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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?

The emails make it clear the management at Twitter reflexively did not want the Hunter story to spread, and they either deluded themselves or made up the "hacked materials" excuse as a pretext to suppressing the story. In the end, the suppression likely became way bigger of a story than the story itself, to the point that even Democratic lawmakers were contacting Twitter to tell them what a boneheaded move that was.

When this story first came out, I was skeptical about the laptop in part because Rudy Guiliani was the source but since then I don't have any doubts that this was really Hunter Biden's laptop and emails. I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun. Hunter is obviously a fuck up, and I think it's obvious that he only got executive positions because of who his father is, but the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

You're not wrong, but I'd feel a lot more confident in the lack of such a chain if there was a horde of serious journalists attacking the matter as ferociously as possible instead of insisting that there's absolutely nothing to see and no evidence of any problems at all, so they're not going to treat it as a real story.

Really though, I actually do think having a fuck-up, crackhead failson extracting millions in graft from various sketchy dealings around the world should be disqualifying for a Presidential candidate. Obviously, I'm not going to get my wish there (and the last thing that Trump enthusiasts would want is to apply that principle consistently), but I think it's entirely fair to demand that the democratically elected most powerful person in the world not have first-order family ties to a comical level of corruption.

Your first point is fair, and I don't really disagree with your second point. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be even a whiff of nepotistic graft anywhere near the highest position of the land, but that's never going to happen. Given how far we are from that reality, I sort of understand the general lack of interest on the topic.