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Comment by ibeckermayer | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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/

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