CIA Involvement in Twitter (opens in new tab)

Even the world's least liked personality can still make valid points. The presentation was crappy, but it was indeed an expose on how Social Media in all varieties works to gaslight users of all kinds... Not just journalists.

Shadowbanning has cost a lot of people incalculable amounts of time and progress in work, while platforms were really made to push their own profit and any agenda that supported their profit.

If a huge platform like Facebook or TikTok were to simply admit the truth, it would basically be - Hey, we don't provide you any ability to chose what you'll see, and we don't even want to help you to succeed in promoting your own business, but struggle on that while we show you all of these ads...

It's bleak, and grim, and now that the world has allowed social media to infect almost every segment of the Internet, logging off means staying off the Internet entirely... Years of secret shadowbanning, covert control, info warfare, and psych manipulation on the Internet have possibly corrupted everything of value online already, but we're still only talking about Twitter... It's not just on Twitter, nothing social online is working right anymore.

I agree with you about the formatting it's pretty bad.

That's exactly it. There is no smoking gun. What we've learned is that, somewhat paradoxically if not surprisingly, is that previous Twitter management had both a leftward bent to it's moderation perspectives (i.e. what to moderate and when) and a general deference to requests from agents of its host nation's government.

Which we basically knew already.

This is like if someone else buys Twitter and published Twitter Files 2.0 and we discover that Musk was sharing conspiracy memes with right wingers. Not much of a shock.

The US surveillance state, which can surveil the internet at the backbone level, and has violently suppressed left movements at home and abroad under every administration for over a century, continues to do shady things. No shit?

The left (not liberals) have been skeptical about twitter since ages ago. Only an idiot would assume that “manufactured consent” wouldn’t apply to the new media.

In that sense, I don’t see anything new on the twitter files. I’m just expecting this to be used by the red team to take power away from the blue team and keep things exactly the same.

The Propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky has been widely discussed on the left for 35 years, even if those discussions didn't mention it by it's formal name. So yeah it's nothing new. But to sum up:

1) Local media has a far right wing, pro police bias because it's customers are small business owners. Small business owners are pro police because they lose money from shoplifters and "bad" neighborhoods are bad for business. They're anti immigration because immigrants are over-represented among new small business owners and tend to outcompete established businesses. They're opposed to labor laws because they increase costs. They're opposed to estate / property / capitol gains taxes because they tend to have a large amount of family wealth. This is not to say that all small business owners are far right, it's just that they have a lot to gain from right wing policies.

2) Mass media tends to have a center left bias. This is because their customers are large national and multinational corporations, who are more interested in messaging and branding. For many reasons, the ages of 18-55 are considered to be the main focus of advertising, with 18-35 year olds being seen as especially valuable. Also, people who live in urban areas tend to have more disposable income. Finally, since what is progressive 30 years ago is often mainstream today, being left wing on social issues is generally a good idea. Imagine if the US only let 18-55 year olds vote, and gave an extra vote to people who were 18-35, lived in an urban area, or had progressive beliefs. That is the ideal media landscape for large media companies. Now there are limits, because large businesses don't want to promote pro-worker or anti-capitalist ideas. That's why the socially progressive economically centrist point of view dominates mass media.

Twitter is a mass media platform, and it must do something to promote center left tweets if it wants to be a profitable ad supported business. And it's more than happy to work with the government to further that goal.

If Elon wants to make Twitter into a privately owned microtransaction supported site, then we can expect it to boost far right wing positions - which is exactly what's happening.

You don't really get to become a billionaire in the US without playing well with the establishment, so quite a few people believe that at some point someone pushed him a little too hard to do something he didn't want.

I'm in favour of the leaks, but ultimately none of the surveillance laws that whistle-blowers exposed in the past two decades were actually repealed at a later point. However, the very fact that this causes such huge debate in the US points to a much healthier public discourse in the US than most western societies in my opinion.

I do think that he probably regretted having to actually commit to the sale. This whole thing reminds me a bit to dealing with racist bouncers growing up. I'd leave disappointed thinking to myself that one day "I'll buy a club myself and put high quality bouncers there that judge people by their substance" only to forget about it a few weeks later. Except that in this case there were also a couple million people every day daring him to do it.