better educated on the topic would be to read the Twitter Files releases yourself.

I did. Your problem is you read them without noticing the parts Taibbi was lying about ;)

The part where he mentioned posts being deleted without saying what they were for instance - you can look all those up on archive.org. They’re penises. The part today about the CIA is just nonsense.

Similarly, the laptop story was suppressed by Trump’s FBI because it sounds worse when you post vague insinuations about it then if you saw the real thing, an obvious fake[1]. You can look up the original “reporting” on the archive too - it comes from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire friend of Giuliani, and it’s full of lurid writing about, again, the size of his penis[2] and claims it’s full of child porn. Are you willing to believe that’s real too? Either way, it’s a legal barrier to letting you see it…

[1] https://twitter.com/revhowardarson/status/159983985145688883...

[2] https://twitter.com/beijingpalmer/status/1325259822829334535

>”Your problem is you read them without noticing the parts Taibbi was lying about ;)”

Including the ;) is unnecessary and makes this post come across in a really condescending way.

Seemed a bit too robotic with just a period. Topic’s kind of heavy you know.

It is, but I also feel like it is counterproductive to the message you are trying to communicate. The rest of the post is otherwise articulate and sourced.

Hunter biden revenge porn bad

In fact, it’s illegal! Whether it’s bad or not isn’t part of the decision tree.

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