I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat.
Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
- The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
- Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval"
In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned.
What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
>In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards.
I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
I don't understand why this gets so oft repeated. The Post article (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...) contains nothing resembling porn. There are some pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe, but that's not even a revelation. We already knew he had a drug problem.
What is a revelation is what could be official corruption, where Hunter gets paid exorbitant salaries to hold jobs he's not at all qualified for, and then funnels a portion of that money on to Joe. There's a possibility of quid pro quo that needs to be taken seriously and investigated further.
The evidence here is at least as strong as Whitewater and Russian collusion, and we appointed special prosecutors to investigate those. We should do the same here.
Who else could be "the big guy" that Hunter is to hold 10% for?
Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging.
So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.
