6 ms·

Just an observation, but it seems that the Twitter files revelations are getting drastically less press than everything else Elon does. It almost feels like kil

Just an observation, but it seems that the Twitter files revelations are getting drastically less press than everything else Elon does. It almost feels like kill the messenger

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
Maybe because there's not really anything of much interest there? Do people get bored with these vacuous "revelations" and fake controversies?
eightysixfour 4y ago
I have read the “revelations” and… they weren’t that interesting to be honest. Pretty much what I expected.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Only maybe cause you work in tech (i assume). A lot of people don't know how these content moderation decisions go down. A mix of public rules, subjective parsing of their language, and external pressure. The last one being the one naive people might not really know about. I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat. Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  They seem to be pretty much what everyone expected. The question is whether that's alarming to you or is it a "nothingburger."
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  You were aware that Twitter was in direct contact with Democrat politicians and campaigns to censor opponents? It was news to me that they were have weekly meetings with FBI and Intelligence communities where the topic was directly about conservatives in government, I guess I was out of the loop on those.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dontreact 4y ago
I'm probably not going to convince you but I just read through the most recent ones and they are not that surprising. To me I would summarize the story as "there was debate inside the company about whether or not to ban Trump", which is a an unsurprising non-headline. In the files there are interesting arguments on both sides but ultimately there is (to me, and I'm guessing maybe not to you?) a clear argument as to why he ultimately got banned after some internal back and forth. He incited violence with his tweets.
_eht 4y ago
Please explain the noteworthy parts of a private entity giving political entities special treatment. I’ll take my answer off the line. Thanks.
- fundad 4y ago
  Not to mention it’s not reliable because they held back all emails from the Trump White House about removing content.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  The noteworthiests bits are government entities directing censorship of private speech. Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort? Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed? If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    > But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort? Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah? > Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed? Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else. > If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech? You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway. Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
  - _eht 4y ago
    Be specific. What was specifically noteworthy about this that you want to see reported and known to the world. Don’t make up an imaginary scenario of deep dark government suppression of religion. Or use a real example. Dicks. Dicks were censored.
fundad 4y ago
By kill the messenger do you mean they feel burned after taking him at his word? They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.
smcl 4y ago
I think it's because they've largely proven to be uninteresting or unsurprising. The two big reveals early on were: - The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected. - Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval" In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned. What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That would be a GDPR violation right there.
- yanderekko 4y ago
  I think it's interesting that the senior leaders did not seem to have an internal non-partisan justification for quashing the Hunter Biden story, though that obviously lends evidence to prior suspicions. >In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
sullivanmatt 4y ago
None of it was news. As we learned during the Trump era, just because a narcissist claims that unjust things are happening doesn't make it true. I, for one, am glad that Twitter suppressed links to and media of Hunter Biden stolen and disseminated without his consent. All the other discussions in the "Twitter Files" are mundane, day-to-day happenings and decisions made at a ton of tech companies across the world with two goals: don't get sued, and don't get bad press. More than half of what has been released had already been covered many times over by other news outlets and journalists. If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging. So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
thelock85 4y ago
I haven’t read everything but from what has been summarized by Weiss, Taibbi, et al, they just seem like primary documentation to things that were reported on at the time. I guess who exactly took which position around various decisions is new information. That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
gadders 4y ago

Just an observation, but it seems that the Twitter files revelations are getting drastically less press than everything else Elon does. It almost feels like kill the messenger

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

Maybe because there's not really anything of much interest there? Do people get bored with these vacuous "revelations" and fake controversies?

eightysixfour 4y ago

I have read the “revelations” and… they weren’t that interesting to be honest. Pretty much what I expected.

fullshark 4y ago
Only maybe cause you work in tech (i assume). A lot of people don't know how these content moderation decisions go down. A mix of public rules, subjective parsing of their language, and external pressure. The last one being the one naive people might not really know about. I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat. Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064 Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
pessimizer 4y ago
They seem to be pretty much what everyone expected. The question is whether that's alarming to you or is it a "nothingburger."
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
You were aware that Twitter was in direct contact with Democrat politicians and campaigns to censor opponents? It was news to me that they were have weekly meetings with FBI and Intelligence communities where the topic was directly about conservatives in government, I guess I was out of the loop on those.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dontreact 4y ago

I'm probably not going to convince you but I just read through the most recent ones and they are not that surprising. To me I would summarize the story as "there was debate inside the company about whether or not to ban Trump", which is a an unsurprising non-headline. In the files there are interesting arguments on both sides but ultimately there is (to me, and I'm guessing maybe not to you?) a clear argument as to why he ultimately got banned after some internal back and forth. He incited violence with his tweets.

_eht 4y ago

Please explain the noteworthy parts of a private entity giving political entities special treatment. I’ll take my answer off the line. Thanks.

fundad 4y ago
Not to mention it’s not reliable because they held back all emails from the Trump White House about removing content.
adamsb6 4y ago
The noteworthiests bits are government entities directing censorship of private speech. Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort? Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed? If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort? Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah? > Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed? Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else. > If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech? You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway. Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
- _eht 4y ago
  Be specific. What was specifically noteworthy about this that you want to see reported and known to the world. Don’t make up an imaginary scenario of deep dark government suppression of religion. Or use a real example. Dicks. Dicks were censored.

fundad 4y ago

By kill the messenger do you mean they feel burned after taking him at his word? They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.

smcl 4y ago

I think it's because they've largely proven to be uninteresting or unsurprising. The two big reveals early on were: - The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected. - Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval" In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned. What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.

jacquesm 4y ago
That would be a GDPR violation right there.
yanderekko 4y ago
I think it's interesting that the senior leaders did not seem to have an internal non-partisan justification for quashing the Hunter Biden story, though that obviously lends evidence to prior suspicions. >In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.

sullivanmatt 4y ago

None of it was news. As we learned during the Trump era, just because a narcissist claims that unjust things are happening doesn't make it true. I, for one, am glad that Twitter suppressed links to and media of Hunter Biden stolen and disseminated without his consent. All the other discussions in the "Twitter Files" are mundane, day-to-day happenings and decisions made at a ton of tech companies across the world with two goals: don't get sued, and don't get bad press. More than half of what has been released had already been covered many times over by other news outlets and journalists. If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging. So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.

thelock85 4y ago

I haven’t read everything but from what has been summarized by Weiss, Taibbi, et al, they just seem like primary documentation to things that were reported on at the time. I guess who exactly took which position around various decisions is new information. That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.

gadders 4y ago