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This is a relatively small thought. But watching more mainstream news being home for Christmas I see the supposedly moderate channels like NBC/ABC constantly running Santos lying about his resume and absolutely zero coverage of alphabet agency interference with twitters moderation. No mention that the fbi was paying twitter 3.5 million and suggesting who to censor.
The former I do think is bad that he lied. The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination. What is it WaPo declares that Democracy dies in Darkness? And there is nothing in the mainstream media about the scandal.
Personally I've only ever skimmed bits about the Twitter Files, I don't use Twitter directly very much, and nothing of the bits I've seen about it shocked my worldview. It mostly seemed like "The US government politely asked Twitter to moderate certain content, the Twitter staff thought about it and agreed it'd be a good idea". If there was some sort of under-the-table-deal going on where Twitter received billions or other compensation for secretly pushing US propaganda, that'd be a lot worse. I don't think it reflects well on Twitter, but I don't think it's fundamentally any different than the censorship every website does.
Where as Santos is a pretty big deal because of how blatant it was. US Congressman is an important position, Santos is probably easily within the top 0.1% of most powerful people in the world. But he only got there through several dozen blatant, outright lies, not even just massaging the truth. Plus there's a decent chance he's connected to some sort of criminal enterprise given how much money he's gotten without explanation, which makes things even worse.
I’d say your basically a slowly boiled frog on this twitter stuff. Your just use to have civil liberties violated that you don’t see an issue with this stuff. And how it went an additional step farther (government pressured/paid speech removal) versus prior nsa mass spying campaigns.
As to power a freshman congressman might be in the top .1% of power (in a group of a thousand Americans on average he’s top dog), but that’s not a ton of power. He certainly is less powerful than say twitter outgoing head moderator Yoel Roth who had the ability to significantly shape mass opinion.
Maybe. I'm just not convinced this is the most pressing issue. At least because I have never once seen a particularly good solution to the problem of big tech soft censorship, so it doesn't particularly matter how bad a problem is if there isn't anything we can do about it.
This is the heart of a culture war. You go back thirty years and people respected the constitution. The first amendment wasn’t just a law it was a value. Win the culture war and get people to like free speech and then we don’t have to worry about guys like Roth playing ball.
And as a second point there’s a point of twitter doing stuff themselves and then there’s a point of our government intervening. The government intervening does have legal standards and we should be doing test cases to establish legally recognized boundaries. Twitter getting 3 million as compensation for censorship expenses is fairly close to government action depending on your opinion.
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The media is biased, in other news enjoy an expose on the defecation habits of bears.
More seriously, ‘democracy’ is an empty word. No one cares about whether elections are free and fair, they care if their guys win. The red tribe is blunter about this, of course- that’s why you’ll see ‘Trump for king’ banners but nothing calling on the senate to deify Fauci- but that’s because they’re blunter in general.
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Almost all media is bad . The news passes through whoever does the filtering
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I cannot tell if this is intended to be hyperbole. I feel like I could name a dozen government scandals worse than anything the US government could possibly have been doing with Twitter. Iran-Contra? NSA spying? Watergate? Pentagon papers? The government pressuring a social media company to suppress speech it doesn't like and promote its own agenda is bad, to be sure, but I am not sure it is "sell weapons to Iran and send the profits to South American rebels in direct violation of an act of Congress" bad.
Watergate was a partisan hitjob on Nixon, who did nothing wrong.
Iran-Contra is definitely a bigger scandal in my mind, as are the Snowden revelations. But this seems like a direct extension of Snowden's leaks, showing how the federal government suppresses, surveils, and manipulates speech to maintain control.
But I would say complete warrantless (or rubber stamp secret courts, which is actually worse) surveillance of every single person across every single server that sends data through America is still the biggest scandal in my lifetime, and until someone takes up the mantle of JFK and tries to break the NSA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, our reaction will continue to be feckless.
If I am reading this correctly, you think there needs to be a martyr president who catches a bullet from the feds to galvanize the people? Because frankly I don't think even that would result in much. Best case scenario is it riles up a group of people, but the whole thing gets spun into a culture war issue. But to begin with I seriously doubt anyone who would earnestly attempt to defang/disband the NSA would ever make it to being president. Bernie is probably the closest.
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Hm, if Nixon did nothing wrong, and it was merely a partisan hit job, why did he resign? The Democrats had only 56 seats in the Senate. Why did Barry Goldwater tell him that he only had 15 votes in his favor in the Senate? Why, after the "smoking gun tape" came to light, did 10 congressmen who had voted against impeachment in committee state that they had changed their minds and would vote to impeach when the vote came to the floor? And why did the House minority leader state that he planned to vote in favor of impeachment.
Because they nailed him very well. And I don't think he did no wrong - he was an outsider who imagined his rank gave him the right to behave as an insider. But that only works if you're doing what the insiders want you to do..
And it's probably fairly naive to think FBI / CIA who were involved had no dirt on people in the senate, and couldn't get some of them to 'see sense'. Collecting dirt on important people is one of the most important jobs of intelligence agencies!
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I don’t think those scandals are worse.
Iran is a different country. Our constitution doesn’t apply to them.
NSA spying. I consider this similar level. Perhaps worse because this was government election interference.
Watergate feels like child play to me. Some burglary.
Pentagon Papers - again bad shit we did to people who weren’t Americans. We expect the CIA and Pentagon to fuck up our enemies
Act of Congress < Constitution
Doing things to non-Americans < Americans
This was literally a coup by the deep state against the will of the American people to overthrow a Democratically elected government.
The part of the Iran-Contra affair that is scandalous does not primarily concern events that occurred in Iran. The part that is scandalous is the part where the executive branch of the government deliberately defied a restriction on what it can spend money on passed by Congress, in violation of Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
Again, the significance in Watergate is not in the initial break in, it is in Nixon's attempts to impede or end the investigation into the break in, due its links to his campaign and top officials. Imagine some people are arrested breaking into Mar-A-Lago. Investigation by the FBI reveals the perpetrators are connected to high level members of the Biden administration and perhaps the president himself. The Attorney General appoints a special prosecutor to investigate. After the special prosecutor's investigation implicates Biden, he fires his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, because they refuse to fire the special prosecutor and end the investigation into him. Would you characterize the scandal here as "some burglary"?
The significance of the Pentagon Papers is only partially the things the US government did in Vietnam, it is also about the way the US government deceived the American people with respect to its intentions and motivations for engaging in the Vietnam War, a war that killed some 50k Americans!
Can you describe for me, as literally as possible the acts you understood the "deep state" to have taken?
Did you say that Obama's actions with PPACA subsidies were as scandalous as Iran-Contra? Were you upset that the mainstream media barely covered it, nor were concerned in the slightest? (Even now, when I went searching for a link, there was basically nothing from any of the standard center-left outlets, probably because I used the search term "unconstitutional", and they almost certainly didn't want that mood affiliation anywhere near Their President.)
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It is funny. Read your watergate example. You are saying “the problem was the cover up that had ties to the Nixon campaign / administration.”
Now, understand what the Republican complaint is here. We had the FBI—amongst other alphabet agencies—actively work to thwart sharing info they knew was coming out that would be harmful to one candidate because the IC favored one candidate over the other.
You might think the above is wrong (though would like to hear the contra argument) but how aren’t those facts clearly worse than watergate?
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Directly violated the first amendment - paid a news media organization to censor relevant news with the desire to change a Presidential election (which they successfully accomplishment).
POTUS spend money all the time without the approval of congress. Biden just spent a trillion on student loan relief without congressional approval
Anything with impeding an investigation was also done with Biden here. Suppressing information of criminal activity by Joe Biden is well the same as Watergate. Except there’s more - first Amendment violation and direct interference with our Democracy
Cia constantly doesn’t tell the American people what they are doing in foreign country. We’ve got like 100 Pentagon paper examples.
I mean I don’t agree with all a lot of these actions in 1-3. But it’s different for the FBI/CIA to propagandize American people on matters related to domestic politics with an end goal of changing election results.
But I don’t want to get into a game of X was worse than Z. Maybe Z is stand alone just a really bad fucking thing - like paying private news organizations to censor people. A direct contradiction of the very first value we wrote into our constitution that the government shall not suppress speech.
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This seems to fail the turning test. The concern is that the IC took sides in a domestic election to favor one candidate over another by controlling the medium of sharing news.
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Perhaps it's...not actually the biggest scandal since a beloved president accessorized his wife's wardrobe?
No one died. No sympathetic face is available to cry on the evening news--Trump already did his best impression when he got banned. Unsympathetic faces are even in short supply, since Elon spends more time waving his hands at stock prices than drawing attention to censorship. You can't place the blame on a political figure and sink his career.
I'd go further and assume the average American was vaguely unsurprised by the news. There's already a sense that the NSA does whatever it wants; why not the FBI? They've even settled down from their gunslinging days of the 80s and 90s. It was vaguely directed at Foreign Influence™ and everything.
On top of all that, the exposé is delivered not as a bombshell...but as a series of threads on the very website it's skewering. Networks can run a segment on a thread on another journo's work, or they can run one on the southern border. Or on a lurid murder. Or on Christmas fluff. I picked all those from the Fox landing page. It "seems like" that's what viewers prefer.
The deal was that the reporters who got the documents had to do their initial reports on Twitter.
Weird. Deal...with whom? Whose interest is served by this drip-feed of ambiguously shocking revelations?
Complaining about the medium seems bizarre to me. It is a way to distract from the story. The story has documentary evidence heavily implicating the FBI amongst other intelligence agencies in an operation to silence damaging criticism of a political candidate because the FBI disliked the other major candidate. That is, the FBI interfered in a domestic election in a material way.
Is there a smoking gun? Not quite. But we are well past more likely than not (and probably clear and convincing evidence). Not quite to “beyond reasonable doubt.” But if the facts alleged are true (which they appear very much to be true) the FBI interferes in a US presidential election for political reasons and yes that is the mother of scandals. If further factual development confirms what appears to be obvious, then this scandal should end with the FBI no longer existing. It should end with numerous people in jail. It should end with Joe Biden resigning (and if evidence comes to light that he was working with the FBI it should end in him being impeached, convicted, and then tried).
Complaining about the medium in that context seems silly. But it reminds me of the aphorism “when you have neither the law nor the facts, pound the table.”
Agree with a lot of what you are saying except Joe Biden resigning over the election interference.
People need to be guilty of the crimes they are punished for. And I don’t see direct evidence that Joe had anything to do with the FBI action. They were an allied group that was not in communication with Joe. Without the interference Joe probably doesn’t get elected but he still did nothing wrong on this charge.
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All this is true, but the NYT won't say it, so it doesn't matter.
...I appreciate that this might be seen as a low-effort statement, but it appears to me that it really is that simple. The majority of people, even the majority of people here, rely on information being delivered to them in specific formats through specific channels before it actually impacts their cognition.
Yes the format does matter. Leftist know that musks takeover of twitter means a lot more of the intelligentsia will be getting reasonable right wing takes to consider.
And in my origional post here I know if ABC nightly new runs a report on twitter files talking about whether it’s concerning the fbi was paying twitter and asking for censors (or cia asking for their accounts not to be censored) and considered it a big deal then my mom would suddenly be talking about the importance of the first amendment to Democracy. And there’s a large voter base that watches some dumb tv then 15 min of nightly news. Those people got a ton of RussiaGate is super serious. They are getting zero on the fbi/cia relationship with social media companies.
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Musk and Musk are the answer to your questions.
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The common joke is that that is not a warning, but a mission statement.
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