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Notes -
Twitter Files 11
Link
Matt Taibbi writes the following.
Twitter was initially unconcerned about reports of Russian state-sponsored activity on its platform (think 2016 election-related stuff), the higher ups thought the problem was basically for Facebook to handle.
However, in September 2017, they informed the Senate that they had suspended only 22 possible accounts as Russian after a manual review of 2700.
This was intensely angering to Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, who blasted Twitter publicly for being so inadequate in their efforts.
Twitter's higher ups were of the belief that this a political stunt by Warner to keep pressure on them hard. In an email to Jack Dorsey, one person wrote that the critics were "taking cues from Hillary Clinton". It is worth reminding that Clinton published a book following her loss in which she blamed FB and other social media platforms for not doing more against alleged Russian state propaganda against her.
Twitter formed a Russia Task Force to deal with their bad PR, starting off by simply doing data sharing with Facebook. They could not find any evidence of Russian activity. In one report, they noted that there was no coordinated activity, with accounts spending in patterns that were akin to lone-wolves. Twitter used a variety of ML models to try and find suspicious accounts, but they always came up with a very small list of possible suspects.
Researchers were quick to publicly condemn Twitter. Some created flawed reports via the Twitter API, and Johns Hopkins professor Thomas Rid accused Twitter of being "the perfect platform that Twitter could build if they were FSB contractors".
This naturally amounted to the possibility of laws enacted to control social media advertising, something Twitter was keenly aware of and tracking. Twitter was willing to remove Russia Today and Sputnik from the website, but the Intelligence Committee (or someone on it) leaked the full 2700 account list, causing reporters from many publications to reach out for comment.
Finally, Twitter gave up and allowed the USIC (US intelligence community) to declare what was or was not foreign state-backed activity, which would then be instantly removed.
More is promised to come, just like my death approaches ever closer with how delayed this shit is.
Anyways, this release is interesting for the look it provides into how Twitter perceived the reactions against its supposedly inadequate efforts. The bit about "taking cues from Clinton" will undoubtedly be blown up into more conspiratorial ranting by some, but assuming the email was correct, it speaks once more to "Russian interference" being a more dogmatic belief. Warner's refusal to believe that he could be wrong here is probably motivated by both personal belief and political alignment.
Oh, and there's also the bit about "reporters now know this model works". It's not clear to me what the evidence provided actually means, we only have Taibbi interpretation to go off. Assuming it's correct, he's arguing that reporters, government, and researchers are working together (perhaps not intentionally, but still) in a way that can get Twitter, or any company, to comply with their demands. I think that one is going make the rounds on anti-left circles many times.
The later release the same day seemed more actively improper -- the fig leaf of foreign intervention is nearly transparent when the identification offered is based on content -- but both point to the same class of problems: a lot of protected government- or government-funded speech aimed to no small extent at getting private actors to shut up specific people.
Which, of course, isn't illegal, and there's no way any of the effected actors would have been able to bring a lawsuit.
There was some discussion of this on another forum and the suggestion there was to try and run it as a class action, specifically focusing on those that had been banned for spreading covid disinformation.
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Main outcome here (again and again, not new but supported by more and more evidence) is this is not about Twitter. USIC and the government can pull this shit on literally anybody they want to control, and there's no known antidote for it. I mean, there is - if you somebody like Andrew Torba, then you are already so cancelled they can't cancel you any more. However, this seems to be your only choice - or become a witch, or become a friend of USIC. And by friend I mean do what they say, and shut up. True, Twitter is full of wokesters which would be glad to work with the DNC to take down Trump and whatever deplorables need to be taken down, but it doesn't matter at the end - the purpose is not to taking down a deplorable or two, or even Trump. The purpose is to have the whole system under control, and the takedowns will follow naturally from that. And here we see the anatomy of how it's done.
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