I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news organizations" peddling unverified and factually incorrect reports on Twitter.
I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.
Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions.
We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
I agree. Fabricating damaging information on the eve of an election is easier than ever, and impossible to correct. Allowing propagation of such fabrications is to be complicit with the bad actors responsible.
Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.
Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.
It’s completely correctable. If fb/Twitter wanted to, they could track every person who saw a piece of “wrong” information, and plaster the retraction in front of their face.
> With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?
It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.
Edit:
> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.
Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
This has been the reality for people on the political fringes for some time now. Unfortunately nobody's been paying attention to it due in large part to the commentariat/journalistic class's willingness to encourage and provide cover for this behavior as a matter of political expedience.
Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
I think delaying the story until it could be somewhat verified is reasonable. I actually read it minutes after it was posted on the NY Post and my first thought was that it sounded like it shouldn’t have been published. I literally thought they’d retract it.
I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
Well, ok, but can you find any other instance of a story that could have used some verification being suppressed by Twitter and Facebook at the same time?
> Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.
Which part of it is not believable?
We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.
The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).
There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.
This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
What Fox News was since Ailes took over, CNN and MSNBC have become. That's something to be really worried about. For a long time, I read the NYT and watched CNN. I never felt the need to check in and see what Fox was saying until the last 2-3 years. Now I do, because I don't trust that I'm getting the whole story.
They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation.
It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic.
The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.
> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.
> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.
> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.
People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on).
I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
They never provided evidence for this. By their own standards they should censor their own actions.
Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.
Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news
"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
You may be right in practice, but according to Twitter the claimed reason was hacking/doxing, not misinformation -- in fact, the opposite of misinformation!
The liberal wing was upset that state and non state actors influenced the 2016 election by manipulating social media.
Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.
I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.
Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.
I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.
I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
Should T Mobile or Verizon be able to censor your phone calls and text messages if they don't like the content? After all, they're private companies as well.
You make valid points and I don't know why are you downvoted. But Twitter is not a journalism play, it is a platform play and purported to be neutral. If there is blatant supression then they will antagonize atleast 50% of Americans which would be terrible for their bottom line.
> will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small
Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...
Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
> Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.
I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
> To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it-please try to believe me-unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...
> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)
In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).
I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].
So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.
No one seems to have pointed it out, so I'll mention that Aaron was clearly paraphrasing Noam Chomsky there. The point about government being partially limited by constitutions and elections while private companies are not is one that Chomsky has been repeating for decades, and the phrase "corporate tyranny" is very much Chomsky's. This is in keeping with his left-libertarian view that workplaces should operate democratically.
It's not that Aaron was plagiarizing—the quote is from a documentary interview (https://www.reddit.com/r/aaronswartz/comments/dpo2ot/both_th...). In that context it's not common to make attributions and the editors would probably have cut it out in any case.
Whenever America disappoints me, and that's basically all the time these days, I remind myself that it has also produced critical thinkers like Twain and Chomsky.
I respect Swartz a lot, and he makes many good points. But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor. As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now, about an article that was published and is freely, legally available online to anyone with a web browser. You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices, but (as long as we prevent a literal technological monopoly, a prospect that seems increasingly probably) the consequences thereof are in no way similar to government censorship.
This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".
This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.
Consider that an overwhelmingly partisan ownership and stewardship of the majority of media, (whether left or right - currently, as the example in the article it's liberal left) has a more insidious power to control the narrative and push counterpoints to the margins until they die naturally, partly because there is in that situation a de facto monopoly.
Government-censored material never actually dies, and has a habit of being leaked (or released on change of government) and causing scandals; Silicon Valley etc-suppressed material has a habit of being sidelined into the anaemic and eccentric irrelevance of the cancelled and the crackpots, and by the time we realise some of them are actually worth listening to, the damage is done.
Especially in the context of a society where "speech is free", and egregious censorship is assumed not to exist, this is arguably even more damaging - the idea that suppression exists is itself dismissed by the mainstream and chattering classes; that isn't necessarily the case in a country under authoritarian, censoring governance.
> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor
Agreed, their narrative shaping capabilities far exceed governments'.
> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now,
That is a very poor way of judging it for several reasons; a) we are not currently on Twitter or Facebook, we don't have the same reach nor subject to same corporate normativities b) past performance is not always indicative of things to come.
> You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices,
Except they claim they are not making editorial choices, and can't be held up to that standard, which a great chunk of the problem.
> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now, about an article that was published and is freely, legally available online to anyone with a web browser.
As long as you control what a large segment of the population sees, you can orchestrate peoples actions. Censorship has never been absolute or complete and doesn't need to be in order to be effective.
I think the perspective of Schwartz is much better developed instead of just ignoring the negative effects of well visited social media sites removing content on political grounds.
They're unaccountable and significant centers of power (unaccountable to the public), yes maybe not with the power of the government, but approaching it. Is that the kind of rule we want?
Thus it always was. Back in the day in America there were a few big newspapers (basically, USA Today plus a couple of local city or state papers) and three TV channels. They all broadly agreed on what was important and how to present it. That was "the news", and it shaped how people saw the world.
If you were so inclined you could find some alternative points of view in the right newsagents, but mainstream mass-media generally represented a single perspective, and that was the filter through which most people saw the world.
People back then complained that the "Republocrats" were a cosy duopoly. There was no culture war because a large majority of Americans were part of a single culture. (As long as you were white, of course. If you were anything else then nobody cared what you thought).
And at the same time, private companies cannot force you to use their services, or threaten you with violence or imprisonment if you refuse to follow their rules.
This is getting blurry as well, and though you are technically correct, one might have to sue or suffer damages for not following their rules:
My children’s schools requires the use of Microsoft Teams From home (and associated TOS) for them to attend class. There is also a parent WhatsApp group for urgent messages to parents. And as of the pandemic, there is also mandatory Zoom classes.
This is a public school. If I sue I could possibly avoid these - I am not even sure of that. But either way, I and my children will suffer if I don’t comply.
Microsoft. Facebook. Zoom. Coerced de facto to follow their rules; they might cancel my accounts if I don’t behave accordingly - Facebook and Google have certainly done so before.
I guess. It’s pretty obvious who the Post answers to.
Companies ultimately have shareholders and customers they are accountable to. Even fairly awful companies like Facebook have to meet some minimal standard of conduct to keep advertisers on the platform.
unfortunately what those shareholders want is the highest possible overall profit extraction from the areas they operate at any cost, which is anti-social and bad.
Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
> They’re not elected.
Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has authority over so many concerns that the one you care about is going to be diluted to the point where you may not even want to vote for the thing you care about the most.
> Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution?
Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it.
Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance.
> What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
Courts.
Also it affects politicians directly. There was a petition here to give a mountain on the Finnish border to the Finnish people. Many people advocated for this but in the end it was struck down because politicians aren't even allowed to give away land and they know it.
I mean, I can switch social media platforms a lot more easily than I can switch governments, and corporations don't have a monopoly on violence which would allow their tyranny to lead to torture, gulags and mass graves, but OK.
I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
The methods have changed, the motivation and net result is the same: opinion and thought control.
Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or can't be said. Essentially only approved opinions and movements are allowed to gather steam, no different to the movement of dissent and mistrust of the government that had to be stemmed previously using gulags.
So yes, you are 100% right it's not the same and we are not being sent to re-education camps. But that doesn't mean certain individuals are not being persecuted through "random" algorithms that target and marginalize them. As another poster here mentioned, censorship does not need to be absolute for it to have an effect. You also mentioned network effects earlier: I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
Except that, you know, private corporations usually can't legally jail you or shoot you in the head for expressing the wrong opinions or propagating the wrong info.
Many are confusing "censorship" with "content moderation". The difference is very important.
Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs.
Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story.
In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
I am always impressed when people make these kinds of absolute statements about the primacy of private property rights.
Now, let's consider:
* Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent
* Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club
* Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money
etc.
I am not saying I agree with those statements. I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform," you are not saying anything substantively different than those statements.
In a universe where the ability to put your speech in front of other people depends on being able to post it online in a place where they might be able to see, there are trade-offs involved that seem to be conveniently shoved aside when it is about news you do not like.
I prefer the cacophonous chaos of everyone being able to tell me about stuff they deem important. One step further, I prefer to live a society that can learn to live with that without falling apart.
> I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform,"
That's a straw man. I never said anything like what you are pretending I said. They obviously could not ban users on the basis of race or religion or a number of other criteria.
But that's not really what's under discussion. The question is should Twitter (or other platforms) lose their right to moderate content when they become successful?
Your analogy is broken. Clever to try to compare Twitter to discrimination though.
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
Content moderation is a form of censorship. Censorship isn't always bad. You can look up the history of the term if you want (hint: it shares the same origin as the term "census").
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
That is a really loose definition of censorship. Most dictionaries say it is the "prohibition or suppression" of content, which I don't think a content moderation is. It requires trying to stop the spread of the content itself, not just the content on a particular medium.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
It's a matter of scale. As the article says, the current Democratic Party Alliance for suppressing damaging stories is so broad, that even though you can publish your story, the chances of reaching its intended audience at scale are slim.
Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
No, prior restraint is a form of censorship where you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. "Content moderation" is a euphemism for censorship that you agree with. "Content moderation" is to platform censorship as "prevention of material support for terrorism" and "the maintenance of the public order" is to prior restraint.
Twitter did not decide that in good faight. First, because they are used as a public platform, like it or not, and as such they are not expected to moderate anything. People follow or block what they want. And second, because they are biased in their censorship and are not forthcoming about it.
> as such they are not expected to moderate anything
When even the president's tweets have been squelched or tagged, I highly doubt that anyone reasonably familiar with Twitter over the last couple of years would have that expectation.
I would say you're proposing a false dichotomy. There are 4 options or more.
In the case of Twitter, in order to maintain their "good samaritan" the extent of their "content moderation" is quite specficic.
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.
The NYPost article was damaging a political opponent to be sure. It was not obscene, lewd, filthy; though clearly twitter allows porn so these are immediately ruled out. It wasn't violent by any means.
Was it harassing or otherwise objectionable? Well I think there's some good debate possible but that debate is cut off immediately because the "content moderation" must be done in good faith. This very clearly is violated.
So Twitter did not content moderate as per the laws they must obey. Therefore we now have 2 options. Twitter loses platform protections and becomes directly liable for any and all content they publish aka any anonymous person posting. OR they stop their censorship.
Doh. By the same logic China (or other oppressors) is not censoring anything because people can travel to Vietnam (or Japan for that matter) and they can tell anyone what they want.
You can call it "censorship" or "content moderation." I don't care, the distinction is meaningless for this conversation. The only meaningful argument is what Twitter (for example) CAN do (legally), and what they SHOULD do (morally).
Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they like.
More of a judgment call, but I would argue that Twitter is morally in the right as well. This is obviously a case of carefully engineering disinformation, using America's value of freedom of speech against us. If they don't suppress it, Twitter is actively aiding bad actors, with very serious consequences. Twitter does not want to be in the business of content moderation, but in this case the information is question is so obviously falsified; it is spread so obviously in bad faith; and its consequences are so obviously dangerous to the nation, that they are justified in taking a moral stand against it.
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
I don't know about Russian involvement, but it was clearly a right wing attempt to meddle in the election to achieve a last minute bomb on their opponent like in 2016.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security
There's no sane way to interpret twitter's actions as anything except censorship. The fact that they're legally entitled to commit this censorship doesn't make it something else.
To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
It is incredibly obvious that most US media is biased. This includes suppression on both sides of the political spectrum. It includes both mainstream media and social networks. It isn’t just here and there. It is endemic.
It pushes mindsets and frames discussions. It precludes discussion. It is coordinated and pushed relentlessly.
You can tell when opinions suddenly shift amongst influence makers. Suddenly others get in line. Welcome to a modernized version of 1984.
Now you know that Twitter and Facebook are party to it as well. So are Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, public broadcasting, etc...
I realized that even supposedly unbiased news was irredeemably compromised when public broadcasting barely reported on the Snowden disclosures. This was after realizing all
mainstream media did not fact check the calls for the second Iraq War.
The real news just serves as a skeleton upon which the powers that be drape a
narrative to further their causes.
If you can’t tell yet, both Biden and Trump are lying through their teeth.
> "The Republican version of Burisma story – essentially, that former General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was Elliott Ness, and Joe Biden intervened to fire him specifically to aid his son’s company – is also not supported by evidence. What Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts have done to date is take a few unreported or under-reported facts and leap straight to a maximalist interpretation of corruption on Joe Biden’s part.
This isn’t right, ..."
It feels like we're learning again how terrible propaganda is, and how to deal with it in a new medium.
I do not claim to be fair or smart or scalable enough to tackle the problem of propaganda, and in fact, I think at times propaganda can be used for good.
However, Matt Taibbi has failed at least as much as Twitter and Facebook have in handling this.
Propaganda needs context. Twitter and Fb were not prepared to provide the context, and so they removed the story. Matt provides some context, but it is buried deep in his post, in the absolutely least likely place for it to be read: the paragraphs right before the last paragraph.
When dealing with propaganda, provide the context front and center.
---
The answer for bad speech is famously 'more speech'. But what is the answer for poisoning the well of public discourse? I think this is the most important question of our day, the crux of the information age. Information is cheap, speech is cheap. I know society has gotten over it in the past, and I have some faith that we will again, but don't pretend it is easy.
The NYT's media columnist had some behind-the-scenes reporting on the Trump campaign's attempt to get the Hunter Biden emails into the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ reported out the story and provided the necessary context. The story ultimately concluded there was no evidence of malfeasance on Joe Biden's part.
The kind of reporting the WSJ did here is worlds apart from just leaking a bunch of documents without any context, and I'm glad we have real journalists doing it this time.
Thought I would post some of the contents of the suppressed articles. They seem falsifiable through financial transaction records:
> A tranche of emails from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden — published exclusively by The Post last week — revealed how the scandal-scarred son tried to leverage his family connections to land lucrative deals overseas and boost his Burisma pay.
> Speaking before reporters at a Marriott hotel near the debate site Thursday evening, Bobulinski claimed he had a falling out with the Biden family when Hunter Biden wanted to pocket $5 million from an initial $10 million cash injection into SinoHawk, ponied up by CEFC.
> “He said, referring to ‘the chairman,’ his father, that CEFC was really investing in the Biden family, that he held the trump card and that he was the one putting his family legacy on the time,” said Bobulinski, who declined to take questions afterward.
> “During these negotiations I repeated to Hunter and others that SinoHawk could not be Hunter’s personal piggy bank,” he went on.
> “CEFC through July 2017 was assuring me the funds would be transferred to SinoHawk, but they were never sent to our company. Instead, I found out from Senator Johnson’s September report that the $5 million was sent in August 2017 to entities affiliated with Hunter,” he said, referring to the Wisconsin senator’s congressional probe into potential corruption in the Biden family.
Was anyone besides me surprised that huge payouts to your family creating massive conflicts of interest are normal? And even acceptable for someone running for office?
In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)
it depends. as a low level foot soldier definitely. the higher in rank you are the greater the odds that you can actually get away with it w/o being held accountable
With other politicians there was always a lot of smoke, some investigations that go nowhere, and then it's dropped without really finding a fire. That's traditionally what I thought "without being held accountable" meant.
Now, we see the fire in plain sight, and the media is saying it's all fine and normal. That's a new level of "without being held accountable".
Isn’t it usually the other way around? People at the top are all in it together, so they look after one another if just for self preservation. Instead they blame it on a rogue employee (or child).
I think the story is a big nothing. It was a comment not by Hunter Biden, but an associate, who may have been overstating or exaggerating what Hunter Biden said he'd do.
And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.)
But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.
Readit News
I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.
Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.
Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.
Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view.
The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.
Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?
It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.
Edit:
> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.
Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
Will we have to resort to signal and other encrypted direct messaging methods to have open discussion?
Or run your own mail server end hope your recipient doesn’t use one that censors?
Creepy stuff.
Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
Dead Comment
What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
And you thought casino keywords brought in revenue...
Deleted Comment
You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.
Which part of it is not believable?
We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.
The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).
There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.
This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.
[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha...
[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134...
[2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...
This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.”
Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20
In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou...
> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.
> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.
> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.
People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.
Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
Dead Comment
Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.
I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.
Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.
I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.
I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...
Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.
I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...
> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)
In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).
I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].
So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
- Aaron Swartz
It's not that Aaron was plagiarizing—the quote is from a documentary interview (https://www.reddit.com/r/aaronswartz/comments/dpo2ot/both_th...). In that context it's not common to make attributions and the editors would probably have cut it out in any case.
Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...
This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".
This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.
Consider that an overwhelmingly partisan ownership and stewardship of the majority of media, (whether left or right - currently, as the example in the article it's liberal left) has a more insidious power to control the narrative and push counterpoints to the margins until they die naturally, partly because there is in that situation a de facto monopoly.
Government-censored material never actually dies, and has a habit of being leaked (or released on change of government) and causing scandals; Silicon Valley etc-suppressed material has a habit of being sidelined into the anaemic and eccentric irrelevance of the cancelled and the crackpots, and by the time we realise some of them are actually worth listening to, the damage is done.
Especially in the context of a society where "speech is free", and egregious censorship is assumed not to exist, this is arguably even more damaging - the idea that suppression exists is itself dismissed by the mainstream and chattering classes; that isn't necessarily the case in a country under authoritarian, censoring governance.
Agreed, their narrative shaping capabilities far exceed governments'.
> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now,
That is a very poor way of judging it for several reasons; a) we are not currently on Twitter or Facebook, we don't have the same reach nor subject to same corporate normativities b) past performance is not always indicative of things to come.
> You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices,
Except they claim they are not making editorial choices, and can't be held up to that standard, which a great chunk of the problem.
Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.
Deleted Comment
As long as you control what a large segment of the population sees, you can orchestrate peoples actions. Censorship has never been absolute or complete and doesn't need to be in order to be effective.
Yes, technically the info is still available.
https://www.redditinc.com/
> Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends.
> Steve Huffman, Co-Founder/CEO
> Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder
If you were so inclined you could find some alternative points of view in the right newsagents, but mainstream mass-media generally represented a single perspective, and that was the filter through which most people saw the world.
People back then complained that the "Republocrats" were a cosy duopoly. There was no culture war because a large majority of Americans were part of a single culture. (As long as you were white, of course. If you were anything else then nobody cared what you thought).
My children’s schools requires the use of Microsoft Teams From home (and associated TOS) for them to attend class. There is also a parent WhatsApp group for urgent messages to parents. And as of the pandemic, there is also mandatory Zoom classes.
This is a public school. If I sue I could possibly avoid these - I am not even sure of that. But either way, I and my children will suffer if I don’t comply.
Microsoft. Facebook. Zoom. Coerced de facto to follow their rules; they might cancel my accounts if I don’t behave accordingly - Facebook and Google have certainly done so before.
My point is, it's not overt like government suppression, but pressure can be applied nonetheless.
Companies ultimately have shareholders and customers they are accountable to. Even fairly awful companies like Facebook have to meet some minimal standard of conduct to keep advertisers on the platform.
> They have no constitution to answer to.
Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
> They’re not elected.
Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has authority over so many concerns that the one you care about is going to be diluted to the point where you may not even want to vote for the thing you care about the most.
Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it.
Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance.
> What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
Courts.
Also it affects politicians directly. There was a petition here to give a mountain on the Finnish border to the Finnish people. Many people advocated for this but in the end it was struck down because politicians aren't even allowed to give away land and they know it.
If the people demand they answer to it, it’s that or off with their heads, usually.
The hard part is getting people to demand they answer.
Lots of cool gadgets and the belief we’re making each other better to dispose of.
I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or can't be said. Essentially only approved opinions and movements are allowed to gather steam, no different to the movement of dissent and mistrust of the government that had to be stemmed previously using gulags.
So yes, you are 100% right it's not the same and we are not being sent to re-education camps. But that doesn't mean certain individuals are not being persecuted through "random" algorithms that target and marginalize them. As another poster here mentioned, censorship does not need to be absolute for it to have an effect. You also mentioned network effects earlier: I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs.
Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story.
In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
Now, let's consider:
* Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent
* Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club
* Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money
etc.
I am not saying I agree with those statements. I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform," you are not saying anything substantively different than those statements.
In a universe where the ability to put your speech in front of other people depends on being able to post it online in a place where they might be able to see, there are trade-offs involved that seem to be conveniently shoved aside when it is about news you do not like.
I prefer the cacophonous chaos of everyone being able to tell me about stuff they deem important. One step further, I prefer to live a society that can learn to live with that without falling apart.
That's a straw man. I never said anything like what you are pretending I said. They obviously could not ban users on the basis of race or religion or a number of other criteria.
But that's not really what's under discussion. The question is should Twitter (or other platforms) lose their right to moderate content when they become successful?
I don't think they should.
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
You may prefer chaos, most people do not.
Dead Comment
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
I hope someone can step in and do to the Post what Peter Thiel did to Gawker.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
Dead Comment
When even the president's tweets have been squelched or tagged, I highly doubt that anyone reasonably familiar with Twitter over the last couple of years would have that expectation.
Says who?
> because they are biased in their censorship
Yes, and reality has a liberal bias, eh?
In the case of Twitter, in order to maintain their "good samaritan" the extent of their "content moderation" is quite specficic.
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.
The NYPost article was damaging a political opponent to be sure. It was not obscene, lewd, filthy; though clearly twitter allows porn so these are immediately ruled out. It wasn't violent by any means.
Was it harassing or otherwise objectionable? Well I think there's some good debate possible but that debate is cut off immediately because the "content moderation" must be done in good faith. This very clearly is violated.
So Twitter did not content moderate as per the laws they must obey. Therefore we now have 2 options. Twitter loses platform protections and becomes directly liable for any and all content they publish aka any anonymous person posting. OR they stop their censorship.
Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they like.
More of a judgment call, but I would argue that Twitter is morally in the right as well. This is obviously a case of carefully engineering disinformation, using America's value of freedom of speech against us. If they don't suppress it, Twitter is actively aiding bad actors, with very serious consequences. Twitter does not want to be in the business of content moderation, but in this case the information is question is so obviously falsified; it is spread so obviously in bad faith; and its consequences are so obviously dangerous to the nation, that they are justified in taking a moral stand against it.
was it?
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi... [2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118 [3] https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-... [5] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/T... [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbi-hunter-... [7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
[8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-putin/putin-...
Dead Comment
There's no sane way to interpret twitter's actions as anything except censorship. The fact that they're legally entitled to commit this censorship doesn't make it something else.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
It pushes mindsets and frames discussions. It precludes discussion. It is coordinated and pushed relentlessly.
You can tell when opinions suddenly shift amongst influence makers. Suddenly others get in line. Welcome to a modernized version of 1984.
Now you know that Twitter and Facebook are party to it as well. So are Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, public broadcasting, etc...
I realized that even supposedly unbiased news was irredeemably compromised when public broadcasting barely reported on the Snowden disclosures. This was after realizing all mainstream media did not fact check the calls for the second Iraq War.
The real news just serves as a skeleton upon which the powers that be drape a narrative to further their causes.
If you can’t tell yet, both Biden and Trump are lying through their teeth.
Deleted Comment
This isn’t right, ..."
It feels like we're learning again how terrible propaganda is, and how to deal with it in a new medium.
I do not claim to be fair or smart or scalable enough to tackle the problem of propaganda, and in fact, I think at times propaganda can be used for good.
However, Matt Taibbi has failed at least as much as Twitter and Facebook have in handling this.
Propaganda needs context. Twitter and Fb were not prepared to provide the context, and so they removed the story. Matt provides some context, but it is buried deep in his post, in the absolutely least likely place for it to be read: the paragraphs right before the last paragraph.
When dealing with propaganda, provide the context front and center.
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The answer for bad speech is famously 'more speech'. But what is the answer for poisoning the well of public discourse? I think this is the most important question of our day, the crux of the information age. Information is cheap, speech is cheap. I know society has gotten over it in the past, and I have some faith that we will again, but don't pretend it is easy.
The kind of reporting the WSJ did here is worlds apart from just leaking a bunch of documents without any context, and I'm glad we have real journalists doing it this time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
> A tranche of emails from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden — published exclusively by The Post last week — revealed how the scandal-scarred son tried to leverage his family connections to land lucrative deals overseas and boost his Burisma pay.
> Speaking before reporters at a Marriott hotel near the debate site Thursday evening, Bobulinski claimed he had a falling out with the Biden family when Hunter Biden wanted to pocket $5 million from an initial $10 million cash injection into SinoHawk, ponied up by CEFC.
> “He said, referring to ‘the chairman,’ his father, that CEFC was really investing in the Biden family, that he held the trump card and that he was the one putting his family legacy on the time,” said Bobulinski, who declined to take questions afterward.
> “During these negotiations I repeated to Hunter and others that SinoHawk could not be Hunter’s personal piggy bank,” he went on.
> “CEFC through July 2017 was assuring me the funds would be transferred to SinoHawk, but they were never sent to our company. Instead, I found out from Senator Johnson’s September report that the $5 million was sent in August 2017 to entities affiliated with Hunter,” he said, referring to the Wisconsin senator’s congressional probe into potential corruption in the Biden family.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-ex-partner-tony-bobulin...
In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)
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Now, we see the fire in plain sight, and the media is saying it's all fine and normal. That's a new level of "without being held accountable".
And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.)
But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.