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Twitter Files 9
Wake up babe, time for your 3 a.m. Twitter Files dump: Link
Matt Taibbi wrote this one, arguing the following.
The FBI has finally made a statement about their activities, denouncing the leaks and implying people like Taibbi and others are conspiracy theorists trying to make them look bad. Taibbi responds to this by saying he's got no problem going after other agencies as well.
Turns out that other US government orgs were involved in discussing misinformation with Twitter. The DOD and OGAs (other governmental agencies) were frequently in touch and in meetings with the same set of tech companies we think of: Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook, etc.
Of note was the role played by the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a task force about fighting the interventions of others into US politics and discourse. There were countless people from other agencies in these meetings as well.
These people, through the FITF and FBI, were sending hundreds of reports of problematic accounts. Requests were always framed around the idea that the account had violated Twitter's policies. Twitter was aware the FBI had people literally trawling the site for policy violations. They were very thorough - it didn't matter how impactful a piece of media or a post might be, it would be reported no matter what.
Twitter felt a bit overwhelmed by how many requests they got, with one employee complaining about the backlog they had of these requests.
Given the sheer scale of requests, there were some number (not clear how many) of requests where Twitter internally said "there's no proof on this".
There's quite a few accounts seemingly forwarded to Twitter on the basis of being pro-Russia, pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba.
This release seems to confirm something that I had feared from the get-go, namely that the government could apply pressure on Twitter to be more responsive if it demanded certain accounts get taken down. It was not my initial concern upon reading the Intercept article about the DHS, as I felt we were a few steps removed from this point, but it seems I was mistaken in a bad way.
Anyways, I'm honestly just getting annoyed now, because I want to write a full post on the Twitter Files and what they do or don't say, but I can't as long as they keep publishing new pieces. The end of this one suggests we're going to get more. Engagement with these on Twitter is way down, suggesting people are getting burned out or just fading away as they assign the Twitter Files a place in their mind and move on with their lives.
Morning babe. Merry Christmas.
I wonder why most people don’t seem to care about thee drops? Or how they could make them more appealing? Maybe wait till after Christmas where only weirdos like us are still following the culture war…
Most people do not care even in the very very very slightest about the government maybe kind of pushing a private company to prevent conservative trolls from shitposting 280 characters at a time.
And they have absolutely zero patience, none, none at all for this being dribbled out slowly like this. It’s boring.
I don't think any of this is true. The same people had lots of patience for slowly dribbled out show trials like the Jan 6th affair, and think censorship of their political opponents is so important that they wailed and gnashed teeth for weeks at the prospect of it stopping.
Jan 6th was about the possibility of the former president being liable for trying to overturn an election result, this is about Twitter being biased against conservatives. It's just not of the same importance.
You're right, they're not. Jan 6th had zero chance of changing the outcome of the election, the FBIs intervention in Twitter almost certainly did.
Or more fairly: please, anyone can phrase either incident as a constitutional crisis or a nothingburger, depending on preference.
Wait, how the hell can you say that the FBI's interventions in social media changed the 2020 election outcome? That's a wild assertion, you're essentially arguing that enough people were persuaded to not vote Trump by virtue of not seeing this story.
What's wild about it? It was a close election, smaller things could have changed it's results. When you ask Sam Harris and other adults in the room about censoring the laptop story, they will literally explicitly say it was warranted, because otherwise Trump likely would have won.
And no, not seeing the story didn't even have to persuade people to not vote Trump, it just had to not persuade people to not vote Biden.
Can you show me where Sam Harris or these "other adults" said this after the election was done?
But how would it have done that? We're talking about there being a group of voters who, in October 2020, held the unstated belief that Joe Biden was not worth being president, no matter what Trump was/did, if he had acted corruptly with regards to a foreign company. This group of voters also had to be geographically distributed enough that their exertion was a deciding factor in how the electoral college voted.
I do not believe there is such a group of voters that fits such the necessary qualities to make the argument that the NYPost could have swung the election had its reporting not been suppressed by Facebook and Twitter for some period of time. I don't even think the story was suppressed for that long.
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Nailed it. People just don’t like watching boo outgroup misbehavior when they are the outgroup getting booed.
Musks needs to do something real here. And it’s creating standing for lawsuits. He needs to work with gop governors likely who can mimic misbehavior twitter can punish and in the process create test cases to take to the Supreme Court. Then we can have clear legal lines for these things.
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I stopped caring as much because it's mostly stuff that I already knew or suspected to be true.
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It's just annoying to follow, that's why I'm not appealed to by this. I don't even use Twitter, but that means I have to wait until someone else posts a link to whoever the fuck is doing the latest release. Fuck this rotation bullshit, seriously. Just annoys me that I can't quickly check Taibbi or Weiss' twitter feeds to see if another post is out.
Also, we're 9 releases in, and most people have made up their minds about what the TF releases say. It's like thinking about Fox or NBC - even if you don't follow each article, you could probably guess the angle they're going with.
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Happy Christmas to all of ye as well!
I should be surprised and shocked and appalled at this, but I'm not. I think most people have the same reaction; after the War on Terror and setting up Homeland Security and the NSA and all the rest of it, and then the Covid pandemic where every local government official could be a little tin god about where people could go or who they could see (while Our Betters flaunted and flouted the laws publicly), the public in general is jaded and has a cynical expectation that yeah, naturally the three letter agencies and the government will be involved in this kind of thing. Controlling the news and what the populace gets to see and gets to say.
Depending on your political inclinations - and this isn't a right/left thing or a Republican/Democrat thing because there are people on all sides like this - if you think that your outgroup or your enemies or the Bad People shouldn't be allowed to spread their hate speech, you will think this is a good thing. If you want to get that account which keeps claiming stuff you know in your bones is wrong (it needn't be factually wrong, but they shouldn't say it because it's bad) then if you can get them banned by anon tip-off snitching that they're pro-Russian (or whatever boogeyman), isn't it all in the service of the greater good?
Look at J.K. Rowling and all that is said about her being a TERF and actively helping to kill trans people. If the trans activists could swing it to get her banned for life from pretty much everything, they absolutely would.
Some people, and again it's not right/left, will think this is censorship and government over-reach and that freedom of speech means you can't do this kind of shit. But most people are so burned-out by it all, they'll shrug and go "yeah, well, what else did you expect?" (I'm in that camp myself).
I’m in the burned out camp as well. There’s just such a lack of seemingly good, un corrupted politicians. Also dismantling the 4th branch isn’t even brought up - Trump said he would drain the swamp but that wasn’t clearly targeted at administrative overreach of alphabet agencies.
Remember how he was nearly impeached for firing the director of the FBI? If he'd really started cleaning house, he'd have ended up with a Betti count somewhere between JFK and Caesar.
I’m too drunk to read that.
A teacup only has one hole all the way through it; so does a donut. Topologists categorize them the same: with a Betti count of one, named for Enrico Betti. A pretzel has three.
JFK had the back of his skull opened by a bullet traveling through his neck from the front. That’s one or two more holes, depending on how his esophagus interacted with them.
Caesar had his circulatory system, a series of tubes, opened to the outside air by several knifes.
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Nah, don't think so. They'd just sabotage all his efforts (as they effectively did). So, he fired the FBI director. The new one came from the same swamp. If he dared to appoint a non-swamp FBI director, all his subordinates would refuse to take orders from him, on the premise he is not qualified, and all the press, half of the courts and significant number of Republicans in Congress would support them. And they would use their mastery of the system to organize some embarrassing failure for him (or just frame him - like they did with Flynn) and leave Trump no choice but to choose a swamp-approved one.
Draining the swamp is not just coming out on the White House balcony and declaring "Swamp is being drained now!". It requires a complex long-term effort, by a team of very smart and very dedicated individuals - which team Trump did not have and had no idea how to compose. His individual efforts predictably were swallowed by the swamp with nothing substantial changing and him getting bored and moving onto the next thing. This system have been built for decades and is feeding thousands, if not millions. Dismantling it would require level of effort and competency to which Trump failed to raise - and thus there's no reason to increase his Betti count. His failure is assured anyway.
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Desantis is hard core not corrupt politician. He has a net worth of like 250k. Which is like 2 months salary of someone his age/education level.
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The stories didn't lead with the bigger bombshells from the start. So much hype was generated around the idea of this being a dramatic expose of all the progressives infesting Twitter like ghosts that when the stories just didn't deliver the right impact, people just slotted it into the narrative they wanted and moved on.
I won't comment on what the right order should have been until the final release, but I think the story about how Twitter was working with CENTCOM should have been in the first 2-3 leaks.
James Baker, "ex" FBI lawyer, arranged things so that he reviewed all the material before it was sent to the reporters. The more interesting info came out after Musk fired him.
I'm a bit surprised that Baker isn't mentioned more often. Before Twitter he was deeply involved in the anti-Trump efforts at the FBI.
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I'm pretty sure the powers that be would declare it a nothingburger no matter the order of the revelations. I've already seen supposed liberals dismiss the CENTCOM stuff as "so the US is using Twitter in a propaganda war against it's enemies, why should I care?".
It wouldn't have been as easy to do, I think. The key point about the CENTCOM stuff that is directly objectionable is Twitter lying about combating state-sponsored hostile activity on its platform.
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You should care because, as the song said, if you tolerate this then your children will be next. But of course, nobody ever thinks the leopards are going to eat their face. Twitter is banning the people I don't like, everything is working as it should be. Hang on, what do you mean a new guy bought it and is now banning people like me? Intolerable! Something should be done about it!
He was specifically referring to the psyops against Cubans, Venezuelans, etc. The closest thing that can happen to an American in terms of the roles being reversed, is for China to try to use TikTok to psyop the west (which is probably already happening anyway)
If the FBI is paying Twitter to censor Americans, that's bad acting on both the FBI and Twitter's part. If the CIA or whatever is paying Twitter to screw with hostile foreign countries, that's still (IMO) bad acting on Twitter's part but it's kinda the CIA's job.
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I wonder how Much of it is due to the MSM downplaying it as well. Not in their interests to give the story any oxygen.
Definitely some of that going on. I think CNN and NBC had some pieces within the last 10 days, but others seem to have just dismissed it after the first couple leaks and moved on.
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