18 ms·

Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike remov

• goodluckchuck 4y ago
  This impacts the perennial argument that these companies are private organizations and the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to them. As it turns out, their censorship regimes are government sponsored censorship.
• newZWhoDis 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • saboot 4y ago
    Yeah, no. The jan 6 people are in jail for a lot more than just protesting.
  • RavingGoat 4y ago
    You have no credibility if you think that they were just "protesting" on Jan 6th.
• cronix 4y ago
  I kind of believed Jen Psaki when she admitted the Biden administration was flagging posts over a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqEvQKO5_gM
• purple_ferret 4y ago
  How is this surprising? People get things resolved via Hacker News when people comment on CEO account comments (Stripe comes to mind). Nearly every company probably has direct lines of access for resolutions for VIPs, politicians not excluded.
  • Dem_Boys 4y ago
    Not surprising but sad. Politicians should be excluded from what you're talking about IMO. They're elected to serve the people and stand for our American beliefs including the freedom of speech. A political party (the DNC in this case) getting tweets removed probably isn't a 1st amendment violation. But it's really shady and anyone from government (the white house in this case) getting tweets removed is likely violating the first amendment (or coming REALLY close to it).
    • martimarkov 4y ago
      I’m pretty sure first amendment does not apply to corporations and their services. The test I normally ask ppl to perform is this. If you think there is some sort of fallacy in it happy to discuss it Can I kick you out of my hours if I disagree with your view? Can I kick you out of my bar if I disagree with your views? Can I kick you out of my platform if I disagree with you?
    • strathmeyer 4y ago
      Sure thing account name Dem Boys created just after the January 6 insurrection. This is trolling stop upvoting it.
    • jshen 4y ago
      Now do Fox News and the GOP
  • AmericanOP 4y ago
    Internal policy debates are evil! To save democracy, public forums should be run by benevolent dictators!!
  • numbsafari 4y ago
• noah_buddy 4y ago
  It’s blowing my mind to see people on Twitter reading the story and thinking this is an issue of whether or not Hunter Biden is a problem. This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims and 2. even the leaders of these organizations are unable to rein in these influences.
  • Dem_Boys 4y ago
    Honest Question: If the white house contacts Twitter and asks for a tweet to be removed, is that a first amendment violation?
    • ryanbrunner 4y ago
      If we take the most innocent sounding version of this, where the White House points out that a tweet is in violation of Twitter's stated policies and asks for those policies to be applied, I think it's pretty clearly not. Of course those requests can and will be made in a biased manner, and it's naive to assume that the nature of the request isn't going to influence how Twitter responds to it, but it's definitely a murky grey area at that point.
      • Dem_Boys 4y ago
        This is a good point! The wording probably matters too. The Biden team asked Twitter to "review" certain tweets instead of "remove" certain tweets. So technically they're not suppressing speech explicitly but implicitly we (and twitter employees) all know what they mean by "review".
        • evrydayhustling 4y ago
          You do realize this was the Trump Whitehouse? and that both Trump's campaign team and White House staff made requests that were honored? And that when Biden's team asked for the reviews it was not the executive branch?
• sasmithjr 4y ago
  What was the content of the "handled" tweets, though? I think that matters a lot. For example, the RealJamesWood tweet (from [0]) seems to be a leaked nude of Hunter; it was most likely (safe to say) posted non-consensually, and I don't really see a big difference between that kind of tweet and revenge porn. Having "stuff they dislike" removed would be one thing, but using the direct line at Twitter for reporting explicit ToS violations isn't a big deal. [0] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760
  • fzeroracer 4y ago
    Not just that, but revenge porn is literally illegal in the state of California, where Twitter is HQ'd. I'm getting increasingly annoyed by people pointing to those removed tweets as a smoking gun while being completely unaware that we know the contents of said tweet and said tweets can easily be interpreted as violating Twitter's ToS at minimum and actively violating California law at worst.
    • chrisco255 4y ago
      The case in point was the removal and censorship of the NY Post's story on the laptop, which was incredibly relevant to the Presidential election. It revealed Hunter as a degenerate crackhead, and an unqualified man-child who benefited directly from his father's position as Vice President to get a powerful, paid position on the Burisma Board of Directors, a favor for which he committed "10% to the big guy" (among other positions, Burisma was not the only one). It underscored the corruption of the current U.S. president, who used his power and influence over foreign relations with Ukraine to enrich his own family and himself. The pornographic images, to what extent they were shown in the NY Post, were redacted. The main function they played is in showing that the laptop contents couldn't have been fake.
      • pstuart 4y ago
        All that has been shown is that Hunter was a POS trying to profit from his relationship with his father, who has been investigated and exonerated by the GOP: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/senate-homeland-security-report-on-hunter-biden-and-burisma/3d48468e81b378ee/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/senate-homeland-secur... Just because they want to offer up 10% to the big guy doesn't mean he took it. If he was guilty he should have been prosecuted (and would have been). Would you be willing to say the same about Trump?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• standardUser 4y ago
  "One would have to assume" Have some perspective man or woman, you're acting like we're supposed to treat you like some babe in the woods and pretend this is genuinely shocking to you? Please. Yes, powerful governments influence actors within their nations. We get it. Let's all feign surprise for a few hours online. But that's not what bothers me. The most frustrating thing is that your perspective fails to acknowledge how this is so painfully, hilariously, boringly mild compared to the corruption and abuses of power that are the baseline norm. It's like when people treat "gig workers" like they're the new 10-year-olds in a coal mine. Yes, all abuses of power are bad, we agree. But do you really expect us to pretend this is anything other than an extremely mild, boring footnote in the grand legacy of abused power?
  • philippejara 4y ago
    How can you care about the NSA leaks when there are murders happening on the streets?!! Equally nonsensical point.
    • standardUser 4y ago
      That's comparing two different issues. I'm talking about long-term trends regarding the same issue, and how people fail to acknowledge the trendline and instead cherry pick recent examples, usually relating to political opponents, and then present the example without relevant historical or transnational context.
  • vasco 4y ago
    Pragmatism in a political thread in hackernews? Did you get lost somewhere? I agree wholeheartedly with this view. People in these threads pretend to hype the outrage, I guess because it makes for more juicy comments, it feels like some kind of role-playing of finding bigger issues than they actually are. These same people that are "censoring speech" be removing some pictures from Twitter, create wars - ukraine the latest - risk nuclear war, print money at will disrupting huge numbers of people and plant narratives about "the economy needs to cool down", and this is somehow the biggest issue of the day. You can call it whataboutism, but if you're worrying about drops of water on the floor while there's a raging fire in the living room, and someone mentions the raging fire, is it really whataboutism?
• rodgerd 4y ago
  "Stuff they disliked" is a pretty obtuse way of saying "revenge porn".
• darth_avocado 4y ago
  Are we going to pretend the same lines don’t exist to old school television channels, newspapers and radio stations?
  • AmericanOP 4y ago
    Apparently only quantum physics can determine if twitter violates the first amendment relative to the observer. A nobel prize awaits discovery of the scale equation for when the law begins to exert force, theorizing anti-hypocrisy particles.
  • rdbell 4y ago
    I think a distinction should be made between abusing position & relationships to spin a narrative vs abusing position and relationships to silence individuals. Both are slimy and abusive but the latter is a violation of constitutional rights.
    • darth_avocado 4y ago
      Again, constitutional rights guarantee very limited protection, and the application is very situational.
• tbrownaw 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598829996264390656 > It [the system] was based on contacts. This reminds me of past "you have to know an employee to get you ban fixed" discussions about not-Twitter here. I'm now wondering about a general - as in not specific to any one company - "favors for friends" culture at the brand-name tech places, over what I guess would be called a "rule of law" culture.
  • wmf 4y ago
    Apparently Meta has an explicit policy that you cannot help anyone you personally know, although you can bump their appeal to the top of the queue or something.
    • anonporridge 4y ago
      > although you can bump their appeal to the top of the queue or something. How is that not directly helping people you know?
• lapcat 4y ago
  > So in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online?!?! I looked at the tweets mentioned by Taibbi in the Wayback Machine, and they didn't actually appear to be unflattering speech or even speech at all but rather photos. The first tweet, for example, was some explicit photos (which I assume would violate Twitter's rules whether or not they were of Hunter Biden).
  • myko 4y ago
    Basically revenge porn. Distributed by known bot accounts. Completely reasonable to have them removed.
  • afavour 4y ago
    I believe all three are pornographic in nature. So while it’s still notable that the Biden team reached out manually to report them it does seem all the tweets were in violation of Twitter policy and fair game for removal.
    • newZWhoDis 4y ago
      • afavour 4y ago
        > Censoring skittle dick (a descriptive term, not a slur) 20 days out from an election was a crime. Nudity was posted non-consensually, which is a crime in California. It was removed. That is not a crime.
        • newZWhoDis 4y ago
          • afavour 4y ago
            > It was actually consensual legally, given the paper her signed deferring ownership of all contents upon forfeiture to the computer repair company. C'mon. Don't pretend like that's legally ironclad in the face of California's revenge porn law, it very obviously isn't and you're doing your case a total disservice here.
• perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  This is a very important point. While the US is ready to preach its values and tries to implement its values across the world, at home these parties colludes with companies to suppress what it does not like. However, in other countries, US tells them to NOT suppress.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ozmodiar 4y ago
    I'm going to need a bigger smoking gun than nicely asking for revenge porn to be removed before putting the USA on the level of Russia or China. If this is the worst they've got then things are a lot less corrupt in the USA than I was expecting.
    • dd36 4y ago
      Plus the US airs its dirty laundry in ways Russia, China, or the Middle East could never allow. Their power structures are too weak for actual freedom.
• babyshake 4y ago
  One thing that is easily forgotten in context of at least this Hunter Biden story is that in 2020, a large cohort of Americans including presumably most Twitter employees not only really didn't want Trump to get re-elected, but were very fearful of what might happen if he did. Not saying that justifies anything, but whether we like it or not humans are very prone to impulsive decision making based on emotions.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  > Since this is true, then where else are political parties trying to get unflattering speech suppressed that we don't even know of yet? Absolutely everywhere.
• mjmsmith 4y ago
  Most concerning thing here is people like Taibbi and Greenwald turning into boomer cranks. I had higher hopes for the xers.
• lkrubner 4y ago
  Some of this material was posted during October of 2020, when Trump was President, so it wasn't the "White House" asking that this material be taken down.
• progrus 4y ago
  YouTube, Facebook (Zuckerberg already said they reached out to squash the laptop story on Joe Rohan), probably many others.
• fwip 4y ago
  They have a direct line to get things reviewed - not removed. I'll bet most big corporations advertising on Twitter have one too.
• cplusplusfellow 4y ago
  Yes but only for some White House admins. The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story. The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.
  • dmix 4y ago
    That’s still fundamentally not the issue here. It shouldn’t matter that there was a certain bias at Twitter at a particular time. What matters was there was a) a serious lack of transparency into decision making and b) a very broad policy/culture of censorship, where ill-defined and ever expanding “misinformation” and “threats to democracy” was enough to silence not only public messages but private DMs between individuals. People say it’s a hard problem to define the limits of content moderation, but when you have politicians and influence groups sending lists of tweets to silence and the only response is “thanks we handled it” then obviously the limits have gone out the window. We don’t have to have a free-for-all to massively reduce the risks in the current system. Limitations and transparency are what defines a good system of governance. Bias in administrations will always exist, but honesty and shining sunlight on it is the only thing that will stop it from turning into a cancer.
  • dd36 4y ago
    You need to think of Twitter as MSNBC or Fox News. Bias in editorial decisions is perfectly legal.
    • cplusplusfellow 4y ago
      Bias might be legal but when we say “the White House” pressured them to take it down, we are being less than clear on what actually happened. The “White House” was trump at the time.
• bitsnbytes 4y ago
  "One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms. " I would say its not a huge leap to think that. I would even say its more than just other social media platforms. I would say it goes into main stream media on BOTH sides, Hollywood, sports, etc including global corporations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI&ab_channel=ShootMeDead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI&ab_channel=Shoot...
• archagon 4y ago
  I'm scratching my head here. It's quite a leap to go from: > political parties... have a direct line to Twitter to get stuff they dislike removed ...to: > in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online Twitter is not the internet. It's a tiny part of the internet. You can say whatever you want on many, many platforms. In fact, people can't stop talking about some of this stuff on HN and Reddit.
  • noncoml 4y ago
    Does anyone really believe that the government and the political parties don’t have direct lines to Twitter, FB, Google, CNN, FoxNews etc etc?
    • toofy 4y ago
      i think the government has direct lines to many industry leaders. im pretty sure it's commonplace for officials to regularly communicate with e.g., oil executives or religious leaders. we've known about the business world having direct lines to governmental agencies for decades. many have been screaming at the tops of their lungs for decades to remove these communication lines between religious leaders/industries and the government. to add some very relevant context to this, we just saw texts between elon and kanye yesterday. kanye is running for president in 2024. all week long has been doing interviews attacking jewish people, praising hitler, and posting swastikas. again, elon has been texting directly with him as recently as yesterday. this communication between political figures and industry seems to be entirely commonplace. is it right? i don't personally think so. i think its problematic as hell. but the problem is significantly larger than twitter. significantly larger. religions, extractive industries, transportation companies, etc.. etc... etc... while some may personally have a problem with it, i'll believe elon thinks its a problem when he ceases communication with all political figures, including for business related reasons.
  • woooooo 4y ago
    It's a tiny part of the internet by volume. Dwarfed by breaking bad reruns. It's the whole internet in terms of journalist and politician communications.
• jbarciauskas 4y ago
  Sorry so which part of Biden or Trump asking for Twitter to review content that is against its own policies isn't free speech?
• mbreese 4y ago
  How is having a direct line to Twitter the most disconcerting thing for you? Of course they have a direct line. I expect that all major political parties, the white house, various legislative committees, etc... would all have a direct line to communicate with Twitter. It's explicitly said that both major parties had these lines of communication, so it's hard to see a problem with the existence of back-channel methods of contact. The only things that I'd be concerned about are (a) why is it informal? and (b) what did Twitter do about the requests? Re (a): This should not be an informal process based upon personal contacts. This should have been a well documented procedure, if for not other reason than to remove the appearance of bias. Sure, Twitter could have assigned a "case-manager" type of contact for each group. But the process for requesting such access should have been formalized (and reviewable). Re (b): Having a direct line to flag to request review/removal of posts is fine. You can request all you want. It's only an issue if Twitter felt like they couldn't reject the request. Again, because it was an informal process, it's not possible to have any sort of comprehensive statistics on who requested what, how often, and how many requests were approved. And again, the biggest benefit would have been to avoid the appearance of any bias.
  • beebmam 4y ago
    Why shouldn't privately owned companies have the right to determine which speech they want to publish?
    • mbreese 4y ago
      Who said anything about restricting speech? Many people (at least on Twitter currently) are conflating a "request" with a "demand". Just because some tweets were flagged doesn't mean they were removed. If they were removed, they might have been against the Twitter ToS and this back channel operated as a batch "report tweet" button. I "request" Twitter to remove Tweets all the time. Normally it's a spam message... sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't. My point is that as an informal mechanism, there is no way to know what was happening. We have no idea how many requests were made, and of those, how many were approved/denied/etc... That is an issue, but the request itself isn't... (Now, if any of these parties had unrestricted, automatic "veto" power over tweets they didn't like, then that would be a major issue. But thus far, I haven't seen that... but I'm still reading)
• EdwardDiego 4y ago
  > So in America you cannot say negative things about political leaders online?!?! A brief perusal of Twitter would reveal that, yes, you totally can, and people totally do, and you're making much ado over not much at all.
• kristopolous 4y ago
  This can be interpreted in good faith as well What if there was, say a spy, that was being outted? Government and politics has an interest here because statecraft has a need to veto things if they want to be effective.
• code_witch_sam 4y ago
  i also have a direct line to twitter to get posts removed. it's called the report button. i wouldn't be surprised if many individual twitter superusers have removed more content than the white house
  • dusing 4y ago
    Does the executive team reply to you in under an hour and Handle it?
• whateveracct 4y ago
  You can say negative things all you want about Joe Biden. Get a joe-biden-idiot.com domain, make shit up, call him dumb. You'll be fine.
• culi 4y ago
  > Most concerning thing here is that this proves political parties (including the white house[0]) have a direct line to Twitter[1] to get stuff they dislike removed. One would have to assume that there was also a direct line to other social medial platforms This is the historical norm not anything new. This is very true about Fox News, CNN, and especially all the other "old media" major (alphabet soup) networks Speaking internationally, there's no stronger propaganda force than the US. Americans very often fail to acknowledge this when criticizing "foreign election meddlers" (which the US has BY FAR the longest and most egregious record of doing)
• mikaeluman 4y ago
  Exactly. And not just in the US, we have had significant indications that the government in Sweden "collaborated" with social media prior to the election. They lost anyway, but we have no idea what kind of effect they had and what stories were suppressed.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  The most concerning thing here is that the FBI was having meetings with Twitter during the campaign, and they weren't about child porn.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• machiaweliczny 4y ago
  In Poland they raided someone house for exposing prime minister. You can see how Aaron, Snowden or Assange ended. Society needs a way to fight back especialylly now as AI could help with controling/manipulating population
• hackernewds 4y ago
  To note, is that during the period the White House resided a president other than the one the thread implies to implicate. So the accusations of government interference is purposefully deceptive.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MichaelMoser123 4y ago
  i thought the lack of support channels was that they try to work like google. Instead it's just a way of handling the scarcity of a resource - a scarce resource is a means of selling it high! Algorithms, Shmalgorithms - in the end it's just some guy in the backroom who is takimg phone calls from the political commissars, just like in the old Soviet Union and nowadays China...
• tootie 4y ago
  Lol to your last question. Absolutely ridiculous thing to even ask. Have you seen the internet?
• chaosbolt 4y ago
  >proves Zuckerberg said it himself on Joe Rogan, it's been common knowledge for years now, only contrarians and stubborn shills claimed otherwise