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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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An update on the Twitter Censorship saga.

The original thread contained the following exchange:

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?

That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.

Now, as much as I sympathize with the response, I have to admit it's rather high on copium. As we all know from our Internet Atheist days, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim, and how would confirming that the federal government did not contact Twitter directly to censor stories look like anyway? An Email saying "we totally were not asked to delete this by the federal government"? That would seem even more suspicious. No, I believe that it's unreasonable to expect your opponents to prove a negative, and sometimes you just have to admit when your theory comes up short on evidence.

Anyway, onto the update:

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.

In it's own right this is also an interesting follow up to a thread from the old place about ex-CIA people getting new jobs at Facebook moderation, and how "extremely inflammatory and uncharitable" it was to claim they might care more about CIA than Facebook interests.

In it's own right this is also an interesting follow up to a thread from the old place about ex-CIA people getting new jobs at Facebook moderation, and how "extremely inflammatory and uncharitable" it was to claim they might care more about CIA than Facebook interests.

Jim Baker very explicitly believes in the Trump-Russia connection. I think that's different from someone who is ex-CIA getting hired on to do moderation.

I don't see how. CIA is explicitly a spooky agency that would benefit from being able to control information on a society-wide scale, so they should not be given any benefit of doubt in these cases.

Ex-CIA means not in the CIA, so nominally, the CIA isn't controlling anything at these places. But I gather your point, your concern is social contacts and unseen influence.

I think it's possible for an ex-CIA member to not want to continue what they did at the CIA. Or for their views on what is to be censored to come from a third party entirely. We can easily imagine a socially progressive ex-CIA person who advocates for censoring media that promotes the election fraud narrative because they genuinely believe the 2020 election was entirely fair, not just because that narrative weakens the US internally.

I dislike arguments from bias i.e "person X has a prior bias, so they are discredited". Sure, in the absence of anything decisive, it's all we have, but we shouldn't forget that, among other things, it treats a person as fundamentally incapable of separating their own beliefs from what they're doing. How are we supposed to demonstrate we can do this (as some people have shown they can) if we assume that no one can ever do so?

The problem with Jim Baker is not him being ex-FBI, it's his continued strong stance on Russia-Trump (he literally used it as a defense for keeping the story censored). His stance is precisely why we cannot take at face value the idea that he could weigh in neutrally on the question. If Baker didn't believe in the Russia-Trump connection and defended the censorship, he would be seen as more trustworthy in this instance. Likewise, say a member of the CIA was known to be anti-Iranian, then brought on after leaving the CIA to overlook all articles on Facebook which included the Iranian ones. I think it's reasonable to tell this person that they need to prove they won't be biased on which Iranian articles to moderate, or if that's impossible, to never let them weigh in on those articles in the first place.

I dislike arguments from bias i.e "person X has a prior bias, so they are discredited". Sure, in the absence of anything decisive, it's all we have, but we shouldn't forget that, among other things, it treats a person as fundamentally incapable of separating their own beliefs from what they're doing. How are we supposed to demonstrate we can do this (as some people have shown they can) if we assume that no one can ever do so?

What? We use the people who have shown they can? I don't like arguments from bias like that either, but that's for normal people, not former members of the least trustworthy institution in US history.

Edit: dropped the last line because it was meant for a different post.

Sure, my point was just that we have to at least be willing to let people demonstrate their commitment to principles. I also think there are ways in which an institution's incentives can make a person seem innately untrustworthy when they might say or do different things in another context.

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