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Twittergate is a big deal (Updated)
3 years ago
We now have hard evidence that that Twitter controls and shapes what it's users see across multiple levels and using various tools. FBI even was trying to play damage control up to the second twittergate drop. All of this was suspected for years and was rather obvious to anyone paying attention but now we have basically signed confessions. It is obvious that the shaping of speech is happening on other big tech platforms as well: Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc. Everything you think you may know very well could have been a false narrative planted there by pervasive information control across multiple platforms. The damage from pushing such false narratives is real and extensive.
There is a reason free speech is the FIRST in the US bill of rights. "Twitter is a private platform" does not hold water when the people making 'requests' of Twitter are government employees and twitter receives lots of public support, such as de-facto official status via adoption by US government officials. Even under the most generous interpretation of private property rights, big tech has successfully managed to practice Enclosure in the digital age. For brief context on what Enclosure is and why it is bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
If you ever made a "freeze peach" joke you contributed to all of these false narratives and the damage they have caused and continue to cause.
These threads threads, plural and still ongoing, discuss the cavalier behavior of Twitter moderators inventing rules as they go along to justify censoring anyone they don't agree with: politicians, reporters, actors and doctors. They resort to "visibility filtering" which is shadow banning by another name. Shadowbanning is criticized as a pernicious form of censorship because it is so easily abused. They also deployed a range of bots to automatically apply harder visibility filtering if anyone stepped out of line and used terms they did NOT want trending. They defer to the FBI and NGO "experts" to take the brunt of the blame for censorship; mostly to justify to themselves and perhaps to any potential audit to make it look more earnest. But who selects which NGOs and experts they listen to? And why would they be rapidly changing their policies so often if it weren't to censor individuals on demand? They censored plenty of posts that did not expressly violate policies, calling these censored posts "NVOs". There's also plenty of cases of behavior that does violate their terms of service that wasn't censored because it followed the right narrative. That is to say, they were unevenly enforcing their rules. And I should note that overreaching rules enforced unevenly is a trademark of tyrants.
Again, this is way bigger than any individual politicians. This fusion of corporations--which reasonably includes NGOs--and state, is textbook fascism and has been used to manipulate elections. Not merely the presidential one, but others as well. The twitter files seem to center around the 2020 election between Trump and Biden, but look on the larger scale. This was merely the nucleation point where they cemented their power, where big tech asserted their dominance over narratives, deciding which ones are allowed and which ones are not. It's natural for reporting to focus on these points as reporters need that draw to get people to read the story, but do read the whole story. This behavior was evident before across multiple platforms, but now we have receipts of it happening within Twitter.
Democracy, if you really value such a thing, is about decentralized power. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc represent centralized and unaccountable authority. They're not even financial successes so the free market appeal does not make sense either. If anything is a threat to our democracy, it's this kind of opaque and centralized power.
If you're out of the loop, Twitter Files:
Part 1: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....22959866683394
Part2: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status.....07575633305600
Part 3: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....52083617505281
Part 4: https://nitter.net/ShellenbergerMD/.....20455005511680
Part 5: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status.....64197194432515
Part 6: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....57534737072128
Part 6b: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....13292491538432
Part 7: https://nitter.net/ShellenbergerMD/.....71630613753856
Part 8: https://nitter.net/lhfang/status/16.....92454261182464
There is a reason free speech is the FIRST in the US bill of rights. "Twitter is a private platform" does not hold water when the people making 'requests' of Twitter are government employees and twitter receives lots of public support, such as de-facto official status via adoption by US government officials. Even under the most generous interpretation of private property rights, big tech has successfully managed to practice Enclosure in the digital age. For brief context on what Enclosure is and why it is bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
If you ever made a "freeze peach" joke you contributed to all of these false narratives and the damage they have caused and continue to cause.
These threads threads, plural and still ongoing, discuss the cavalier behavior of Twitter moderators inventing rules as they go along to justify censoring anyone they don't agree with: politicians, reporters, actors and doctors. They resort to "visibility filtering" which is shadow banning by another name. Shadowbanning is criticized as a pernicious form of censorship because it is so easily abused. They also deployed a range of bots to automatically apply harder visibility filtering if anyone stepped out of line and used terms they did NOT want trending. They defer to the FBI and NGO "experts" to take the brunt of the blame for censorship; mostly to justify to themselves and perhaps to any potential audit to make it look more earnest. But who selects which NGOs and experts they listen to? And why would they be rapidly changing their policies so often if it weren't to censor individuals on demand? They censored plenty of posts that did not expressly violate policies, calling these censored posts "NVOs". There's also plenty of cases of behavior that does violate their terms of service that wasn't censored because it followed the right narrative. That is to say, they were unevenly enforcing their rules. And I should note that overreaching rules enforced unevenly is a trademark of tyrants.
Again, this is way bigger than any individual politicians. This fusion of corporations--which reasonably includes NGOs--and state, is textbook fascism and has been used to manipulate elections. Not merely the presidential one, but others as well. The twitter files seem to center around the 2020 election between Trump and Biden, but look on the larger scale. This was merely the nucleation point where they cemented their power, where big tech asserted their dominance over narratives, deciding which ones are allowed and which ones are not. It's natural for reporting to focus on these points as reporters need that draw to get people to read the story, but do read the whole story. This behavior was evident before across multiple platforms, but now we have receipts of it happening within Twitter.
Democracy, if you really value such a thing, is about decentralized power. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc represent centralized and unaccountable authority. They're not even financial successes so the free market appeal does not make sense either. If anything is a threat to our democracy, it's this kind of opaque and centralized power.
If you're out of the loop, Twitter Files:
Part 1: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....22959866683394
Part2: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status.....07575633305600
Part 3: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....52083617505281
Part 4: https://nitter.net/ShellenbergerMD/.....20455005511680
Part 5: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status.....64197194432515
Part 6: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....57534737072128
Part 6b: https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....13292491538432
Part 7: https://nitter.net/ShellenbergerMD/.....71630613753856
Part 8: https://nitter.net/lhfang/status/16.....92454261182464
https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....52083617505281
For you, Tocixcog, to focus on the specific person relaying the info from Musk is highly disingenuous.
tl;dr, nudes of Hunter Biden, posted as revenge porn, are not protected speech. (Also, neither Hunter nor Joe was an official in October 2020.)
If this were Don Jr's laptop it would be all over the news. And rightfully so!
Now, you have half a point that children of politicians benefit from nepotism. But this is more a power problem than a party problem. Donald signed his companies over to his sons, rather than a blind trust. Jared Kushner's fund got $2b from Saudi Arabia, and its first investment went to California.
As for the nepotism angle, the corruption is so rampant throughout all of Washington that it would be ridiculous to only enforce the rules if Trump is engaging in it. If Trump and co engaged in anything, it's because they were inspired by the mountains of corruption before them. Most importantly is that you were aware of this corruption. But the other kind of corruption, like Hunter's Burisma dealings, were suppressed and this did influence voting.
And let me re-iterate, this is just ONE story of many that Twitter has suppressed. And Twitter is just ONE platform among many that are being manipulated. Getting hung up on this one story is missing just how huge and pervasive the issue is. State actors and corporations working together in this manner is textbook fascism and it is being performed to circumvent the bill of rights. If you get hung up over stories about president's sons then you're missing the much bigger picture.
Point A: it was Trump's FBI. Do the "files" give specific examples of censorship of Democratic talking points at Republicans' behest?
As for your second comment:
"Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here."
https://nitter.net/mtaibbi/status/1.....67426129543169
You titled this, "Twittergate is a big deal." Does either thread give non-Biden examples?
Until you understand that this is way bigger than Trump or Biden you are stuck with an stunted understanding of the whole state of our union and you will not grow in any meaningful way. So long as you fixate on Trump/Biden, you are demonstrating that you have ignored everything I've said and you refuse to even read the important stories I have linked for you to read, and thus you are disrespecting my time and efforts. I will mock and treat you condescendingly because you're still stuck in the WWE playpen of political theater.
Note: I've updated the main post because I ended up rambling way more and that should be part of the general topic.
For one thing, faces and heels make laws and appoint judges, affecting millions of people directly. I have to be invested in part of that.
For another, what would "solving" Twittergate (my word, not yours) look like? Not even the steps to get there, but a solved state? Visibility filtering and tools like it arose from a particularly visible episode of disinformation campaigning (which, like it or not, contributed to one party's 2016 victory). And if you want to retort that algorithmic topic promotion was just the same problem with opposite polarity, we're now into the weeds on search engines and the somehow-yet-another-political-question of net neutrality (should a website give a user exactly what they ask for, and no more?).
Lastly, I hope you don't think Elon is any purer a champion, or Bari any less of a pawn in this cynical angle. That billionaire paragon of free speech is keeping the tools you call "shadow banning by another name." https://twitter.com/whstancil/statu.....20232994201601
The big picture about Twittergate is Enclosure. Turning the public square into private property and moreover using that private ownership as shield to violate rights. There's a lot of things that are defacto illegal to say. If you say them, you get banned from social media. And there's a lot of topics. Which begs the question: How much information has been kept from us?
Elon is a billionaire that made his wealth by sucking on the government teat. Of course he's no savior. Maybe his goal is to demonstrate that Twitter is too powerful to be owned by anyone and force the government to buy it from him. That would fit with his history. Hard to say what his real goal is. But what I can say is this current episode demonstrates the kind of agenda-driven moderation behind one social media platform. It's obvious it has been happening, on Twitter and elsewhere.
This censorship that was fairly well known and Twittergate is the very rare signed confession that rarely comes out to vindicate a well substantiated conspiracy theory. Lately there have been quite a few well substantiated conspiracy theories that have been vindicated. Eventually the media could no longer suppress the information and would admit certain facts to be true, but discussing those facts before the media admits it would trigger a ban on social media. Twittergate is extra important because it's about HOW the ones benefiting from these conspiracies were enabled by social media by using censorship to silence the truth.
I don't trust Twitter. Just like you cited, Elon still believes in visibility filtering. Mastodon doesn't look great, but at least it's not Twitter. One of the tragedies is that no social media is profitable. They're all oligarch pet projects that have been kept afloat through deep pockets. This manipulation of the market has stymied adoption and development in alternatives; we would expect to be Mastodon to be more advanced if Twitter only had the engineers and hardware and hosting it could afford with its own revenue.
It would be foolish to discard this information because it's coming from Elon or Bari. Again, all of this was well substantiated before Elon took over. And there a many, many Twitter employees and ex-employees that could dispute twittergate.
Twittergate represents a crisis in epistemology. We have to seriously ask what we think to be true and why we think it to be true. A cohesive narrative across multiple platforms is not enough and Twittergate is just one example of that kind of narrative synchronization being employed.