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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.
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 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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