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Notes -
Twitter Files 10
Another thread, another author writing for the Twitter Files. Link
David Zweig writes the following.
Twitter and other important internet platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) were in meetings with the Trump WH since the start of the pandemic to help combat misinformation. The Trump WH was concerned with 5G conspiracies, "runs on grocery stores", and "panic buying".
The Biden WH on the other hand was concerned about Covid. They wanted high-profile anti-vaxx accounts taken offline, noting people like Alex Berenson. The justification was that Covid misinformation was killing lots of people.
Twitter did not immediately capitulate, they were internally hesitant and debating as to whether to suppress people spouting arguments that went against government positions on the topic. But this does not mean that they didn't suppress people.
Twitter's moderation, as you might expect, consists of machine-learning bots at the first layer, then contracted moderators from the Phillipines, and lastly review by "higher level employees" (implied American, or familiar with the culture).
Twitter took the establishment position on Covid, sure, but this went far beyond just applying the "misinformation" tag to people saying vaccines don't work or that Covid is a hoax. It went as far as slapping that label on anyone saying anything that contradicted the mainstream CDC position on anything Covid-related or Covid-narrative-related. In most cases, the same message was seen ("Misleading: Learn why health officials recommend the vaccine for most people") and could no longer be interacted with. Some examples:
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, argued that not everyone needed to take a vaccine, and that it was good for old people and their caretakers, but children and people with natural immunity were fine.
@KellyKGA cited CDC statistics to argue that Covid was not the leading cause of child deaths from disease.
@_euzebiusz_ cited a study which argued that mRNA vaccines were associated with cardiac arrests.
I have to say, if there was ever a case that reeked of TDS to me, it would be Jim Baker complaining and asking why Donald Trump saying "Don't be afraid of Covid" wasn't a violation of the company's Covid policies, to which Yoel Roth reminded him that it was a "broad, optimistic statement". Or maybe Baker just had a day of Covid-brain, who knows?
In any case, I'm really annoyed that Zweig doesn't talk at all about the Trump WH and what Twitter did or did not do during that time, or about any other requests the Biden WH might have made. Yeah, it's Covid and all that, but are you seriously telling me the Biden WH didn't ask about other topics? At least tell us if so. Tell us about how many requests were made, percentages of fulfilled requests, etc. You could very much do that here and make a stronger, more principled point.
As for what was said, I don't really think it's new. Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.
P.S: whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?
((I can't help but think the combination of a December 26th release and the overtly culture-warry nature of theFP is intentional, given some other decisions; this does seem like the sort of efforts that you'd want to run if you didn't want to get a lot of gen-pop attention.))
[Contemporaneous discussion here]. This one particularly bugs me because it was really bad work from the CDC, and either Twitter put a CDC slide deck referencing a preprint above their own ability to do math, or (to steelman) wanted the debunking of a bad study blocked for general trust or virtue of silence reasons. It's good that this wasn't in the list of things that the Biden team was forcing, but it's not so good to find out that it actually hit a human for review.
Yeah. It'd be either really philosophically convenient or inconvenient if the Trump White House's broader incompetence meant it also couldn't coordinate the level of meanness that the Biden White House has, but it's hard to tell if that's actually the case or if Zweig's just glossing over it. Banning talk of store runs hit a lot of stuff, and that's being overtly charitable and assuming it's not a byword for all of the mask-labeling that was flying around.
To an extent, but as with the last few posts, there's more to the matter than whether or not it was happening at all. The information here absolutely removes a lot of the more charitable options or explanations. The possibility that the more aggressive abuses of these labelings were just a side effect of a well-intentioned but purely-algorithmic and poorly-designed process was a least moderately plausible, and it was never clear to what extent twitter's 'manual' review ever touched a human or would ever consider appeals. For KellyKGA specifically, there were believable reasons she might have gotten a bunch of gang-reporters!
Nope! Get enough 'tattles', and be on the wrong side of a question, and out you go. You could hire an attorney and get twitter to do an internal audit (wtf?), and while that might get you unsuspended even that the highest levels of human review was... charitably not very good at math or far more interesting in the connotations or side effects of true information than the truth. That's kinda important, and really hard to prove from outside.
Likewise, 'everybody' knew that the CDC and White House were coordinating 'misinformation' work, because they published news saying exactly that. But it kinda makes a difference if they were just discussing policy at a theoretical level, or on an object level, or even if it were just specifically The World's Wrongest Man that the White House wanted to ban. But even Berenson's lawsuit wouldn't have been able to find that he was just one (high-profile) of a list that the government was sending to Twitter and regularly raising pressure on. And it's probably still not illegal! But even if every single one was similarly wrong, the White House singling out specific people and strongly encouraging social media companies to ban them is something quite a lot of people would deny was happening just six months ago.
I've interacted with some of the people doing review of internal, employee-generated content at Facebook, and they're seeming incapably of deductive reasoning.
I posted internally that since the COVID risk is concentrated among the elderly and we have few, if any people at the company that are 70+, then our risk profile is lower than the risk profile for the country as a whole.
This resulted in content removal and a meeting with the censors. I tried to explain the reasoning and it was like talking to a wall. I was effectively told that you're not allowed to do your own reasoning. Conclusions like this have to come from an "authoritative source" and that such sources are either government public health agencies or peer reviewed papers.
I was also told I didn't have a source on age distribution at the company, which would mean this was speculation which was also not allowed.
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Wait, can you explain what you mean? Your linked image just shows this person refusing to continue the debate.
KelleyKGA has a habit of tweaking the noses of fairly high-profile people: the guy in that screenshot is a previous (Trump-appointed) US Surgeon General, but compare here (bio).
That doesn't sound like a lot, but it doesn't take a lot to get a hatedom, these days.
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