3 ms·

Not even close. Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous re

Not even close. Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop. The reality was that Trump was in office at the time and the Biden team, as private citizens, requested TOS enforcement on Hunter's naked pics and received it. Yes, some of the TOS enforcement hit conservative outlets merely on account of association with the material despite the fact that they made an effort to censor the private pics, but from the emails it was crystal clear that this was because twitter lacked a mechanism to grant special trust to these outlets and not an intentional effort to kill a story (and a sorry nothingburger of a story at that). Revenge porn doesn't typically have a legitimate public interest involved; their infrastructure to deal with this edge case was not well developed. Ro Khanna (D) was the only Dem in office to wander into the fray and he did it on the side of Free Speech. Interesting how that tends to get omitted from the story. Thanks, Republicans. You defeated the terrible censorship. Now I know what THEY didn't want me to: Hunter Biden has a huge cock.

woooooo 3y ago
Taibbi specifically had tons of meeting notes on "alignment" between twitter's content policy team and people from DOJ, FBI, etc. Yes, Trump was president at the time.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Yes, there were meetings between twitter and the feds monitoring Prigozhin's bot farms. Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't. Not only did the feds not lean on Twitter to suppress Hunter's dick picks, but the coordination that I saw is actually coordination I want to see. Yeah, the spooks should talk with the social networks, so long as the social networks can check and balance the requests. If you disagree I would like you to explain to me what is so important about allowing Dimitri Prigozhin's bot farms to go unchallenged? Do you want another TEN_GOP incident, where a prominent republican account turns out to literally be run out of Dimitri Prigozhin's IRA just outside Moscow? I'd think you would want to avoid another embarrassment like that.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    > Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't Incorrect. What Taibbi wrote was that Twitter approached the FBI, asking whether the laptop story was misinformation. The FBI had in fact known that this was a genuine hard drive long before it reached the press (nearly a year before) but nonetheless said that the story was probably a misinformation campaign. The government leaning on social media was not related to the laptop story. That came later, in 2021, where the government worked through NGO proxies to lean on social media to ban people arguing against lockdowns and even supplying lists of users to ban or suppress. The 5th Circuit had ample time to review the evidence and found it compelling enough to uphold the injunction. Do you think these judges are just being duped by misinformation?
  - the_doctah 3y ago
    There were plenty of receipts and evidence. Check your facts.
Manuel_D 3y ago
The Twitter files encompasses more than just the Hunter Biden laptop story (where the FBI did indeed say the story was likely disinformation , despite knowing it was true. Whether this was bureaucratic dysfunction or deliberate remains unclear). It also encompassed purported COVID misinformation (much of which turned out to be true). Government agencies and government sponsored NGOs did indeed direct social media to ban specific individuals advocating against blanket lockdowns. The notion that Taibbi et al. aimed to show that Biden is some illuminati-like shadow figure ruling the world secretly is a straw man. It did indeed show what it sought out to prove: the government directly and indirectly directed the censorship carried out by large social media companies and often labeled true facts as misinformation. Read the injunction itself: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23867628/preliminary-injunction-against-biden-admin-re-social-media.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23867628/preliminary-... that prohibits communication between government and social media companies precisely because of this coercion.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  I limited my investigation to the Hunter Biden Laptop story in the first Twitter Files release; the dishonesty I saw from Musk and Taibbi on that subject was enough to pass judgement. The Republican MO is to pivot to a different claim in the firehose-of-falsehood the moment you get called out. I'm not impressed.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    And what dishonesty was that? > Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop This is not at all what was claimed. The focus on the Hunter laptop censorship was on the FBI confirming (or at least strongly suggesting) that the story was disinformation despite the fact that the FBI knew of its veracity. Not due to any string pulling by Biden.
the_doctah 3y ago
>Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop. The Twitter files were very specific about the plethora of 3-letter agencies set up to do nothing but make censorship requests. Your claim is a strawman.
jtbayly 3y ago
Ignoring the fact that there were concerted efforts by people in various government branches to attack and get rid of Trump while he was president makes your argument silly. Just because Trump was in office doesn't mean his political enemies in the government were unable to use their governmental powers to censor speech that would help Trump get reelected.

woooooo 3y ago

Taibbi specifically had tons of meeting notes on "alignment" between twitter's content policy team and people from DOJ, FBI, etc. Yes, Trump was president at the time.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Yes, there were meetings between twitter and the feds monitoring Prigozhin's bot farms. Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't. Not only did the feds not lean on Twitter to suppress Hunter's dick picks, but the coordination that I saw is actually coordination I want to see. Yeah, the spooks should talk with the social networks, so long as the social networks can check and balance the requests. If you disagree I would like you to explain to me what is so important about allowing Dimitri Prigozhin's bot farms to go unchallenged? Do you want another TEN_GOP incident, where a prominent republican account turns out to literally be run out of Dimitri Prigozhin's IRA just outside Moscow? I'd think you would want to avoid another embarrassment like that.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  > Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't Incorrect. What Taibbi wrote was that Twitter approached the FBI, asking whether the laptop story was misinformation. The FBI had in fact known that this was a genuine hard drive long before it reached the press (nearly a year before) but nonetheless said that the story was probably a misinformation campaign. The government leaning on social media was not related to the laptop story. That came later, in 2021, where the government worked through NGO proxies to lean on social media to ban people arguing against lockdowns and even supplying lists of users to ban or suppress. The 5th Circuit had ample time to review the evidence and found it compelling enough to uphold the injunction. Do you think these judges are just being duped by misinformation?
- the_doctah 3y ago
  There were plenty of receipts and evidence. Check your facts.

Manuel_D 3y ago

The Twitter files encompasses more than just the Hunter Biden laptop story (where the FBI did indeed say the story was likely disinformation , despite knowing it was true. Whether this was bureaucratic dysfunction or deliberate remains unclear). It also encompassed purported COVID misinformation (much of which turned out to be true). Government agencies and government sponsored NGOs did indeed direct social media to ban specific individuals advocating against blanket lockdowns. The notion that Taibbi et al. aimed to show that Biden is some illuminati-like shadow figure ruling the world secretly is a straw man. It did indeed show what it sought out to prove: the government directly and indirectly directed the censorship carried out by large social media companies and often labeled true facts as misinformation. Read the injunction itself: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23867628/preliminary-injunction-against-biden-admin-re-social-media.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23867628/preliminary-... that prohibits communication between government and social media companies precisely because of this coercion.

jjoonathan 3y ago
I limited my investigation to the Hunter Biden Laptop story in the first Twitter Files release; the dishonesty I saw from Musk and Taibbi on that subject was enough to pass judgement. The Republican MO is to pivot to a different claim in the firehose-of-falsehood the moment you get called out. I'm not impressed.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  And what dishonesty was that? > Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop This is not at all what was claimed. The focus on the Hunter laptop censorship was on the FBI confirming (or at least strongly suggesting) that the story was disinformation despite the fact that the FBI knew of its veracity. Not due to any string pulling by Biden.

the_doctah 3y ago

>Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop. The Twitter files were very specific about the plethora of 3-letter agencies set up to do nothing but make censorship requests. Your claim is a strawman.

jtbayly 3y ago

Ignoring the fact that there were concerted efforts by people in various government branches to attack and get rid of Trump while he was president makes your argument silly. Just because Trump was in office doesn't mean his political enemies in the government were unable to use their governmental powers to censor speech that would help Trump get reelected.