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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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