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It does not seem like this really exposed any new information - Twitter publicly justified its actions as being about its hacked data policy back when this all
by andreyk 4y ago
It does not seem like this really exposed any new information - Twitter publicly justified its actions as being about its hacked data policy back when this all happened (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-cites-hacked-materials-policy-to-justify-censorship-of-ny-post-hunter-biden-article/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-cites-hacked-mat...). All this shows is some internal disagreement as to whether that was the right call. By the way, Facebook also suppressed the news story citing its misinformation policy (https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/15/look-behind-ny-post-headline-about-joe-biden-and-u/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/15/look-behind-n...).
It was already widely criticized at the time(https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-files-blocked-ny-post-hunter-biden-censor-1235448481/?sub_action=logged_in https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/twitter-files-blocked-...):
" Twitter subsequently reversed the decision, saying that it had updated its hacked-materials policy and would not retroactively apply it to the New York Post. Other news outlets, including the New York Times, have since reported that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden and the documents on it were authentic. Predictably, Twitter’s blocking of the Post became a rallying point for Republican politicians accusing the social network of censoring conservative viewpoints. "
So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?
- andrew_ 4y agoT̵w̵i̵t̵t̵e̵r̵ ̵p̵u̵b̵l̵i̵c̵l̵y̵ ̵j̵u̵s̵t̵i̵f̵i̵e̵d̵ Twitter publicly attempted to justify I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.
- tootie 4y agoAlso irrelevant. They don't need anyone's approval to do anything. If they satisfied their shareholders they upheld their duty.
- jeffreyrogers 4y agoThe part where they removed tweets because they were asked to or banned accounts because they were asked to is a pretty big deal. And even though everyone knew they did that it wasn't in writing. It's kind of like the Snowden leaks, everyone who thought about the issues involved had a basic idea of what was going on but until it was out in the open people could just deny it.
- freejazz 4y agoTaibbi doesn't even say any of that
- RonaldRaygun 4y agoBut that's going to be the narrative. The actual reality doesn't matter, just like the endless gloating these days about the so-called "Russia hoax" - where there was a bunch of shady goings-on between the Trump campaign and the RU gov't who was quite explicit in their desire to work with and assist his campaign. But because it didn't achieve the nigh-impossible feat of a successful impeachment vote by his own party, they act as if the whole thing was a ridiculous put-on when in fact they'd be frothing at the mouth if it was Joe Biden and the CCP. Narrative is the only thing that matters, especially to these folks, and unfortunately that's why our society is fucked. Because they are definitely going to win that battle. They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here.
- jacquesm 4y agoThis started with the 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' and it hasn't stopped since because it wasn't smacked down hard. Smear campaigns work, the question is if you let them or not and the US seems to firmly believe that smear campaigns (and lots of money) are legal means of achieving political dominance.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago> They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here. I certainly didn't claim that and I have thousands of comments on HN under my real name that you can verify that with. I'd appreciate it if you didn't group me in with whatever "folks" you think I'm affiliated with. For context, the twitter thread said both political parties made requests to remove tweets and ban accounts that were acted upon. And in my own comment I made no reference to specific political parties. Nor am I registered or affiliated with either one.
- Dig1t 4y agohttps://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago"Handle" could be "take down tweets on request of the Biden team without review" or "handle this request by the Biden team by considering our current policies and making an independent decision". Neither would be terribly surprising to me, although for sure the first is more damning. But Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another. If it is just "prioritize this support request by a VIP" it's not particularly damning or even scandalous, I would assume that would be the case at any social media company.
- ytpete 4y ago> Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another The tweets in that citation are mostly available on the Wayback Machine, and 100% of those accessible ones contained frontal nudity: https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752 https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752. So they would have been taken down as a clear ToS violation no matter what.
- cwkoss 4y agoYeah, the rest of the thread was mostly uninteresting documentation of what everyone already knew. I want to know more about what 'handling' tweets means, whether all 'handle' requests were accepted or in which instances did twitter push back, etc.
- toofy 4y agoi'd have to go back again and reread, but was the term "handle" used at all? i remember them asking to "review" some tweets and to measure them against the tos. i very easily could have missed them asking to "handle" it though... i think those semantics matter, which is why i ask.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- llanowarelves 4y agoThe "hacked data policy" mysteriously didn't apply to 100gb+ data dumps of competing social networks when it was politically expedient.
- tootie 4y agoSome valuable context from an insider. Twitter, FB and others were given an explicit warning of a pending disinformation campaign by law enforcement ahead the laptop story breaking. https://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717336576 https://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717...
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
- sroussey 4y agoNo one has a constitutional right to post on Twitter
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
- whateveracct 4y agoRight to speech doesn't mean write to publish that speech on any platform or outlet. Twitter, like a newspaper, also has freedom of speech to counterbalance your own.
- newZWhoDis 4y agoHigh level officials employed by the US government criminally conspired against the United States to work with a private company and deprive US citizens of their right to freedom of speech for political gain. Members of the FBI abused their position as law enforcement to collude with a political campaign and censor social media against damning information for their preferred candidate. This is all fact.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sroussey 4y agoThis is not fact. This is a narrative for people with no domain experience, and a desire to see conspiracies.
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoIt shows collusion with politicians to coordinate censorship.
- mc32 4y agoWasn't that one of those things certain people deride as "conspiracy theories".
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoThese days the difference between a conspiracy theory and accepted reality is 3-6 months.
- mulnz 4y agoDidn’t take long for this post to bring new folks in off the woodwork.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoNew? We've been here for years.
- Dudelander 4y agoDoes it though? I don't think a campaign staff pointing out tweets that might violate the TOS counts as collusion. That's just a campaign interfacing with Twitter the same way everyone else does. If it was collusion, then every white house press briefing in history would be too. Which, sure, might be Chomsky's point of view, but I don't think anarchists need to be convinced that Joe Biden is bad.
- hgfdhgdfhgdf 4y agoWhy aren't Taliban tweets removed that violate the TOS?
- 4y ago
- renonn 4y ago“So... doesn't seem like a big deal” not an argument
- gjsman-1000 4y agoThis is only Part One of several. Part Two comes out tomorrow.
- oxff 4y ago> It is not a big deal. You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't". Friend-Enemy is all it is.
- degobah 4y agoWhat did the Biden campaign do that the Trump White House did not? "In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored." The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
- oxff 4y agoThis is quite obviously about substantial influence on election news cycle; and of course pointing the finger at the other side is already contained in the friend-enemy distinction.
- degobah 4y agoYou are more scandalized about the campaign of a private citizen emailing Twitter to ask that dick pics of his son remove, than about the White House emailing Twitter to have tweets removed?
- M4v3R 4y agoThe difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.
- etchalon 4y agoThere's no data in the thread which points to any internal metrics at Twitter which shows outsized influence by Democrats. There's an implication based on the political donations of Twitter employees that that was likely the case.
- fattire 4y agoHere is an account of the whole laptop decision on Kara Swisher's podcast from the perspective of Twitter's former safety chief Yoel Roth. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-safety-chief-left-elon-musk/id1643307527?i=1000588297388 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-sa...
- meetingthrower 4y agoReally good podcast and Kara has always been a treasure. Her takes on Musk now are hilarious now too!
- cm2187 4y agoThese policies were always a pretext. The two major social networks blocking the same story at the same time citing different policies that are obviously inconsistently applied (did Twitter block the story about Trump's leaked tax returns? Did facebook block Biden when he claimed that covid would be gone once everyone was vaccinated?). These emails show twitter executives puzzled by the application of those policies. I agree, nothing we didn't know. Like I suspect the further findings alluded to at the end of the thread. But it's kind of like the Snowden revelations. Anyone a bit tech savvy strongly suspected what the NSA was up to, and would have been surprised of the contrary. But it's interesting nevertheless to see the proof. And to see how political viewpoints are censored at the request of politicians.
- nathias 4y agothe life of a politically inconvenient story: 1. it's conspiracy theory 2. it was obvious to everyone 3. forgotten
- Ygg2 4y agoI had this happen on Reddit personally. Shared my Covid experience. Got accused of spreading misinformation. Makes me wonder, if conspiracy theorists might have a point.
- dial9-1 4y agoI've consistently been called a conspiracy theorist since the whole covid story started. I got insider info and knew exactly how the timeline'd play out for years to come. at this point a "conspiracy" is just a "spoiler alert"
- Ygg2 4y agoI've no such insight. I just said that: A) Got vaccine and got infected right after second dose (1 week) B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect. At this point Deus Ex was a credible prophetic game, where a "vaccine" that doesn't cure but postpones symptoms is seen as a miracle cure, which is eerily similar to "we'll need to be vaccinated every few months" that was present in media at some point. That's pretty much every pharma's wet dream. Edit: As someone outside of USA, I find it remarkable how people seem to associate vaccine skepticism, despite pharma in US having strong motivation to push novel drugs that don't solve the issue, just treat the symptoms.
- demarq 4y agoIt exposed that the public was being misled by powerful communications company. One that deemed itself influential enough to politics as to introduce rafts of policies and tools to remain fair and factual. The scandal is that these very same policies and tools were being lent to the rich and powerful to distort the publics perception. The very thing Twitter wanted us to trust it was not doing, was exactly what it was doing. It raises important questions on ethics and no amount of “we already know” makes this ethical.
- UberFly 4y agoCorrections and retractions published on page D-12 never make up for the days of A-1 news that turns out to be incorrect. The new information is the turmoil that was going on withing twitter as they knowingly applied their suppression mechanisms.
- tomohawk 4y agoThere's nothing really new in your post either, since it misses the whole point. All your post does is restate the obvious. It was obvious the story was true and that Twitter covered it up. The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended. In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech? The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.
- ethanbond 4y agoJust a note for other readers who are not quite so far down the rabbit hole: no, it wasn’t obvious that all or even most or even just the “relevant” bits of the laptop contents are authentic, and it’s still not known today. Some emails have been verified, many others have not been, and we still don’t know the origin of the laptop itself. Allegedly Hunter handed it to a blind computer repair man (no video!) and said “I am Hunter Biden.”
- kryogen1c 4y ago> doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known? This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs. The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics. What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON. This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together. We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.
- ethanbond 4y agoI think the thrust of your argument is really the only meaningful story here, but I don’t think it’s an especially good example of it. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that influential people and orgs have more direct lines into channels of influence. Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y agoLOL, touch grass! You’re going off the shallow end.
- steve76 4y ago
- kcplate 4y ago> So... doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known? Yes, most of this was known…but the big (ugly) revelation is that it confirmed something that was suspected—Primarily the direct coordination with the Biden campaign to suppress the story and lock specific accounts that referred to it. FWIW, by saying “we updated our hacked materials policy but we will not retroactively apply it to the event that required the update”, I think Twitter rubbed salt into a wound they created. It basically underscored that they were content to play a part in the current election manipulation (likely because of the big baddie they opposed) even though they knew it was wrong enough to change the policy.
- yonaguska 4y agoThere was no evidence that any of the information was hacked, specifically no evidence that any foreign govt was involved in procuring the information either. So Twitter wasn't following their own policy/justification about "hacked" materials. Taibbi states this in tweet number 22.