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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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.

I am a little confused about the contents of tweets 21 and 22 in the thread. Reproduced below with emphasis added.

21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.

22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.

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

New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.

You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.

Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022.

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)

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

I think the difference is twitter was biased about who it censored and lied about it

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)

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.

I think the difference is twitter was biased about who it censored and lied about it

What is the evidence of this? It's not like we have the full data on accounts Twitter censored, only the ones Weiss picked...

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 best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.

The evidence presented would seem to contradict this

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?