Muskovite Birds of a Feather: Notes on the Great Twitterpation

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Tiassa, Nov 4, 2022.

  1. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    The headline informs as to timing of the quitting, though. I.e. Musk is not stepping down straight away and leaving a vacuum at the top for the days/weeks/months it takes to find a suitable person. So seems a reasonable headline: the first part is the grabber: Musk to quit as CEO... but when? Oh, okay, only when a replacement is found. If it takes 10 years to find someone he deems suitable, though...

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  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I didn't see anything wrong with that part of it either.

    My biggest objection there is that it doesn't say that Elon will be remaining as Twitter's owner. Maybe the BBC expected its viewers/readers to already know that. But knowing it kind of drains "Elon Musk to quit as Twitter CEO" of its impact. The headline-news aspect derives from the implication that he will be walking away from Twitter, which he most assuredly is not.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2022
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  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Honestly, I don't understand the confusion. The mystery was and remains whether Musk will actually step down as CEO. Meanwhile, the detail—

    —is its own sort of head-scratcher. It doesn't really seem genuine confusion, but as a joke it just falls flat, because the actual answer is, No more than a light bulb.

    Beyond that, two reminders about BBC News: First, it's British. If we insist the phrase, "Elon Musk to quit as Twitter CEO when replacement found", is so vague, what would be more precise according to the function of a headline? In British parlance, this might not be so confusing. Moreover, note the BBC News sentence and paragraph structure; they write for middle school reading comprehension. If you read closely, they'll even end sentences with prepositions, and up with it most British will put.
     
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  7. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    The headline isn't confusing. It's redundant.
     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    No, it's not. That's just silly.
     
  9. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Sometimes, when somebody comes right out and says it, we might wonder why anyone else needeed that part explained. And while social media is not the whole of everything, and thus most people aren't immediately caught up in the Twitter tempest, some things remain straighforward.

    Robert Wright↱ suggests—

    I think people are overdoing the Elon-Musk-is-a-hypocrite thing. I'm not saying he's not a hypocrite. It's true that he promised to make Twitter a haven for free speech and then, once he was running the place, started stifling speech he found threatening—speech about where his private jet is, about rival social media platforms, and so on.

    But to dwell on this irony is to focus on a misdemeanor while a felony is unfolding in plain view. The biggest crime Musk is committing against the Twitter community (and against the American community and even, in a way, the whole world) isn't in his role as chief of Twitter but in his role as Tweeter in Chief. His ownership of Twitter has made him its most prominent user, and he's putting that prominence to destructive use. And this destructiveness is ominous in what it says about how he'll wield his power over Twitter policy.

    Musk's approach to tweeting is roughly the approach you'd encourage everyone to adopt if your goal was to carry America's political polarization to new and horrifying levels. His Twitter feed is a case study in the psychology of tribalism, the psychology that is tearing the country, and to some extent the world, apart.

    Obviously, his Twitter feed isn't the only Twitter feed that fits this description. Twitter has long been a machine that rewards the people who most egregiously exemplify this psychology; it gives the most tribal tweeters bigger and bigger followings and more and more clout. Its algorithm is a recipe for turning assholes into Alphas.

    So why single this one Alpha out for special condemnation? In large part because, as the guy who's running Twitter, Musk is in a position to do something about the problem.

    —and the thing is, there really isn't anything new about the general phenomenon; Elon Musk is a particular case, and extraordinary. It's one thing, for instance, if this or that comedian you've never heard of attempts to perform The Aristocrats, but the idea of an actual aristocrat actually taking it so far in an apparently genuine performance is somewhat new to our living generations.

    It is, in fact, easy enough to disagree with Wright insofar as Musk is just another CEO, and some of what Musk is in a position to do is pretty much standard fare among social media CEOs, i.e., "structural reforms—re-engineer Twitter's algorithm." It ought not be any surprise that the algorithms of social media, designed to trigger user engagement, amplify misinformation, bad faith, and wilful reprehensibility. Jack Dorsey could have defanged the algorithm, but Twitter, as a business, depends on poisonous injections.¹

    Furthermore—

    In retrospect, the clearest early sign that Musk wouldn't put his new pedestal to anti-tribal use was his decision to put it in the service of his political ideology. This actually surprised me. Under the influence of what now seems like remarkable naivete, I had thought that Musk might set aside his political tweeting once he was running the place—somewhat as a newly installed NFL commissioner would refrain from rooting publicly for his favorite team. Certainly I'd expect as much of any Twitter owner who was seriously concerned about the tribalism problem. So when, shortly before the midterm elections, Musk tweeted that undecided independent voters should vote Republican, my hopes for a new and better Twitter started to fade.

    —this bit seems like something of a platitude. To be clear, "the clearest early sign that Musk wouldn't put his new pedestal to anti-tribal use" was the tribalistic temper tantrum in which he obliged himself to purchase the platform.

    And the thing is, while it's easy to disagree with Wright, sure, people focus too much on the hypocrisy, his effort to temper his words, to present a façade of trying to be fair, reads strangely naïvely. At one point, he actually writes, "In fairness to Musk: One reason it's hard for him to set aside his ideology as he performs his duties at Twitter is that his ideology is tightly intertwined with those duties as he sees them." It's a great line, except he seems to actually mean it. That is, it makes a fine joke, given its subtext, that, it's hard for Musk to separate the bigotry and make-believe from his business duties because the bigotry and make-believe because he believe the bigotry and make-believe are part fo his duty, but, in fairness, nobody is surprised that a hereditary relic of bigotry considers bigotry his duty. It may be "natural that his politics and professional duties are, in his mind, hard to separate," and, sure, "Still, it's unfortunate", but as a joke it's not even a matter of punching up or down. As a joke, Wright would be coddling Musk; as a serious discursive consideration, the paragraph is exemplary of a certain other problem.

    An example has to do with wokeness and the destruction of society: Musk at one point posits a particular crackpot as exemplary of woke, and in his way Wright gets the answer correct:

    The Times piece, after mentioning some other people who are concerned about our impact on the ecosystem, says, "But it is rare to find anyone who publicly goes as far as Mr. Knight." Yeah, that's because it's rare to find someone who privately goes as far as Mr. Knight—which in turn is because Mr. Knight is a nut! Yet Elon Musk is depicting Knight's mission—the extinction of the entire human species—as a straightforward expression of wokism.

    But then Wright goes on to explain, "If you had to rank tribal Twitter moves in order of perniciousness, the one Musk employed here would have a shot at the number one slot." And he's not wrong, per se, but there is nothing new about this rhetorical style; one of the only reasons it remains effective is because people keep pretending it's somehow new. The sleight in question "consists of finding an example of extreme and atypical behavior in the other tribe and depicting it as typical of the other tribe", and, let's face it, even in our own experience at Sciforums, this pretty much drives American conservative discourse. Using Covid and anti-maskers as an example, Wright sagely observes, "one thing almost all Republicans and Democrats have in common is that they never scream in supermarkets".

    And Wright revisits political correctness, observing Musk's misrepresentation of Stanford University. It's one thing if Wright is "personally not shocked to see this guidance in Stanford's website style guide", and, sure, neither am I, but Musk's misrepresentation matters:

    This may seem like a small thing—a minor distortion that has the effect of gratuitously deepening America's tribal divide by just a hair. But these little distortions, these incremental contributions to the morphing of truth into falsehood, happen zillions of times each week on social media, and they do as much damage to (if Stanford will pardon the expression) America as the big fat lies do. In an ideal world, the head of Twitter would be someone who is mindful of this problem, not part of it.

    To the bitter end will Wright keep throwing bones.² As a general statement, sure, it might be "hard to say whether Musk is consciously dishonest or just careless and reckless", but "careless and reckless" are a different circumstance compared to Wright's suggestion, "in fairness to Musk", that "it's natural" that Musk's professional duties and personal beliefs are so utterly intertwined. By that measure, it would be "hard to say" whether the dishonesty is conscious or pathological.

    But the Stanford example is, more than projecting a particular onto the general; that part is largely implicit compared to the misrepresentation. This form of misrepresentation dates back nearly forty years, at least; it is at the heart of complaints about political correctness and lamentations against thought police. The Stanford example first misrepresents the facts, first, in order to then project.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    ¹ See #95↑ above:

    「The people you followed? What about the subjects you followed? That's a lot of tweets, and we might wonder if they should simply dump it all on a user, or how will they decide which posts to exclude. At that point, we are beyond any naked assertion of general free speech. In any case, Twitter doesn't even organize the tweets in chronological order without being told explicitly. It actually gets kind of stupid, but the more important point is that if Twitter simply piled all the posts from people and subjects followed, in chronological order, users would get sick of all the free speech.」

    ² e.g., "… if Stanford will pardon the expression", an apparent joke that also misrepresents Stanford University and the example at hand.​

    Wright, Robert. "The Misunderstanding of Elon". Nonzero Newsletter. 21 December 2022. Nonzero.Substack.com. 24 December 2022. https://bit.ly/3WZtK15

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  11. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    And as Wright shows in his consideration of Musk promoting Covid conspiracism, sometimes it's just about misrepresentation: "Granted, this issue is complicated," Wright says of a tweet condemning Anthony Fauci, "and it has all kinds of weeds you can get into", but what Wright doesn't say, or seem to understand, is that Elon Musk is simply the right wing writ large on the internet. We've seen this kind of behavior at Sciforums for over twenty years, and in some cases even encourage it.

    Let's toss a coin, though: If heads, then Wright is pandering to a personal notion of fairness; if tails, then Wright really doesn't know. He expresses what seems a straighforward point, "that if you're going to accuse someone of being criminally responsible for the deaths of millions of people, you have a moral obligation to spell out your indictment", and the only real objection ought to be familiar, some anti-liberal muttering about elitism and presuming to be a moral judge of anything. But as Wright goes on to explain, "Instead, Musk engages in the kind of drive-by character assassination that there's way too much of on Twitter." And, sure, it's "particularly indefensible" compared to either Musk's follower count or his ownership of the site, but there is a lot of this drive-by on the internet in general, and has been for decades.

    Elon Musk is not doing anything new in these ways; what makes it feel new is the scale of his forty-four billion dollar wager against free speech.

    Wright's "personal theory of Elon" considers that Musk is "a troll" who "enjoys outraging people, and he likes the attention that outrage can bring", and the Twitter boss "genuinely doesn’t understand human beings very well, so he sometimes underestimates how damaging the outrage will be to his reputation". Indeed, the challenge he faces is to create a sympathetic portrait of Elon Musk without saying so explicitly. Wright offers "a good example" of the two points of his Elon theory "working in tandem", recalling when Musk was seen "amplifying a crackpot conspiracy theory about the man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband".

    "That the tweet came as a reply to Hillary Clinton," Wright suggests, "is evidence that there was a trolling impulse behind it." And, inasmuch as people need it spelled out so simplistically, Wright does that. But now it's time to shed tears for Elon: "That Musk later deleted the tweet," Wright explains, "is evidence that he’d underestimated the blowback—blowback that anyone with a sound understanding of human psychology and human social dynamics would have foreseen."

    The thing is, "a sound understanding of human psychology and human social dynamics" is actually rare; a reasonable sketch should suffice. Still, Wright really wants to mitigate the implications of Elon's behavior. "This last point is kind of a sad one," Wright warns, and then recalls that Elon Musk is autistic, and autistic people often experience a dearth of cognitive empathy, and the Twitter boss has even "talked about how much trouble he had as a child understanding the intentions of other people, and he’s suggested that he was bullied as a result". In this way, "It’s possible to see his Twitter conduct as a reaction to all that … but a reaction that is still, after all these years, lacking in the kind of social calibration that comes naturally to most people."

    True as that may be, Wright's apparent inability to account for malice in Elon Musk's behavior starts to stand out: "Viewed in this light," Wright continues, "Musk’s endless online quest for attention and adoration is poignant."

    And then he adds, "But that doesn’t make it any less destructive."

    We might wonder if perhaps Wright is trying to keep Musk supporters reading along, and thus pulling punches, but even that suggestion is naïve, at least:

    If you’ve been on Twitter for very long, you’ve probably seen glimmers of its promise: moments when "elites"—journalists or scientists or social scientists or businesspeople or whatever—have good-faith, civil arguments, airing their disagreements in an illuminating and productive way. If this kind of discourse became common on Twitter, that could reduce the chances that America, and even the world, will fracture along tribal lines; elite cohesion can facilitate broader social cohesion.

    The challenge of making this kind of constructive discourse more common on Twitter is a stiff one. Certainly Twitter’s previous proprietor didn’t manage. There’s some truth to Musk’s apparent belief that the old regime’s ideological leanings, as reflected especially in its content moderation, made some people in the other tribe—in Musk’s tribe—feel unwelcome on the site.

    In the three remaining paragraphs, Wright avoids the most obvious of considerations. In order: He considers Musk playing peacemaker by mounting a "so fierce that it could have the same effect except in the opposite direction and in greater magnitude, driving lots of influential people on team blue off the site", but does not consider whether or not this is part of Musk's goal. He compares his own and Musk's "theories about what Twitter's big problem has been", but excuses the Twitter boss because, for Wright's purposes, "it doesn’t matter, because the point I’m trying to make right now is that there was no need for him to choose between these theories"; and, sure, "It would have been possible for him to advance his free speech agenda without being so gratuitously and destructively tribal," but Wright studiously avoids any notion that Musk's wilful behavior goes any further than disability, which in turn is its own sort of problem. And, lastly, Wright muddles a paragraph about potential good outcomes that might come about: "Maybe in a year or two owning the company will have become such a professional and personal burden that he’ll unload it." And it's one thing to note than in this "digital town square", the "mayor … is the very definition of a bad citizen", but the one thing Wright will not countenance is malice.

    Remember to what degree the Musk argument paints Twitter under Jack Dorsey as some sort of leftist paradise; it's a false narrative, but Wright panders to it: "There’s some truth," he claims, "to Musk’s apparent belief that the old regime’s ideological leanings, as reflected especially in its content moderation, made some people in the other tribe—in Musk’s tribe—feel unwelcome on the site." And here is what that truth is: One of the main reasons conservative content is challenged is that it is insupportable. One of the main reasons conservative arguments are refused and even prohibited is because not only are they insupportable, conservatives insist on reiterating insupportable arguments over and over again.

    We didn't need forty-four billion dollars to learn this lesson at Sciforums; nor do we need forty-four billion dollars to fail to learn. Remember, this is the political range that advocates trickle-down, young-Earth creationism, fake Biblical literalism, supremacism, antivax, general quackery, and other observable unreliability and even falsehood. Again: Another way to look at it on the societal scale is that one of the reasons conservatives feel subject to greater scrutiny is that they have a harder time answering for their arguments. The party of supremacism, antivax, religious extremism, and disinformation is going to feel canceled whether anyone actually censors them or not, because what they have to say is constantly rebuked, set aside, ignored as much as one can, and so on, because they are so often wrong or simply lying.

    We come back to our own discussion, and suggestions about a variety and clash of opinions; the notion that people will only be able to distinguish between truth and lies if they can hear a variety of different opinions presumes those diverse opinions reasonably accurate and expressed in good faith. This is what Wright omits, and, sure, we might wonder why.

    He's not convincing Elon Musk; he won't convince the Muskateers; his point about so-called "elites" having good-faith, civil argument is the sort of thing conservatives have long denounced as elitism. Even under Jack, the Twitter experience was an extension of other online experiences; the bad faith and crackpottery have long been the stuff of discussion boards, comments sections, and wallposting. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is a high-profile, overpriced reiteration of what has gone on for decades. The omission from Wright's analysis is strange. He's not necessarily wrong, but perhaps just trying too hard, though, again, we might wonder why.

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  12. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    We shouldn’t disregard jawboning (the laundering of government censorship though private intermediaries). Politicians and government officials shouldn’t be permitted to manipulate political discourse behind the scenes.

    This bill prohibits officials and federal bureaucrats from using their authority or influence to promote censorship of speech or pressure social media companies to censor speech.

    Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act (H.R. 8752)↑
     
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  13. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    there was no censorship of right wing ideas. can we please just drop this bullshit conspiracy theory
     
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  14. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Again, I agree very much.

    With Democrats in control of the Senate, and with the current occupant of the White House, there's little chance it could become law.

    I think that a better path to address this would be through the courts. Ideally it could be appealed up to the Supreme Court, who I trust would find that government censorship by private proxy would be a First Amendment violation. Hence a new law probably isn't really necessary.

    In the 1960's-1970's period, it was the left that was protesting the Vietnam war (and subject to a huge Russian influence operation) and in favor of a whole lot of other causes that sometimes resulted in riots and other wholesalc civil disobedience. And during that period a series of Supreme Court decisions came down that protected rights to protest and to criticize government policy.

    The irony is that today it's the right that can make best use of those exact same Supreme Court decisions originally made to protect the free-speech rights of the left.

    In Chicago Police Dept. vs Mosley (1972) US Supreme Court ruled in part:

    "But, above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. ... To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control. Any restriction on expressive activity because of its content would completely undercut the "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." "

    Which on its face would seem to forbid the FBI's attempts to quash a whole series of Twitter accounts with little or no justification, apart from the fact that in some cases the accounts repeated what the FBI suspected might be Russian talking points. In fact the FBI was constantly pressuring Twitter, demanding that Twitter examine their data more closely to provide the FBI with evidence that these were indeed Russian accounts operated by Russian intelligence or Wagner.

    If the FBI's FITF (Foreign Influence Task Force) wanted particular accounts suppressed, shouldn't it be the government's responsibility to do the investigative work and be the one to provide the evidence supposedly justifying that action? (Even if the suppression still wouldn't pass Constitutional scrutiny?) Shouldn't it be accompanied by a court order?

    And it's still happening. Just in the last few days, Twitter has been banning accounts critical of Ukrainian president Zelensky, unknown to Elon who quickly got the accounts reinstated. It's unclear who was orchestrating that, but deep state apparatchiks might still be on the payroll. A number of former FBI and CIA worked at Twitter, some of whom maintained close back-channel contact with their former agencies. It wasn't just low level people either, it included the FBI's former chief counsel, who was a central player in the Russia-collusion conspiracy hoax. (Elon fired him.)

    And we still haven't gotten to Twitter's eager participation in US government psychological operations directed at Twitter users in target nations abroad. The United States was doing precisely what it accused Russia of doing. (It's still unclear what effect these efforts by either side had on public opinion in the target countries. My guess is very little.)

    One thing that the 'Twitter Files' have taught us, is that the distinction between the government "alphabet agencies" and the social media companies can almost be invisible at times. They operate as if they are one and the same thing.

    And it's my worry that state of affairs is both unconstitutional and a direct threat to the future of democracy both in the United States and worldwide.
     
    Last edited: Dec 25, 2022
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  15. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    Are you suggesting that the handling of the Hunter Biden story is just a conspiracy theory? We now know what happened at Twitter and Facebook admitted it took actions at the request of the FBI.
     
  16. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    Well said!
     
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Hey, remember the time you fell for right-wing make-believe↗? Or, as such, maybe you didn't.

    Understand, it's not "some semi-divine 'God's-eye'". It's not "some extra-Constitutional right". Quite simply, I didn't fall for the right-wing make-believe↗. You, however, apparently did, so maybe that's something to keep in mind. Again: One of the main reasons conservative arguments are refused and even prohibited is because not only are they insupportable, conservatives insist on reiterating insupportable arguments over and over again.

    That is, it's not about some "incredible assumption of self-righteousness"; think of it this way: Something happens, someone gets caught telling a fake story, but people like you come along later and repeat false witness, and then you feel offended because it could only be "some semi-divine 'God's-eye'" establishing "some extra-Constitutional right" derived from an "incredible assumption of self-righteousness" that compels others to refuse the fake narrative.

    So, yeah, you said something that wasn't true, and got called out on it. Just for example. It wasn't about divinity, special rights, or any presumption of self-righteousness that isn't your own. People spread propaganda, it was debunked, and you either fell for it or wilfully decided to propagate falsehood. Sometimes, that's just how it goes.

    And beyond just you, or us, sure, repeat that process perpatually. Perhaps you might be offended at a colloquial description by which that infinite futility is pretty much what conservative argument comes down to, these days, but if we were to sweep away all of this excremental make-believe, we can only wonder what would remain, because if that part ever had merit, then it should have been what conservatives brought.

    But it didn't, so neither did they; it's like the point that not being allowed to censor someone doesn't mean a conservative is oppressed. So, let's talk about an incredible assumption of self-righteousness: No, that conservatives do not get to decide who gets to have human rights does not mean they're oppressed. That facts do not agree with their narratives is not a question of divinity, which, as you're aware, is the justification for much right-wing falsehood; nor is it a question of extra-Constitutional rights such as conservatives demand; and conservative self-righteousness is what leads us down these roads.

    Look, whining from petulance is not a formally listed fallacy, and it probably never should be.

    And it's one thing to discuss these questions at Sciforums, or even fight about them in our MetaTwit InstaSnap feeds, but someone went and spent forty-four billion dollars on an argumentative position that can only be won, ironically, through solipsistic relativism requiring parity between truth and falsehood.

    Naturally, the argument invested in extra-Constitutional rights justified by its own incredible assumption of self-righteousness presuming divine favor and insight would prefer that in "matters of intuition, feeling and opinion, where no factual truth-of-the-matter even exists", "about all that can be done … is let the different opinions be heard and let the reader make up his/her own mind". After all, the last thing someone in that position would want to do is test their feelings, opinions, and intuitions according to facts.

    • • •​

    Why would they ever stop, now?

    From Reddit via Twitter↱: "The problem with left-leaning media is they're intrinsically more strict with their propaganda to only using verifiable sources so it's really hard to poke holes in their ideologies and arguments in comparison to a lot of low-quality rightwing content." There is, of course, controversy about the provenance of that statement; tracking it down at Reddit, there is still a chance the source was a provocateur or even just someone recounting what someone else said.

    It may be that "Musk's tribe" might "feel unwelcome" because of content moderation at Twitter, but the problem remians that one of the main reasons conservative arguments are refused and even prohibited is that they are insupportable. And in twit-time, one posting depicting an ostensible "conservative self own" has racked up over three million views in about fifteen hours, has been retweeted over 13,700 times, and piled up 111,000 likes. That is to say, even if it was just somebody's joke, it plays well right now. It's actually hard to believe a seasoned right-winger said that, but not as hard as it should be.

    And it's not like this is new. You've been here for sixteen years, and seen this lamentation play out over and over again in our community. But we should also consider how these standards actually denigrate the right wing while seeking to afford it special protection. The basic idea is that we do not wish to suppress political views, so rightists never need to support their bigotry, crackpottery, or make-believe; taken to its fullest implication, we are making reasonable accommodation for people who are incapable of behaving any better. That is↑: Are we, then, acknowledging that a given political view cannot be expressed without disinformation, fallacy, and disruption?

    Or we just let the different opinions be heard and let the reader make up his/her own mind, as such. Meanwhile, so many of those formulations fail to exclude fraud; after so many iterations, it stands out. The failure to exclude swindle is not an accident.

    Of course, Elon's forty-four billion dollar wager isn't a failure to exclude swindle, but to empower it.
     
  18. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    Yes absolutely. theres no story there other than the right wings fake grievances. IT has been proven time and time and time and time and time again that any sort of bias in political moderation on social media went against the left.
     
  19. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

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    A government that infringes on our fundamental rights is undemocratic, plain and simple.
     
  20. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    With the Hunter Biden issue: The Biden campaign, made requests to twitter that certain tweets be removed, pointing out that they violated Twitter's own policies( the Trump campaign made similar requests). Biden was, at that time, holding no governmental position. The government at that time was under the Trump administration.
    As far as FBI payments to social media companies goes: The FBI can get an order, which needs to be signed by a judge, to collect stored data from these companies in a course of an investigation. When they do so, they are required to reimburse the company for the costs associated with supplying that data. So while this is technically " Social media company A took actions at the request of the FBI and were paid for it", it is in no way the nefarious act that some people want to portray it as. And neither is it linked to the Hunter Biden issue. Some people work really hard to take two unrelated issues and stretch them as far out of shape as possible in an attempt to make them overlap.
     
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  21. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I suppose that it is a "conspiracy theory". But some conspiracies do turn out to be real and the theories to be correct.

    The FBI takes Hunter Biden's laptop from the Delaware computer shop guy. They have posssession of it for the better part of a year. The FBI also has some of the world's best computer forensics people. So presumably they already knew that it was indeed Hunter's laptop. They could have easily interviewed some of the other people referred to on the laptop to verify it and probably did.

    So months later the FBI discovers that the New York Post has the contents of the laptop's hard drive and plans to publish a headline story about it. (I expect the Post told the FBI and asked for the agency's comment before the story ran.)

    So the FBI scrambles to put out a warning to all the social media companies that the Russians are expected to produce a big piece of disinformation and to be alert for it. And along comes the Post story.

    What is Twitter supposed to think? The FBI never reveals that they weren't talking about the laptop story or that their own forensics people could be expected to have already authenticated it. They just winked and nodded as social media platforms everywhere dismissed the story as Russian bullshit. Twitter bans the New York Post for printing the story.

    What's more, somebody (presumably the FBI) organized some 50 former intelligence officials to issue a statement. The statement read that none of them had examined the laptop or its contents, but it did look to them like something that Russia might have planted. (Which isn't unreasonable.) But as soon as it hits the establishment media headlines, it becomes '50 former high-ranking intelligence officials confirm laptop story is Russian disinformation', which isn't what they said at all.

    Much as it pains me to say it, I think that in the case of the laptop, the blame lies less with Twitter's old regime, than with the FBI (or whoever they were taking their orders from).
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2022
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  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Honestly, I can't decide between observing the historical naïveté, or something more cynical like, how dare the alphabet agencies treat implicated white people like innocent Black people. After all, the implicated white people are still being treated better.

    It's kind of like Republicans and the idea of what is unprecedented.

    There was a time when evidentiary chain of custody mattered, but, hey, it's a conspiracy theory about a Democrat, so conservatives and that old libertarian bloc of Republicans don't really care about such details.

    And while we're all worrying about this Hunter Biden conspiracy theory involving Burisma, we're also looking away from how Secretary of Energy Rick Perry leaned on the board of Naftogaz, seeking billions of dollars in contracts for companies that happen to support him politically, including one where he had previously been a director. And consider the differences: We know the Perry story happened, and the only question is whether they successfully tiptoed the law. We can't even establish chain of custody on the laptop, nor reconcile the metadata with the story accused.

    But since you raised the question of the "Twitter Files", perhaps you might explain why you find the stunt credible, especially considering the episode when Bari Weiss tried to show how an account was treated unfairly, but provided a screenshot that appears to show the account was protected against moderation without special permission. Given how much of the "Twitter Files" scandal depends on misrepresentation by Taibbi and Weiss, and the underlying complaint against liberals implicates Jack Dorsey as some sort of liberal elitist, there are many reasons to doubt the crediblity of the reporting. Compared to the burden of proof, no wonder you're going with naïve complaint about the "alphabet agencies".

    We might expect, if the case is so clear-cut, that the accusers could do at least a little better.
     
  23. Thus Spoke Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    150
    That would be a problem because that’s exactly what Twitter had to defend itself against. They said that their moderation decision was not coordinated with the Biden campaign. They said that they did not receive a request from the Biden campaign and didn’t violate the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.

    What Roth did say in a sworn statement was that he had regular meetings with the Director of National intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security. During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

    Weird, eh? And yeah, congress is interrupted as government anywhere at anytime in the United States.

    FYI, even false speech is protected speech. The basic principle assumes that everyone is competent and can make up their own mind. Even if it’s divisive speech from Russia or any other foreign speech.
     

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