Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives, the executives specifically mentioned the "Biden Team", Ro Khanna wasn't necessarily against censoring the story she was upset that Twitter shut down the Trump admin's press secretary account for dm'ing the NY Post Story and that Republicans on the Hill were rightfully so making a big deal out of that.

Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.

More than one smoking gun here and yes this is a huge story. I doubt we'll hear much out of it on CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC oligopolists.

Just so you know Ro Khanna is a man. Also appears to be the representative for a substantial part of the Valley, like Cupertino and San Jose.

https://khanna.house.gov/

> Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives

Thinking that this isn't happening, particularly by parties during an election is massively naive. How Twitter responds to it, and whether there was any undue pressure made by those parties would be a scandal, but "VIP account has a direct line to higher ups" is nothing.

Nothing said by parent suggests that they think this wasn't happening on the regular, or by other administrations. The shark was jumped here.

Weird how you say it was blatant partisan censorship but ignore that the Trump administration did the same exact thing while they were actually in the executive branch. It's almost like there is something blatantly partisan here going on, but it's not the "censorship"

Both of these things are bad, yes?

If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of Trump's executive direction, does that not count as some kind of 1A violation?

You should be explaining this to the poster I responded to, not me. But, generally, no. I don't think it's a big deal that anyone emails twitter and then twitter's moderation team looks at a post to see if it violates the rules.

>If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

If that's the metric when why isn't Fox News and all the right wing media, and online Republican commenters not in-kind donations?

Not sure why you're singling out Fox News and "right wing" media here, but I certainly think it's a problem when major networks coordinate coverage with their preferred candidate. That certainly counts as a "service" to me.

> If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

if this is our metric (and it very well could be) then every industry ever needs to be investigated--i guarantee you religions are massively guilty of this. we don't have to look far at all to see churches loudly preaching for one party right now. i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states. and i guarantee you countless other industries will be as well.

im sure elon himself has direct lines to many politicians. honestly i think this is a path we should explore with all monied/influential folks and politicians. lets mitigate quid pro quo with these people.

I clarified in a subsequent comment that what I'm talking about is explicit coordination. There's a major and consequential difference between a Priest telling his Parishioners during Mass that one candidate is better than another, or a media outlet saying the same thing during their prime time show, and some kind of explicit coordination between the campaign and those entities. The former is just run of the mill 1A protected speech, the latter is much more nebulous.

>i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states.

This is a dangerous subject, but KSA obviously does this all the time and it's not any different than Russian tomfoolery on social media, or what all these people did with Twitter, but we all just sort of let it happen because reasons. It's honestly disgusting.

sure, i’m just pointing that, if our metrics are that whatever-this-is should be considered scandalous and that it should be mitigated, then i can guarantee that we’d find way more of this out there. way more.

and i think we’d all win.

direct lines of communications, closed door meetings, etc… between religious leaders and candidates are widely known and id love for us to scandalize this and insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.

direct lines of communication, meetings etc… between oil execs and politicians is also widely known. i’d love to insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.

same with elon too. since the immediate realm we’re in surrounds twitter execs, i absolutely think we need to know which political influencers, politicians, and aspiring politicians he’s been in touch with and what exactly they’ve been discussing. this is absolutely 100% relevant to this exact tweet thread. twitter execs communicating with politically active people.

i can almost guarantee we will uncover all kinds of shady things happening across the board. we all can win here.

Zero disagreement. Maybe what we should be hoping/praying for is a deluge of leaks and whistle blowing from social media employees, explaining how all of this is Oz behind a curtain and Oz, as it happens, is rather stupid.

Yeah there is a difference, a priest telling his people to vote for one candidate while being a tax free organization is illegal.

Do you agree non consentual intimate images should be taken down?

If so, what Biden's team did is not an issue.

>Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.

That's not illegal election interference in the slightest.

This one is pretty bad in my opinion:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

The government is not supposed to be censoring people's speech, however they are effectively doing just that using a layer of indirection.

The Biden campaign is not the government.

So if in 2016 the Trump campaign had done the same thing, you'd be fine with the response, "The Trump campaign is not the government."?

I would, yes. In fact, the Trump White House did just that, it’s right there in the thread. Without knowing what the tweets they had removed were, I don’t see evidence of wrongdoing. There are legitimate reasons to have tweets taken down: malicious impersonation, revenge porn (which apparently some of these were), death threats, etc.

But Biden was likely to be elected, members of his staff appointed to government positions and staff at Twitter likely understood that.

Were they? It wasn't clear even for most of a week after the election that Biden was likely to be elected.

it was clear for the whole campaign the odds were pretty even

Is that a defence or further proof of malfeasance?

The Biden campaign, which became the government, perhaps in part due to the assistance provided, requested and received assistance. If the campaign wasn't the government and didn't have the power to compel assistance, why did Twitter help?

Because at least some of the content reported by them was unequivocally bad? Like someone's nudes that were published without consent. Or are you saying that if NYPost decides to run some candidate's children's nudes all of a sudden it's journalism instead of revenge porn?

Joe Biden wasn’t “the government” yet, look at the date. I wish we knew what these tweets actually were. If it was suppressing a news story, that’s bad. If it’s asking for death threats to be removed, that’s not bad.

(Matt himself acknowledges that both parties had tweets taken down, his evidence for bias is apparently that Twitter employees donated more to democrats https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&...)

Surely Twitter still has the data in an archive somewhere, but it’s not clear from the thread that Matt knows what the content of these tweets was.

Many of the removed tweets flagged by Bidens team were literally nude pictures of Hunter Biden.

Wow, 99.7% contributions went to democrats... If that isn't damning evidence of partisan bias I don't know what is! I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that one-sided.

for 2022 mid terms, opensecrets.org reports 95.38% for democrats, 0.19% republicans, 4.42% others.

overview of 2022 mid terms for technology: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=B&Bkd...

Twitter specifically: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/recipients?toprecip...

FTX: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D00007369...

The two "others" were Bernie Sanders and Evan McMullin, and the one Republican was Adam Kinzinger, a high-profile Trump critic who didn't even run for reelection in '22. There was a single individual donation of $200 to the RNC.

I don't know what anybody expects, though. Tech workers tend to be young, affluent, educated city-dwellers, and that demographic is strongly and increasingly inclined toward supporting Democrats. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, a liberal city in a heavily Democratic state. There's no conspiracy at work here. Republicans could choose to try to appeal to tech workers if they wanted.

Those are from individuals, capped at a few thousand dollars. The GOP raised more than the Democrats in the PAC arena, so we’ll never know the true balance when accounting for big donations at the top.

> as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias

I thought that was the smoking gun.

A smoking gun for twitter maybe, but GP is talking about writing off “the left” because of this.

Ro Khanna for President. The only politician with any moral compass.