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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 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?

Through any of these communications. Ah-hah!

I don't think we need to get conspiratorial though. The absence of any direct communications does mostly confirm that the decision to censor the story based off the "Hacked Info" policy was kinda-sorta just made up by Twitter employees. We find out in the string of posts that previous implementation of the Hacked Info policy required authorities to say some content was h4x0r3d in order for Twitter to remove it. Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

It sounds like Twitter staff made the decision to censor the laptop story and suspend the NYPOST based on personal political leanings. This was in direct contradiction to company policy. I believe "not 2016 again" was mentioned by at least one exec in these communications. I'd be more willing to cite the thing if it was in a dang news article or substack.

"The first amendment isn't absolute" bit is a conspicuous wink wink, nudge nudge vote of approval. I agree it doesn't exude the air pressure. To characterize it as a coordinated campaign of governmental interference or conspiracy would not be accurate. One thing I thought about after seeing was the Moldbuggian Cathedral essence of it all. When you look at the event as a whole it's pretty convincing. It all worked swimmingly.

Truthful October Surprise smear campaign targeting favored party candidate gets censored by employees of the largest politically relevant social media platform in the world. No direction between between favored party and party loyalists required. My recollection is the "Hunter Biden laptop story = Russian hackers" narrative went on for some weeks as the premier explanation and deflection. The media cover for a Biden win was total, complete, and impressive. So impressive that Ro Khanna thought it was too impressive and not a good look.

Maybe that theory of decentralized coordination can't ever be disproven as a convenient explanation, or we can accept this result as a logical, realistic end in a string in decisions. Of course the Twitter staff wanted to, and then did, successfully censor the story! Why wouldn't they?

EDIT: Tangential, but I checked out of curiosity. NYPost was suspended on the 14th of October. The account was reinstated 2 weeks later on the 30th and Twitter made this announcement.

This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.

There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.

Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.