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This entire thing is so bizarre to me. There is a room full of non-technical senators effectively testifying the unproven and one-sided statements of a single p

This entire thing is so bizarre to me. There is a room full of non-technical senators effectively testifying the unproven and one-sided statements of a single person (Zatko), who was let go from Twitter, with no ability for Twitter (or anyone at the company) to defend themselves or refute these statements.

zitterbewegung 4y ago
What you say is untrue. Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  For good reason. Usually, these whistleblower sessions are used as a place to get sound bites for campaigning and give the CEO a tongue lashing. Due to the pending acquisition, this one has stakes that are about 100x higher than the typical whistleblower session. If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children) For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn. As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4]. It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-are-suing-for-trauma-ptsd https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-a... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-over-ignoring-hate-speech/a-59610062 https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-ov... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings [4] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-depression-young-girls-lawsuits-claim/story?id=87418473 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-d...
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      > no one monitors these groups In a country that values freedom of speech and association, this is considered a feature, not a bug.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        US-style absolutist interpretations of "freedom of speech" always come at a serious cost - and in almost all cases marginalized people (people of color, jews, and most recently trans people) end up bearing that cost, while the majority society feels no impact.
        claytongulick 4y ago
        US-style absolutism about freedom of speech comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse. It seems that much of the world has forgotten or willfully ignore these lessons. The cost of freedom is that people will use it to do things you don't like. Freedom isn't necessary for a society to function, lots of societies function without it, and have for most of human history. Given the choice though, I prefer to live in a society that chooses to maximize liberty. Without freedom of speech, all other liberties are irrelevant. There's a reason why it's the first amendment.
        ohgodplsno 4y ago
        >comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse. Your country is barely 300 years old and has had a single constitution for its whole existence. The US has learned _no_ lessons through its existence. It's a country founded by colons who didn't want to pay taxes to the UK. The amount of lessons the US can give the world is about... none.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        mschuster91 4y ago
  - rvz 4y ago
    > If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Good. It is an indefensible house of cards where it can take someone like Mudge to just blow it up and give the regulators a reason to give a massive fine and put them under strict rules to do better, and they should give them massive fines.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Mudge won't blow it up. Regulators may go for $X00 million of fines, but that's it. The company will release a statement saying, "all of this is incorrect about our business, and we are inviting some congresspeople to come meet with us on a fact-finding trip." Rules might get a little stricter, but the lobbyists from Facebook and Google won't let them get strict enough to hurt them - and any rule that hurts Twitter materially will hurt FB a lot more. This kind of thing is a once-in-3-months occurrence now, and no meaningful changes ever come of it. The only reason this one is different is because of the specter of Elon Musk's acquisition falling through.
      - dereg 4y ago
        Lindsey Graham committed to, in the testimony, working with Elizabeth Warren to create new rules, similar to Europe’s GDPR. Perhaps watching the testimony would change your mind.
        deltree7 4y ago
        When it comes to details, dems and repubs want totally opposite things. Repubs want free speech (unbanning of conservatives, Trump), Dems want control (what can and can't be said on the platform). Bottomline, Ain't happening
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Could counsel have appeared instead?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    No. Individuals get invited to Congress (or subpoenaed), and you can bring a lawyer to advise you, but they cannot speak.
throwoutway 4y ago
It’s not a court, and Twitter doesn’t have a right to be there (nor do any executives want to be in front of Congress under oath). Edit: The ranking member of the committee in the video said that the Twitter CEO was invited but refused to join the hearing. So there you go but Twitter has already testified more or less through compliance statements and attestations about their security, and now we’re finding out about what they’ve been sweeping under the rug.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  This is a fair point. They had their chance when they filed their statements with the SEC and others. And they also control a big megaphone. If they want to release a statement, they can tweet it and boost it directly into everyone's feed.
- rvz 4y ago
  Maybe that is why they were hiding. So someone else had to say something. All it takes is this experienced security professional to bring down the house of cards that Twitter security is built on and it will just tell us that they have been hiding lots of skeletons and nasty secrets that were spun by the company for years.
justin66 4y ago
> no ability for Twitter (or anyone at the company) to defend themselves or refute these statements. In declining to appear, their CEO traded the ability to refute statements in real time alongside Mudge for the ability to release carefully crafted statements after the fact that will receive public scrutiny but do not require him to tell the truth in response to any questions from congress, the content of which are out of his control. Misleading public statements can get them in hot water with regulators, but lying to congress is a crime. It's probably a smart move, and it's certainly not unfair to Twitter.
specialist 4y ago
Senators may (appear to) be naive, ignorant, unteachable. It might even be true. Their staff and advisors most certainly are not. When Sen Orrin Hatch is asking stupid questions about facebook and ads, it's most certainly an act. For the benefit of the blue hairs back home. As a former activist, I assume any public hearing is performance art. Personal anecdote. One time the rules were suspended and I was allowed to testify about a bill being considered. I pointed out the vendor they were about to award an important contract appeared to be out of business. No phone, website offline, offices shuttered. (I had prev made sure some contacts from the local media were present.) Whoops! Immediate recess. Hour later they reconvene. That bill is promptly tabled and onto next order of business. Exactly zero comment made about the matter. That council never repeated the mistake of letting me go off script.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

What you say is untrue. Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter

pclmulqdq 4y ago
For good reason. Usually, these whistleblower sessions are used as a place to get sound bites for campaigning and give the CEO a tongue lashing. Due to the pending acquisition, this one has stakes that are about 100x higher than the typical whistleblower session. If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children) For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn. As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4]. It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-are-suing-for-trauma-ptsd https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35xk5/facebook-moderators-a... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-over-ignoring-hate-speech/a-59610062 https://www.dw.com/en/india-facebook-under-the-microscope-ov... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings [4] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-depression-young-girls-lawsuits-claim/story?id=87418473 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/instagram-eating-disorders-d...
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    > no one monitors these groups In a country that values freedom of speech and association, this is considered a feature, not a bug.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      US-style absolutist interpretations of "freedom of speech" always come at a serious cost - and in almost all cases marginalized people (people of color, jews, and most recently trans people) end up bearing that cost, while the majority society feels no impact.
      - claytongulick 4y ago
        US-style absolutism about freedom of speech comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse. It seems that much of the world has forgotten or willfully ignore these lessons. The cost of freedom is that people will use it to do things you don't like. Freedom isn't necessary for a society to function, lots of societies function without it, and have for most of human history. Given the choice though, I prefer to live in a society that chooses to maximize liberty. Without freedom of speech, all other liberties are irrelevant. There's a reason why it's the first amendment.
        ohgodplsno 4y ago
        >comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse. Your country is barely 300 years old and has had a single constitution for its whole existence. The US has learned _no_ lessons through its existence. It's a country founded by colons who didn't want to pay taxes to the UK. The amount of lessons the US can give the world is about... none.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        mschuster91 4y ago
- rvz 4y ago
  > If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars. Good. It is an indefensible house of cards where it can take someone like Mudge to just blow it up and give the regulators a reason to give a massive fine and put them under strict rules to do better, and they should give them massive fines.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Mudge won't blow it up. Regulators may go for $X00 million of fines, but that's it. The company will release a statement saying, "all of this is incorrect about our business, and we are inviting some congresspeople to come meet with us on a fact-finding trip." Rules might get a little stricter, but the lobbyists from Facebook and Google won't let them get strict enough to hurt them - and any rule that hurts Twitter materially will hurt FB a lot more. This kind of thing is a once-in-3-months occurrence now, and no meaningful changes ever come of it. The only reason this one is different is because of the specter of Elon Musk's acquisition falling through.
    - dereg 4y ago
      Lindsey Graham committed to, in the testimony, working with Elizabeth Warren to create new rules, similar to Europe’s GDPR. Perhaps watching the testimony would change your mind.
      - deltree7 4y ago
        When it comes to details, dems and repubs want totally opposite things. Repubs want free speech (unbanning of conservatives, Trump), Dems want control (what can and can't be said on the platform). Bottomline, Ain't happening
whimsicalism 4y ago
Could counsel have appeared instead?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  No. Individuals get invited to Congress (or subpoenaed), and you can bring a lawyer to advise you, but they cannot speak.

throwoutway 4y ago

It’s not a court, and Twitter doesn’t have a right to be there (nor do any executives want to be in front of Congress under oath). Edit: The ranking member of the committee in the video said that the Twitter CEO was invited but refused to join the hearing. So there you go but Twitter has already testified more or less through compliance statements and attestations about their security, and now we’re finding out about what they’ve been sweeping under the rug.

xhkkffbf 4y ago
This is a fair point. They had their chance when they filed their statements with the SEC and others. And they also control a big megaphone. If they want to release a statement, they can tweet it and boost it directly into everyone's feed.
rvz 4y ago
Maybe that is why they were hiding. So someone else had to say something. All it takes is this experienced security professional to bring down the house of cards that Twitter security is built on and it will just tell us that they have been hiding lots of skeletons and nasty secrets that were spun by the company for years.

justin66 4y ago

> no ability for Twitter (or anyone at the company) to defend themselves or refute these statements. In declining to appear, their CEO traded the ability to refute statements in real time alongside Mudge for the ability to release carefully crafted statements after the fact that will receive public scrutiny but do not require him to tell the truth in response to any questions from congress, the content of which are out of his control. Misleading public statements can get them in hot water with regulators, but lying to congress is a crime. It's probably a smart move, and it's certainly not unfair to Twitter.

specialist 4y ago

Senators may (appear to) be naive, ignorant, unteachable. It might even be true. Their staff and advisors most certainly are not. When Sen Orrin Hatch is asking stupid questions about facebook and ads, it's most certainly an act. For the benefit of the blue hairs back home. As a former activist, I assume any public hearing is performance art. Personal anecdote. One time the rules were suspended and I was allowed to testify about a bill being considered. I pointed out the vendor they were about to award an important contract appeared to be out of business. No phone, website offline, offices shuttered. (I had prev made sure some contacts from the local media were present.) Whoops! Immediate recess. Hour later they reconvene. That bill is promptly tabled and onto next order of business. Exactly zero comment made about the matter. That council never repeated the mistake of letting me go off script.