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So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the ot

So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. What am I missing?

woodruffw 4y ago
Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is required to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US government's positions and re-derive every public policy position for itself. It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit. Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?
- junofan 4y ago
  I mean, you can skim the emails here [1]. Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad. [1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad? I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page 147), and so far I see: * A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe there's some question about propriety, but that isn't itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is entirely private-to-public. * Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them for sending those media reports (p. 164). * Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to (about 30 pages of just that). * Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public information about vaccines: that they don't contain microchips, etc. Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.
    - junofan 4y ago
      I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical. For ex: p516 is a request from a redacted sender in which the sender shares an elections-related post and then asks to know how it was handled. The message footer references CISA policy. I think the tone is a little strange and could be reasonably construed as a way to work around the policy of not seeking action laid out in the message footer.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        > I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical. Because it's the crux of TFA. Without evidence that the Federal Government pressured companies to spike information they considered unfavorable, this is just a big pile of emails between bureaucrats and office workers. The email on p. 516 exemplifies this: someone in USG is asking Meta how they responded to a local government report. They're not asking for any specific action from Meta, and there's no evidence in the replies that Meta's employees construed the request as a demand to do anything.
traviswt 4y ago
It would be wild if we find out he was also banned in a similar manner to this Berenson guy. As for what you’re missing, maybe that Trump was too anti-establishment, like his “drain the swamp” rhetoric? Based on the article this seems like it would be a systemic issue.
peteradio 4y ago
> What am I missing? Prior political allegiances of said companies.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
> What am missing? The article isn’t about big tech or why they comply. It is about the US Government employing a proxy (wittingly or not) to violate The Constitution of The United States of America and conceal that activity.
pessimizer 4y ago
> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. No it didn't. It tolerated all types of behavior from and around him (that wasn't tolerated from other people) until the last possible second that he could have a say about anything, then it immediately banned him to please the new regime. Trump literally assassinated an Iranian general I believe largely because that general would humiliate Trump in twitter fights, not banned. New regime? Banned.
- aaron_m04 4y ago
  No, he was banned before the new regime, but immediately after he was implicated in an attempted coup.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    "Coup" over the introduction of a new regime. If your beliefs rely on Trump being powerful enough in the last days of his term to be a threat to a FAANG company in good stead with the incoming regime, your beliefs are fragile.
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
With the current lobbying and campaign funding rules, government is more or less a consortium of big businesses. What exactly does business have to fear, when all the branches of government are full of their own representatives? You can’t both assert that the government doesn’t serve the people AND government doesn’t serve businesses. I agree that it is an unreasonable premise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- towaway15463 4y ago
  What would be the point of influencing government if it had no power over you?
  - deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
    The reverse is true as well. What would be the point of influencing government if it gave you no power over it?
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      It’s rather circular, I imagine.
dilap 4y ago
As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." They banned Trump when he was on the way out, and an administration still very hostile to him and his supporters was on the way in.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  The wind was obviously blowing in a different direction on Dec 11 when all 50 states had certified their elections. Why wasn’t he banned then?
  - dilap 4y ago
    Even if in your heart-of-hearts you wanted to ban Trump, I don't think you'd do it then -- seems like bad strategy w/ the various legal challenges to the election still in play.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      All legal challenges to the election were over on Dec 11. The last of the last ditch, hail Mary efforts was the Texas case, which was rejected by SCOTUS on Dec 11. With that rejection and the certification from all 50 states, that was the key day that the winds changed definitively. Instead of banning him on that day, Twitter banned him on Jan 8, after he had used Twitter to organize a violent coup attempt on Jan 6. I think Occam's razor tells us we should accept that Twitter banned Trump for the obvious and proximal cause, rather than some hypothetical effort to curry political favor that predates the inauguration of the new administration, but postdates the new administration's certainty.
      - dilap 4y ago
        Ah, my bad on the timing. Thanks for the correction. Still, I think my logic still holds; if they banned him out of the blue right as the winds changed, it would be obviously political; by waiting for a casus belli (as it were), they can credibly claim non-political reasons.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Nothing. These companies are about making a profit. Anarchy and excess deaths both reduce profits. This explains their actions very easily.
naasking 4y ago
> On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power. I'm not sure why you would neglect that. Maybe they would banned him anyway, or maybe not. We can't evaluate that counterfactual, but what actually happened is consistent with the narrative.
- krapp 4y ago
  >Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power. What means of retaliation do you believe Trump would have had against social media platforms while in office? A President doesn't have the legal authority to simply outlaw companies they disagree with, nor do they have a right to a social media account, or to force businesses to accept them as a customer, or carte blanche to violate contracts or terms of service. Sign an executive order making it illegal to ban his accounts? Executive orders aren't laws, and Presidents aren't monarchs. Meanwhile, as a billionaire celebrity even out of office, Trump remains perfectly capable of suing over his social media bans, which he is currently doing.
  - naasking 4y ago
    He can direct the justice department to investigate all sorts of possible infractions, costing them considerable money in legal fees, disrupting business activities, and causing negative PR. Trying to do any of this as the election loser it just comes across as sour grapes, and the justice department wouldn't follow any directions of this sort. And this is just scratching the surface.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Texas has been doing this to big tech https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-1848956901 https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-...
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 4y ago
> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president Honestly that makes it worse - they appear to be following orders given by a specific political party but ignore those given by the other.
waffleiron 4y ago
The previous president was banned after he no longer had political power.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  While literally true, this doesn’t accurately reflect the immediate circumstances that led him to be banned. In other words: it’s not true that his lack of political power was the thing that got him banned.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Also to say he lacks political power is objectively false. While he's no longer in office, for sure, he still wields tremendous political power.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  He was a) the current president and b) politically powerful enough to trigger an attack on Congress. It's a little silly to pretend he was somehow a powerless private citizen on Jan 6. The man remains politically powerful today; see his impact on the current Republican primaries as an example.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      This is not a sensible response: the Capitol riot was the closest the US has come to open, widespread political violence in a century and a half. The fact that it was largely ineffective doesn't detract from it any more than the Beer Hall Putsch's failure detracts from, well, you know.
      - dmix 4y ago
        A single gun shot was enough to stop an entire group of unarmed rioters, but they still posed the greatest risk of political violence in 150 years? If the capitol police had properly prepared for the event as if it was a normal DC protest instead of a speaking event then none of it would have happened. The thin line of cops was obviously insufficient. The police response just took some time to organize but it was never under any serious threat of being overwhelmed.

woodruffw 4y ago

Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is required to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US government's positions and re-derive every public policy position for itself. It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit. Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?

junofan 4y ago
I mean, you can skim the emails here [1]. Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad. [1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad? I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page 147), and so far I see: * A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe there's some question about propriety, but that isn't itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is entirely private-to-public. * Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them for sending those media reports (p. 164). * Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to (about 30 pages of just that). * Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public information about vaccines: that they don't contain microchips, etc. Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.
  - junofan 4y ago
    I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical. For ex: p516 is a request from a redacted sender in which the sender shares an elections-related post and then asks to know how it was handled. The message footer references CISA policy. I think the tone is a little strange and could be reasonably construed as a way to work around the policy of not seeking action laid out in the message footer.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      > I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical. Because it's the crux of TFA. Without evidence that the Federal Government pressured companies to spike information they considered unfavorable, this is just a big pile of emails between bureaucrats and office workers. The email on p. 516 exemplifies this: someone in USG is asking Meta how they responded to a local government report. They're not asking for any specific action from Meta, and there's no evidence in the replies that Meta's employees construed the request as a demand to do anything.

traviswt 4y ago

It would be wild if we find out he was also banned in a similar manner to this Berenson guy. As for what you’re missing, maybe that Trump was too anti-establishment, like his “drain the swamp” rhetoric? Based on the article this seems like it would be a systemic issue.

peteradio 4y ago

> What am I missing? Prior political allegiances of said companies.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

> What am missing? The article isn’t about big tech or why they comply. It is about the US Government employing a proxy (wittingly or not) to violate The Constitution of The United States of America and conceal that activity.

pessimizer 4y ago

> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. No it didn't. It tolerated all types of behavior from and around him (that wasn't tolerated from other people) until the last possible second that he could have a say about anything, then it immediately banned him to please the new regime. Trump literally assassinated an Iranian general I believe largely because that general would humiliate Trump in twitter fights, not banned. New regime? Banned.

aaron_m04 4y ago
No, he was banned before the new regime, but immediately after he was implicated in an attempted coup.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  "Coup" over the introduction of a new regime. If your beliefs rely on Trump being powerful enough in the last days of his term to be a threat to a FAANG company in good stead with the incoming regime, your beliefs are fragile.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

With the current lobbying and campaign funding rules, government is more or less a consortium of big businesses. What exactly does business have to fear, when all the branches of government are full of their own representatives? You can’t both assert that the government doesn’t serve the people AND government doesn’t serve businesses. I agree that it is an unreasonable premise.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
towaway15463 4y ago
What would be the point of influencing government if it had no power over you?
- deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
  The reverse is true as well. What would be the point of influencing government if it gave you no power over it?
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    It’s rather circular, I imagine.

dilap 4y ago

As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." They banned Trump when he was on the way out, and an administration still very hostile to him and his supporters was on the way in.

ModernMech 4y ago
The wind was obviously blowing in a different direction on Dec 11 when all 50 states had certified their elections. Why wasn’t he banned then?
- dilap 4y ago
  Even if in your heart-of-hearts you wanted to ban Trump, I don't think you'd do it then -- seems like bad strategy w/ the various legal challenges to the election still in play.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    All legal challenges to the election were over on Dec 11. The last of the last ditch, hail Mary efforts was the Texas case, which was rejected by SCOTUS on Dec 11. With that rejection and the certification from all 50 states, that was the key day that the winds changed definitively. Instead of banning him on that day, Twitter banned him on Jan 8, after he had used Twitter to organize a violent coup attempt on Jan 6. I think Occam's razor tells us we should accept that Twitter banned Trump for the obvious and proximal cause, rather than some hypothetical effort to curry political favor that predates the inauguration of the new administration, but postdates the new administration's certainty.
    - dilap 4y ago
      Ah, my bad on the timing. Thanks for the correction. Still, I think my logic still holds; if they banned him out of the blue right as the winds changed, it would be obviously political; by waiting for a casus belli (as it were), they can credibly claim non-political reasons.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Nothing. These companies are about making a profit. Anarchy and excess deaths both reduce profits. This explains their actions very easily.

naasking 4y ago

> On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power. I'm not sure why you would neglect that. Maybe they would banned him anyway, or maybe not. We can't evaluate that counterfactual, but what actually happened is consistent with the narrative.

krapp 4y ago
>Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power. What means of retaliation do you believe Trump would have had against social media platforms while in office? A President doesn't have the legal authority to simply outlaw companies they disagree with, nor do they have a right to a social media account, or to force businesses to accept them as a customer, or carte blanche to violate contracts or terms of service. Sign an executive order making it illegal to ban his accounts? Executive orders aren't laws, and Presidents aren't monarchs. Meanwhile, as a billionaire celebrity even out of office, Trump remains perfectly capable of suing over his social media bans, which he is currently doing.
- naasking 4y ago
  He can direct the justice department to investigate all sorts of possible infractions, costing them considerable money in legal fees, disrupting business activities, and causing negative PR. Trying to do any of this as the election loser it just comes across as sour grapes, and the justice department wouldn't follow any directions of this sort. And this is just scratching the surface.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Texas has been doing this to big tech https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-1848956901 https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-...
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 4y ago

> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president Honestly that makes it worse - they appear to be following orders given by a specific political party but ignore those given by the other.

waffleiron 4y ago

The previous president was banned after he no longer had political power.

woodruffw 4y ago
While literally true, this doesn’t accurately reflect the immediate circumstances that led him to be banned. In other words: it’s not true that his lack of political power was the thing that got him banned.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Also to say he lacks political power is objectively false. While he's no longer in office, for sure, he still wields tremendous political power.
ceejayoz 4y ago
He was a) the current president and b) politically powerful enough to trigger an attack on Congress. It's a little silly to pretend he was somehow a powerless private citizen on Jan 6. The man remains politically powerful today; see his impact on the current Republican primaries as an example.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    This is not a sensible response: the Capitol riot was the closest the US has come to open, widespread political violence in a century and a half. The fact that it was largely ineffective doesn't detract from it any more than the Beer Hall Putsch's failure detracts from, well, you know.
    - dmix 4y ago
      A single gun shot was enough to stop an entire group of unarmed rioters, but they still posed the greatest risk of political violence in 150 years? If the capitol police had properly prepared for the event as if it was a normal DC protest instead of a speaking event then none of it would have happened. The thin line of cops was obviously insufficient. The police response just took some time to organize but it was never under any serious threat of being overwhelmed.