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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 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.
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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