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All I can think of is TechDirt's Content Moderation Learning Curve. The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.
Masnick's a two-faced prick on this particular topic among no shortage of others, and that post there could not be more of a strawman were the characters named Simplicio and Sagredo, but to engage with this far more seriously than it deserves:
The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract. But it's not like the SPLC is any less "shared ideological capture", and was heavily involved in moderation decisions at length, including far away from SPLC's supposed domain expertise.
When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.
Yes, the point of the article is that very few of the people who talk about being a "free speech platform" have any idea that there's tons of stuff they are going to be legally obliged to moderate. The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter, it's about the specific convergent evolution of social media moderation policies as the first paragraph makes clear:
It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.
What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech. Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.
I don't even know how to respond to the implication that legal or financial pressures are due to shared ideological capture. If your primary revenue stream is from people advertising on your platform then it's important for the survival of your business in a non-ideological way that they continue to do that. You are somewhat at the whim of what advertisers like and want. Similar advertisers only want to advertise on your platform because they believe they can reach users who will buy things. If users abandon your platform en masse that is also bad for your business, so you are somewhat beholden to the desires of users, whatever your ideology. Legal pressure even more so! I guess X could stop reporting CSAM or responding to DMCA takedowns, but the end result would definitely be the end of their business! How is ideological capture related at all? Sure some social pressure and its response may be due to shared ideological capture, I acknowledge as much in another comment.
What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference? I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.
And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).
The piece is literally titled 'Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve' and is tagged Elon Musk. And you're right, but it just makes him an asshole, and your post a non-sequitur to drop in.
Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.
Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.
The tort is tortious interference, sometimes called intentional interference with contractual relations. It's not an add-on to some other tort: it's trying to induce people to breach binding contracts with a specific person. The exact rule varies by state, but it can cover behavior that would not be tortious in itself (in some rare cases, not applicable here, even by negligence), typically requiring either malice or that the act be done without legal justification.
See the Third Restatement of Torts, which (while trying to scale down the tort from past version's array of privileges!) listed :
(emphasis added, note that many states still use far more expansive caselaw)
Now, that legal justification includes a wide First Amendment exception for interference that is truthful or at least opinion (possibly with some modulos for private information). And courts have been somewhat wishy-washy about "sole purpose of injuring the plaintiff". But this is not an open season for any statement to be immune: see SpamHaus v. DatabaseUSA. Musk alleges that they have separately made private claims to advertisers that are contradicted by widely available evidence. He could well be wrong or lying -- there's a reason I use "alleges" and "if true!"
((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))
A bad like or reply this month can be strong evidence that Musk needs to lay off the cocaine, but it can't be the cause for a campaign to Twitter advertisers that's over a year old.
((In addition to the other inconsistency.))
I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button. The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests. Twitter was (and is) free to ignore unofficial requests from the government. The doctors in the first article would not be free to disregard the government's prohibition on discussing certain topics with patients. The two things are different in very important ways.
Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.
I mean, yea. It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.
I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."
That's not really my point; I can instead point to environments where Mere Polite Requests were obviously immediate jawboning, and were Masnick's twitter still open I could show more clear examples. But look at the articles and compare the dramatic differences in charity or even mere honesty in describing them -- most evidently the Super Report button instead ended up being weekly meetings or dedicated fast-response systems, but also the NRA-backed bill being described in far more maximalist terms than even the already-aggressive read by the newspaper he linked.
And Masnick is a two-faced prick, so while it claims that, instead it points to this comparison of official requests -- primarily legal demands like subpeonas and court orders, for mere double-digit (and often low double-digit) number removal requests. Aka, it tells us nothing about unofficial requests to take down accounts, which (again in contrast to Masnick's claims) ended up being thousands of accounts passed by spreadsheet and face-to-face meetings, not just a slightly more polished version of the Report Button you or I could use.
Masnick does not know the relative proportion of those unofficial requests that resulted in a removal. We don't have statistics, and given the heavy influence Baker had at the building they may not exist anymore. The selections Taibbi brought give 60%-85%, but Taibbi doesn't claim to have done a meaningful statistical analysis; he just provides a single e-mail that would break Twitter's transparency report for that time block. If Masnick had planted his flag on the possibility of consistent pushback, I'd not have highlighted that as severely or been as critical of him generally (although I wouldn't be surprised were his 'consistent' pushback to include one-offs that still resulted in account bans).
But he instead makes ludicrously strong claims with clearly wrong backing, and only ever one way.
I think you're vastly overestimating the popularity of guillotine twitter or of journalists, or of the relative proportion of the site's users or advertising targets those two groups or their sympathizers make up.
Well, no. Even before the Twitter Files, Yoel Fucking Roth declared that :
That is law enforcement specifically mentioning a hack-and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden in October of 2020, which is a good deal less general than "possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia".
((We've since learned that a 'totally private institution' funded in part by the State Department ran an exercise I'd call impressively prescient -- were it not for the FBI having already taken possession of Hunter Biden's laptop and corresponding documents months before the exercise was run.))
There's no clear "you must censor this or go to jail" e-mail, fair. There is 'just' all of this very precise concern about this particular topic, sent while the FBI and DHS were making claims about intransigent social media groups being allied with foreign governments, and while many politicians were talking up CDA230 modifications for those who didn't cooperate.
But Klobuchar wasn't sending the letter, so it's not really jawboning, it's just still a small coordinated groupthink with shared ideological capture.
Again, the ADL started calling Twitter's advertisers about Musk publicly (as in through newspapers) in November of last year, Musk claims that they did so privately the week he closed on the company and had called him saying they would do so if he did not continue certain parts of the Trust and Safety paradigm before that. Unless he or they have a time machine, the ADL's problem can not have started this week.
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