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Notes -
Part 2 of the Twitter Files have been released
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600
Instead of Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss is doing the honors
Twitter suppressed the virality of certain accounts and hashtags of conservatives and covid-skpetics, such as Sanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who came out against mask mandates, and Dan Bongino. Twitter also has different tiers of moderation. Highly controversial, high-traffic accounts have an extra layer of oversight.
I thought it would be worse, but still makes twitter look bad.
A small note: the existence of shadowbans and search suggestion bans was already public knowledge.
The 'tweet thread' format sucks. It's hard to interpret this - how many conservative accounts had restrictions, how many non-conservative accounts did, what precisely were the restrictions, how many views were prevented, etc. Elon owns twitter, and could assign a few people to spend a week figuring that out. Given "the only condition was it first be published on twitter", hopefully there'll be more details in written form in the future.
So, twitter applied some restrictions to some conservatives - but how much in practice? What's the absolute decrease in views of conservative content this would've caused? Is it greater than 5%? 1%? .5%? .1%? It's hard to tell. We're shown a few accounts with restrictions, of thousands of 100k+ follower conservative accounts - do 1 in 5 conservatives have restrictions or 1 in 100? What does 'do not amplify' mean? Internal tools can have strange names. That could in principle mean 'never show to anyone who isn't a follower, and show at 20% rate to followers', or 'this account has botted retweets in the past - increase threshold for bot filter'. It probably did affect kirk's views, but it's hard to draw strong conclusions from three words on a picture of an angled computer screen. Twitter has the resources to tell us exactly what actions 'do not amplify' corresponded to! One of the examples is dan bongino (big conservative personality) search banned, with no other restrictions. He still is search banned.Search banning doesn't lower reach noticeably, as people don't search tweets that much relative to browsing, so did that materially affect him? And purely anecdotally, a lot of random high-follower twitter users just don't show up in search, how can one know this is a 'twitter targeting conservatives' as opposed to 'twitter moderation sucking'?
There's also the moldbuggian issue of asymmetry. Conservatives aren't suddenly going to win on an 'even playing field' (moral and political censorship for much of the 1900s was very conservative in today's sense, yet here we are). Getting twitter neutral and letting conservatives speak isn't going to win anything - conservative media had massive popular reach on twitter and facebook and TV and the web a year ago, the censorship didn't reduce it meaningfully, and twitter censoring less won't change that. So the significance of elon fixing that, or the practical harm to some cause from twitter shadowbanning kirk or libsoftiktok, isn't much.
Twitter's censorship hurt the far-right, covid-skeptics, and similar more clearly - instead of a few shadowbans, they're mass suspended every six months - so elon could let them liveWill recent moderation changes will let them stay on - is the mass unban (of e.g. bap, anglin, many others) tied to a looser moderation policy? Or is it a second chance for "incorrectly banned accounts" without any rule change, given there have been far-right banwaves after elon took over?
Just look at Steve Sailer's account.
This would be much more convincing if I haven't seen many similar graphs over the past few months, together with claims about censorship being lifted ... except with the inflection point in January or June. In general, single graphs like this have many causes, and drawing conclusions from them is hard.
There seemed to have been a bit of a thaw earlier, however, the recent increase is far more stronger, as far as I can tell.
I remember more comments about decreased throttling after Musk took over, not before.
Do you spend much time on twitter?
You are free to reply with these graphs though.
Yes, I look twitter constantly. I don't remember where I saw them unfortunately. As part of said constant use, every month I see a few 'twitter started censoring my views/followers: check out this chart' and sometimes a 'twitter stopped censoring my views/followers and i'm finally taking off, yay!'. And that was true well before musk.
As above, this doesn't mean he hasn't removed large shadowbans and it isn't causing rightwing accounts to grow rapidly - just that this doesn't really prove anything.
The info about throttling hasn't come out yet, and I believe you are going to be proven wrong.
There were various throttling methods employed on a lot of RW and GOP accounts. Some of it went away when Musk was buying Twitter, but some of it is still in play.
It takes some time until situation becomes equitable.
My claims here are measured though - I'm confident i'm right in the sense that "just steve sailer's graph isn't good evidence for concluding suppression". Compare to believing a n=7 unrandomized trial with p=.049 on the effect of st johns wort on anxiety, even if it does have an effect (the effect is probably much smaller).
I'm also not claiming that throttling isn't affecting RW and GOP accounts - although I claimed elsewhere that said throttling wasn't significantly restricting (e.g. ~ 10% to 20% of all views) the largest / mainstream conservative accounts, but more was applied to far-right accounts more (sailer being the latter). (from OP "Twitter's censorship hurt the far-right, covid-skeptics, and similar more clearly")
I'd end up being wrong in a related sense of "not being aware of something true" if it was shown that sailer was suppressed and that suppression was directly related to that specific view spike, even though the graph still is too little evidence. But there's no way musk or the journos will release detailed enough analyses to conclude that (even though twitter probably could technically).
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I think the most damming thing is not that the censorship existed, but how it was ideologically enforced/biased . It does not matter if it was only a small amount of censorship or that it had no major material effect, it still occurred and makes the left look bad (if you look at this from a culture war angle). In the grand scheme of things, this does not change much, I agree.
Does the thread have any new information about 'how it was ideologically enforced/biased', though? There's just the photos of computer screens, and internal communication that you can read as referring to suppressing conservatives given what we already know, but don't really tell us anything new.
It is possible she is cherry-picking the data, and that the apparent bias is statistically insignificant. If there were a way to reach either Musk, Bari or Matt, this would be a great question to ask. I would need to see the raw data. ...good luck with that though.
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I am a little confused about the contents of tweets 21 and 22 in the thread. Reproduced below with emphasis added.
Did Weiss mess up the date in tweet 21? Because Elon bought Twitter in late October 2022. He had been owner for over a month, apparently, when the tweet with the home address went up and when Twitter Support decided it did not violate their policies.
It also seems kind of weird to criticize previous Twitter management for limiting the reach of accounts they think violate their policies, since this is Elon's own position
This is not, in fact, Elon's own position.
"Note, this applies just to the individual tweet, not the whole account"
Appreciate the clarification, for some reason was not threaded with the one I linked.
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See here. All perfectly fine, I'm sure. https://twitter.com/KingChristianCS/status/1594848557843943429
No rules being violated here, no
sirma'am https://twitter.com/Droidytv25/status/1595123798466269184Definitely no calls for immediate violence here that are apparently perfectly ok as long as it's happening to a "fascist terf woman" https://twitter.com/A7aKoala/status/1595101534047576072
Definitely no bias on the part of Twitter's moderation team. What a thing to pick on as if this makes their behavior look any better...
I agree, Elon Musk's moderation is very biased.
Do you really think this is helping you? The obvious deflection, the sneering, what's even the point of it? Acting exactly like everyone in that twitter thread isn't going to convince anyone.
You started it, man. You can't lay on the thick sarcasm like "all perfectly fine", "no rules being violated here", and "definitely no bias" and not expect @Gillitrut to respond in kind.
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The fact of the matter is the old Twitter team is literally not in charge anymore. Musk has owned the company for a month and a half. Every tweet you linked happened almost a month after Elon took over. How on earth do you blame pre-Musk Twitter for content that was created and remains up after he is in charge?
Because while he fired a lit of people, he didn't replace everyone, and even if he did, at the moment he can only draw from a pool of Californians. Regardless of management they will have the same bias.
Unless you're implying Elon should have hooked everyone up to Neuralink and control every single thing they do, I don't see how it's reasonable to claim he should be able to rid the company of it's pre-existing bias so quickly.
Hey hey, not all of us Californians are bonkers. Only most of us.
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How long do we have to wait, post-acquisition, to start holding the CEO and owner responsible for the moderation decisions of the company he is CEO and owner of?
Funny enough
https://twitter.com/annecollier/status/1600889250761027585
This is from today - looks like the progressive entryists don't just all disappear when the technically formal ownership of an organization changes.
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I'd give him 6 months to a year.
Keep mind, I find the project rather hopeless, and will be extremely surprised if he pulls it off. But at that point it will only be his fault.
Now, can you answer any of my questions? Do think company owners have the ability to read minds, and control all employees at once? If not, what is you expectation that the bias should be fixed by now based on?
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Because A) all the 3rd world contractors are still using the rules the previous team set up, and B) the exact same thing happened when they did this to Rowling last year.
Believe me, I'd be tremendously happy if Musk's new moderation eliminated this and anyone defending it, laughing at their sudden change of position on "free speech". Hopefully it will, in time.
For how long post-Musk takeover do you think it will be reasonable to blame moderation decisions on previous management? If the tweets are still up six months from now will it still be the previous Twitter managements fault? Or will it be on Musk then?
Absolutely. If that behavior towards us is tolerated in six months I'd call his takeover a pathetic waste of time.
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I think she got the date wrong. Wiki says Libs was doxed in April https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok#Identity_revelation_(April_2022)
I think the difference is twitter was biased about who it censored and lied about it
Based on @Bernd's sibling comment, this is not correct. The tweet was made after Musk took over and apparently his team thinks it doesn't violate Twitter's policies.
What is the evidence of this? It's not like we have the full data on accounts Twitter censored, only the ones Weiss picked...
LibsOfTikTok was first doxxed in April. Bernd has found extant tweets (without info re: if they've been reported or adjudicated), but doxxing Libs with 'joking' violent discussion was a very common thing through that time period, and Libs had a report denied that week.
The particular tweet I linked was the one Weiss mentioned, IIUC, but yes, there's definitely been a longstanding pattern.
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From twitter in 2018
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning
and
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/26/twitter-says-it-does-not-shadow-ban-despite-complaints-by-republicans/
The evidence presented would seem to contradict this
Maybe they added shadowbans between '18 and '22? As linked above, shadowbans and search bans were publicly known twitter features a year ago at least
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I am not seeing what the evidence in these articles is supposed to be. I see allegations that they do this, but where is the data?
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