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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Twitter felt a bit overwhelmed by how many requests they got, with one employee complaining about the backlog they had of these requests.

  6. 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".

  7. 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…

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.

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.