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0 pointslovich3y ago0 comments

Kinda seems like he’s more doing PR for musk than journalism. He’s posting stories aligning with musk’s interests on musk’s platform using data supplied by musk.

I watched a debate panel with several journalists who were part of the Twitter files and they claimed they had full access to everything because an engineer sat in the room with them and ran queries for them. They seemed to believe that the database couldn’t have possibly been pre filtered or that an engineer who was building queries on the fly already, could alter the data. At one point the journalist literally claimed that they couldn’t have possibly filtered out all emails with the phrase myocarditis that quickly.

I know we’re in tech and have a closer understanding of technology than experts in other fields but it was kind of appalling seeing how ignorant they were of how the data they were being shown could be manipulated and I feel like their lack of suspicion about it ruined their credibility.

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Dig1t3y ago

He is posting emails and communications that have literally nothing to do with Musk. They are comms between people who used to work at Twitter and politicians. How is that doing PR for Musk? I don't understand.

Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.

You are right though that there is a certain level of trust here in Taibbi's reporting and fact checking.

lovichOP3y ago

Musk wants to paint himself as the savior of free speech and pet of that is by casting Twitter 1.0 as some sort of nefarious agents of the government who were trying to control all communication. The Twitter files are trying to reach the same narrative conclusion.

I’ve also read the Twitter files and the stated summaries on the tweets routinely didn’t match the linked evidence, or stretched it to the weakest but still technically possible conclusion.

> Your pre-filtered database (conspiracy) theory doesn't really seem like the simplest explanation.

While calling this out as a conspiracy is kinda laughable given the content of the Twitter files, I want to make it more clear that I was appalled by the journalists being certain that the data couldn’t have been manipulated and then giving examples of how it would be impossible that were actually relatively trivial to implement. They also claimed they had access to “all” the data when that was patently not true. They had access to a gate kept version of the data which they could not verify, and I think that’s an important point given that one of the major critiques they have about Twitter 1.0 and the government is a lack of transparency. I also found this suspect when Musk and the journalists involved like Taibbi claimed they were going to show “everything” and instead of a database dump they keep linking excerpts of documents. Maybe they’ve finally done a database dump but after the first 5 or 6 Twitter threads where it was all cherry-picked I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt

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