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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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We can read their "experience" tab on linkedin (most of them aren't visible logged out, cba to make a throwaway):

Doug leads the Special Security Support Team for Twitter, managing Corporate Security efforts to detect, assess and mitigate threats to Twitter's most visible employees and events.

Focused on crisis management; business continuity; flexible & remote workforce security; and security training & education for the best flock of rock stars in the world. đź’™

• Generate crisis management plans for offices, data centers and events. Lead efforts to test the crisis framework of those plans via tabletop exercises with leaders worldwide.

• Proactively and reactively lead teams to assess and manage global incidents and crises affecting Twitter’s employees, offices and reputation.

• Integrate with global risk teams to assess validity and priority of risks. Utilize intelligence data and findings to drive decisions.

• Collaborate with operational managers to ensure procedures are in place to support and/or minimize risks to employees who are traveling or receiving threats online.

• Responsible for oversight of Twitter’s emergency communications system.

--

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce. ... You know, when it comes to you, I can't decide whether you're a reflexive contrarian or something else entirely.

To illustrate the point with some hyperbole - If, hypothetically, I was a dark elf silently plotting to dismantle the USG, execute Plan Moldbug, and install BAP as Emperor, it'd still be (if I was talking to other live players who too might take action) worth contesting confused claims about how the Cathedral works and uses power - lest my allies box shadows and spend years on based political projects that accomplish nothing.

You expect Intelligence people to put things like "* And oversees compliance with government directives and assorted 1st Amendment violations" in their LinkedIn?

twitter has "trust and safety" people whose job it is to censor threats, cp, racism, extremism, etc. there are a lot of people who explicitly that. the people that OP linked whose profiles I could view and get information from very clearly laid out security (computer or physical) roles instead.

rewording my question: do you expect them to put a smoking gun in their Linked in profiles?

Them working for T&S isn't a smoking gun though, it'd just be twitter hiring people to do a task they explicitly claim they are doing and intend to do. If an ex-FBI person is 'preventing extremism on twitter', they're just one of a hundred twitter employees doing that, it isn't illegal or anything. Most 'normal' people, and especially the 'cathedral', will just read that as 'fbi person who works at twitter now', and not infer any "government directives" or "1st amendment violations". Despite that, the linked individuals are just twitter hiring people with security skillsets for security roles.

Them working for T&S isn't a smoking gun though,

Nobody said that it is, why are you fixated on it?