What do we learn from the Twitter docs on the Hunter Biden story?

[TSherbs]

What did they do? Just call it what you think it is. What's the worst thing, in your mind?

[TSherbs]

I've actually been in and out of the hospital yesterday and today (not for me), so I really don't have the time or inclination for research. I hit this site on drive-bys as I head off to take care of things, etc. I need the condensed version, in blunt terms.

[dneal]

Sorry to hear, regardless for who it's for.

The worst thing for me is evidence of a bureaucracy protecting itself. Trump was many things good and bad, but one of them was a threat to "the swamp" as he calls it. That's the circle of politicians, lobbyists and business profiting from the taxpayer; exacerbated by the bloated agencies and legions of useless government employees. Business includes the media, which is the mouthpiece for the circle.

None of this is new. It goes back to political machines of the late 19th century, "robber barons", etc... What is new is that the internet and social media is a way for "the people" (of all political persuasions) to communicate easily and rapidly. Why do you think there is so much effort expended to control it? and why everyone has turned on the Tesla guy (previously the savior of the planet with his electric cars)?

Trump threatened to expose it, or even bring it all down, and the "cabal" discussed in the Time article stopped him in 2020. Musk is threatening to "out" it, and there are legions of pundits, celebrities, politicians, etc... now decrying a billionaire owning a media company. Why are people so afraid of ideas they don't agree with being discussed?

This isn't illuminati conspiracy theory. It's what we all know. Bernie and his 1% spiel is about this, just like Trump and his "swamp" spiel is. They get away with it as long as they pit us against each other.

[TSherbs]

Thanks, dneal.

I share your sentiments here about bureaucratic entrenchment and the gross reciprocal power sharing in Washington (meaning the swamp). You likely elevate that problem above where I would put it, but I share your dislike and distaste for it.

[TSherbs]

Why are people so afraid of ideas they don't agree with being discussed?

I want to return to this question at another time. For good and bad reasons, but I need more time to elaborate.

[TSherbs]

Why are people so afraid of ideas they don't agree with being discussed?

I want to return to this question at another time. For good and bad reasons, but I need more time to elaborate.

--fear of instability
--fear of loss of status, power, or comfort
--fear of loss of advantage for their children
--simple discomfort with change
--fear of loss of personal investment in an idea


"Ideas" are not neutral, innocuous human social objects. Ideas are invested with enormous potentiality and power. Ideas can change the world, can alter balance of power, can strip individuals of their will to live or make them eager to strip life from other persons or peoples. Ideas can heal or hurt. Ideas can be weaponized for good or evil, for personal gain, collective gain, or purposeful harm. Ideas often get a lot of human investment into them and thus we become reluctant to let go of them because of the dislocation in life or ego or world-view that might result from it.

In the way that a bullet is not only an inert package of alloys and explosive chemicals, or a rock on a cliff edge is the same as a rock at the bottom of a valley floor. Sure, rocks and bullets can be discussed, but their "potential energy" (so to speak) for good or for bad will likely also come into the conversation and energize fear and apprehension. Same with ideas. Probably even more so with ideas.

[dneal]

I agree that ideas can be dangerous. The question is about them being discussed though. Censorship and propaganda are the tools of tyrants, which is why the first amendment is, well... first.

[TSherbs]

I agree that ideas can be dangerous. The question is about them being discussed though. Censorship and propaganda are the tools of tyrants, which is why the first amendment is, well... first.

Censorship and propaganda are the tools of parents, too. Of religions, of politeness, of courtesy, of schools, of the military, of business and marketplace, of governors and town school boards...My point with that is that that the control of exposure to, disemmination of, and discussion of ideas that we disagree with is exactly what all elements of authority engage in (one way or another).

[dneal]

Ok, and parents are Plato's "benevolent dictators". The analogy falls apart after that, on many fronts.

The context is free society, not households.

[Chuck Naill]

Sounds like word salad.

[TSherbs]

that's fine, I just wanted to answer dneal's question above

if others have a difference answer, they can chime in

[Chuck Naill]

If the boy fucked up, oaky How many fathers would have protested?

[dneal]

Back to the topic of Twitter - There has been a delay on further releases, and Matt Taibbi just released why:

THREAD: Twitter Files Supplemental

On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.

We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.

The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated.

Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”

“My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss.

The first batch of files both reporters received was marked, “Spectra Baker Emails.”

Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.

The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday.

Reporters resumed searches through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today. The next installment of “The Twitter Files” will appear @bariweiss. Stay tuned.

[724Seney]

If the boy fucked up, oaky How many fathers would have protested?

Fair question.
As is how many fathers would have facilitated and been beneficiaries of the "fuck up?"

[dneal]

@ Seney. Please don’t feed the troll.

[dneal]

Twitter Files Part Two - Bari Weiss. Link contains references mentioned (screenshots, etc...)

THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.

1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.

3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify.”

6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.

9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.

10. All without users’ knowledge.

11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.

12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.

13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”

14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.

16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was
@libsoftiktok
—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”

17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.

18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”

19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:

20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”

21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.

--edit--

#21 was from 35 seconds ago. I might add more as she continues to post, but it's definitely interesting.

--continued--

22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.

23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:

24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”

25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”

26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”

27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by
@abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, @isaacgrafstein
and the team The Free Press
@thefp

28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.

29. We're just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we'd love to hear from you. Please write to: tips@thefp.com

30. Watch
@mtaibbi
for the next installment.

[dneal]

Laptop.jpeg

[Chuck Naill]

If the boy fucked up, oaky How many fathers would have protested?

Fair question.
As is how many fathers would have facilitated and been beneficiaries of the "fuck up?"

As with Fred Trump?

[TSherbs]

Interesting "take" on the more recent Twitter dumps re:the treatment of Trump and other certain conservatives, by Isaac Saul of the "Tangle" blog.

After summarizing the argument from "the right" and from "the left," he gives his take, which I always appreciate more than those other summaries.

Twitter files: Part 2, 3, 4 and 5.
BY ISAAC SAUL – 14 DEC 2022

Today's topic.
The Twitter files. Today, we're going to be covering parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the "Twitter files," a series of leaks being posted to Twitter by the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger about Twitter's moderation decisions. We covered part one of the files already, which included internal communications about the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

One update from that report: In our first edition covering this, we mentioned that Taibbi and the other reporters had agreed to “unnamed conditions” in their reporting. Since then, all three reporters have said that the condition was that they must post their reporting to Twitter first before publishing it anywhere else, and have all insisted they’ve been given unfettered access to Twitter’s internal files.

In Part 2 of the series, Bari Weiss explored the way Twitter uses blacklists to actively prevent certain accounts or tweets from trending, and reduces the visibility of those accounts. Included in her thread was evidence that Twitter had actively limited the reach of Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who argued Covid-19 lockdowns would harm children, as well as conservatives like Charlie Kirk, LibsOfTiktok, and Dan Bongino. She shared screenshots of how Twitter’s tools work, including “do not amplify” and “trends blacklist” lists.

In Part 3, Taibbi began sharing internal communications related to the decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform. He shared internal Slack messages showing that Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, was meeting on a regular basis with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) leading up to the 2020 election. Taibbi described an environment where "Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives."

Taibbi also pointed to Twitter officials who were considering the "context" of Trump's tweets, not just the tweets themselves, to determine whether he was in violation of the platform's rules and worthy of a suspension. This was counter to their publicly stated rules, which said they could not consider the myriad of ways tweets could be interpreted while making content moderation decisions.

In Part 4, Michael Shellenberger writes that senior Twitter executives were creating justifications to ban Trump, sought a policy change for Trump alone, and expressed no concern for the implications of such a ban. Shellenberger adds the context that in 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, and 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats and that Roth, head of trust and safety, said there were "literal nazis" in the White House in a 2017 tweet.

Shellenberger cites internal deliberations where Twitter officials concede its ban of Trump was based "specifically on how Trump's tweets are being received and interpreted," even though in 2019 it said it would "not attempt to determine all potential interpretation of content or its intent." Notably, Twitter executives decided to abandon their "public interest" policy that protected other politicians and public figures from being permanently banned on the site in order to kick Trump off of it.

In Part 5, Weiss explores the actual removal of Trump from the platform. In these tweets, she notes that Trump went into January 8, two days after the riots at the Capitol, with one remaining strike before a permanent suspension. He tweeted twice:

The first said: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

The second said: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Weiss shared chats from inside the company where staffers expressed confusion about how either tweet could be described as incitement, despite the fact they had prompted many employees to call for Trump's permanent ban. Just an hour later, however, Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, suggested the tweets may be "coded incitement to further violence." Members of Twitter's scaled enforcement team then suggested they “view him [Trump] as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

After a 30-minute all-hands meeting in which Gadde and former CEO Jack Dorsey tried to explain why they hadn't yet banned Trump, employees became increasingly upset. One hour later, Twitter announced a permanent suspension of Trump's account.

Together, Weiss, Shellenberger and Taibbi make the case that these files show how Twitter targeted conservatives and bent their own rules to punish users whose politics they did not agree with.

Critics of this narrative say Musk is selectively leaking internal documents to reporters who he knows will craft the narrative he wants, and that the files don't prove conservatives were treated any differently from liberals. Rather, many say, the internal communications show there were many difficult moderation decisions Twitter had to make and they took those decisions very seriously.

***

My take.
Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. It is meant to be one perspective amid many others. If you have feedback, criticism, or compliments, you can reply to this email and write in. If you're a subscriber, you can also leave a comment.

These were more interesting and newsworthy files than installment #1.
Most jarring to me were the weekly meeting with government entities like the FBI, and the very obvious invention of new standards to police Trump.
We'd still benefit from seeing how liberal accounts were handled on the platform.
Well, these were a lot more interesting than the first installment.

When "Part 1" of the Twitter files was released, I wrote that "there was very little new information that hasn't already been reported by many outlets." It wasn't that the story wasn't important, or the details weren't damning, but there just wasn't any "bombshell" or "smoking gun" file showing Twitter had acted in an obviously unethical way to censor the Hunter Biden story. What it really showed was that there were internal deliberations about the decision, lots of people didn't think it was the right call, and the wrong decision was made. I said this at the time, as did many other commentators on the right (and, eventually, former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted they screwed up).

Part 2, 3, 4 and 5, taken together, are more interesting. These revelations included screenshots from Twitter administrative dashboards showing tools Twitter uses to suppress the reach of certain accounts. They also showed that the company, in simple terms, came up with new rules and potential violations in order to justify banning President Trump, and that several dissenting internal voices questioned the insular and ambiguous nature of how that decision was made. Additionally, Twitter regularly acted on the censorship requests from agencies like the FBI, DHS, DNI, and political campaigns, and Twitter's head of safety was meeting with those agencies on a weekly basis.

This is all big news. It is not a "nothingburger." And even though Twitter is a private company, there are very real free speech questions at play. How critical was the government's role in suggesting what content to suppress? Did these suggestions ever breach the level of coercion, or pressuring? How evenly were these standards applied across the political spectrum? Even if these instances ultimately fell short of violating the first amendment, liberals would do well to recognize "free speech issues" aren’t always about government suppression of speech. Private companies can and do suppress speech, and whether that is explicitly unconstitutional is separate from the question of whether it's a societal harm or not.

Twitter has also been slippery about its position on suppressing these accounts. Many on the left have pointed out that Twitter defines "shadowbanning" as “deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” But, as Ben Sturgis pointed out, this is also the most extreme version of this definition, and the conservatives who have said they were "shadow banned" over the years have obviously not meant that literally nobody could see their tweets. Rather, those posters meant that the engagement on their accounts was being artificially limited because of what they were posting, and they could tell.

Despite these claims getting mocked and derided by journalists and the left, these files show they were, at least in a few cases, actually right. And we have good reason to believe the active suppression of these accounts was probably more common than we know.

If you're on the left, think about it this way: Musk owns Twitter now. He clearly has issues with progressives, and has been hammering the "woke mind virus" he thinks is infecting the country. What if Musk, at the guidance of someone like Bari Weiss, were to label anti-Israel protests on Twitter as antisemitic hate speech and then instructed Twitter engineers to suppress tweets from Palestinian activists and/or suspend the accounts sharing those messages? What if, simultaneously, Twitter execs were meeting with the FBI for guidance on what counts as suspendable? Would liberals react with a shrug and insist that Twitter was a private company, so this isn't really a big deal?

I doubt it.

Which brings me to my final point: Twitter does suppress the voices of people on the left, too. The glaring hole in this entire ordeal is that Weiss, Taibbi and Shellenberger have failed to shed any new light on the ratio of this suppression, who Twitter most often targets, and why. They've shown us a handful of examples of prominent conservatives being throttled, that Twitter will create new standards on the fly in order to justify certain moderation actions, and did so in Trump's case. They've shown that, around the 2020 election, they were having regular contacts with government agencies (but again, it's worth remembering this was Trump's government, not Biden's).

But none of that tells us the full picture. I could, for instance, do a "bombshell" Twitter thread on all the big oil money being donated to Democrats, and frame it as proof that the Democratic party is owned by fossil fuels, and insist that if you want to do something about climate change you should vote for Republicans. But without also sharing that Republicans similarly take millions from big oil, this would be a misleading narrative to generate.

Given the political leanings of Twitter employees, executives, and the users of the site itself, I think it is a very safe bet that Twitter's moderation policies are unevenly applied and targeted against conservatives. But, again, Taibbi, Weiss, and Shellenberger haven't yet shown that, and Musk has hurt his own case by refusing to share the files with journalists outside of these three — who were already on his team before this whole controversy started.

As I said after Part 1, Musk should release the files more widely, and the journalists involved should flesh out differences in how moderation decisions were made between liberals and conservatives. I want to see some of the internal deliberations on moderating liberal activists and voices, and then compare. On top of the very important information we've already seen, that would add a great deal of context and strength to the narrative they say they have.

Sounds right to me.

[Chuck Naill]

I liked the “big oil” analogy because that’s exactly what occurs too often for comfort.