THE BIG TECH THREAD

[bklynboy68]

The thing is, Twitter isn't reducing, say, the influence of Mitt Romney's tweets. Or most right wingers.

It's Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino and those people.

Not that long ago, it wouldn't be an outrage on the right for a platform to reduce the influence of wild, paranoid, anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.

No shit. Word is he’s kicked off a bunch but there’s more to go. Amazing that this wasn’t a priority under previous management.

[bklynboy68]

[ziggysmalls]

Last time I checked Twitter with the nice people banned Rand Paul and the NY Post.

I just shake my head at how poeple are like "ehhh who cares..."


FFS

[lovemachine97(Version 2)]

Last time I checked Twitter with the nice people banned Rand Paul and the NY Post.

I just shake my head at how poeple are like "ehhh who cares..."


FFS

Because it's no different than Brett banning people on here he doesn't want to hear from, unless the government made them do it under duress.

Those people have no right to use Brett's platform to engage in speech he doesn't want to allow, and neither do Twitter users.

[bklynboy68]

Because it's no different than Brett banning people on here he doesn't want to hear from, unless the government made them do it under duress.

Those people have no right to use Brett's platform to engage in speech he doesn't want to allow, and neither do Twitter users.

Brett’s not working alongside government to ban speech or users that question government.

[lovemachine97(Version 2)]

Brett’s not working alongside government to ban speech or users that question government.

And yet, so far in the TWITTER FILES the evidence we have of that is the White House in 2020 asking for tweets to be removed and a group of 9 Republicans and 3 Democrats in Congress threatening a "bloodbath" in regulatory hearings for their moderation policies.

Government cannot require these moves. They cannot coerce them. However, cajoling or asking is not a first amendment violation, and neither is the government and Twitter having the same goals.

That's not to say we shouldn't look at anything and investigate smoke, but as long as Twitter wasn't required or coerced into this action--I said, 'unless the government made them do it under duress'--then it's no different.

[Dave's Dreidel]

I think it can be argued that whenever the USG "asks" for something, there is the thinly veiled threat behind it of "we're asking nicely, and if you don't comply we will make your life hell."

[bklynboy68]

December 9, 2022 7:22pm EST


Twitter Files Part 3 reveals what led to Trump's removal from social media platform



The third installment of Elon Musk's Twitter Files delved into what led to the removal of former President Trump's account.

In "part one" of the third installment, which dates from October 2020-January 6th, Substack writer Matt Taibbi told his followers, "We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies."

"Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech," Taibbi wrote on Friday.

He then shared a screenshot of a Twitter employee asking, "Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?"


Taibbi reported that executives at Twitter "started processing new power" following their decision to ban Trump, indicating they were "prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The ‘new administration,’ says one exec, ‘will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.’"


One unnamed executive alleged the "context surrounding" the actions of Trump and his supporters "over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years" contributed to the ban.

"In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways," Taibbi wrote. "The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots."


After alluding to the second installment of the Twitter Files that addressed the shadowbanning of conservatives, Taibbi reported, "As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of 'vios' as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway."

Taibbi then shared internal Slack messages from Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, who made light out of heightened discussions with federal agencies following Jan. 6. Roth joked about the lack of "generic enough" calendar descriptions to conceal the "very interesting" meetings he had.


"One particular slack channel offers an unique window into the evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 and early 2021," Taibbi reported. "On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called 'us2020_xfn_enforcement.' Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved ‘high-profile’ accounts (often called ‘VITs’ or ‘Very Important Tweeters’)."

He continued, "There was at least some tension between Safety Operations – a larger department whose staffers used a more rules-based process for addressing issues like porn, scams, and threats – and a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and [Twitter's former trust and policy chief Vijaya] Gadde. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President."

"During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day," Taibbi added.


Taibbi then turned to correspondence involving Twitter's policy director Nick Pickles with one employee asking him if Twitter should say it "detects ‘misinfo’ through ‘ML, human review, and **partnerships with outside experts?*’ adding, "I know that’s been a slippery process… not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that."

Pickles himself is seen asking if Twitter could "just say ‘partnerships,' later writing, "e.g. not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts."

Taibbi revealed that Roth not only met with the FBI, DHS and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, he apparently discussed the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story.


"Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an ‘Aspen Institute thing,’ then take a call with Apple," Taibbi wrote while sharing a screenshot of an exchange.

Taibbi shared another message, explaining, "Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets, the second of which involves a former Tippecanoe County, Indiana Councilor and Republican named @JohnBasham claiming ‘Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.’"


"The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack. Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was 'proven to be false,' then noted the second was already deemed ‘no vio on numerous occasions,’" Taibbi reported. "The group then decides to apply a ‘Learn how voting is safe and secure’ label because one commenter says, ‘it’s totally normal to have a 2% error rate.’ Roth then gives the final go-ahead to the process initiated by the FBI."


"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," Taibbi wrote.



Taibbi then turned to an October 2020 tweet made by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who joked that he voted with his mail-in ballot and then "voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me!"

This led to internal discussions with one Twitter employee saying "I agree it’s a joke… but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet a crime."

"The group declares Huck’s an ‘edge case,’ and though one notes, ‘we don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire,’ they ultimately decide to leave him be, because ‘we’ve poked enough bears,’" Taibbi reported. "'Could still mislead people... could still mislead people,' the humor-averse group declares, before moving on from Huckabee. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in 'confusion.' This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues."


On Thursday, The Free Press editor Bari Weiss revealed Twitter's efforts to suppress prominent conservatives, a resurfaced September 2018 clip of Dorsey's testimony to a congressional committee was asked point-blank whether Twitter "censors" its users.

She pointed to Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.

"Twitter secretly placed him on a 'Trends Blacklist,' which prevented his tweets from trending," Weiss reported.

She reported that Fox News host Dan Bongino was placed on a "Search Blacklist" and Twitter had Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk on "Do Not Amplify."


Taibbi, who published the first installment of the "Twitter Files," addressed what led to Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election.


https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitte...media-platform

[MD 5150]

Did Jack Dorsey lie under oath?

[lovemachine97(Version 2)]

This thread is definitely more interesting than the previous two. I'd like to zoom out for a second and metion that I can't think of a journalistic reason why you'd publish piecemeal like this without knowing the full context, how all the facts relate, and thus the real story, in context, without threads that go nowhere, like you're writing Lost. WE have already had our first 'Well, we mentioned a thing in thread 1, and we are told it happened, but we haven't seen that it did, but we are told it did, but then again we haven't read nearly all the stuff yet.' Well, shouldn't you have, though, before publishing?

Anyway, setting aside the FBI meetings part of this (get to that in a minute) I think this shows some true chaos, with some okay and some not so okay decisions happening in a whirlwind. At the same time, the idea here is squashing conservative points of view, but they sure do spend a lot of time talking about it and not just automatically deleting tweets or doing full shadow bans. (We should also remember that Twitter reversed themselves on squashing the laptop story the next day.) I should stress I prefer Twitter doesn't do all this shit. I think the culture of free speech is important. But I still don't yet see anything that is any worse, though less transparent, than what Musk says he is going to do.

The FBI meetings thing is really the juiciest thing, here, but before I freak out I have suspicion that Taibbi is characterizing these as election content meetings and I have this sneaking suspicion that these are the meetings that Zuckerberg talked about on Joe Rogan (I can't put the YouTube link at all without a giant player showing up, but the video code after the V= is BN3PIGLDscQ), that Yoel Roth mentions in the FEC investigation of Twitter over the election, and that were testified to while being deposed by FBI agent Elvis Chan, who was the liaison to these companies for general information about cyber security threats during the election. Something tells me, since we know the full breadth isn't even known by Taibbi nor Weiss, that it is these meetings that we are talking about, where no one involved says they were told to suppress anything specific.

But if it isn't, then that gets more interesting.

[ziggysmalls]

Maybe I just dont see it. One of the biggest social media platforms decided to censor content based on political ideology. They had at least weekly interactions with the DOJ and FBI> They were told about misinformation. They decided to act as judge, jury and executioner with content. Meanwhile denying it in press and will be likely all called to swear an oath. Jack's counterpart at FB Zuckenberg did testify about the government inferring about mininformation. Then you have former governemnt employees, which was about 54 who likely all still have seciurity clearances, relations with the DOJ, FBI, CIA, etc all who likely had influence witih current peoples career path stating eveyrthing was a hoax. Russian misinformation wihtout analyzing anything.

You have Big Tech that is selectively picking out people to limit their speech on yes a private platform but still a part of out of our media. Just like the NY Times, Washington Post, etc decided not to air stories or change the narrative. Remmeber when Dan Rather used that bogus story on GW? That one event was criticized because yes it was a political hit job. This is hundreds if not thousands of political hit jobs.

That said I cannot fathom how anybody thinks this is all good, no story, etc. Government would never ever do anything malicious to a party, persons, race, etc. Freaking slack messages show that there was intent of limiting information. Censoring information and people are going to be testfiying about this.

[bklynboy68]

Maybe I just dont see it. One of the biggest social media platforms decided to censor content based on political ideology. They had at least weekly interactions with the DOJ and FBI> They were told about misinformation. They decided to act as judge, jury and executioner with content. Meanwhile denying it in press and will be likely all called to swear an oath. Jack's counterpart at FB Zuckenberg did testify about the government inferring about mininformation. Then you have former governemnt employees, which was about 54 who likely all still have seciurity clearances, relations with the DOJ, FBI, CIA, etc all who likely had influence witih current peoples career path stating eveyrthing was a hoax. Russian misinformation wihtout analyzing anything.

You have Big Tech that is selectively picking out people to limit their speech on yes a private platform but still a part of out of our media. Just like the NY Times, Washington Post, etc decided not to air stories or change the narrative. Remmeber when Dan Rather used that bogus story on GW? That one event was criticized because yes it was a political hit job. This is hundreds if not thousands of political hit jobs.

That said I cannot fathom how anybody thinks this is all good, no story, etc. Government would never ever do anything malicious to a party, persons, race, etc. Freaking slack messages show that there was intent of limiting information. Censoring information and people are going to be testfiying about this.

And James "Russia Hoax" Baker of all people working there and getting fired for trying to edit these releases.

[bklynboy68]

This gets even better. A Podesta for crying out loud.




Dec 9, 2022

John Podesta’s 'niece' QUITS Twitter Trust & Safety Council as Elon Musk takes on child exploitation

[Brett]

Information has been censored by platforms on all media forever. This is nothing new. And I seriously doubt you would care this much if it was the political party you liked that did it. Let’s be real. You guys wouldn’t give two shits about any of this crap if it was liberal crap that was being suppressed. Fox News suppresses liberal stuff all the time. They spread bs about the pandemic that were clearly false, but that’s what media is now. All of these media outlets have agendas, every single one of them. Twitter is no different. It’s another shitty platform for the media to spin their biases. And it will continue to be the same thing with Musk as the owner because he has his own set of values and biases that he uses at will. Nothing is going to be different except the slant.

If you guys really believe that the news media has ever been transparent with regards to the government, then I don’t know what to tell you. I was a journalism major. I went to college for this. I know what the media did even back in the early 90s. Nothing has changed now. The only thing that has changed is that everyone knows everything now because of the Internet.

You guys are just very selectively angry about the things you don’t like. You have the same biases as everyone else. And from what I can see only thing Twitter got rid of was all the false bullshit by all the people who are anti-believers in the pandemic.

Twitter is a fucking shit hole. It was a shit hole before and it’s a shit hole now. You want to know where the worst people exist online in the mainstream, just look at Twitter. That’s where they are.

And of course, when you have an owner, like Musk who says shit like “I am for free speech,” which is a thinly veiled comment for “I’m going to allow racist and hateful horrible people on Twitter unless, of course, it somehow conflicts with my personal idealogy.” So, of course, you give a voice to those who don’t deserve to have a voice, and it gives them more power. Twitter is a racist’s wet dream. I think whatever information has been suppressed is far less serious than what is going to occur under his regime. The rise of hatred in this country has grown exponentially since Trump was president, and it will only get worse with someone like this trumpeting his platform like this. Twitter will continue to be the breeding ground for hatred. It’s about as much of a viable media source as the toilet paper you wipe your ass with.

Do you know how much Elon Musk’s ego is getting off on all this? Dude is just laughing at the entertainment value he is providing, because he doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything else.

[chain]

Information has been censored by platforms on all media forever. This is nothing new. And I seriously doubt you would care this much if it was the political party you liked that did it. Let’s be real. You guys wouldn’t give two shits about any of this crap if it was liberal crap that was being suppressed. Fox News suppresses liberal stuff all the time. They spread bs about the pandemic that were clearly false, but that’s what media is now. All of these media outlets have agendas, every single one of them. Twitter is no different. It’s another shitty platform for the media to spin their biases. And it will continue to be the same thing with Musk as the owner because he has his own set of values and biases that he uses at will. Nothing is going to be different except the slant.

If you guys really believe that the news media has ever been transparent with regards to the government, then I don’t know what to tell you. I was a journalism major. I went to college for this. I know what the media did even back in the early 90s. Nothing has changed now. The only thing that has changed is that everyone knows everything now because of the Internet.

You guys are just very selectively angry about the things you don’t like. You have the same biases as everyone else. And from what I can see only thing Twitter got rid of was all the false bullshit by all the people who are anti-believers in the pandemic.

Twitter is a fucking shit hole. It was a shit hole before and it’s a shit hole now. You want to know where the worst people exist online in the mainstream, just look at Twitter. That’s where they are.

And of course, when you have an owner, like Musk who says shit like “I am for free speech,” which is a thinly veiled comment for “I’m going to allow racist and hateful horrible people on Twitter unless, of course, it somehow conflicts with my personal idealogy.” So, of course, you give a voice to those who don’t deserve to have a voice, and it gives them more power. Twitter is a racist’s wet dream. I think whatever information has been suppressed is far less serious than what is going to occur under his regime. The rise of hatred in this country has grown exponentially since Trump was president, and it will only get worse with someone like this trumpeting his platform like this. Twitter will continue to be the breeding ground for hatred. It’s about as much of a viable media source as the toilet paper you wipe your ass with.

Do you know how much Elon Musk’s ego is getting off on all this? Dude is just laughing at the entertainment value he is providing, because he doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything else.

Well said Brett.....