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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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