site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Via information from Twitter's Archives, Elon has released what he calls "THE TWITTER FILES" part one, via journalist Matt Taibbi.

And uh...

it's nothing?

So we learn the following events that I highlight because they seem important to me. If you believe I have omitted an important fact from the thread, feel free to point it out.

  1. There were ways for VIPs to report tweets to twitter staff in a way the average person couldn't. As an aside, all of the tweets in that image were nude images of Hunter Biden - not anything about the laptop story, or corruption exactly, just nudes of Hunter Biden, which are arguably prevented by any policy on revenge porn.

  2. Both the Biden Campaign and the Trump White House used these lines of communication. It is notable that only one of Biden and Trump was President in October 2020, and it was not Biden.

  3. It was biased to Dems because more dems work at Twitter. I'm kinda missing the causation here but sure.

  4. It seems like different teams at Twitter were not on the same page about their policy.

  5. Matt Taibbi sees no evidence of any government or intelligence agency having spoken to Twitter directly about the laptop story in any fashion.

  6. Twitter internally argued some more about whether this was good or bad

  7. Ro Khanna reached out to Twitter to tell them that they shouldn't be supressing speech.

  8. Twitter asked the opinions of 9 Republican and 3 Democratic House Staffers

  9. The house Dems thought there should be more moderation, said "The first amendment isn't absolute"

  10. Dorsey often intervened on high profile suspensions

Uh, this story contains the following actions from Democratic party officials who were either in office or affiliated with the government in some fashion at the time:

  1. Ro Khanna, house rep, said they should not censor the story

  2. Some Democratic staffers said that there should be more moderation in an informal bitching session

Nevertheless, Elon and others are treating this like it was some sort of horrid crime by the Biden administration, which was not in office, and when it had exactly the same capabilities as the Trump administration, actually in office had with Twitter?

And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story. It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

You're right that there isn't anything substantially new here. Yes it proves that Twitter wrongfully censored a true news story, but we already knew that. What these revelations do show is that the previous Twitter administration was incompetent (which makes Elon look better by comparison).

they were malicious, not just incompetent