I don’t think he does, I think he can literally see engagement falling in the days after a stunt and he’s trying to keep it up. Matt seemed to imply there would be another thread following this one so buckle up

There is a story here! Politicians having direct access to social networks to suppress narratives they don't like is interesting. But 1) I don't think it's surprising and 2) it appears it was not politically motivated at least in a bipartisan sense.

A story but one delivered with the kind of panache to drive traffic.

A lone company acting on its own to suppress a story may not be surprising to you, but collaboration between government and a corporation to suppress speech definitely should be. It's where fascism begins.

That's not even remotely news. This came out years ago. Still, your characterization is a bit ridiculous.

None of this news today except that Taibbi has now proven that Twitter actually did have an internal debate about whether to take down the laptop story, which runs contrary to his own narrative.

That's why I think your characterization is ridiculous because there is: a) no suppressing of narratives; b) the "direct connection" is the same thing any other VIP would have. Further to this, the guy was running for President of the united states, I can think of dozens of reasonable reasons why the campaign would want to have quick access to someone at Twitter. Also, your characterization is ridiculous because on top of assuming all that (which are contrary to the facts you are pointing to), you also made all of these assumptions without even bother to inquire what it was that was taken actually taken down.

And I agree! My point is they had that channel, not a value judgement on whether that was in or out of twitters terms of service.

What’s even more damning is how their own internal folks are sounding the alarm “how can we possibly defend this decision” and yet the decision stood.

It’s pretty clear that Twitter had a very strong alignment to one political party and that resulted in the deliberate suppression of an important news story right before an election.

It’s pretty scandalous.

97% of Twitter (US?) employees donated to the Democrats? Is it normal for approximately 100% of your staff to donate to a party? This seems quite odd to me.

It surely isn’t 97% of Twitter employees donating to Democrats. It’s 97% of donations by Twitter employees going to Democrats. I’d imagine the actual percentage of Twitter employees who donate to anyone is pretty low.

Plus you’re then drawing a direct line from that to access to execs. IMO that needs specific evidence. Plenty of tech execs are well connected to both parties, because they’re, you know, rich elites.

If you can't handle the scrutiny, then don't accept a high powered job, at a multi-billion dollar company.

Of course people will get excited. If Elon were to flog a "Hunter Biden's laptop" story that turned out to be that its hard drive was 4500 RPM when the SKU was marketed as 5400, and that capacity was measured in gigabytes rather than gibibytes, people would still get excited. Facts have little to do with any of this, it's all a post-modern, post-truth exercise in perceptions.

Minimizing it is condescending. Tainting it through associating it with Musk is as cynical as tainting it by associating it with mystery Russians.

> Maybe twitter's policies were bad, and applied inconsistently. But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.

Authoritarians love the idea of corporations subservient to government being used as a tool of the state to crack down on human rights. Lots of people don't see a problem with it.

If you don't think so now, you might in 2024. So it's time to care now.

"The Biden team" was not the government in October 2020. (For that matter there is a "Biden team" right now that has no governmental capacity, that is, his re-election team, which is probably engaged in these same kind of activities with many platforms.) I have to wonder if these communications aren't just pretty normal? It might be easier to evaluate how alarmed we should be if any detail were provided by Taibbi at all.

"Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."

Buddy, it's called the first amendment. It isn't a hard read.

Something that doesn't involve the government can still be a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, just like something that doesn't technically break any laws against discrimination can still be unfair or racist.

Which they did, because they were naked pictures of Hunter Biden, being distributed without his consent.[1] They would also be illegal to distribute under revenge porn laws but were being distributed by Chinese-originating accounts.

[1] https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/159883024902577356...

Besides, the poster's point was that many of these people are now going to receive death threats from whackjobs, not that their contents were too sensitive.

You don't even need this "Twitter Files" thread to know that there is plenty of evidence; I don't really see how you can say with any such confidence that Twitter's policies have been even handed.

> there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party, and to be honest- I don't really care if they do

Ah yes the old, "It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, they deserved it."

If you truly believe that there's no clear evidence, then I don't know what to tell you. Taibbi shows emails where Twitter and the US government collude to censor true information that people wanted to read. That is a big deal.

I see everyone saying this while ignoring the timeline. This happened before the 2020 elections. Biden was not president back then.

No, the millions of voters who selected him over trump did that.

This hit job using hacked iCloud information to post revenge porn of Hunter Biden was not going to change people's votes, it had nothing to do with Joe Biden. Just another Russian hack job.

(Note, for example that the poll numbers you read in the NY Post were based on 437 of the original 1,335 respondents because they literally excluded everyone else to get the numbers they wanted to base this story on.)

People voted Trump out because he utterly gutted our country, even when handed layup after layup. Knock it off with this "Biden was installed" shit, jesus christ.

But let's ignore that and repeat all the bad stuff the news told us Trump did, and how Biden is a saint for swooping in and saving our democracy.

Like what?

I am not engaging in a discussion where the other party handwaves away with a simple "many of the things". You don't get to pull that junk and then say "let's label everyone willfully ignorant".

"10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:"

in this case the government was run by donald trump, and the censorship was to remove stolen revenge porn

And the US government isn't run by any one person. The president is the most powerful individual, but there are other officials (both elected and appointed), and they are the ones who colluded.

I don't care whether it's the president, or the speaker of the house, or a freshly-trained FBI agent. Nobody in government should be pressuring private companies to prevent people from reading what they want to read.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Hunter's ****.

I've heard it phrased this way: never send an email that you wouldn't be happy to read out in court.

But I'm curious, how can this policy be enforced? If I delete some of my work emails, how can a court prove that the emails ever existed and that I deleted them?

As I was told in my first day of training at a large investment bank, "If you have something sensitive to discuss, pick up the phone".

If yes, don't send it, or rephrase it accordingly.

Wow. You really believe that, don’t you? I wonder which political party you vote for.

> and to be honest- I don't really care if they do

Clearly. The reason for that is, your political side is the beneficiary.

Clearly they were.

>But there is no clear evidence that they explicitly favored one party

The evidence is not only clear, but overwhelming. But more than favoring a party, they favored the DC blob narrative. See the treatment of Wikileaks vs the treatment of CIA propaganda accounts like PropOrNot or Bellingcat as crystal clear examples.

>I don't really care if they do. If Elon thinks this is some sort of big shock that will cause people to get excited.... I can't really see why.

This is really the problem and the issue at hand. Many whose perceived political opponents are being silenced and attacked by the unholy cabal of government and big tech don't care (or worse, are happy) because they have no principles. At the end of the day, those they look down upon, or that they think are bad for whatever reason, are getting the shaft, and that is just fine with them. Those of us with principles think that everyone deserves to be treated by the same set of rules, even those people we don't like or who we think are bad. Unfortunately, the schism between the principled and unprincipled is only growing wider as the former group shrinks and the latter group grows daily.

You mean emails the company paid you to write for its benefit? They were never yours. Also, there's the adage about never emailing any statement you wouldn't want on the front page of the NYT for this exact reason.

"There's no REAL proof that large corporations overwhelmingly favor the left" is the political version of "there's no REAL proof that the earth is round"