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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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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?

It's not an FBI agent demanding they take down the story or risk arrest, so in that sense it's not a 'bombshell', but the 'room temperature' here started with public statements that social media would face increased regulation if they didn't clamp down on misinformation, and a bunch of former and a few not-so-former intel people saying the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” by the 19th. Having them also say it privately by the 16th is unsurprising, but it's also kinda scandalous even if not unconstitutional in any enforceable way.

That Taibbi didn't find direct contact specifically about the laptop story is pleasantly surprising -- as is the Dem congressional staffer with any interest in the First Amendment -- but it's not the only thing required for there to be a scandal, here, if a lesser one. I mean, that's especially the case given that it's already known that Twitter Safety people were meeting directly with the Biden team in non-e-mail approaches, but even if all of those things were never intimidating anything about this specific story or threats of future regulation, you still have other problems:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

That's genuinely less bad than if the Biden administration called them up and said 'fuck the NYPost in particular', but it's still at a particularly ugly nexus of federal power and speech that's largely gone unexplored because no one with standing could challenge it. And the defense that this was the Trump ODNI, DHS, and FBI doesn't reduce the scandal very severely, for the same reason that Peter Strzok being part of the Trump FBI doesn't make Strzok's behavior less bad.

((And there's separate mini-scandals, here: the DNC was pointing at a RealJamesWoods tweet that... it's blurry as hell, and I don't really want to look at any politician's junk for very long, so I assume it's a dick? But it's also the man smoking crack. Note that the Twitter declaration above emphasizes the lack of coordination as a defense against electioneering claims. Yes, the media exception probably matters more, and yes, the RNC and DNC have long been political 'fixers', but even assuming every such removal was perfectly legitimate, it's still the DNC e-mailing Twitter and telling them to remove a private citizen's commentary on a matter of political interest. Not illegal! The DNC isn't a government! Probably not even unprecedented, given past cozy relationships to newspapers. But come on; people were raising concerns when federal campaigns said maybe Palin's involuntary biographer shouldn't rent the house nextdoor and stare at her backyard all the time.))

There's some 'charitable' explanations, here -- the FBI had a Hunter laptop well before the NYPost story and probably before the meeting warning about it, so maybe their concerns about hacks related to it were 'really' making sure none of their people leaked, for example -- but this is a pretty severe issue even if not The Worst Case.

Biden administration

You mean campaign?

Not every specific instance would break down that way, but I think it would be worse if it were someone who got hired into the early Biden admin in 2021, or worked as part of the team for that, even if not on the Biden campaign team during the 2020 election season. And, in turn, it would be even worse were anyone who held office or a Hill job at the time. Partly that's just the more direct ties to government force, but it also just feels closer to power than politics.

Now, as you point out, the Biden administration as a whole wasn't in office before the election, and it's not clear a lot of individuals who could have made those calls had other personal offices. So it's not likely, and without any specific evidence needs to be treated as purely imaginary. But it's the hypothetical a lot of people are motioning around when they say that the reveal here wasn't that bad.