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Ask HN: Are there valuable insights from the Twitter files?
I've been reading the Twitter files, but I'm struggling to find anything that's much of a revelation in them.
Twitter removes pictures of Hunter Biden's penis, and US three-letter agencies meet with top social media execs seem pretty weak.
I'm fairly left-leaning though, so I may be glossing over something. Objectivity, are there details that are valuable outside of scoring political points?
- h2odragon 4y agoFlip it round. If the Trump White House had ordered social media to suppress reports about their involvement with russia, would that be "ho hum that just happens?" It's not just the penis; it's the emails detailing "10% for the big guy". Just like it wasn't the "pee tape," but the komprmat; right?
- mind-blight 4y agoWe're those emails actually scrubbed from Twitter though? My understanding is that the scrubbed material was actual photos of his genitals. It's have no problem with Trump getting the actual "pee tape" scrubbed. I definitely have a problem of discussion of it is scrubbed
- mjthrowaway1 4y agoThey temp banned the whitehouse press secretary for linking to the NYpost article about the Hunter laptop.
- lesuorac 4y agoThey didn't do so because the White House told them to. They also only did so for ~24h during which Fox News didn't even run the story because even they thought it might be fake. Which is less of a stance than twitter took. Twitter just disallowed pointing links to the NYPost article for 24h but you were free to talk about the content on twitter.
- jacquesm 4y agoYes, let's flip it around: what do you think are the chances that if such evidence was present that it would have been released to the journalists doing their 'investigation'?
- throwaway23597 4y agoUh, extremely high? It just wouldn't be Musk doing the evidence releasing, instead it would be leaks from other employees.
- constantcrying 4y ago>what do you think are the chances that if such evidence was present that it would have been released to the journalists doing their 'investigation'? With a 100% chance it would have been broadcasted by Twitter to the entire world, from where it would have been become the biggest "news story" of the months. Journalists would have unanimously declared solidarity with twitter, lawsuits would have been launched and investigations would have been performed. Do you actually believe that anybody on Twitter would have taken it and covered it up that Trump was forcing them to censor? What world do you live in?
- ModernMech 4y agoFirst, the Twitter files show that the Trump administration did make requests to Twitter. Of course old Twitter didn’t let us know, so your hypothetical is already disproven by the world we do live in. We still don’t know what those requests were because (tellingly) Musk won’t disclose those. Also remember that for as much as conservatives say that Twitter is a bastion of left wing thought, Trump was permitted on the platform even though he repeatedly violated the TOS. He was treated better than most any Twitter user up until he used the platform to stage an attempted coup against the US government. So not only was Twitter protecting him, the bar for taking action against him was astronomically high. Moreover, Trump didn’t have to use Twitter to suppress the Russia investigation; he obstructed justice and then his hand-picked attorney general used the DOJ to run interference on the Mueller report, which mainstream media credulously accepted. That’s far worse than anything alleged in the so-called Twitter files, but you didn’t see Republicans mad at the DOJ for that. This is why their current indignation over the Twitter Files rings so hollow. If the FBI is really acting politically through Twitter, part of the cause must be the politicization of the DOJ under Trump administration, which was gleefully used as a political tool for 4 years. You’ll never see that level of self-reflection though. So my answer to the original question of “do these files contain valuable information?” is: maybe, but if you expect the people who are maddest about the Twitter Files to actually fix anything they allege, that would be like thinking Elon Musk is the guy to bring free speech to Twitter; the people who are the maddest are hypocrites only mad that this tactic is being used against them. They will happily use this tactic against others once they have power (all the while suggesting they will fix the issue). And we know this because they did exactly that from 2016 to 2020.
- jasonhansel 4y agoYou do know that most of this happened during the Trump administration, when Trump was ultimately in control of the FBI, right?
- h2odragon 4y agoWell that's kindof the question, ain't it? Is anyone in control of the FBI? If so, they appear to be unconcerned about things like the limits to their powers articulated in the Constitution.
- faeriechangling 4y agoDepends on what you consider valuable or surprising. Nothing revealed so far shocks me all that much. A few people at a company with a very much centre-left culture had it out for right wingers, sometimes for less justifiable reasons, sometimes because the person they disliked had been skirting around the rules for years. What a shock. Jack as expected generally was pretty consistently seen pushing back against such notions but not very strongly. One thing the Twitter files did reveal to me is that Jack is exactly the sort of person I thought he was, mostly a voice of sober second thought relative to those reporting to him. The thing I've found most interesting about the Twitter files is how Musk insisted on a selective leak honestly. Because this leak was so selective, I don't have much choice but to presume what he isn't leaking is exculpatory evidence. I don't see how Twitter was run under Agarwal to be any worse than how it's run under Musk honestly, it just sucked in a different way, and mostly wish Jack was still in charge. Because you know, he actually believed in Free Speech and wasn't a phony like Musk.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- someNameIG 4y agoThe target audience for the files seem to be right wing Americans, and I'm neither of them so haven't paid much attention. But they seem to be a bunch of half-truths, only releasing information that Musk wants. @jack asked Elon to release all his email yet that wasn't done, so it's very possible there's a lot that either contradicts and/or puts in context that goes against the narrative the files are trying to push.
- puffoflogic 4y agoJust curious, how did you determine the released data is "a bunch of half-truths"? Do you have access to more complete data sets which contradict what we've seen? Why are you keeping this additional data private if so?
- jamesboehmer 4y agoI would think the "half-truths" refer to the difference between the content in the twitter files vs taibbi's and weiss's reporting of it. The FBI emailed twitter safety to report violations of twitter's own terms of service. It's not clear twitter actually did anything with those reports. But to read taibbi and weiss, it was as if the FBI threatened twitter to ban nypost because of the hunter biden laptop article, which never happened.
- someNameIG 4y agoHalf-truths in that it's only part of the truth. They haven't published all internal Twitter files have they? Like I said they haven't even published a previous CEOs email, despite him asking them to.
- meepmorp 4y agoNo, it's ginned up nonsense that appeals to people who are looking for a justification for their anger and sense of grievance.
- mythrwy 4y agoGovernment agents looking to control narrative outside of calls to illegal behavior is ginned up nonsense? It's unsurprising for sure, but still improper and disturbing in a nominally free and democratic society.
- lesuorac 4y agoThe great think about twitter is that it lets you direct link to messages. Which of the tweets in the twitter dumps actually show "Government agents looking to control narrative outside of calls to illegal behavior"?
- DantesKite 4y ago> The great think about twitter is that it lets you direct link to messages. Which of the tweets in the twitter dumps actually show "Government agents looking to control narrative outside of calls to illegal behavior"? "4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others." https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605294744833343488?s=20&t=gkU0KKOVgkBLE-I9EYXUag https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605294744833343488?s=20&t... "6. The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists." https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605295735553118245?s=20&t=gkU0KKOVgkBLE-I9EYXUag https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605295735553118245?s=20&t...
- UncleMeat 4y agoIsn’t this the opposite of the concern? Everybody is talking about government censorship and this is asking Twitter to not censor content.
- jonfw 4y agoYou don’t see an issue with members of congress and us intelligence pressuring social media companies to suppress political speech? A private company censoring speech is one thing- it was widely known that Twitter was moderated with a bias towards liberals. But the government doing so seems like a violation of the first amendment, doesn’t it?
- jamesboehmer 4y agoI keep reading statements like this saying that the government pressured twitter to censor speech, but never really describing exactly what happened. Can you point me to the place in the twitter files where this happened?
- tanseydavid 4y agoDid you read it first before asking? Serious question.
- jamesboehmer 4y agoI did, and I read no such thing.
- jonfw 4y agoThe twitter files are not that long
- jamesboehmer 4y agoI know, I've read it, and I didn't see anything you're describing. Which part of it are you referring to?
- colpabar 4y agoAll the responses from “left leaning” people claiming that this is all no big deal has fully cemented the notion that the left I signed up for is dead and gone. I thought free expression and not trusting the government and not trusting corporations and recognizing that when governments and corporations work together it’s almost always a bad thing for regular people. What the hell happened? How is this a nothingburger? The latest drop reveals that the pentagon was involved too, and it was using special access to promote US propaganda in the middle east. Now that it’s not about “hunter biden’s penis” anymore, can we start getting upset? I feel like I’m losing my mind! https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605292454261182464 https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605292454261182464
- lostdog 4y agoThe Twitter files emphasized stupid things and ignored real issues, and that's why it's being treated as a nothingburger overall. The real issues are (1) What government requests are reasonable and what should Twitter respond to outside of subpoenas, and (2) Should certain groups, such as celebrities and political campaigns, have their review requests prioritized. However, the Twitter files are trying to convince you that Twitter threw the election to Biden, and that any moderation discussions are inappropriate. These are stupid and highly biased points of view. It's no wonder we cannot discuss it meaningfully. The Twitter files themselves poisoned the discussion. It's very similar to the lab leak theory? Should we check whether the virus had origins in a lab? Of course! However, the real question being asked by its store supporters is "Can we blame the Covid crisis on the scientific community, and also maybe democrats?" Again, how do you even address the important question when it's drowned out by a ludicrous and biased political question? That's the thing about the Twitter files. They almost purposefully sank their own message. It's so frustrating.
- colpabar 4y agoThat’s not how I’ve interpreted the reporting on it so far. I haven’t read anything that explicitly claims twitter “threw the election” for biden, at least not in the actual twitter files. What I have read is that a lot of the moderation requests at the behest of the FBI were favorable to biden and democrats in general. Whether that swayed the election isn’t exactly clear, but the coverup happening right before the election makes it impossible to ignore. I also think you’re being a bit disingenuous and assuming bad faith from the get go. I’m sure there are tons of replies to the original tweets saying the things you’re claiming are being said, but the original tweets don’t make such bold claims. The main message I got from everything so far is that the feds had a lot of influence over twitters moderation decisions, from inside and out. As a leftist, I think that’s a bad thing. I do think that the hunter biden laptop story is a massive scandal and I detest how it’s been reframed as “it’s just dick pics bro.” That was a coverup of pretty clear cut corruption and it seems that the FBI ordered it, and I think that’s bad. I do really hate that they were forced to release this stuff on twitter, and I’m optimistically hoping that’s the main reason it isn’t being discussed as much as I think it should be. (I almost never click twitter links on hn.) It could absolutely have been done better and I know it’s just to drive traffic to the site. I’m hoping mainstream outlets actually cover it once everything has been released, but I’m pretty doubtful. Frustrating indeed.
- throwawayCAF 4y agoIt seems a bit unfair to summarize it as removing pictures of Hunter Biden's penis. They willingly suspended news organizations at the behest of the FBI for something the FBI knew was legit, and as a result they (and other social media outlets) directly influenced US elections. It's easy to ignore that point when you're happy with the outcome, but it should give you the heebie-jeebies to see that kind of political collusion between the government and big tech.
- jamesboehmer 4y agoWhich news organizations were suspended?
- mtmail 4y agoBest summary I've read so far is https://mastodon.social/@malwaretech@infosec.exchange/109547351287811796 https://mastodon.social/@malwaretech@infosec.exchange/109547... "Certain foreign governments have been known to engage in hacking to obtain dirt on politicians, which they then leak around election time to influence voters (remember the DNC leaks? That was Russian Intelligence). Social media platforms are aware of this, and are actively working to try and limit foreign intelligence agencies ability to influences the public via these 'hack-and-leak' operations. [...]"
- keithalewis 4y agoThe FBI meddled with the 2020 election. Who needs the Russians when you've got the FBI?
- tatrajim 4y agoWell, I like the part about the ex-FBI agents at Twitter having their own slack channel. Reminds me of the CCP committees now required at every Chinese private corp. Who doesn't love a secret police network at one's workplace?