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So, it appears the latest (and seemingly last) set of Twitter Files has come out via Bari Weiss. Link.
This one is about what was going on inside Twitter after Jan 6th, 2021, but before the Trump ban.
It seems, as common sense entails, that employees who disliked Trump were growing more agitated over the refusal to ban him. Per Weiss, Twitter had always refused to ban him before, but the rising condemnation for Jan 6th from inside and outside was growing. People were aware that nothing he did violated the rules directly, hence one employee saying that he would "thread the needle of incitement."
In a bizarrely pro-Trump interpretation of his tweets, one staffer who was supposed to actually evaluate his tweets said that when Trump referred to "American Patriots" in a tweet, he wasn't referring to the rioters, but to people who voted for him. I have no idea why this person thought that the people who rioted weren't Trump supporters.Edit: As pointed out in the responses, I think I've misinterpreted the above. I don't think this staffer intended to separate Trump's supporters from the rioters, but it could be read that way due to the informal nature of the slack chat.
Hell, the decision of the Trust and Safety team was that no, Trump's tweets about patriots or not going to the inauguration. An official named Anika Navaroli is cited as declaring the tweets acceptable for Twitter's policies, but Weiss tries casting bad faith on her testimony to the Jan 6th committee when she said that she had been trying for months to get people to realize that if Twitter did nothing, then "people were going to die". I don't know why Weiss thinks this is a contradiction, you can believe that someone skirts the line for incitement and that particular tweets don't cross the line.
There are some points made about how Twitter never banned other heads of state for things that were far more clearly in violation of Twitter's policies and which were allowed to stay up with the speaker not banned.
Anyways, the conversation at Twitter shifted once Gadde asked if his tweets could be seen as "coded incitement to further violence". This is the line that Twitter's "scaled moderation team" (no idea what that is) then began pushing as well, with the idea that if Trump was referring to the rioters when he said "American patriots", then it would be a violation.
There's also a point where some employees apparently started referring to the Banality of Evil, with Yoel Roth explaining that was an accusation that Twitter's policy enforcers were like Nazis obeying orders.
Anyways, Twitter banned Trump. Employees in favor of this celebrated and Weiss suggests they moved on to the topic of tackling medical misinformation.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this latest (last?) reveal. The annoying thing about this is nothing is being fully made public. There are no dumps of slack chats for people to gauge how the company's employees felt about all this, just the screenshots that are deemed appropriate to be shared. We ultimately have to trust that Weiss' depiction of these people as substantially demanding Trump be banned as reflecting the consensus, but there were clearly dissenters to this policy. You even have one person saying that they disagreed with the "Twitter doesn't arbitrate truth" policy but respected it nonetheless.
A point of interest to me: the TTS team's refusal to declare Trump's tweets to be in violation of policy, with agreement from some key staffers that no coded incitement was present. That's counter to the narrative being written about the TTS team with the other Twitter Files threads.
I find this release mostly disappointing. I was hoping for a smoking gun in regards to Fauci. Some of Musk's comments about how Fauci should be prosecuted also got me thinking he had good inside evidence about Fauci misdeeds. Instead I just see more stuff that basically confirms that the obviously politically motivated banning of Donald Trump was in fact politically motivated.
There's no reason to believe Musk or Twitter has any evidence with regards to Fauci. Musk has teased a COVID installment of the Twitter Files, but it's most likely going to be more of the same -- politically motivated suppression of COVID heresy.
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I don't particularly care about Trumps twitter ban, but these twitter files just add confirmation to what the last few years have led me to think.
That the problem isn't twitter, and it isn't twitters moderation or banning.
The problem is people. Specifically the two groups: who orchestrated and implimented censorship and bans, aka twitter employees, professionals, journalists, government employees (the people in Curtis Yarvins cathedral or Neema Parvinis octopus models); and the mass of semi normal people who accepted or supported this, as the joke goes insisting that it isn't happening and it happening is a good thing, insidting cancelling doesn't happen while cancelling or pouring hate on their colleagues or so called friends, etc.
The continued existence of either sets of people, not institutions, not moderation policies, not anything else but people, completely eliminates any trust in a liberal democratic system I might have.
Their continued existence itself sets that trust to zero, as it has been demonstrated to me that they can and will subvert and twist institutions, companies, governments, and even societies to favour their own dogmatic ideologies and in groups in ways are overbearingly totalitarian.
The expectation is that any new system, company, society, government etc will eventually be subverted again, unless it is rampantly intolerant of them in a way not compatible with liberal democracy at all.
As Karl Popper made clear, you can't have a tolerant society if you tolerate the intolerant, and I now think that he was right.
The problem is I don't think a tolerant non totalitarian society is possible anymore. Its internment camps for life for them, with North Korea style ancestry tracking or else we can't have a tolerant non-totalitarian society. Notice anything about that last sentence?
A flowery metaphor for it would be....
If you build a thousand bridges they'll call you the bridge builder, but fuck one goat.....
The PMC/liberals/tolerant empathetic individuals/communists/classical liberalsso tolerant they ignored it/whatever you want to call them have taken western civilisation and forced it to fuck goats non-stop for several years now.
I'm pretty sure Popper defined intolerant as people who were actively unwilling to engage in any kind of discussion whatsoever and would be willing to even resort to force.
"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
Not a big correction to your point, but just a reminder that his problem wasn't people holding intolerant positions, but when they would also refuse to rationally debate them at all.
Yes but collusion between the state and private enterprise, both backed up by and encouraging mass mob movements, with the apparant aim of silencing any dissent, obfuscating any counter reason or evidence, and shaming and silencing any moral disagreement already meets the intolerance criteria.
EDIT:
To reply specifically to this:
"I'm pretty sure Popper defined intolerant as people who were actively unwilling to engage in any kind of discussion whatsoever and would be willing to even resort to force."
It would seem to me that a lot of people would be unwilling to discuss many things, e.g., human rights, etc. By popperian logic an insistence on any principle being undebatable is itself intolerant. I live in a society where questioning is, as far as I can tell, viewed as a supremely intolerant act despite being the inverse of what is true.
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Why would you use what happened on Twitter as a knock against democracy? Twitter, like most websites, are almost entirely authoritarian. The wants of the masses are ignored unless it gets to a point where people leave the platform en-masse, and moderation decisions like this are ultimately beholden to whoever is at the top of the corporate food chain. There's no voting, there's no oversight, and the only reason we're seeing the "Twitter files" now is because Musk is releasing them to discredit the previous elites and cast legitimacy on his current endeavors.
Because its just another piece of evidence that there is a totaltarian (alwayd bad), authoritarian (sometimes bad, sometimes good), state -corporate collusion that shuts down debate, reason, exchange of evidence, and truthseeking in general. It appears that mass mob behaviours are encouraged, and that this system appears to select not for the health and prosperity of the people (like any good ol' fashioned good fascism***), but only for some highly individualistic lifestyle options and personal profits for a very small elite, as well as for the profusion of greater totalitarianism and refusals to discuss or accept compromise in society.
That twitter has recently demonstrated that resistance to this totalitarian state-corporate partnership requires that one be as rich and well connected as Elon Musk, on again off again worlds richest man, just highlights how, well, total the intolerant totalitarian regime is behind the facade.
I am not a billionaire, There are no options I think can guinely and effectively take to resist this regime as it appears to have fully co-opted discourse, debate, the
scientific process/establishment, elections and democracy, and markets. Or at least is capable of doing so ad-hoc if it is required to crush dissent or even honest debate and confusion.
Focusing on it as twitter as a tech company is the wrong layer of abstraction to correctly model what is apparently going on here, and in wider western society.
*** This is a joke, I may have some opinions that could be described as faschist by a Guardian article in the year of our lord 2022, but positive endorsement of good ol fashioned fascisms love for the Volk is 100% meant as tongue pressed firmly through the cheek and off 20 lightyears into space.
The solution to wokists co-opting and subverting the public square of the future is to set down regulations that push both sides to be treated equally. Democracies can have problems with pushing sides towards truth-seeking due to human nature, but using this as an argument to abandon democracy is farcical when dictatorships almost universally have a worse track record on this front.
No, that has been proven to not work. If treating "both sides" equally worked then wokists would not have been able to co opt and subvert not just the public square but the entire edifice of western civilisation. You cannot persuade me that something already empirically proven to be a failure will work a second time, just because of a slight change to the magic words that dictate how people are supposed to behave.
Dictatorship or monarchism having a worse track record over all is debatable and yet also utterly irrelevant, as long as it is better for me and mine. This is the lesson wokism teaches, and it teaches it well.
If you join the party early, you can indeed reap great benefits in dictatorship.
The same if you manage to get near the king and lick his boots hard enough to be promoted to nobility. Just work hard, trust in yourself and you will make it.
Party has already started, but if the best time to finish work and show up was 70 years ago, the second best time is now.
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I agree. But either there is always a somewhat fixed percentage of authoritarian personality types in any given cohort, or we created the cadre of current year neojacobins somehow. If the former, where was this personality type in the 90s/00s? They couldn't all have been running home owner associations / leading parent groups against satanism in video games. If the latter, we can correct course. Slowly, over decades.
I don't know where they were hiding in the 90s/00s.
But ultimately the path tode nazifying Germany couldn't occur until approx 5 million german combatants had been killed ong with the mass destruction of german industry.
So to correct course over decades I would expect something like Germanies treatment post 1945 to be reuqired.
The anology for the english speaking west in the era of state and corporate collusion to supress dissent would be something like the following.
Scale for population (include women too, as no longer limited to physical combat by men). This gives 20-40 million from the USA, 4-8 million in the UK, 2-5 in each of Canada and Australia, and that one guy in New zealand. These people don't have to be killed but they can't continue to participate in government, politics, ecience, education, etc. No voting, no participation in markets if any kind, no bank accounts, no healthcare, no property ownership, no internet access allowed, etc. They would need to be outlawed.
The destruction of the industries that they previously captured, which would be something along the lines of handicap the wests industry, science, and government and give China thrle 21st century. Sillicon valley gets deleted. No more google, etc. Servers get the c4 treatment en masse.
Prohibition of their sacred symbols and policy positions moving forward, so that's no more of any of the various shibboleths that I won't name here but you'll know what they are or might be I expect.
Mass propoganda and education campaigns to prevent their ideology/religion from being thought of well ever again.
Finally, their leader get the Nuremburg treatment and get trials which result in hanging or other death penalties if found guilty.
Then the decade long process of fixing things can begin.
Of course none of this is remotely realistic or even truely desirable given the sheer scale of it and sexond, third, etc order effects, the consequences to such damage to external force capabilities regarding e.g., Chinese or even Russian threats. I am merely demonstrating that the process of restoring trust in a tolerant non totalitarian system requires the removal of the old as well as credible demonstration that it isn't going to be reasserted next Tuesday.
Thank you for reading my peculiar thought experiment haha.
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The lizardmen are real and they work for Twitter! Heh.
Ha, I didn’t catch that at all. I hope it’s really the origin of that team’s name.
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This is particularly hilarious combined with the "misinformation" angle where Twitter literally arbitrates truth. But I guess no censorship is ever enough.
It looks like everybody has their own level of tolerance there. For some it's OK to have super strict rules as long as they are consistently applied, for some it's ok to follow "to friends, everything, to enemies - the law" and apply rules in some cases while ignoring them in others, to some it's ok if you can find the rule to ban, no matter how tenuous the connection, but the rule must be found - and to some the ban has to happen no matter what, and if the rules are not enough, just invent the new ones and ignore them. Maybe it helps the censors to feel they're good guys after all.
As for the narrative, I am not sure it is countered that much. Surely, there were discussions about how to ban a particular deplorable account, and whether a particular deplorable tweet can be matched to a particular rule. That doesn't mean the team didn't have common goal of suppressing certain kind of speech. I mean, it is known that Trotsky and Stalin became bitter enemies at the end, and no doubt argued a lot before that, but that doesn't mean they weren't both communists and didn't have the common goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and build the Communist society everywhere. If some of the Twitter team disagreed about whether a particular tweet should be suppressed in a particular manner, that does not exactly disprove the narrative of the existence of the system of suppression based on politics and point of view. It just gives us an insight on its inner workings.
Keep in mind that this was pre-COVID. Most of Twitter’s biggest “well, ackshuallys” hadn’t yet become so salient.
The existence of disagreement is important, even if it was ineffective. Frankly, all these threads are a blur, but I got the impression other releases wanted to paint TTS as leading the charge. The bailey is something like “Twitter was so captured you couldn’t even find rules-lawyers,” and this helps to argue against that particular form.
I'm not sure the existence of disagreement is that important. The communists over their history were constantly Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea, but is that of any use for the victims of communism? (except for the fact that you're never safe even if you're a communist - you may end up in a wrong fraction and be goolaged with the rest of them) Dissent is only valuable if it can lead to substantial changes and improvement. If it's a squabble about how to oppress the enemies of the people more efficiently, then for those who are declared the enemies of the people, it's of little value. It's sure interesting to know that there were different approaches to censorship at Twitter, and different fractions struggling for control over the levers, but ultimately it doesn't change the overarching picture of systemic censorship-eagerness.
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I thought most of this stuff was from October 2020 to January 2021; Twitter had begun well-ackshuallying in May 2020.
I suppose you’re right. I had the year wrong.
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I wonder if social media companies will relearn some of the lessons that our legal system learned a long time ago, such as the virtue of having an impartial and disinterested judge rule on a case after hearing arguments from both sides. Twitter had a mob of politically motivated employees lobby for a result, which was reached using a secretive ad hoc process.
Or maybe there is some reason that this method works better for these companies. When unimportant people are affected, most bad decisions are put down to these companies using cheap and efficient but often unfair moderation practices.
I'm not sure that applies here. In Trump's case, it seems like there were just too many people with political motivations and not enough who cared very much about the integrity and fairness of the system.
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I don’t understand. Didn’t they have to have eventually declared a policy violation in order to ban him?
That's explained in the linked thread. Vijaya Gadde proposed the "coded incitement" argument, it was taken up by the scalable enforcement team, and then that was eventually used (Weiss implies this, anyways) to ban him.
So the TTS team weren’t the ones who declared the violation, is that what you’re saying?
In this case, I don't think so. They were the ones who said the tweets in question were actually just fine.
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They don't have to do anything. I mean, there's no due process amendment for Twitter accounts, they can ban anybody anytime for any reason or without one. They say they only ban for policy violations, and maybe in some cases that's required, but nothing prevents them from banning anybody just because they hate him so much that the rules go out of the window.
On one level, sure this is how they can choose to operate but the caveat is that this clearly means that twitter would be open to the charge that they are operating as a publisher - with all the potential liability that comes with that. On the other hand, the court system in the US in 2022 is run by people with the same outlook as Vajaya Gadde so legal consistence isn't something that can be expected - it all runs on who / whom now.
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As a former Facebook employee, I recognize some similarities in how Twitter employees have learned to buy media narratives without question.
When I first joined it was eye-opening to see the contrast in what was printed in the media and what insiders had to say. The media would say one thing, and inside you'd have someone saying, "no, I wrote the code, here's a link to the code, this story is wrong." Fellow employees would mostly thank the person and express disappointment in the media.
In the last few years this changed. You'd have people at the center of some media controversy clarifying what happened, and then their coworkers would argue back, citing articles that were clearly wrong in light of the testimony and evidence from those insiders.
For Jan 6th, a media narrative developed that Trump incited the violence. The evidence, as far as I can tell: holding a rally and telling supporters to march to the Capitol and make their voice heard. That he had said to do this peaceably was either dismissed or ignored.
At Twitter this incitement narrative appears to have been received without question.
A very small group of us at Facebook pushed back on this narrative, arguing that Trump was at most guilty of moving too slowly to call for the rioters to stop. This wasn't well received. Most of the company and 100% of everyone that mattered bought into the incitement narrative, or at least pretended to.
There were clearly people in power who didn't agree with the narrative. That they were overruled doesn't mean they don't exist.
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I would be amusing if out of retaliation Musk banned Biden
I am not sure why social networks need to act as arbiters of political matters or accuracy (such as determining what constitutes as Covid misinformation). Perhaps it's for fear of losing advertiser revenue if perceived as being too complacent about purported extremism. Pre-2016 it seemed like this was not as much of a problem. Now it's not just about social networking, but being a planform for government officials and the media.
I think that would be a really, really bad move. And not all that amusing, either.
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The motive is more direct and personal: It’s not arbitration if you are already sure it’s the truth.
I think a lot of analysis of media bias overlooks this concept. It’s more appealing to posit a conspiracy or at least a class struggle. But the banal explanation is simpler.
Given that Twitter already influences The Discourse, its employees feel a perfectly normal tribal obligation to use that influence. On seeing something bad, stopping it feels good. For those who saw Trump as getting away with murder, so to speak, that meant trying to apply any sort of consequence. It’s the old “I know it when I see it” test from obscenity law.
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Bizarrely pro-Trump? The tweet was this:
Were there 75,000,000 rioters? Did Trump actually say in this very tweet he was referring to people who voted for him?
What this release amounts to is many people inside Twitter were looking for a reason, any reason, to ban Trump, and despite some initial resistance by some more process-oriented people, he was indeed banned.
The responses litigating exactly how many Republicans can fit on the head of a pin are missing the point.
“Coded incitement to violence” was a band-aid. Trump obviously didn’t explicitly call for violence, but there was a vocal contingent at Twitter who were sure they were enabling a turbulent-priest scenario.
As far as band-aids go...it was kind of, sort of, not the worst?
For an extreme case, you could imagine a leader who posts perfectly inoffensive general encouragement, but only exactly one week after members of his tribe commit an honor killing. He would be signaling that he is not ashamed, maybe even supportive. Might that not normalize the action? If this leader has consistently claimed he’ll go to bat for his team, such as with pardons, is he not shifting the cost-benefit?
We could tell this hypothetical leader apart by checking when he doesn’t speak up. If he’s only occasionally supportive after such a crime, and the timing is inconsistent, and sometimes there’s another’s good reason to give praise in the news, he’s got plausible deniability. More importantly, he is sending less information. His partisans can’t be quite so sure that honor killings are okay or that he’d bail them out. He doesn’t have to disavow, just not set up the classical conditioning.
But Trump does not shut up. You could have a mass shooting all over the news and he’d still take (figurative) shots at Pelosi. This is a downside for actually sending coded signals—while still giving enemies plenty of noise to sift for patterns. It’s the dog whistle argument all over again. Screech shrilly enough, and a dog could plausibly take notice.
So Twitter has a bunch of Democrat partisans who are predisposed to see incitement in Trump’s language. And Trump keeps giving them ammunition by running his same old strongman schtick regardless of what’s happening at the Capitol. The end result is that he gets banned not for a smoking gun, but for a reading of the tea leaves.
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The staffer in question said the following according to Weiss.
"voted for him" and "terrorists" (referring to the Jan 6th rioters) are not mutually exclusive. I'd expect that sort of interpretation from a Trump supporter looking to deny, deny, deny. When I ask myself who was there, I don't think the answer is ever going to be "people who aren't Trump supporters but decided to riot inside".
We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way. This is why I said not having the full logs to comb through makes this frustrating - we literally cannot assess accurately how many people wanted Trump gone. We can only speculate about it based on things like political donations, and we have no reason to assume the process-oriented people weren't also left-leaning or anti-Trump. The phrase "vocal minority" exists for a reason.
Is this just confusion about the Twitter staffer's unclear grammar? The "not" in that sentence refers to the "he's saying" part, not the "voted for him" part. Another way to say it would be "It's pretty clear he's referring to people who voted for him, not the rioters". The Twitter staffer was not denying that the rioters were a subset of the voters, he was claiming they were not the group Trump was referring to, because Trump was referring to the set of all Trump voters.
I think the unnessesary "and" might be adding more ambiguity to an already ambiguous sentence, would it have been clearer if he said "He's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not the terrorists"? Of course it also comes from whatever the grammatical term is for the thing where you omit the verb-phrase in the second half rather than repeating it from the first half, it would have been clear if he said "It's pretty clear he's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not saying the "American Patriots" are the terrorists"). For instance:
https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/omitting-a-verb-when-it-appears-the-second-time.170698/
And then all the people replying to you are confused because they don't understand that you're interpreting the "not" as meaning "the rioters are not Trump voters" and think you mean that referring to a superset necessarily must be referring to each individual subset.
Now this would be an interesting error on my part, but I don't think I'm misinterpreting the staffer's sentence. For clarity, I'll reproduce it here.
If this person wanted to say that Trump was referring to all his supporters as opposed to only his rioting ones, it would have been clearer to say:
I don't think this is some arcane or less-used way of writing either, and it would make the point clearer to anyone I asked about it, pro or anti-Trump. This is why I think this person, perhaps accidentally, did imply that Trump supporters don't include the rioters. They might not have meant it, but this is why I read it this way.
Of course the sentence could have been clearer. It's sloppy conversational English relying on the reader to fill in part of the sentence which accidentally ended up having a more straightforward meaning that the writer did not intend, something akin to a garden-path sentence. If there was no context your interpretation would have been the more intuitive one. But there is context, and it's very unlikely that a Twitter employee would claim the rioters were all false flaggers rather than Trump voters, or argue it that particular way if he did. And I think that not only does my reading of it match what he meant, it matches how the other Twitter employees in the conversation interpreted it, how the reporters posting the conversation interpreted it, and how the people responding to you in this thread are interpreting it. So while it's a bit interesting that your reading of it is also possible based on the text it doesn't seem particularly significant.
Your interpretation still has the same problem for me. To quote your rephrasing:
This rephrasing still implies that the rioters are not people who voted for him.
I think I've honed in further on our point of disagreement. You think that I'm implying this person intended to exclude the rioters. I can see why you thought that (ironically enough, it's the same issue between me and this staffer - how something is read vs. intentions). I'll edit my post to make this clearer, thanks.
No, it says he is not referring to that set of people. Let us say that someone writes an article saying "email is an insecure medium, since it is transmitted in plain text". Someone writes a headline about it saying "Computer researcher says Yahoo Mail is insecure". Even though Yahoo Mail is a subset of email, he was not referring to it, he was referring to a broader category that it happens to be a subset of.
I'm not sure what our disagreement is over. I would agree that the intention is not to be specifically about Yahoo Mail (analogously, the staffer might not have thought Trump was referring only to the rioting supporters), but a plain-text reading could be interpreted my way.
If it's the significance of my interpretation, then I would agree with your previous point that my interpretation is probably not that important. I just found it odd, that's all.
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He didn't add the word just, so you read it in a way that nobody else - including probably the author - would read it. All so you could paint him as bizarrely pro Trump, because for some reason you are really keen on convincing everyone that half of twitter were Trump loving deplorables.
You must be from another universe's themotte.org, because you're referring to some comment not present in this thread that would suggest my motivation is to paint Twitter's staff as Trump supporters by a large percentage. I invite you to demonstrate what I've said that would in any way support your argument because I can tell for a fact you didn't read any of my comments, and if you did, you assigned maximum uncharitability to them.
As you wish.
Hell he says, an exclamation, because that's how outlandish it is to suggest bias at Twitter.
Accusing Weiss of trying to cast her as a bad faith actor for telling the house that she had struggled for months to get Trump banned, which by necessity implies that she is in fact acting in good faith. Which maybe doesn't make her a Trump loving deplorable, but sure looks like an attempt to paint the woman lying to the house about how dangerous Trump and his supporters are as neutral - shifting the balance away from Twitter leaning left.
At this point I was growing suspicious of your motives. I can see reasonable alternative explanations for every point I've mentioned, in isolation at least.
My charity begins running out here. I am suspecting your goal is to downplay the left lean at Twitter.
I honestly can't figure out what you were trying to do with all of these posts if not obfuscate the level of left wing bias at Twitter. Just rampant contrarianism?
That one's on me. It was about a less-likely interpretation of what that person said that also gave an odd conclusion about how this person was thinking. I don't think this person is a Trump supporter.
This is what I mean by not being charitable. I made a very specific claim about what that point contradicted in a prior TF, I said nothing about what it said about bias overall. I've never argued Twitter isn't biased in general. But you can't use "Someone is biased" to claim "Someone is being biased in this specific case".
Unless you have access to the unfiltered slack/chat logs from Twitter, what Weiss and the others are showing us amounts what they think is relevant proof. It may be that they've honestly captured internal sentiment at Twitter, but we fundamentally cannot know this regardless, and the lack of posting the logs or any ban lists as mentioned in previous Twitter Files means we're forced to evaluate how reliable the reporters are. I don't think they're above letting bias infect their reporting.
Bias is not a substitute for an argument, only an initial evaluation metric.
I'm giving my opinion on the Twitter Files based on my evaluation of them. That my evaluation disagrees with a popular right-wing view of the files is because those people and I see different things. I consider it important to be contrarian even if I agree with someone overall, yes, but you'll find a long history of me supporting the view of major institutions as biased against the right on multiple occasions. Importantly, no one is even disagreeing with most of what I have to say on the Twitter Files, they're trying to argue that I've misunderstood Trump's tweets (and based on the downvotes, I seem to have struck a nerve even when I agree with my opponents).
If I posted an argument that it was absurd to use a specific outcome from interacting with an institution to conclude it was racist against group A, I suspect I'd get lots of upvotes and supporting comments. But if I do the same against the anti-institution narrative, I get downvoted and accused of trying to hide said institution's bias.
It is this behavior that I especially despise because it indicates to me that people are abandoning the importance of being strict and conservative with their claims about something in favor of accepting more pleasing narratives. If I didn't accept that from the left, why would I accept that from the right (or anti-left)?
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I mean, or you could just recognize that it’s utterly ridiculous to take “75,000,000 great American Patriots” as somehow intended to pick out rioters specifically and thus constitute “indirect incitement.” If merely referring positively to any group whatsoever of which they’re a subset is doing that, then Trump would never be allowed to praise “people who support me” ok social media ever again.
OK, so either Twitter was set up in a way that allowed a minority of partisan wackadoos to get their way over a more reasonable “silent majority” on one of the biggest social media decisions in history, or it’s just stuffed with partisan wackadoos full stop. If anything the former seems worse than the latter.
I didn't say any of this.
I don't think most companies rely on democratic voting to determine policy, so it shouldn't surprise us that a small number of vocal people can have an effect much larger than themselves. But there was clear pushback, that pushback just wasn't enough. If we consider it as reasonable that voters get to decide what happens, then the people who "voted" in this case to ban him seem to be much more in number than those who don't. A democratic outcome, even if it conflicts with the morality of others.
I thought you were saying that the people pushing to ban him were a vocal minority. Now I’m confused.
There could have been a vocal minority. We don't know because the slack logs aren't available for us to peruse. There was also pushback from the TTS team and a few others who didn't see the tweets as violating any rules.
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There was likely at least one non-Trump supporter that decided to.
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2021/2/17/22287763/activist-capitol-riot-video-sold-nbc-cnn-35k-each-john-sullivan-federal-charges
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In colloquial English, when a person is referring to a large group of people who are defined by a single property, they are not making any claim about some infinitesimal small fraction of that group. When Obama spoke about how great Muslim Americans are, he’s referring to the normative case, not any who have murdered or beheaded. When Pelosi or whoever says Mexican Americans are our friends and neighbors, she’s not referring to the traffickers and rapists. When I say “I stand with Boston” after the bombing, I’m not referring to the worst possible cohort of Bostonians. This is just how it works for everyday English.
It’s clear Trump is referring to the normative member of a class of people defined by their having voted for Trump. It is ridiculous to assert that the non-normative 0.000005% cohort of rioters or whatever is being referred to in any sense. But, an argument can be made that this is coded language where the colloquial meaning means one thing but the intended meaning hints at another.
I think colloquial English also has many instances of people saying "the vast majority" or "most X" or "the general Y" or some other variant of that, in which people make it clear that while a category may contain some particular sub-faction, that sub-faction isn't the average case. So I think even people defending their points admit that the category includes the undesirable sub-faction, only that it isn't representative. So when Trump says "American patriots", both a Trump supporter and I would agree that this group who supported Trump includes the rioters, but that the vast majority of Trump supporters are not rioters.
Would any reasonable person interpret it this way in different contexts? For instance, when Biden said veterans are the backbone of the country, is he telling us that wife-beaters and murderers are the backbone of the country? If AOC says she is committed to protecting POC, does this mean she intends to protect serial killers and terrorists?
I think they're referring to the modal person of those groups, who are not bad people. Not that those bad people don't exist in those groups.
So why isn’t Trump referring to the modal “great American Patriot” who voted for him?
He is. We just can't forget that "modal" isn't shifted much by the rioters.
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I'm certain that some of the people rioting at the Capitol were part of the "75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me."
I'm not at all certain that this tweet was some dog whistle meant to praise those specific people. Trump's not known for subtlety. He'd already made a video telling the rioters he loves them.
If this is your standard, then a politician will never be able to praise their voters if some of those voters includes people who participated in a political riot. Given the summer of 2020 and the Capitol riots, that's practically everyone.
All of the Twitter Files stories have highlighted the little dissent they found. I can't see an incentive for misrepresenting that. What would change if instead of one person dissenting it was 10% of the company?
My standard is not that you can't praise your voters, only that we shouldn't pretend your voters may include the anti-social and criminal. I would agree that those people by and large don't define any particular voter base.
How would you change the tweet without spoiling its positive message?
I don't think it should be changed. I think it's clear he's talking about his voters overall, not a specific sub-group. But I wouldn't say that his tweet doesn't include those people.
But then it wasn’t bizarre. The whole point was people arguing that tweet was secretly trying to encourage more rioters when you are effectively saying no — that isn’t a reasonable interpretation.
The interpretation of by that employee was bizarre in that it tried to separate the rioters from Trump supporters. All I'm saying is that this isn't very reasonable - you probably don't have many non-Trump supporters rioting inside the building. This can be true even if we say that the modal supporter isn't a rioter.
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What the staffer said doesn't change what the tweet said. So, either the "75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me" referred to the people who voted for Trump and was not a reference to the rioters.... or you're trying to claim that because some or all of the rioters presumably voted for Trump, the group of 'voters' includes the 'rioters' and therefore the tweet was rule-breaking. This latter interpretation is the bizarre one.
No, you're expanding my point beyond what I'm saying. I'm not arguing that the tweet is a violation, only that it's not reasonable to define "American patriots" in his tweet as mutually exclusive with the rioters. I agree that the tweet shouldn't be removed and isn't violating any policy.
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