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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 bi
by paulgb 4y ago
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.
- mpweiher 4y ago> as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias I thought that was the smoking gun.
- paulgb 4y agoA smoking gun for twitter maybe, but GP is talking about writing off “the left” because of this.
- Dig1t 4y agoThis one is pretty bad in my opinion: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paulgb 4y agoJoe Biden wasn’t “the government” yet, look at the date. I wish we knew what these tweets actually were. If it was suppressing a news story, that’s bad. If it’s asking for death threats to be removed, that’s not bad. (Matt himself acknowledges that both parties had tweets taken down, his evidence for bias is apparently that Twitter employees donated more to democrats https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&t=edhjSccEuxK5jecEXtW1dg https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&...) Surely Twitter still has the data in an archive somewhere, but it’s not clear from the thread that Matt knows what the content of these tweets was.
- mikeyouse 4y agoMany of the removed tweets flagged by Bidens team were literally nude pictures of Hunter Biden.
- bavell 4y agoWow, 99.7% contributions went to democrats... If that isn't damning evidence of partisan bias I don't know what is! I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that one-sided.
- CodeArtisan 4y agofor 2022 mid terms, opensecrets.org reports 95.38% for democrats, 0.19% republicans, 4.42% others. overview of 2022 mid terms for technology: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=B&Bkdn=DemRep&cycle=2022 https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=B&Bkd... Twitter specifically: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/recipients?toprecipscycle=2022&id=D000067113&candscycle=2022 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/recipients?toprecip... FTX: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D000073694&topnumcycle=2022 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D00007369...
- djur 4y agoThe two "others" were Bernie Sanders and Evan McMullin, and the one Republican was Adam Kinzinger, a high-profile Trump critic who didn't even run for reelection in '22. There was a single individual donation of $200 to the RNC. I don't know what anybody expects, though. Tech workers tend to be young, affluent, educated city-dwellers, and that demographic is strongly and increasingly inclined toward supporting Democrats. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, a liberal city in a heavily Democratic state. There's no conspiracy at work here. Republicans could choose to try to appeal to tech workers if they wanted.
- ttyprintk 4y agoThose are from individuals, capped at a few thousand dollars. The GOP raised more than the Democrats in the PAC arena, so we’ll never know the true balance when accounting for big donations at the top.
- agripa2 4y agoThe Biden campaign is not the government.
- chroma 4y agoSo if in 2016 the Trump campaign had done the same thing, you'd be fine with the response, "The Trump campaign is not the government."?
- paulgb 4y agoI would, yes. In fact, the Trump White House did just that, it’s right there in the thread. Without knowing what the tweets they had removed were, I don’t see evidence of wrongdoing. There are legitimate reasons to have tweets taken down: malicious impersonation, revenge porn (which apparently some of these were), death threats, etc.
- jdkee 4y agoBut Biden was likely to be elected, members of his staff appointed to government positions and staff at Twitter likely understood that.
- noirbot 4y agoWere they? It wasn't clear even for most of a week after the election that Biden was likely to be elected.
- runsWphotons 4y agoit was clear for the whole campaign the odds were pretty even
- newsclues 4y agoIs that a defence or further proof of malfeasance? The Biden campaign, which became the government, perhaps in part due to the assistance provided, requested and received assistance. If the campaign wasn't the government and didn't have the power to compel assistance, why did Twitter help?
- ecommerceguy 4y agoParty 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.
- wincy 4y agoJust so you know Ro Khanna is a man. Also appears to be the representative for a substantial part of the Valley, like Cupertino and San Jose. https://khanna.house.gov/ https://khanna.house.gov/
- ryanbrunner 4y ago> Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives Thinking that this isn't happening, particularly by parties during an election is massively naive. How Twitter responds to it, and whether there was any undue pressure made by those parties would be a scandal, but "VIP account has a direct line to higher ups" is nothing.
- andrew_ 4y agoNothing said by parent suggests that they think this wasn't happening on the regular, or by other administrations. The shark was jumped here.
- freejazz 4y agoWeird how you say it was blatant partisan censorship but ignore that the Trump administration did the same exact thing while they were actually in the executive branch. It's almost like there is something blatantly partisan here going on, but it's not the "censorship"
- 4y ago
- jmpman 4y agoRo Khanna for President. The only politician with any moral compass.