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?
These policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies.
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.
> citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied
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.)
Isn’t the revelatory part that both parties had bat phones to the moderation teams, and that the team working with the Trump admin was intentionally sandbagging violations by “The Left”?
None of that stuff is against the rules. New York Times articles and overly optimistic predictions do not constitute private information or misinformation. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they violate the TOS.
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 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.
The whole point of the NSA is that it does the things that Snowden revealed. They were tremendously annoyed by it not because he revealed they were doing it in the abstract but because he revealed details that got people to change their practices, forced the NSA to change their practice, and reduced their effectiveness.
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.
Since Guccifer 2.0 I've come to be at least a little suspicious of any leaks that seem one-sided. The timing too only heightens my radar (so to speak).
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.
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.”
"Handle" could be "take down tweets on request of the Biden team without review" or "handle this request by the Biden team by considering our current policies and making an independent decision".
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.
1- Biden wasn't in government, he was running for office. Private citizen at the time.
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.
> 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.
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.
What was asked was "More to review from the Biden team". I suppose having some sort of access to request reviews of specific tweets is concerning, but this alone does not demonstrate the degree of influence they had over Twitter's moderation decisions to me. But, it's telling that more damning emails weren't shared...
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?
Did you bother looking over the content of those tweets? You can go to archive.org right now and see what was 'censored', but I recommend not doing so at work. Or you can look at my prior posts instead for an explanation.
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.
Why not? It was a request not a demand. After 2016, I really hope politicians are asking social media companies to review dangerous bullshit, twitter is free to look at the content and deny politician's requests. And I mean for any country's politicians. Civil wars and genocides have started and happened on and as a result of twitter and fb's lack of moderation relating to political content.
I think it's a blatant first amendment violation. Twitter are acting as agents to state to silence individuals. The federal government cannot pick and choose who gets to speak.
> This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
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?
Some valuable context from an insider. Twitter, FB and others were given an explicit warning of a pending disinformation campaign by law enforcement ahead the laptop story breaking.
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.
Does it though? I don't think a campaign staff pointing out tweets that might violate the TOS counts as collusion. That's just a campaign interfacing with Twitter the same way everyone else does. If it was collusion, then every white house press briefing in history would be too. Which, sure, might be Chomsky's point of view, but I don't think anarchists need to be convinced that Joe Biden is bad.
Collusion implies coordinating on something illegal or worth hiding from the public - what exactly is the alleged wrongdoing? That Twitter had people that worked with both presidential campaigns to expedite the review of moderation requests? I mean, by this definition, what interaction between private institutions and politicians doesn't qualify as collusion? Like what principles are even being violated here?
It shows that politicians asked. Which should be pretty obvious. Anyone can ask. Speaking of collusion, why is this getting so much hype right now coming on that heels of the new GOP House majority announcing that they're going to make it a focus of next term? That seems extremely well timed to me. And the underlying story behind the whole thing is still fishy and not interesting.
There's nothing really new in your post either, since it misses the whole point. All your post does is restate the obvious. It was obvious the story was true and that Twitter covered it up.
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.
Just a note for other readers who are not quite so far down the rabbit hole: no, it wasn’t obvious that all or even most or even just the “relevant” bits of the laptop contents are authentic, and it’s still not known today.
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.”
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".
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.
So much pent up anger that your response to a calmly worded good-faith question is a title-cased bad-faith accusation. Get some sleep and drink some water, maybe.
> So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
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.
There was no evidence that any of the information was hacked, specifically no evidence that any foreign govt was involved in procuring the information either. So Twitter wasn't following their own policy/justification about "hacked" materials. Taibbi states this in tweet number 22.
Corrections and retractions published on page D-12 never make up for the days of A-1 news that turns out to be incorrect. The new information is the turmoil that was going on withing twitter as they knowingly applied their suppression mechanisms.
The part where they removed tweets because they were asked to or banned accounts because they were asked to is a pretty big deal. And even though everyone knew they did that it wasn't in writing. It's kind of like the Snowden leaks, everyone who thought about the issues involved had a basic idea of what was going on but until it was out in the open people could just deny it.
It exposed that the public was being misled by powerful communications company. One that deemed itself influential enough to politics as to introduce rafts of policies and tools to remain fair and factual.
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.
> doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
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.
I think the thrust of your argument is really the only meaningful story here, but I don’t think it’s an especially good example of it. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that influential people and orgs have more direct lines into channels of influence.
Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.
Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. It's so wild to have the slimy-ness of our American political system be revealed in yet another way. So in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online?!?!
Since this is true, then where else are political parties trying to get unflattering speech suppressed that we don't even know of yet?
It’s blowing my mind to see people on Twitter reading the story and thinking this is an issue of whether or not Hunter Biden is a problem. This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims and 2. even the leaders of these organizations are unable to rein in these influences.
> This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims
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.
While I applaud added clarity in all things, I wonder if there is anything unique about social media here at all? Is there obvious reason to think that the dynamic between, the, say, NYT and the Gov works or has ever worked any differently -- or have we simply been less aware of what went on in the past?
What was the content of the "handled" tweets, though? I think that matters a lot. For example, the RealJamesWood tweet (from [0]) seems to be a leaked nude of Hunter; it was most likely (safe to say) posted non-consensually, and I don't really see a big difference between that kind of tweet and revenge porn.
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.
Lots of people talking about ToS as if it's applied consistently and without bias. Let's assume that the oft-storied "pee tapes" were real, published by a mainstream news outlet and posted to Twitter. Would those same individuals regurgitating ToS violations agree that should receive the same treatment, or would they have been complicit in spreading it as far and wide as possible?
Not just that, but revenge porn is literally illegal in the state of California, where Twitter is HQ'd.
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.
> So in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online?!?!
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).
I believe all three are pornographic in nature. So while it’s still notable that the Biden team reached out manually to report them it does seem all the tweets were in violation of Twitter policy and fair game for removal.
My understanding was that those were examples and that he was implying that there were vastly more that had been requested and removed by both parties before those tweets. Did I misinterpret his tweet?
I'm scratching my head here. It's quite a leap to go from:
> 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.
I'm on the same page. Frankly I was actually wiling to buy the argument that Twitter suppressed the story on direct orders from Biden himself, or whatever, and that such a level of coordination continued once he took office. It's... not unreasonable. Certainly Musk sold that as what the story was about.
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.
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?
Pragmatism in a political thread in hackernews? Did you get lost somewhere? I agree wholeheartedly with this view. People in these threads pretend to hype the outrage, I guess because it makes for more juicy comments, it feels like some kind of role-playing of finding bigger issues than they actually are.
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?
How is having a direct line to Twitter the most disconcerting thing for you? Of course they have a direct line. I expect that all major political parties, the white house, various legislative committees, etc... would all have a direct line to communicate with Twitter. It's explicitly said that both major parties had these lines of communication, so it's hard to see a problem with the existence of back-channel methods of contact.
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.
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.
I had a really interesting and probably too speculative article about Terry Davis over 10 years ago and it got pulled from Reddit and HN after hitting the front page of both within a minute or so of each other. They had been on both front pages for a few hours and then bam, wiped from both.
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
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).
One thing that is easily forgotten in context of at least this Hunter Biden story is that in 2020, a large cohort of Americans including presumably most Twitter employees not only really didn't want Trump to get re-elected, but were very fearful of what might happen if he did. Not saying that justifies anything, but whether we like it or not humans are very prone to impulsive decision making based on emotions.
I think a distinction should be made between abusing position & relationships to spin a narrative vs abusing position and relationships to silence individuals.
Both are slimy and abusive but the latter is a violation of constitutional rights.
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.
Apparently Meta has an explicit policy that you cannot help anyone you personally know, although you can bump their appeal to the top of the queue or something.
> Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms
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)
i also have a direct line to twitter to get posts removed. it's called the report button. i wouldn't be surprised if many individual twitter superusers have removed more content than the white house
"One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. "
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.
To note, is that during the period the White House resided a president other than the one the thread implies to implicate. So the accusations of government interference is purposefully deceptive.
Some of this material was posted during October of 2020, when Trump was President, so it wasn't the "White House" asking that this material be taken down.
Exactly. And not just in the US, we have had significant indications that the government in Sweden "collaborated" with social media prior to the election.
They lost anyway, but we have no idea what kind of effect they had and what stories were suppressed.
In Poland they raided someone house for exposing prime minister. You can see how Aaron, Snowden or Assange ended. Society needs a way to fight back especialylly now as AI could help with controling/manipulating population
This impacts the perennial argument that these companies are private organizations and the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to them. As it turns out, their censorship regimes are government sponsored censorship.
i thought the lack of support channels was that they try to work like google. Instead it's just a way of handling the scarcity of a resource - a scarce resource is a means of selling it high!
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...
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.
That’s still fundamentally not the issue here. It shouldn’t matter that there was a certain bias at Twitter at a particular time. What matters was there was a) a serious lack of transparency into decision making and b) a very broad policy/culture of censorship, where ill-defined and ever expanding “misinformation” and “threats to democracy” was enough to silence not only public messages but private DMs between individuals.
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.
This is a very important point. While the US is ready to preach its values and tries to implement its values across the world, at home these parties colludes with companies to suppress what it does not like. However, in other countries, US tells them to NOT suppress.
I'm going to need a bigger smoking gun than nicely asking for revenge porn to be removed before putting the USA on the level of Russia or China. If this is the worst they've got then things are a lot less corrupt in the USA than I was expecting.
I'm a moderate, not a Democrat and not a Republican.
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.
From a country with five viable parties: this picking sides thing, or even being a “moderate” is just weird and kind of horrifying how normal the populace thinks it is. It’s not normal. People should be FREAKING OUT that their governmental system is in such bad shape. They’re too busy cheering for whichever tribe they’re in.
All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.
The difference between the multiparty countries and the USA is that in the USA the compromises needed to form a government are made before you do the final vote. In some ways I think that's better because the parties have to have a fuller and more realistic platform than in Europe where you can get a bunch of parties in power only caring about a few issues each and the tradeoffs aren't presented upfront
I don't think Americans are particularly likely to think politics is one dimensional. Each of our two parties is composed of multiple subgroups whose ideals and interests don't match - they regularly have disputes among each other, and it's less common but far from unheard of for an interest group to migrate between parties. What we call a "party" just mixes in components of what a European-style system would call the "governing majority".
A two party system works. I'm from a country with a 20+ party system and it's dysfunctional. In addition, you can't lump Democrats or Republicans in the USA in their respective boats. There's a hundred shades of grey within each party. But rallying behind one candidate versus a hundred in a primary makes for a better setup than anything else I've seen in other countries.
> but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely
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."
The point is that the principle of free speech is far more important than any topic of the day. Enemy of my enemy situation.
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.
Speech by teachers in school isn't free. It is delivered to a captive and inexperienced audience (children).
That's why school should focus on teaching skills and not interpersonal issues. Overloading children with 50 genders is just nonsense and confuses them.
I'm a moderate
Democrat ... authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas
both sides suck
This is a great expression of what is commonly described as a South Park republican. That is, someone who believes they live in a political space between republicans and democrats which does not actually exist. The fundamental emotion is cynicism, which manifests as active hostility towards any notion of empathy for any other dimension of society, and ultimately distills down to status-quo-ism.
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.
> the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the [opposite side] grow to resent them
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.
Is there a smoking gun here that points the blame to any officials representing the party, as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias?
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.
Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives, the executives specifically mentioned the "Biden Team", Ro Khanna wasn't necessarily against censoring the story she was upset that Twitter shut down the Trump admin's press secretary account for dm'ing the NY Post Story and that Republicans on the Hill were rightfully so making a big deal out of that.
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.
The whole idea that there are "sides" to be had is IMHO extremely sad in the first place. This whole bipartisan system bullshit is causing so much damage, and its been going on since at least the 70s.
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” -John Adams in letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.
That's an odd take on US history-- it certainly wasn't all roses before the 70s, what with political sides getting people blacklisted, killed, or even starting a civil war.
The irony of that statement is that we're talking about a private company deciding what is or isn't appropriate on its platform, not de jure censorship. It is not Twitter's responsibility to facilitate the Republicans' attempted October Surprise.
On the other hand, where Republicans have political power, they are using it restrict speech and rights, by law.
It's also ridiculous to me that they think removing a couple naked pictures of Hunter is "censorship". As if you can truly "censor" information on the internet. You can maybe slow its spread, but if anything, the hardest thing is get things off the internet, not on.
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.
One of the curses of democracy is you have to form coalitions with other humans instead of ideals. At least in the US it is out in the open. Many countries have worse problems and bigger, more friendly smiles.
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.
Pedantic reminder that the US is not a democracy, and representing it as one is missing the point of the US. We are a constitutional republic, because democratic decisions need reigning in.
The tweets the Biden campaign asked Twitter to take down (you can verify this yourself) were all non consentual intimate images of Hunter. That is both against the Twitter ToS, hence flagging to them, and illegal in 48 states + DC, including California, where Twitter is based.
This is such a ridiculous political narrative. The Democrats are not for policing speech, Twitter can police whatever it wants. Imagine being a conservative and thinking government regulation of corporations is wrong and simultaneously thinking you have a right to post stuff on twitter.
I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm millions of Americans in very significant ways. Tucker Carlson and Libs of TikTok all but encourage violence against LGBT people. Republicans are trying to prevent Black people from voting. Many Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election and are actively working to be able to overturn future elections. Republicans have gerrymandered many states so that Democrats don't have a chance. Women have lost access to abortion which is medically necessary in many cases and has left them in situations where they don't get treatment until sepsis or other serious complications have set in even if they survive, it can have a huge recovery time (and they may never fully recover) and it can end up costing a lot of money due to lost wages and healthcare costs.
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.
> I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm ...
Just realize you bee-lined straight into partisan politics. Speech policies need to be above that.
You've clearly put a lot of effort into this post, but I think you need more one on one time with the more reasonable people who now vote Republican as I don't think you'd pass an ideological Turing test atm.
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.
It doesn't look good that a lot of credible media outlets had to walk back their stances on the Hnuter Biden laptop and lab-origin covid. Both proved to be plausible enough that they never should have been censored or suppressed.
It’s useful to read what the media actually wrote at the time rather than how Republicans portray it. I’ve included a number of links below but the main thing which is obvious is that coverage was dominated by the questions of authenticity and especially the challenges of not having a forensic trail which wasn’t tainted by Giuliani, who was so unreliable that even Fox News warned reporters not go trust him. A lot of that coverage also focused on how Fox and the WSJ passed on the story because they couldn’t verify key details, or how the Post’s own journalists had reservations because they couldn’t verify details such as whether an email ever got a reply or particular meetings actually happened. Years later, the story remains the same: some relatively boring details have been confirmed but nothing explosive has been found and evidence of tampering likely means that if something was buried in there Giuliani would have helped Hunter Biden by tainting the evidence to the point that it wouldn’t stand up in court.
At that point, we are just hijacking the libertarian party and turning it into something it isn't, which its adherents today would oppose.
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.
I think a story one could tell about more recent events is that Twitter banning various extreme right wing views was good for the Republican Party because they could make arguments about free speech or whatever and not need to deal with those extreme views being associated with the Republican Party. If such views aren’t hidden, maybe it will force Republicans to work harder to separate themselves from such views, similarly to the way that Democrats expend much effort trying to show that they aren’t secretly communists or whatever.
Hunter biden laptop story isnt really a right wing view and clearly benefits Biden. There is a performative aspect to banning "extreme" views that certainly domt help Republicans.
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".
> 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.
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.
You're comment is a little greyed out which means people are downvoting it. The core aspect being that democrats are center right and republicans are extreme right. The both-sides enlightened centrists can't accept this. The do-nothingness tenant of being in the middle regardless of ideology simply shatters.
I think something a lot of people miss is the difference between Democratic voters and Democratic politicians.
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.
> 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.
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.
Good, don't ever choose a "side". "Sides" are for corralling people into manipulable herds. Every issue should be considered individually using logic and data, rather than following the blind recommendations of a "side" down the line.
If this issue is the sticking point given the other differences in platform (many that involve fundamental rights and freedoms), then it sounds like Republicans have managed to find a good new wedge issue (you not voting is a known part of their playbook).
"people on the left" have no better than than people on the right or anybody else in this regard. When it suits them, when they believe it will advantage them, they are all for suppression of peoples' rights.
I’m surprised by the outrage here. The proliferation of information is always subject to tampering - from news outlets picking headlines to social feeds oriented around engagement. Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties, from the beginning to the end. (If you had told me that powerful people/organizations could not get tweets removed, I would have been surprised; based on my experience functioning on 21st century tech platforms there is almost always a way to engineer content.)
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.
> Literally 100% of the flow of information is being shaped by interested parties
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.
>
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?
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 dont think OP was being dismissive about this whole thing, think OP explained their main point of view when they mentioned,
> 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.
> 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.
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.
It's kind of interesting in the sense that reading internal emails is always kind of interesting...but otherwise, nothing here seems particularly shocking or groundbreaking.
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.
> 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?
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.
I don’t really see a debate. I see an email listing tweets from “the Biden team” and a response that it’s been taken care of.
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!
The story is in how anxious they were to fit it into a hacked material case. Because there was no other existing mechanism in which to do it. (They claimed it in the emails Taibbi referenced.) They admit it was not tenable, because first amendment issues were specifically raised by Rep. Mo Khanna.
It wasn't tenable because the hacked materials policy is for doxing not journalism. Many of the biggest stories broken by NYT and WaPo over the decades have come from hacked/leaked materials. The policy was never meant to prevent these kinds of stories.
Not sure who the person is that posted this, is this legit? The format on most of those "emails" is just completely off and the grammar/spelling check underlining suggests that this is being viewed in an editor.
It's pretty odd that the Verge and Platformer have had wall to wall coverage of every moment of Twitter the past few weeks, including live-tweeting content sourced from (perhaps appropriately) disgruntled ex-employees. And yet here, silence so far.
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."]
It posted as I saved. I edited my comment to reflect that, though my point still holds. Calling it "a flop" is consistent with their recent bias (or pandering?) and ignores the substance of the matter almost entirely.
Perhaps with some investigatory reporting The Verge could have broken this story themselves a year ago -- "the right way."
I think Platformer essentially has a 'get clicks by hating Elon/showing Twitter under Elon' approach these days.
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.
For me the biggest hypocirsy was crying over laid-off H1B visa employees of Twitter and what a monster Musk is. The H1B visa situation is there for decades. The party of humanitarians didn't do a single thing for H1B visa holders. Instead of they used H1B visa holders' accomplishemnts as a way to justify illegal immigration. [1]
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.
You linked to a 6 year old article about the 400 richest Americans, of which 42 were immigrants. What does this have to do with H1Bs and illegal immigration?
It's still kind of odd to think that you can be an in-favor executive at a company, then somebody else can buy your company, fire you, and go back and read all your work emails (many of which would be extremely sensitive) and share it with journalists who then screenshot it and share it with the world on the same platform that employed you!
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.
Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time. So if you're going to blame anyone for this, blame the government. Also the owners of Twitter knew that Musk would have access to these messages. That was priced into the deal. Executives and managers at publicly traded companies are very aware of information retention policies and make sure to avoid putting certain things in writing. That's why so many of the emails are along the lines of, "Can you take a look at this?", or "More to review from the Biden team.", instead of being explicit commands. It's just a miraculous coincidence that every single one of those requests results in censorship or banning.
> 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.
> Because of laws passed after the Enron scandal, publicly traded companies are required to retain internal communications for long periods of time.
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?
> 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.
in this case the government was run by donald trump, and the censorship was to remove stolen revenge porn
> But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
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.
This seems like a kind of question where people are going to come to different conclusions based on what echo chamber they are part of (because news of different instances of policy enforcement are going to be promoted by different groups). You could try to get a handle on the objective truth through a quantitative analysis. Otherwise, we’re all just claiming our priors are obviously the truth.
That nothing in work email is private is well-known (not everyone knows this). That wasn't my point. I place "company looks at employee's email after a credible report of hacking/abuse/whatever" and "rich person purchases major tech platform and uses it to publicize ex-employees email to affect public opinions" in two different categories, especially given the ex-employee was a C-level officer handling some extremely complex and sensitive decisions.
> . 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.
The golden rule: before sending anything potentially sensitive, ask yourself: if this email/doc/note were to be published on the cover page of NYT, would you be embarrassed by it?
If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.
I don't know why people keep pointing this out- I already knew this when I made my comment. I knew it from the day I joined Google and it was just proved out when I read my own manager's email (from a previous role) on the front page of the NYT.
This is very different from legal discovery and disclosure.
It is not even slightly odd. Everybody from the lowest pleb working at any company is made very aware that emails, messages, and any communication that goes through company systems or computers or phones are not private, and may be accessed by the company at any time for any reason, or be subject to subpoena by third parties.
> 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.
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.
> If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.
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.
This isn't about any story that Elon Musk was flogging. It's about a true story that was published in a major tabloid about one of two presidential candidates on the eve of an election that every major media outlet colluded to suppress.
Minimizing it is condescending. Tainting it through associating it with Musk is as cynical as tainting it by associating it with mystery Russians.
> Isn't the problem that the government is doing an end run around the 1st Amendment?
"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.
> But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party
"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"
It’s pretty clear that the policy was heavily driven by connections and with 97%+ employees donating to the Democrats (edit:of employees who donated), it’s obvious which party had the ear of executives.
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 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.
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.
>Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently.
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.
Readit News
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?
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
1. it's conspiracy theory
2. it was obvious to everyone
3. forgotten
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.
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
Does it still rub you the wrong way that Trump was "the government" telling Twitter to remove speech?
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.
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.
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...
[3]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/130/
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.
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.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Joe_Biden
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?
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-sa...
https://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717...
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.
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.”
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.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
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.
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.
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not an argument
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.
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.
Since this is true, then where else are political parties trying to get unflattering speech suppressed that we don't even know of yet?
[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
[1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
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.
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Now that we know the laptop is real, what do you think will come of it?
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.
[0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's the whole internet in terms of journalist and politician communications.
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?
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.
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.
(c) The lack of transparency around this process.
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.
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
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).
Wealthy people in America have access?
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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.
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)
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.
I'll bet most big corporations advertising on Twitter have one too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM
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.
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...
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They lost anyway, but we have no idea what kind of effect they had and what stories were suppressed.
Zuckerberg said it himself on Joe Rogan, it's been common knowledge for years now, only contrarians and stubborn shills claimed otherwise
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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...
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Absolutely everywhere.
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.
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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.
All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.
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.
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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.
You're just arguing that he doesn't really believe what he says. Why communicate in words at that point?
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.
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?"
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".
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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.
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.
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.
I thought that was the smoking gun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just realize you bee-lined straight into partisan politics. Speech policies need to be above that.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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/
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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."]
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/2/23490863/elon-musk-twitte...
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&...
Perhaps with some investigatory reporting The Verge could have broken this story themselves a year ago -- "the right way."
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.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/note-to-readers-8d4
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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.
> 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.
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?
in this case the government was run by donald trump, and the censorship was to remove stolen revenge porn
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.
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.
If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.
> 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.
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.
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.
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If you don't think so now, you might in 2024. So it's time to care now.
"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.
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"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.