Biden team asking Twitter to "handle" tweets they don't like. This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.

Neither would be terribly surprising to me, although for sure the first is more damning. But Taibbi hasn't yet provided enough detail to know one way or another.

If it is just "prioritize this support request by a VIP" it's not particularly damning or even scandalous, I would assume that would be the case at any social media company.

The tweets in that citation are mostly available on the Wayback Machine, and 100% of those accessible ones contained frontal nudity: https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598829964454858752. So they would have been taken down as a clear ToS violation no matter what.

2- They weren't telling, they were asking, and if Twitter feels like they were told, they can sue the government for violating their First Amendment rights.

You are correct, technically Joe Biden was not a part of the government at the time that this email was sent. Do you honestly believe that this behavior is keeping with the spirit of the first amendment?

His team, and the DNC (here's one that's very similar, except that its from the DNC instead of the Biden team https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjAuD6eWAAEFiXY.jpg)

are enormous and very powerful, and effectively a part of the government.

Do you think this kind of emailing Twitter and asking them to "handle" tweets they don't like, stopped on the day that Biden was inaugurated?

And, of course, it's a moot point anyway because Taibi says requests came, and were honored, from both sides, including the White House. Even if "Joe Biden wasn't President yet" is true, Trump was President and his White House was working with Twitter to suppress speech. I just don't see how it is a question, either legally or morally, that the Federal Government, with Twitter, has been violating the first amendment.

What you see is a non-government person asking a non-government business to censor something. What I see is a former Vice President, Congressman, and Presidential candidate, backed by the DNC, asking a major communications channel to censor something.

The former sounds like sophistry to me.

Okay and you are assuming that Twitter would just take down the tweets, or that the tweets didn't violate Twitter's policies. Is it not okay for someone in the gov't to hit the report button?

Being president or not seems like kind of a big deal to me.

I guess people's argument then would be that the govt (or whatever) indirectly limited Twitter user's speech.

If you are talking about the a more general ideal of "open and free speech" - which private companies are never legally required to uphold, but may choose to espouse anyway - then it's clearer to say that instead of conflating it with the First Amendment, which will just distract others from the points you're trying to make.

If you are worried about the "violation of the 1A spirit " should you not complain first about the government asking for things to be taken down? Or at least display the same level of outrage?

So no, it’s not “the entire reason.”

For the other 2000 or more women, it was exactly what you say, he asked, and they had to say yes (to get anywhere)

What a weird thing to try to nitpick. There are plenty of shakier instances of takedowns by Me Too. Weinstein isn’t one of them and they’re not “the entire reason” for the movement.

Are you saying the metoo movement was about physical aggressive rape of women?

Because it’s not. It’s about those in power exploiting their power for sex. And how is that done? Mostly by soft power, which you can’t say no to. Which is the whole premise of the parent comment.

I think the point is that Twitter, a multibillion corporation run by rich, powerful, and well-connected people, isn’t in the same position w.r.t. the government as fledgeling starlets were against Weinstein.

Twitter could have said no, and they would have been fine; they are protected from the government by the Constitution. Twitter has tons of money, and could easily file a lawsuit or defend one as well.

Insofar as the Biden campaign is concerned, it is impossible to violate 1A when you are not imbued with government power. There is no such thing as a private citizen compelling Twitter to take something down, the only possible thing you can be doing is requesting. Both campaigns did this so feel free to draw your own conclusions as to whether the Trump campaign did something wrong, but I will point you to the word “campaign” and note that a campaign is also a private party, so pretty unlikely.

First, how deeply rooted democratic operatives within Twitter took totally unprecedented action to censor a potentially highly damaging story.

Second, that Twitter publicly lied about their justification for doing so, which itself probably broke laws (at the very least a serious FTC enforcement action). Companies cannot lie that something was done because of a TOS violation. Consumers have a fair and reasonable expectation here that was violated when the company made up reasons for censoring the story - even in DMs!

Third, the chaotic response within Twitter and its internal paralysis in recognizing and “unfucking” the hijacking of their toolset for overly political and nefarious purpose.

Fourth, and this one really just irks me because it was gaslighting on a national scale, that so many channels and people picked up and ran with the “disinformation” and the particularly ridiculous “Russian disinformation” angle in an attempt to discredit the reporting.

Good luck out there.

I’m not making judgements, people should support political movements they believe in, but at a certain point it affects your ability to be impartial. It’s obvious that you don’t get to play the game unless you’re playing for the right team. The fact that Twitter employees might be biased isn’t all that much of a conspiracy.

Your post works really hard to characterize Twitter employees as "nefarious" "[D]emocratic operatives" who "publicly lied", "broke laws", and engaged in "gaslighting on a national scale", which frankly I think is baseless and unproductive. But putting that aside, it seems to me that the nature of running a communications platform like Twitter is that there's always someone who thinks this about you. The stakes are pretty high, especially around elections. I'm not a fan of social media, in particular I think Twitter on balance has been pretty bad for humanity, but my reasoning isn't that it's particularly good or bad for a given viewpoint (which seems to be yours). I think what they're trying to do is impossible, they will always fail, and there will always be big negative consequences.

For example, Twitter could've let this story ride. But it's not about Joe Biden, it's about Hunter Biden, and there's no vetted evidence of JB wrongdoing. But if JB loses the election because of this, well that's a huge failure for Twitter also. Or they can build a huge investigative unit that competes with all the disinformation bureaus of all the worlds' governments, but that's clearly a losing proposition.

We get a lot of kicks from armchair quarterbacking and our "I would fix Twitter in two shakes with my enlightened moderation policies" (at least one of us got pretty carried away with this and spent $44B to take a swing) wind-bagging, or alleging some mix of corruption and incompetence. They're a pretty good punching bag. But it's worth saying some reasonably smart people have dedicated their professional lives to solving these problems, and pretty clearly they failed. I think this is probably because what they were trying to do, while noble, is impossible. You can't make a global, public communications platform that all the world's dignitaries use that is (reasonably) free of disinformation and acceptable to all major participating parties. Hell you probably can't even do it for just the Republican and Democratic parties, let alone Germany + China.

What you can do is sell out to them over and over again, which is probably what EM will do. Twitter will become a wasteland of propaganda and banal marketing, trading whatever bona fides it has left for exposure on its platform. It's essentially a private equity buyout of Twitter's attention capital. I think the previous leadership team was wise to this, I'm pretty sure EM still isn't (he burned a lot of their attention capital in a 2 day bonfire), but give it a few weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Js2Qk7hpg

If you mean that some(all?) the particular tweets mentioned as censored by Tabibbi were about frontal nudity and thus reasonably censored I am not arguing.

They can just as much suppress speech, by using the implied threat of future government action.

And this is basically just as bad.

Can you point to the emails/comms where this was implied?

That happening, ever, at all, implies a non zero chance that if you refuse, they will be upset and do something about it.

Something does not have to be 100% certain for it to have a huge chilling effect on speech.

Ok. Well let me explained.

The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform.

Trump did the same for four years. (“Failing New York Times” etc. if you remember?) If Twitter acted because of coercion by the government, violating 1A, why were they not also corerced by Trump?

Nobody, including Twitter, had a crystal ball that told them that Trump was going to lose the election. Trump was in government and Biden wasn’t.

You could have just said "yes, I agree with you. Thats what happened."

And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.

At no point did I say that the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Biden to be arrested for life for 1st amendment violations, or whatever other strawman that I did not say.

So, once again. You could have just said "Yes, you are correct. Biden's team did reach out to a platform to have content removed. "

See, I don’t agree with this. Trump tried to achieve the exact opposite. He and many in the GOP made it clear that they wanted the Hunter story to be kept on the agenda. If Twitter was pushed leftward by the Biden team, they were also pushed rightward by Trump and the GOP who wanted Twitter to do the exact opposite.

The outcome is at best a net zero chilling effect.

There is no logical reason to believe that a candidate has a greater chilling effect than the sitting President and the Senate majority. You have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.

I am saying that an action has a chilling effect.

No matter how many times you bring up other actions, it remains the case that the action that I brought up has a chilling effect.

What you are doing is engaging in bad faith, by using a tactic called "whataboutism". No matter what your opinions are, on other politicians, my original point stands.

A former president, who is running for president, having their team reach to to a social media platform to have content removed, has a chilling effect, regardless of anything else that other politicians are doing.

If you are a bad faith actor, then you can continue to engage in whataboutism, without directly engaging with this point, I guess.

Things can still have a chilling effect even if someone is not literally in government right now.

Such as, for example, if the team making the requests is the political campaign of a former vice president, who is currently running for president.

No matter what bad things you think other people have done, it does not invalidate this point.

If your next statement is something of the effect of "Well what about this other thing that this other politician did!" in any way or reference what so ever, I am just going to take that as you admitting that you are acting in bad faith.

Both political parties do this, and have full time press relations people whose whole job is to do this. We might feel that is unhealthy, but crucially, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same as jailing those who defy the requests, or compelling their speech at gunpoint, or seizing the means of broadcast.

Ok, so then you could have just said "yes. I agree with you completely that they were trying to pressure them to remove the content.

You are completely correct in everything that you said!"

You just agreed with me.

> Requests, criticism, even pressure - those are not the same

A chilling effect on speech can still exist. And chilling effects on speech, from government/politicians, is something we aught avoid.

I want to know more about what 'handling' tweets means, whether all 'handle' requests were accepted or in which instances did twitter push back, etc.

i think those semantics matter, which is why i ask.

no outside person asked twitter to “handle” anything. they asked them to review it.

It seems like at minimum they are bypassing the reported tweet queue.

It feels likely that these report judgements disproportionately had the outcome desired by the requester. If not all requested tweets got taken down/suspended until deleted that will look a lot better than if this channel effectively allowed unchecked censorship.

It's not a hard outcome to achieve. Only report things blatantly violating the ToS and you get that outcome.

I would not be surprised to find out sometime that there are judges who might disagree with you on that point.

The 1st amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech. You just admitted he was not part of the government. Therefore it’s not a 1st amendment violation.

It may be morally wrong, or violating “free speech”, but I don’t see a 1st amendment violation.

I'm not going to claim that it isn't an issue that VIPs have excessive influence on social media companies and there operations. People with lots of followers have certainly been able to pull strings to craft the message at twitter in the past. Joe Biden and his campaign team c. Oct 2020 are certainly to be counted in that number. Things like banning certain accounts ( https://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-parody-twitter-acc... ) or getting your account unblocked ( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45953747 ).

I am going to ask specifically how this is a first amendment issue when none of the people involved had any role within the government at the time this took place.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Are you talking about the tweets with nudity they emailed about?

To be clear, first amendment doesn't say the gov't shouldn't (let alone can't) ask you to do (or not do) something. It states that the legislative body of the federal government cannot make a law abridging the freedom of speech.

It should come at no surprise that high profile users of twitter (government, celebs etc) can make requests to have content that clearly violates the twitter ToS removed and are served with higher priority.

[1] https://ischool.umd.edu/news/how-taliban-used-twitter-to-tak...

So ok, there was some new information (from which it's hard to confidently extrapolate much, I would say). But mostly it's a rehash of a known story, right?

Does it still rub you the wrong way that Trump was "the government" telling Twitter to remove speech?

Biden wasn't in office at the time of communications, yet was clearly a figure of influence in government.

"Handle" is an okay word to describe the scenario via an internet comment, yet also not a literal quote.

I wish we could get back to trusted parties coming to reasonable conclusions while citing sources. It seems we're stuck in a cycle of gaming SEO and piecemeal info via social media.

I guess us "citizen journalists" are learning just how challenging it can be to relate a story accurately and with minimal bias.

What in the world are you saying here? What exactly is a “figure of influence in government“, and how does that matter?

Setup, WTF are you saying?

Second, Tucker and Thiel are influential but I probably wouldn't say government, I'd say they're influential media figures. Third, yes I imagine Tucker and Thiel do have a greater ability to influence in some areas than your average Joe.

Finally, if your next response contains another WTF-type comment, you'll have the last word.

Calls for censorship coming from individuals or groups who later assume positions within government are worth reviewing because it may inform how they operate while in office. Calls that come after taking office may be punishable. Therefore, any influence exerted during campaigns of private citizens, while unpunishable, is still interesting to follow. An incumbent up for re-election is not free to exert such influence, though I imagine it still happens on their behalf, and I'd say those unpunishable actions are worth following too.

All private messages aren't interesting, but these ones are because they called for censorship. Also, censorship just means suppression of content. It doesn't have to be done by a government.

Let’s stop being vague, what messages are you talking about?

Here is a US representative, a Democrat no less, arguing that the story should be allowed to remain on the basis that even if it was hacked material, journalists are not responsible for the illegal actions of a source, and because the story is of national interest. On the other hand, the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story. Regardless of what that removed content was, the suppression of the story has itself been national news for awhile and it's worth clearing the air with facts to understand what occurred. One of them was a blurred image of Hunter Biden [5].

So again, it's interesting because these are calls for censorship, and campaign messaging can indicate what the candidate might do while in office.

None of this, by the way, should be construed to be limited to the Biden campaign or Democrats. Groups have been censoring each other for eons. Communists censored everyone but their own messaging, McCarthy censored them, Anthony Comstock did it, religions and dictators do it, and on and on.

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...

[2] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598838041371516929

[3] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828601268469760

[4] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

[5] https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1598837329250045953

Now Twitter can suppress whatever they want, and we can disagree or agree with it, but there was NO evidence presented that anyone asked them to do that.

Edit: this explains it better than I did. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-...

Edit: you know where there were direct messages from a campaign and officials while in government? It was from the Trump team and Fox. Tons of them.

From my comment above,

> the "DNC" [3] and "Biden team" [4] were apparently asking Twitter to clean up certain content in relation to that story.

If it isn't true, the Biden team and DNC can publicly deny what's presented in those messages.

The Atlantic article you cite makes a different case than you do. They're saying no violation of the first amendment occurred, and I agree with that. I've always found the released communications interesting nonetheless.

> you know where there were direct messages from a campaign and officials while in government? It was from the Trump team and Fox. Tons of them.

All are concerning regardless of party. Sen. Hawley has been probing the same of this admin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJZ2MTDEWY

This is the end of the conversation for me. I've got other things to do.

Gotcha, so there’s nothing here to be concerned about unless they release something new.

https://twitter.com/greggnunziata/status/1599295288081948673...

And the GOP supports him while he calls for suspending the constitution https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/trump-lot-things-itll-...

Finally, even if I or the public could only focus on one thing, Trump's statement appeared after the Twitter Files release.

Is it really so problematic for you that I, a person distant from you on this planet, express interest here about Twitter's comms with DNC or Biden team?

It's not reasonable to repeatedly ask me to convince you to change your mind. You've seen the same things as me, I think it's interesting, you think it's not. This is end of convo for me.

That's the entire crux of their argument, selective enforcement when it fit their political desires.

This is not quite accurate. The FBI did take the laptop, but Isaac (the repairman) made a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani as some sort so assurance because he feared the laptop would be black holed by the FBI.

The Biden team never asked Twitter staff to “handle” anything. They forwarded tweets that [violated twitter’s ToS][1], a Twitter staff member forwarded them for review, and at that point the reviewer said they “handled these.”

That’s what content moderation is supposed to do!

[1]: https://twitter.com/parkebench/status/1598841731763810304

The analogy falls flat.

230

Twitter was supposed to fear Biden?

Biden has a long public history, without abuse of power.

It's not comparable.

Thank God.

Pretty sure “playing ball” helps build goodwill with the people who decide whether to break your company up or not.

[1] The tweets referenced by the biden team were Hunter Biden dick pics, you can check yourself in the Wayback Machine

Twitter definitely removed pornography which wasn’t labeled or which was posted without the consent of the people involved.

As for CSAM, whoever told you that is blatantly lying to you. There are annual reports showing thousands of reports to NCMEC and accounts getting banned - here’s last year:

https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/202...

Source on this?

Anecdotally, the reaction of everyone I know working in law enforcement to the Musk purchase and subsequent layoffs was "this is going to make it infinitely more difficult to get CSAM taken down from Twitter".

Yeah, that’s gonna need a reputable citation.

I mean Zuck must be the devil himself by now then... Or is it Musk's ideological views creating such consternation? In which case, also interesting to see the federal interest.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/intimate-medi...

This page goes back to 2018, too, so it’s hardly new: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103200035/https://help.twit...

> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.

> Sharing explicit sexual images or videos of someone online without their consent is a violation of their privacy and one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. In addition to posing serious safety and security risks, it may also result in physical, emotional, and financial hardship for the person whose media is shared.

The hacked content in general is covered by this. Given the contents, it doesn’t appear that the news exemption covers most of the material:

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...

Here’s the history on the above quote for those that missed the allusion: https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/will-no-one-rid-me-of...

I mean, I guess it's ok to expand the definition, but let's be clear that's what we're doing here. Also, it isn't particularly rhetorically effective.

I think it's a good thing that we're having a discussion on when the Whitehouse is applying pressure for tweets to be removed, and how nicely asking is or isn't pressure. I actually think that these actions were entirely legal. The Biden campaign and the Trump administration can and should be allowed to ask for posts to be reviewed.

But I think we'd damn well take a close look at when and why they do choose to do so.

It’s been years since the “Hunter Biden laptop” non story, and the vague unsubstantiated accusations are still flying. Zero work seems to have been done since then to substantiate any of the claims, which says a lot about how much those making them care that what they’re saying is true or accurate. The vague claims and conspiracy theories do the job just as well it seems.

You’re right after all; the only reason anyone cares about the Hunter Biden laptop is because they think it will take down a different Biden.

The problem is it actually doesn’t. Despite your innuendo, the shadiest thing that can be pointed out is vague notions of influence peddling, which has been effectively normalized after the last administration’s blatant and gratuitous influence peddling. It’s hard to get people fired up about something you’ve been claiming is totally cool and legal for the past 6 years. So no surprise that no one cares to hear about influence peddling and shady deals from the team that brought us Jared Kushner’s $2billion Saudi fund and Trump’s first impeachment.

The laptop story is a dud. Republicans will spend years investigating it and find nothing. Sure they’ll find something and try to make it into a huge scandal, but after living through Whitewater and Benghazi, we all know the drill. It’s a long tradition in Republican politics.

The faster you get over and move past the laptop, the better (for you that is… the longer Republicans cry about this non issue, the better it is for Democrats politically, because only the most rabid partisan Republicans care about this at all).

You can argue it is minor in comparison to, say, impeachment proceedings re: Burisma, but did Twitter do the right thing in suppressing the laptop story? Probably not. I don't think most people want private citizens like Gadde tampering with elections in the future.

Removing blatantly violating content isn’t controversial, nor is a member of the concerning party’s staff emailing Twitter asking for a prompt review.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752

What is the news story regarding photos of Hunter Biden? That he's naked like the rest of us under his clothes?

Let the news come out and let everyone decide for themselves what the value is. Censoring it is the issue

Campaign staff reporting tweets that made him look bad seems… fairly pedestrian?

There’s far more egregious examples of bad behavior out there than this.

Sorry, what “own violations?”

And the original sarcasm: you are upset that an employee is reporting violating content that concerns their employer? I didn’t realize that if you click the report button on the post, you must have 10 degrees of separation from it, otherwise it’s untoward.

Are you aware of how almost all content moderation on the public-facing web works?

And wait, “throughout the whole internet”? I missed the part when Twitter became the sole TLD and its vast expanse meant any violating content found must surely have been discovered by time-consuming and pain-staking methods. Or maybe a reverse image search and a few interns can find some violating content that hadn’t been flagged yet on one single website.

Enough with the indignation and false accusations.

EDIT: In fact, let's not rely on our memories. Here's the original NY Post story, the one which you weren't allowed to share on Twitter:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...

This article doesn't make any kind of allegations about CP. Why are you making things up?

"The conservative radio host Wayne Root claimed without evidence in a tweet shared tens of thousands of times that Hunter Biden's laptop contains videos of him sexually abusing Chinese children."

That's just one article, I remember seeing many YouTube comments and 4chan posts about it, which could suggest they were bots pushing a narrative.

The Hunter Biden story is, and has always been, about him selling access to his father to Ukrainian powerbrokers so that what we're seeing unfold now over there would be possible. His claims to be saving "10% for the Big Guy" clearly allude to money being kicked back to his dad the Vice President at the time, and current man in charge of delivering billions of dollars to those same powerbrokers in Ukraine now.

This is what the investigation is about. Nobody cares if Hunter was a drug addict or a douchebag it's always been about the above.

Posted today:

https://twitter.com/JoanneRansing/status/1598963377984135183

"Hunter Biden had sex with his niece Natalie. His dead brother's underage daughter - he was also banging her Mom. Will they manage to keep this video secret forever? Lots of people have seen it including me."

https://twitter.com/kuckieman/status/1598895748636372992

"One question, Are you ok with the pictures of Hunter Biden and clearly underage girls? You and Hunter are the problem."

https://twitter.com/wokeantag0nist/status/159901527380973568...

"Hunter had sex with underage girls and used his dad to broker deals against America’s best interest, “ what’s the big heal lolz” congratulations you’re dumb and pathetic enough to be Biden’s next diversity hire"

Me: shows credible proof demonstrating that's not the case

You: feigns confusion

Why are you playing dumb?

Well, I think we've identified the issue. Please don't look up flat earth tweets, it will break you heart.

It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.

You could also summarize the findings as “no evidence of tampered emails or hacking was found on the laptop”. But you didn’t (and I wouldn’t) as that too would be disingenuous.

Neither summary is a fair framing, particularly for techies.

For at least some of the details, see the Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... or https://archive.ph/b1Ser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

But let me guess Wikipedia is also part of the fake news media?

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-found...

Third parties on the emails have come forward to verify some of the emails.

> No criminal activity by the Bidens was ever found.

Hunter Biden is guilty of lying on a federal firearms application. For starters they should throw the book at him for that since Democrats are “tough on guns” right?

The corruption angle has never been fully investigated either. The whole Ukraine do nothing job was clearly payment for access to his father. We’ll see what comes up when they finally look into it next Congress.

> It should be impossible to look at this objectively and conclude that this wasn't a carefully timed misinformation campaign.

Just because something has a political angle doesn’t mean it’s immediately false.

> It drives me mad that the right somehow turned this into a persuasive argument to people.

The blinders worn by the half the left, and forced onto the eyes of the other half, are a much worse problem.

Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess. But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.

Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t mean the public cannot discuss the matter or present it’s opinion on the legality.

The laptop isn’t meaningless. It’s a data dump of evidence of guilt. Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm while under the influence of narcotics to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).

> Hunter is being investigated by the FBI. If the house wants to spend it’s time investigating a single individual fine I guess.

The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.

> But if influence of someone not in office being investigated is going to open the door wide to Trump and his kids.

The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.

If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now. They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.

Then you go on to list a bunch of meaningless things to me. Hunter Biden brandishing firearms and taking drugs is meaningless. He’s a private citizen. His problems are well known. The brandishing of the firearm thing is especially hilarious, because the people who are most concerned about taking down Hunter Biden wouldn’t even consider that a crime.

Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.

How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.

That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.

> the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done

And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.

But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?

> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.

Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself. People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that. Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?

With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.

That's completely bullshit. Legal gun owners are the number of advocates for actually enforcing gun laws on the books. Not creating cockamamie new ones that go after cosmetic features or make criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.

Being a drug addict and purchasing or even being in possession of a firearm is a serious crime and it should be investigated. I guarantee you that 100/100 legal gun owners would endorse prosecuting drug addicts illegally in possession of firearms.

The true hypocrisy is that while the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms. They want to throw the book at legal gun owners for some newly created minutiae, but won't endorse charging a literal meth addict brandishing a firearm with a felony.

> Actually I take that back, Hunter Biden allegedly trading on his fathers name and giving kickbacks to “the big guy” has been normalized by the Trump family as standard operating procedure for top political families in this country.

Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.

> How are any Republicans even mad about this? Oh right, they are not. What’s really going on here is that Republicans hope the laptop will be to Biden as Whitewater was to Clinton, and Benghazi was to Hillary — the pretext that allows investigation, which will hopefully reveal or cause the other prey to make a mistake.

You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy? You don't see anything worthy of investigation in the $250K/month deal he was getting from that Ukraine gas company for his "expertise"?

> That’s all this is, which is frustrating, because a total of 0 people involved in pushing this care about the things you listed as not meaningless and evidence of guilt. It’s just a political playbook that’s been run nationally 3 times already, at least. The fact not everyone can see through it is worrying.

Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.

> And yet, the FBI is investigating and Biden isn’t pressuring the AG or firing the director of the FBI as Trump did.

You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?

> But regardless, you say it’s about “Trump hate” and whataboutism but it’s really about normalization. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised people yawn about accusations of nepotism and self dealing after they told people for years it’s not a big deal. Why should anyone care about Republicans suddenly crying about self dealing now, after brushing it off for so long?

I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. It's just the same, "Can't you see it! It's everywhere!!" over and over again. Show some actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.

> Trump was President since 2016 and was not only immune from prosecution, but it was found he used his position as President to obstruct the investigation into himself.

Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.

> People thought the system would be capable of quickly removing such an obvious tumor, but apparently only voters have enough power to do that.

Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.

> Apparently controlling the AG and DOJ is enough to keep one from being indicted, who knew?

Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment. Read up on Occam's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

> With most prosecutions of the scale that would be needed to take down someone as powerful as Trump taking years, Trump probably won’t see a courtroom for another 12-18 months.

They've had all kinds of investigations for years. The truth, or I guess "sad truth" for you, is that there's nothing there to actually charge him with.

I don't know who you've been talking to, but my family members who are very mad about this Hunter Biden laptop also believe there's no such thing as an illegal firearm, and anything labeled as such is a violation of the 2nd amendment. That's the basis for my amusement.

> the left wants to disarm the populace, will not endorse doing so when it's one of there own that clearly should not be in possession of firearms.

Again, don't know who you've been talking to, but I'd challenge you to actually produce an instance of someone on the left who would defend Hunter Biden's guns. The general line I've seen is that if he did something wrong, Hunter Biden should go to jail. No one on the left (that I've seen) is defending him like the right is imagining. Again, show me. I'm not seeing it.

> Great talking points with zero actual evidence. Like I said, if there was any actual evidence, there'd have been some charge in some jurisdiction by now. But there isn't.

There have been charges in jurisdictions. The first charges landing so far are that his namesake company is actually a front for massive fraud. The trial for that is currently under way. Trump was also named as an unindicted co conspirator on a crime someone else went to jail for. The only reason Trump himself wasn't indicted was, again, because he was President and his Justice Department couldn't do anything to indict him. In fact, political appointees in the DoJ worked to scrub Trump's fingerprints on the Cohen case as much as possible. Really all you're saying is that the other shoe hasn't dropped yet, and we should take that as evidence it never will.

> You see no issue with Hunter taking a cut on behalf of his dad in exchange for shaping policy?

Sure, investigate the hell out of this claim. But no one has been able to show that any of what you say is even remotely true, and in fact the opposite is true. The biggest claim made I've seen so far is that Hunter somehow influenced Biden to go after a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son. But this claim completely falls flat on its face when you realize that Joe Biden's actions were supported by the entire government, including Republicans. Why does Hunter Biden need to use back channels with his father to get him to do something that literally everyone agrees needs to be done?

No one can answer that without the entire narrative collapsing, so all these other unrelated conspiracy theories are added onto the pile about child porn and other nonsense. No matter what the results of this investigation are, they're already tainted to the point that no one will listen. So investigate all you want, but it's so partisan now that no one who doesn't care already will be paying attention.

> Clearly at least I care and the House majority that is going to take up the investigations.

I wonder if you were just as concerned with Whitewater and Benghazi and Durham. I wonder if you will be disappointed yet again when Republicans fail to deliver on their claims, and they resort to "well no laws were technically broken but we feel it was improper!"

> You mean the FBI that asked Facebook and Twitter to scrub the laptop story?

Yes, I mean the FBI that is traditionally staffed by very conservative people, and has always been run exclusively by conservatives. Indeed that one. They've shown evidence, and given Jan 6 and recent events, I'm inclined to believe them.

> I've yet to see you point to any actual corruption. Show an investigation that went somewhere. Show a charge that actually stuck.

Okay, the first and most obvious would by Trump's charity, which was found to be a self-dealing grift instead of a non-profit and was directed to be shut down by New York. So there's no question Trump and his entire family (they were guilty of the charity fraud too) are not above committing fraud to enrich themselves. Republicans cheered this behavior enthusiastically.

If you want to talk about Trump's government corruption, look no further than his grift with the Secret Service, where he charged them astronomical rates to stay at his own properties, while telling the public that he was only charging them at cost. Or take Trump's lease of the post office, which was found by the GSA Inspector General to have violated the Constitution's emoluments clause. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I don't want to be here all day.

All of these instances were met by yawns and shrugs by conservatives. That's how they normalized it. If they had pushed back against Trump's grift, they would have more of a sympathetic ear from me today when they complain about a supposed Biden grift. But they didn't then, so I can't take their outrage seriously now.

> Immune from prosecution is not immune from investigation. They've investigated him non-stop for years and it has lead to nothing. If not, point to something meaningful.

The Republican-lead Senate Intel Committee investigated his campaign for colluding with Russia, and found that his campaign manager was coordinating strategy with a Russian intelligence officer. The Mueller report found that Russia attacked the 2016 election and Trump welcomed their help. They also found Trump obstructed justice into this investigation 11 times. Further it was found by the House that Trump extorted a bribe from Ukraine, but although the Senate didn't disagree, Senators from his party were swayed by Trump's argument that he did so for the good of the country. Which... okay, sure. Then the House found that Trump incited insurrection, and while the Senate agreed with the facts, they didn't agree they had the power to impeach.

Notably the investigations that got the furthest were mostly beyond Trump's reach to impede. Also notably, none of the investigations have come up as empty as Whitewater, Benghazi, and the Durham probe. For every single investigation into Trump, where there was smoke there was fire. Republicans don't have the same track record.

> Referring to a human being as a cancerous growth is disgusting. You're clearly incapable of any kind of unbiased analysis.

Kindly, I noted the former President was corrupting the system he was supposed to run, as a tumor might. If you don't care for my analogy, move past it. No need to police my tone. I didn't claim to be unbiased, and I'm not pretending to be. Although I'm curious now if you think you're behaving in an unbiased way, because that's clearly not the case.

> Apparently absence of an indictment can only mean rampant corruption and the additional crime of a conspiracy by Trump to prevent an indictment.

Trump's untoward influence on the DoJ and the lengths went to to protect him are not hypotheticals. Read the Mueller report, it sells it out. Read the accounts of the USAGs who resigned under political pressure from Trump and Barr. I mean, the whole fact that Barr was appointed in the first place is evidence of this. The whole fact there was a need for a Special Counsel after Comey was fired is evidence of this.

> They've had all kinds of investigations for years.

I don't know why you keep harping on this point. "For years" the investigations have been in the hands of Trump's political allies. Until "recently" i.e. the last two years, during which said investigations have rapidly progressed after political influence was lifted. Since then Trump's company has been in court and looks about to receive a death sentence, and his home has been raided by the FBI, where they found clear evidence of a crime. But despite these recent developments, because some arbitrary time has elapsed, by your estimation he's squeaky clean?

Trump's FBI.

Chain of custody is a problem.

> Everything from brandishing an illegally obtained firearm

Conservatives supporting denying American's their right to bear arms. Gotcha.

> while under the influence of narcotics

So?

> to admitting to taking a cut of deals on behalf of his father (“10% for the big guy”).

Private citizen not in government.

> The House absolutely should look into these allegations. Because till now nobody had taken them seriously.

Gotcha. The FBI and Trump never took this seriously.

> The Trump hate is so strong that the left cannot even admit an investigation of corruption should be done into a meth addict who was clearly selling influence to his father without some kind of whataboutism.

Private citizens vs Government officials. Conservatives and their big government overreach and policies and their anti-1A stance.

> If there was actual Trump corruption, him and his whole family would be in prison by now.

So Clinton wasn't corrupt. Gotcha.

Also, the investigations are still ongoing. See Taxes, for example. And all the previous charges filed against him and case after case he lost.

But sure, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn, Stone, and Cohen are nobody related to Trump.

> They’ve been investigating him non stop since 2015. But they haven’t found anything worthy of charges.

They've found evidence they could charge, but not enough they want to risk a trial on as it's not a "slam dunk" case.

But hey, the Clintons are not corrupt, and the elections weren't stolen! Those are interesting points of view for you.

Moderating content isn't the goal. Moderating behavior is.

To me, the bigger issue is the white glove treatment, and the appearance of preferential moderation.

But I think that’s where political realities come into play. I don’t doubt that these companies feel the need to make lawmakers feel heard or risk legislation/regulation that will harm the platforms.

I think this is touching on something much bigger, in that these kinds of government/company relationships are everywhere, and have been for decades.

The difference with the Twitter situation is one of public visibility and direct impact on individuals trying to do something as seemingly innocuous as post and share links on social media.

Which is absolutely not to excuse the behavior. If anything, I hope this wakes up more average Americans to the kinds of quid pro quo and shady handshake deals that have been going on forever.

Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government.

I mean, why is government control such a big deal when private citizens (like the Biden campaign, or this other guy who seems to have a lot of control over Twitter all of a sudden) can get the same favors? Either it matters or it doesn't, right?

It doesn't cover someone (regardless of influence or position) asking a company to review content against their own terms of service and policies.

e.g. I believe Tim Cook could probably contact someone at Twitter and get an answer. Do we really believe he would go in the same queue as a “regular” citizen?

To me this is a shocking revelation to anyone who doesn’t actually understand how the world works.

Are people just being partisan or easily manipulated here?

The fact that you bring up something tangential instead pretty much shows how people don’t want to treat this rationally.

Was Twitter biased, is Fox biased etc. doesn’t seem particularly relevant.

Nonsense.

First of all, "government" is not an "in" or an "out". They represent their constituency; those are people, and in this case, they are the representatives of the workers at twitter (judging by the donations).

Secondly: Twitter is not "speech" but a newspaper that prints nothing but personals[1]. All day long. The owners make a decision every day to keep printing that newspaper with everything that's in it[2].

With that firmly in mind, let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time, the people working at that newspaper saw the people working at another newspaper do something to their estimation illegal and unethical[3], and decided to use the tool at their disposal to stop it. And management backed them. It happens.

Then a rich person who thought to their estimation it wasn't, bought the newspaper and set policy that the people working at the newspaper were not allowed to use their estimation of legality or ethics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_advertisement

[2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/1...

[3]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/130/

Third, that wasn't the government because Biden wasn't president at the time. Presidential campaigns are not the government.

…And fourth, all the posts they reported were Hunter's nudes, meaning the posts they were getting taken down were likely illegal already (under revenge porn laws) and certainly against ToS.

And then I remember the number of people around me who got jobs because they "knew" someone.

I'm not even nearly shocked by this. And if you are, you don't recognize human nature.

Should it happen? No.

But it's a private company. They can do wtf they like. Just like Elon is doing now.

Should it be regulated? Maybe.

Quoted email: "Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 8:28 PM"

You: "government"

You may wish do double-check who was "in government", because checking my notes, it was not Biden.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Joe_Biden

Narrative is the only thing that matters, especially to these folks, and unfortunately that's why our society is fucked. Because they are definitely going to win that battle. They're already claiming that Biden, as a private citizen, was an agent of the "deep state" violating the 1st amendment with his shadowy cabal and it's just going to go downhill from here.

I certainly didn't claim that and I have thousands of comments on HN under my real name that you can verify that with. I'd appreciate it if you didn't group me in with whatever "folks" you think I'm affiliated with. For context, the twitter thread said both political parties made requests to remove tweets and ban accounts that were acted upon. And in my own comment I made no reference to specific political parties. Nor am I registered or affiliated with either one.

You’ve been duped.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201025002626/https://twitter.c... - yes, it's a dick pick. Do not click that link if you don't want to see it.

That doesn’t strike me as notable or surprising at all, even if it’s new information.

For this to be surprising, I think one would have to implicitly believe one of a few things:

1) Twitter isn’t a meaningful political battleground, 2) politicians don’t know it’s an important political battleground, or 3) Twitter should treat a content report from “newuser18472” the same as a report from a notable organization or individual.

Reasonable things to believe, but IMO not surprising at all to find out they’re false.

If you want to see one, https://web.archive.org/web/20201024235823/https://twitter.c...

You can then judge the question of "did the person in the image consent to having their picture shown on Twitter, or is this in violation California penal code 647(j)(4)?"

Other than timeliness, would you expect any different resolution if they were reported by a private citizen unrelated to the Biden campaign?

If the answer to both of these question is 'no', what is the big deal?

Twitter publicly attempted to justify

I think at this point we can agree that a public agreement on whether or not they were actually justified is impossible to obtain. Viewing the discussions around their internal justifications is interesting at the very least.

https://mobile.twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1598835976717...

This is a blatant lie. We now have documented proof Twitter employees conspired with rogue elements of the United States government to defraud US citizens of their constitutional rights.

Twitter acted as a an agent of the government when it removed speech at the behest of the government, everyone involved is open to criminal charges.

That they even went so far as to conspire with a political campaign and the government to do that and more is simply icing on the cake.

We have documented evidence high level officials of the US government colluded with private entities to unconstitutionally and illegally defeat those rights.

Those US gov employees took government dollars while conspiring illegally to prevent the exercise of guaranteed rights, this makes it fraud.

Jail for everyone involved is the most charitable outcome.

Members of the FBI abused their position as law enforcement to collude with a political campaign and censor social media against damning information for their preferred candidate.

This is all fact.

This is a narrative for people with no domain experience, and a desire to see conspiracies.

The employee has committed fraud against the United States of America.

im sorry? rogue elements? conspired?

what is even happening in this comment section?

(You may have been using the "historical present tense"[1], in which case what you said is technically correct, but potentially misleading to some readers.)

[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/twitter-unbans-donald-trump-truth-...

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/historical-present-verb-tense-1690...

Alex Berenson was unsuspended after he sued Twitter (unbannings were unprecedented, as this was before Musk's takeover), after he proved that Biden staffers had demanded his suspension. Government employees and legislators are not legally allowed to pressure companies to remove speech, as the Supreme Court ruled that it goes against the 1st Amendment.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1597663153739169794

not an argument

You would be literally fuming about how Fascists Are Hanging Democracy From The Rope if Biden and Trump was switched in this case. So would most "it is not a big deal it happened, but it would have been big deal if it didn't".

Friend-Enemy is all it is.

"In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."

The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752

There's an implication based on the political donations of Twitter employees that that was likely the case.

Instead, he talks about campaign contributions, which isn't even circumstantial evidence of bias. You don't have to contribute to a political campaign to process moderation requests from them. There's no plausible mechanism by which the volume of requests that can be processed is related the amount of money donated by Twitter employees. You just need one contact and again, no evidence exists - and not even clear accusations have been made - that Twitter employees involved were reluctant to process requests made by the Trump team.

If anything the fact that Matt Taibbi is dishonestly trying to make this connection is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that they couldn't find anything even remotely damning. Because if they could find something actually damning, they would've used that instead. Resorting to, ugh, Twitter employees are liberal, so I'm sure they weren't entirely being fair in processing requests from the Trump team and ugh, more contributions to the Democrats so like, must be able to process more requests, which is a complete non-sequitur, is highly damaging to whatever narrative that he's trying to push.

Even if he had a database like that, it's unlikely it's easily classified in a way you could actually correlate individual actions to specific sources. I highly doubt there's a database column for "as commanded by the dark Democratic conspiracy."

> This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.

Yet the fact that there's absolutely no attempt to even analyze the data for signs of bias, but have to resort to a complete non-sequitur, is quite telling. It likely means that the raw data doesn't support their narrative. You can also share a sample of tweets that were requested to reviewed by both parties and which ones got removed and which ones did not. If the Trump administration's requests were not honored despite the tweets clearly being in violation or the Biden campaign's requests being honored despite the tweets clearly not being in violation, well that would be something if there was a clear pattern, or internal discussions that explicitly suggest that they are making decisions like that specifically to favor one candidate. It still has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, but it would at least corroborate the claim that Twitter was biased.

Again, the standards need to be high because they are the party with all the information. This type of insinuation can be persuasive if you're the outside party that suspects bias and the other party controls the information. But claiming that there might be some bias, look at all this external information as to why it might have happened, tells the exact opposite story, when they are the ones that control the information. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi literally have all this information at their disposal and clearly want to spread this narrative that Twitter was biased in the Democrats' favor. But they can't prove it - it seems ridiculous for them not to have looked into this, but they thought it was best not to release that information. Why not? Almost certainly because it detracts from the narrative.

Hold on the second does not follow from the first. They might have send more request because they had a more savy social media team, they might have send more request because much more ToS violating content was posted about Biden.

If there is a massive difference in percentages of honored requests that could _maybe_ indicate bias (but that's still a bi maybe).

https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/159882999626439065...

It does not say "98.47% of Twitter donated to Dems".

Rather it says: "Of the $968,749 contributions made by employees of Twitter, 98.47% of those contributions went to Dems."

It says nothing about the number of people making those donations and thus nothing about the percent of the employees that made those contributions.

(edit)

It is also fun to extend that table to 2016 and before:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...

    Contributions by Party of Recipient
    Cycle   Total       Democrats    % to Dems  Republicans % to Repubs
    2022    $185,267    $165,969     99.73%     $451            0.27%
    2020    $968,749    $909,431     98.47%     $14,137         1.53%
    2018    $309,394    $295,722     96.38%     $11,100         3.62%
    2016    $858,596    $589,301     69.07%     $263,945        30.93%
    2014    $41,300     $23,300      88.59%     $3,000          11.41%
    2012    $35,529     $34,279      99.28%     $250            0.72%
    2008    $3,000      $3,000       100.00%    $0              0.00%

If not, would you please restate "98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems" to be more representative of what the numbers say.

Your argument is totally dishonest. It's infuriating. What are you saying? That because it's possible 14,137 Twitter employees donated $1 each to the republicans and 1 person donated the other 900K, we can ignore this 98.47% figure entirely?

Second of all, the dollar measurement is not a useless one. It is a measure of wealth, influence, and conviction in the cause. Those Republicans donating $1 probably aren't in charge of censorship. The guy who donated $900K though...

Third, this is Twitter we're talking about. They are headquartered in San Francisco, a very blue city in a very blue state. Their employees are young educated techies. I have friends who work there and have visited their office several times.

Point is, you're not fooling anybody but yourself. Enjoy your motivated reasoning.

If you switched the characters here, we all know that this would be the biggest story ever about social media. "Trump Campaign coordinates with Twitter to rig the election" would be the headlines. 2016 really and truly broke so many people's brains.

I think you’re replying to the wrong comment

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-twitters-former-sa...

I agree, nothing we didn't know. Like I suspect the further findings alluded to at the end of the thread. But it's kind of like the Snowden revelations. Anyone a bit tech savvy strongly suspected what the NSA was up to, and would have been surprised of the contrary. But it's interesting nevertheless to see the proof. And to see how political viewpoints are censored at the request of politicians.

1. it's conspiracy theory

2. it was obvious to everyone

3. forgotten

Makes me wonder, if conspiracy theorists might have a point.

I just said that:

A) Got vaccine and got infected right after second dose (1 week)

B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.

At this point Deus Ex was a credible prophetic game, where a "vaccine" that doesn't cure but postpones symptoms is seen as a miracle cure, which is eerily similar to "we'll need to be vaccinated every few months" that was present in media at some point. That's pretty much every pharma's wet dream.

Edit: As someone outside of USA, I find it remarkable how people seem to associate vaccine skepticism, despite pharma in US having strong motivation to push novel drugs that don't solve the issue, just treat the symptoms.

That's not the result that can be inferred from seeing unvaccinated people having no symptoms. In other words, people having no symptoms without vaccine or even having side effects from the vaccine itself does not disprove the statistic of vaccinated people having lesser symptoms on average.

And afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors.

So as Usual in studies - through data collection, statistics, and correcting for bias in cohorts.

> afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors

There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant. I would recommend reading some to understand it better than your summary.

I just read this: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...

> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”

This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.

So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?

When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.

The flu vaccine also does not grant long term immunity, but it has the same utility for public health.

Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.

Also you do realize you’re contradicting yourself? You’re saying nobody forced anything but if you want to live in society you must follow the rules. There were no laws forcing me, it was my desire to keep my job. My job created the mandate, not society.

Regarding your new argument, which doesn't seem to be pointing out a perceived contradiction in any interpretation I can make of it, your job created the requirement because society said it didn't want age discrimination in employment. If your employer forced only older employees to get the vaccine in order to keep its insurance costs low, there would have been lawsuits. Forcing all employees to get vaccinated has well-established legal precedent and has the benefit of reducing insurance costs slightly more.

Yea I’m not sure my job has many older people, nor would they care about their insurance costs.

Which works for some diseases. Others are only effective for shorter periods of time and/or against specific variants. The flu vaccine should be a familiar example to most people, needing periodic refreshers that are most effective against certain variants and not others.

It's also worth noting that the diseases that are treated as a "one and done" are generally those where you're unlikely to be exposed in day to day life for a variety of reasons.

Even the flu vaccine has known potential side effects

And guidance hasn’t changed because the benefits still outweighed the risks, though more studies are warranted and are in process in light of updated vaccines and mutating variants.

We didn’t wait until the studies could be completed because we had enough data.

Yes, it's unfortunate that the vaccine has side effects. But if you're seriously concerned about the risk of heart problems the vaccine is the safer bet.

The question is only: did you want higher or lower chances of survival? Cherry picking a situating you think you may have experienced and worrying about it is not useful. Attribution is hard. In single cases close to impossible.

The day I had issues I was camping. Given the testing I certainly didn’t have COVID unless the tests are wrong. No unrelated heart issues prior to this, EKGs everything prior showed normal.

I’d rather not have heart issues to help someone else feel safe. And if my chances are lower, then how come after taking the first dose and having issues, then ceasing further doses at my Drs request, how come I never got it? You see you can isolate yourself and invalidate the need for increased survival rates. Bonus, you don’t have heart issues either!

Really all this shows me is its “every man for themselves”. All anybody cares about is if they survive or if they get a hospital bed if needed. And they’ll force, or attempt to force, others to do things to give them an extra level of safety. Because of this, you’ve created a “new vaccine” antivaxer

People double check yours. There's a few common vaccines that people assume are "life long" but actually have a recommendation for a boosters when you're an adult.

But yeah, in general the length of immunity differs, some vaccines work forever, some not. It's a limitation of what we can produce.

> So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated?

Multiple reasons. Prevent many deaths, lower symptoms, make recover easier, lower emergency departments load, lower transmission, etc. None of those were going to be perfect or work independently of people's behaviours.

Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all.

Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.)

Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.

> what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated

The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives.

The confusion here is your own misunderstanding.

- previously deleted this content but adding back since another replied before I could modify -

> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.

The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.

It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.

Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.

Why do you find this puzzling? What countries haven’t adopted mRNA vaccines and what do you mean by “adopted”?

> The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.

And Johnson&Johnson is still available now in the US. They pulled it out of an abundance of caution and because there were other vaccines on the market. If Johnson & Johnson was the only vaccine on the market it wouldn’t have been pulled because of the risk of clotting.

-edit-

This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.

> It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.

Why would this be puzzling? Can you share some scientific resources that describe the differences in using a “whole virus” versus “part of a virus” and how that affects vaccine effectiveness? I’d like to read the same materials you did.

> This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.

There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?

In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle.

The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.

We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.

> In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle

Alternatively I’ve been vaccinated, and boosted twice, and maintain a health lifestyle and haven’t contracted COVID-19 that I’m aware of while living in a city, interacting with other people, and traveling. These are just anecdotes and don’t generalize. There are also people who are “perfectly healthy” who get severely ill, some people who didn’t know they had an underlying medical condition who died, and people who were otherwise healthy suffering from long COVID. I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.

“It’s ok for me to smoke cigarettes because so and so smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100”

> The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.

It seems pretty straightforward. You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID, or if you do the severity of the virus is typically not as bad as it could be, or you don’t get the vaccine and you roll the dice for no real reason.

> https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-key-differences-i...

Ok but what is puzzling about this?

mRNA vaccines? Most of the vaccines widely in use prior to 2021 were quite old.

> I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.

Are you more likely to get a disease being in contact with 500 people a day or 5?

> You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID,

In my personal circle I know two people who didn't contract covid. One was vaccinated and one was not. The sheer numbers infected make me highly skeptical it did anything at all to stop transmission. mRNA vaccines never worked in the past, but suddenly they work under an emergency situation.

I'm not aware of any study comparing the vaccine vs lower mortality of new variants. Vaccine proponents say mRNA vaccination shows lower mortality and the numbers all things being equal make it seem it does. However there are new variants. Maybe the vaccine did nothing at all, but launder billions of tax payer dollars? Maybe it's just the new variants being less deadly we have to thank? Or maybe it's a little of both.

> Ok but what is puzzling about this?

The fact they chose mRNA, never widely used and even downplayed the immunity gained by contracting covid naturally. To the point people with prior infection were fired if they refused the vaccine.

This is just flat-out wrong, and shows stunning ignorance of how clinical trials and medical research is done, which is probably why you were accused of spreading conspiracy theories.

There’s an enormous body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines minimizing symptom severity.

What. This isn't how reasoning works. "My friend wasn't wearing a seatbelt when they got in a car accident and they didn't die but this other person was wearing a seatbelt and did die, so it's not like seatbelts have a provable positive impact on collision safety."

People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter. This is not a free speech issue. If you are interested in the Hunter Biden story there are about 300 other sources you could find information about it within about 1/2 a second, it was one of the most widely reported stories in 2020 if I remember correctly.

I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?

We discussed this years ago when it first started. When you’re the defacto town square then no, you shouldn’t be able to kick people out for whatever reason.

> Why don't we analyze Fox News's decision to run or not run certain stories.

How do you justify the left ignoring stories in their media? For instance the story about Chase Staub.

> People's first mistake is getting their news from Twitter, or Fox News for that matter.

There’s always an assumption it’s Fox. Try WSJ.

> This is not a free speech issue.

Very much disagree. Ask yourself why you’re so upset at this information. Or if you’re not upset, ask why there is so much anxiety around this story. Clearly some the left are concerned about what this will result in.

> I guess the story is that the people that ran Twitter were left leaning? Which we already knew going into it?

Yes and that’s a problem when they use their political viewpoints to control the conversation.

Has anyone been arrested or imprisoned for running the Hunter Biden laptop story? Has any government authority threatened anyone with arrest for running the Hunter Biden story? No? Then not a free speech issue. Twitter is not a government agency. Don’t like their moderation practices? Start your own twitter which is exactly what Trump did and is the correct response. He can then push or censor whatever stories he wants and people decide whether or not they want to traffic on that site. That is the beauty of the free market we play in.

If Fox wants to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party while masquerading as news, good for them. If Elon wants to unban everyone on Twitter and let everything go unfettered with no moderation, good for him. There are lots of other choices out there.

None of this is new or interesting. This seems like more of a school cafeteria food fight than any kind of “free speech” issue.

You seem pro echo chamber and I still cannot for the life of me understand why you want to control speech so much. It’s almost like you’re scared a second voice in the room because it’s harder dispense misinformation that leads to support.

If I host a comment section on my blog and someone starts posting nazi propaganda I should have the right to remove those posts. Or any other posts I don’t like. Twitter is just a bigger version of that.

If you don’t like twitter’s moderation policies don’t use twitter, use truth social or Parler or 4chan or whatever.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/retired-navy-seal-made-famous-com...

While CNN has many many articles on the individual, they’re missing this one.

I'm guessing that "the premier media source for LGBTQ Georgia"[1] is probably left-leaning and they've covered it. Same for "a central part of Washington, DC’s gay and lesbian community"[2]. Reasonably sure that [3] lean left.

[1] https://thegavoice.com/today-in-gay-atlanta/police-arrest-ch...

[2] https://www.metroweekly.com/2022/12/atlanta-man-arrested-for...

[3] https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/11/28/chase-staub-arrest-ma...

> Your search - "chase staub" site:foxnews.com - did not match any documents.

I guess if CNN, WaPo, etc. had Atlanta local affiliates, they'd probably have covered it locally as well.

[1] https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/atlanta-police-charge-perso...

But some did. You just disagree that they count even though at least one of them (PinkNews) has more reach than WAGA-TV (Fox5Atlanta).

There is clear distinction between content producers (like TV or newspapers) and platforms (like social networks, Youtube, and others). Content producers produce content with some bias, their consumers have (hopefully) similar bias and everyone is happy. Bias is here, it is editorial policy and nobody is understand it. It has some disadvantages in contrast to unbiased producers, but that is probably unreachable ideal.

With platforms, you have matching content producers and consumers (or just parties trying to communicate) and then you have third party (platform) who 'moderates' the content regardless of whether communicating parties are interested or not. Because it is not supposed to be editorial, it tries to dress it as rule enforcement. But biased rule enforcement is just much less acceptable than biased editorial policy.

I don't understand why this is a story to begin with.

So we're now at stage 2.

Effortless.

I hope that clears things up.

If it was done at this scale, it’s likely similar censorship happened at the company on a smaller scale as well.

Because of this it’s accurate to say that Twitter’s leadership team created the optics that it was a town square that only supported a specifically political philosophy and was hostile to other political philosophies.

Can you honestly and truly say that if a laptop was abandoned at a repair shop with similarly explosive revelations about Donald Trump jr that this story would have been censored to the same degree on Twitter using the same policy excuse? I can’t.

No, because Donald Trump and his family's dealings are already well documented, and because he was the one who created the atmosphere of misinformation which led to the censorship to begin with, in order to undermine and subvert the peaceful transfer of power.

But if we're going to ignore context entirely for the sake of hypotheticals, who knows? Donald Trump censored environmental data from government websites and banned government employees from discussing climate change on social media, he declared the press enemies of the state and had reporters he disagreed with barred from the White House, and allegedly assaulted and arrested, he wanted TikTok banned because someone was mean to him, he wanted to send the military in against political protestors. He, like Musk, seems like a charlatan and authoritarian who only cares about what serves his own interests. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which Trump would want to silence a story, but he's so corrupt, and no one cares when a Republican does it, so he wouldn't bother.

Also, what "explosive revelations?" Like Trump's hotel businesses being used to launder money for the Russian mob and Iranian military? Ivanka being involved in policymaking despite having no qualifications? Tax fraud disguising gifts as "consultant fees" to avoid estate taxes? Accepting gifts from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause? Numerous sexual assault lawsuits? Jared Kushner selling visas to Chinese investors? Something like that? Anything that even rises to the level of "Just another Tuesday at Mar-A-Lago?"

I mean, if nothing else, even conceding there is a story here, it isn't the story people want it to be, and the sheer mass of hypocrisy behind the outrage is threatening to collapse into a singularity.

Ahh yes, whatabousism. You realize of course that the fact that you can easily repeat this list just underscores that there was literally no media censorship of these stories, even GOP friendly media covered them. Even if there was an attempt by the Trump campaign and presidency to request and suppress these stories the media and social media companies specifically didn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldnt censor them. That alone makes this an apples to oranges example.

I stopped reading here. This is a blatant lie. DT didn’t create the “atmosphere of misinformation”. This is blatant, biased, emotional response. You are the problem with this country.

Taibbi is about as muckracking-leftwing as it gets.

Now, I'm not saying Muskovite won't take cash for "moderation" from the political parties.... this is going to be a MASSIVE cash spend presidential cycle.

What I'm shocked about is that there isn't a "moderation" bidding system. Democrats give twitter 10 million to suppress this story... does the RNC want to up it to 15 million to not suppress, or 20 million to PUSH it?

Maybe Elon will make a profit after all.

Here's a better example: the Canadian trucker protests. GiveSendGo was hacked, and the names of people who had donated to the protests were made public - and Twitter had no problem with those "hacked materials" being shared on its platform.

You'd think that if there was ever a reason to block the publication of hacked materials, it would be to prevent private individuals from being doxxed, not to protect the political interests of the worlds' most powerful people.

(People, please don't reply to tell me why you didn't like the Canadian truckers' political views, it's not relevant.)

Names are explicitly listed as exceptions to the ban in sharing personal information.

Heck even if the new articles about the topic would have used hacked material as source it dint not include that material itself and thus wound not fall under that policy anyway. Not even articles about a confirmed hacks fall under this policy even if the hack is confirmed with the hacked material itself.

This is and was a excuse from the very start.

https://sgp.fas.org/jud/snowden/complaint.pdf

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/641

"Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; ..."

It's definitely possible to imagine a situation in which Snowden "knowingly ... sells ... any record ... or thing of value of the United States" to Russia, namely a copy of the information he had available to him while working for the NSA.

I'm not sure how courts have interpreted "record ... or thing", and whether (for example) a copy of a page from an internal government wiki would count, but let's assume that digital information is a "thing" and that copies of it are still "of the United States".

I'll further grant, for the sake of argument, that the US government has secret evidence that such a selling did take place (perhaps witnessed by a double agent working at the Kremlin, who could be called upon to give a witness statement at a trial held in secret), although I don't actually believe such selling occurred.

My main point, though, was that I don't know of any court interpreting "steals" in a statute to mean "making an unauthorized copy of" or "leaking". You're right, though, that there are other laws that cover what Snowden did.

Is there some reason you would know this? Intellectual property and classified information are things. You can steal them.

So-called "intellectual property" is neither intellectual nor property. If I randomly mash the keyboard for a few minutes, the resulting jumble of letters can have its redistribution restricted by copyright law, despite not requiring any intellectual feat to produce. It is also not property, since I cannot own ideas that exist within your head or the sound waves that emanate from your mouth when you whistle a tune I wrote.

> You can steal them.

No you can't. The legal definition of "stealing" requires that the perpetrator takes someone else's property (which an idea isn't) without permission with the intent to deprive them of the property. You can't deprive someone of an idea by making more copies of that idea, much less is that the intent behind copying, so the label of "stealing" is completely inapplicable.

If, for example, some hacker found out the President is a spy for China they’d suppress it but if a CIA agent breaks the law and leaks it’s fine?

A hacker doesn't even know what the information is before the attack and is likely an adversary who will use any information to damage, regardless of public interest.

And as as the Twitter files show and the Democratic rep (Ro Khanna) highlighted, they were banning a “news article” about hacked materials, no hacked materials themselves. Are we prepared to even ban the media from talking about hacked materials?

Access is not the same as authorization.

Oh but it is. You see, for the people who encourage this behavior, the hacking of the Canadian Truckers' protesters never happened and it was good that it did.

It’s a set of rules selectively applied depending on whether or not your political allies or opponents are on the receiving end.

Taibbi leans left and I don’t but I like reading his articles (despite premises I may not agree with) because he’s at least honest in his arguments and doesn’t try to bury or twist inconvenient facts.

My suspicion is that his grey-tribeism is genuine, but the red-tribe content is what pays the bills at substack.

I've been sober all my life, I was a teetotaller until 2016 when I developed a 4-drinks-a-day habit which persists to this day. I've been clearly sober dor most of my life though.

TDS was never a real thing amongst the left. It was and is generally a thing amongst liberal Dems and some Repubs. The Lincoln Project is a propaganda PAC attacking TDS and is a great example. It’s by establishment Republicans who have close to the same policies as Trump but want control of the GOP back. A lot of liberal and/or moderate Democrats approve of the Lincoln Project. Too many times have friends been gleeful over their propaganda.

The left did not and is not going to be part of any TDS BS. I consider myself far left and have far more Trump apologetics to say than TDS is overblown.

> the left has had far more saying in what's allowed on social media than the right, so if you have any integrity you'd stand on the side of the right to create some equality/justice

If I may, this is a centrist point of view. Since the left isn’t in the picture, it’s moderates vs the right. How can a call for integrity be to stand with the right when it isn’t binary?

Why not stand with the left? Or even just left leaning American politics like Bernie and the squad. Who are Democratic Socialists. Not even on the left economically. They believe in the Nordic capitalist system. This is one option to stand with and we still haven’t gotten to the left yet. Any one could also stand with the left in these circumstances. Right off the bat we have four options to choose from. With those options, in my humble opinion 99% of the time it takes no integrity to side with the right if youre a left leaning.

How so? In my eyes this is a case for a corrupt businessman that uses political ties for his gains. That’s pretty right wing isn’t it. At the very least there is no critique of capitalism, quite the contrary.

I also find it interesting that freedom of speech has seemingly become a right-wing talking point.

Because hate speech and misinformation is part of the right wing platform...

This is ignoring voter manipulation which was a big part of the 2016 election (as proven by the Cambridge Analytica leaks among other) tilting the voter to the right (see also e.g. brexit’s leave campaign illegal campaign financing and other dodgy behavior).

Compared to these—often flat out illegal—actions by the right, moderating hate speech is nothing.

Stop demonizing.

On the one hand, the leading Presidential candidate on the right has within the last 24 hours said he wants to suspend the Constitution and be reinstated President by dictate on social media. On the other hand, some people were constantly posting he was saying mean things, and some executives at a social media company tried to handle some things.

Totally gotta stand on the side of balance!

Are you talking about the theory of Russian interference? If so, that is not the same as denying the results, that is questioning the integrity. The difference is huge. The later calls into question bad actors and asks for reforms going forward, the former calls into action the removal of the elected president in favor of the looser.

Now as for the conspiracy of meddling with the election. I thought that was pretty well documented fact. We have stuff like the Cambridge Analytica leaks that show actual manipulation of voters.

Maybe you should look into how the US meddles in foreign elections. It is something countries do to each other. Russia has always done that and so have we. There was nothing special about 2016. These complaints about CA are the left's equivalent of when the right says there is mass voter fraud because of one or two minor instances of election fraud.

I don’t understand, do you think we should have blind trust in election, that there shouldn’t be partisan and independent observers, that security measures shouldn’t be scrutinized? And if we find a fault, we shouldn’t call for reforms. We should just “trust” the system?

No, this is not the same as denying the results without evidence. There is no equivalence here.

But he’s not so tribal that he pushes fabrications and half-truths.

If you think a left-wing person who says “whoa, Trump is terrible but lying about him only makes the left look bad” means someone is no longer left wing, we have some serious problems.

Yes…just like the comic Elon tweeted describing his views.

He’s still left, I still disagree with him but at least he’s intellectually honest (which appears to be the problem you have with him).

Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.

They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.

I don't know what this means. How many people are included in this? Are you on the left or right under this specifications? Is everyone? If someone is defending Hunter Biden and the Dems, are they on the left here? Why would the left be the status quo? What about someone on the left who believes Hunter is not good, nor his family, nor the Dem party^^. How can both of these examples be on the left?

> Taibbi and Greenwald haven't moved right on policy, they're still left of center and arguably to the left of the liberals who criticize them.

> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.

I find this hard to believe. Taibbi didn't need to begin the Twitter thread by writing the left then Dems in parenthesis. No need to muddy the waters by incorrectly using left when he knows what the left means and knows it does not mean the Dems. Meanwhile using that language is sure to stoke up the right.

> They just love pointing out inconsistencies from people who fight the news cycle battle week-to-week. They're contrarians, not conservatives.

There's actual people doing this. That are picking apart both Dem and Repub inconsistencies and showing both establishments are not good. This contrasts Taibbi and Greenwald. Greenwald specifically has clearly been moving more and more to the right. At least publicly. Who knows how much of a grift all of this is. I can always check Fox News (which is just as bad as regularly going on CNN) next week and see Greenwald on again

^^This could be considered being a contrarian.

You're highlighting them needling the democratic line on "news cycle of the week" type things, and I agree they do that.

Re: "the left" vs democrats, I think taibbi was writing for a general audience who doesn't make a distinction there.

They aren’t politicians. They don’t have policies. Right wing agitprop can be done by non policy journos.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1414595359368691712

You can’t love libsoftiktok and not be on the right.

—

I’m highlighting them being some level of propaganda mouth pieces (probably for their own fatter check sizes) for the right. Highlighting Dem stuff repeatedly makes that clear. Mixing the left and Dems makes it even worse. They know what they are talking about. They know blurring the left and Dems helps the right. That’s one of the main right wing GOP cornerstones. Pretend Biden or Harris are on the left. That moves the Overton window to the right or doesn’t let it budge.

This is also another conservative policy. Policy being —- make liberals, Dem voters/politicians, and the left into one bogeyman. Which provides multiple benefits to the right.

You seem to view it as a zero-sum, with us or against us thing. And there may be some validity to that with the realities of politics. But if someone had never once said "I like conservatives" or supported a single conservative policy plank, it's wrong to call them conservative.

You could call them insufficiently loyal and I think they'd agree with that. But on stuff that matters for longer than a 24h news cycle they're consistently liberal.

Taibbi, for example, wrote an entire book about Eric Garner's killing, documenting a ton of NYPD corruption in the process.. and has also spent a bunch of time making fun of embarrassing weepy SJWs on Twitter.

Who is us? I was never on the same side as either of these people. Even 5 or 10 years ago.

> wrong to call them conservative

Libsoftiktok is literally a right wing HATE account/community. Greenwald loves it.

> insufficiently loyal

Loyal to what? I don’t like Democrats…they don’t either.

(Unless you voted green)

Can we agree on the far more important issue of libsoftiktok being a right wing conservative account that is loved by Greenwald? Spreading bigotry and hatred. Smh.

The thing that Bernie understood and most libs don't is that we can be united on class issues or divided on culture war issues. We lose with the latter.

I've never seen libsoftiktok and I don't read a lot of Greenwald lately. I like Taibbi and subscribe to him.

I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to contest things. Once I nailed down Greenwald down you hand waved it away. I wouldn’t remain friends or defensive of someone who publicly supports a hate account/community. That says enough to me about Taibbi and how he sees Greenwald.

Maybe none of us are good enough for you and you'll have to be content with green party candidates

Your responses remind me of Joe Rogan saying people like Ron DeSantis are good people trying to give people freedom because that’s what Desantis told Joe to his face.

You’ve shown your true colors wrt libsoftiktok. This is one of countless examples of the hate libsoftiktok spews. It’s not hard to come by: https://god.dailydot.com/libsoftiktok-facebook-account-banne.... I should not have kept holding out hope you came in good faith.

I’ll let my transgender friends know they shouldn’t worry about the hate that comes their way because it isn’t real.

I suspect the people who have had death threats and such thrown at them because of the account don’t feel the same way you do.

You can question if its ethically appropriate to re-post these stuff as it frequently seems to be from people with severe mental problems. The claim however that people get death threats because of that account is silly. If something causes people to send death threats then if more people see it it would result in more death threats but that is not the fault of whoever made it visible. If this is the hill you want to die on then you should advocate for total censorship of everything since everything could trigger some unstable or evil person to send out death threats.

So then then question here is why do you write comments on HN? It's dangerous! Your posts and the posts you help push could increase the number of death threats being send. I'm sure you dont care about that at all. You write and post whatever you want and feel zero responsibility for other peoples irrational (re)actions. Obviously that is how it should be.

> if this is the hill you want to do die on…

> So then then question here is why do you write comments…

To make it clear. People have gotten threats because of the way libsoftiktok has editorialized stories. The moral bankruptcy is squarely on the account.

The pseudo-intellectual attacks you’re doing are weird. Changing the argument to pretend I’m upset that any one can be triggered by anything is weird. Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.

I can simply go look what that account posts and I did exactly that and it is in fact re-posts of stupid tiktoks form deranged people. No one questions that they have a bias or push a narrative by selecting what they re-post. That is literally what every person on the internet does. Yet they are not in any way responsible legally or ethically for any threats someone else sends out "because" of them. Just like if someone would send a threats to libsoftiktok because of what you wrote here. Clearly you would not be responsible for that.

>Pretending libsoftiktok is not an anti-lgbtq hate account is weird. Supporting hatred is weird.

I never said any of that. You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.

I could not care less what they are anti about. My whole point was that they are not responsible for the action of others. There is no incitement for such actions. I dont support hatred I support logic. Blaming someone for the action of others is illogical and probably a result of your emotional involvement rather than rational thought. You can only blame that account for what that account actually did. I highly doubt it is sending out threats because then it would have been deleted.

> Clearly you would not be responsible for that.

Because I am not an influential propaganda mouth piece. Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.

> You seem so emotional bout it you make up stuff.

Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…

>Also I did not direct any one toward any one else nor am I saying some wild accusation like saying any one is a groomer. I also am in no way directing any one to have libsoftiktok or any one else “cancelled”.

Sure you didn't but neither did libsoftiktok. You write this as if this separates you from what that account did and thus indirectly accuse them of doing these things. But where is the proof? Why cant you just link to the "offense". Why is here not a single tweet that encourages people do do any kind of harmful action to anyone?

>Yes, this is such a good faith reading of my comments…

You aren't replying in good faith if you make stuff up. I'm calling you out and obviously this is not a good faith argument and its not meant to be one. Its meant to give you an opportunity to self-reflect instead of doubling down on accusation that you can not provide any evidence for.

It seems reasonable to assume the accusation originated in emotional coping because that is how it reads like. If you have a different reason why you made these accusations then feel free to tell me but I'd much rather had evidence for the claims than debate about why you lie to me, fully aware that I can and did look into what the account posts and its none of the things you accuse them of. You just dislike them which is fine. I dislike what FlatEarthZone posts on twitter. But I'm not gonna accuse them of hurting people trough the extended hypothetical harmful action of their followers, that would be silly.

Libsoftiktok was put on hidden black list[1] by twitter because they where unable to ban the account as it did not break the twitter rules. (The rules obviously include the stuff you accuse them of.)

They repeatedly temporary suspended the account[2] and accused them of "hateful conduct"[3] similar to your accusation. Then later the highest "authority" on twitter internal confirmed "[they have] not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy."[4]

The suspensions where then justified by a variation of your bogus accusations for "encouraging harassment"[5] while if that would have been the case they would have simply terminated the account.

And while not relevant to the content the account posted its still quite interesting that when Libsoftiktok got doxed, which is actually against twitter rules, they did nothing.[6]

[1] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601018810495995904#m [2] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601019593606107136#m [3] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601019900071288833#m [4] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601020845224128512#m [5] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601021201815457793#m [6] https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1601022887556571136#m

Some of us did know, that's true, but we were labeled as conspiracy theorists and the like. And when the truth came out in the open those calling us conspiracy theorists of course that embraced the "that was always been a known fact! What are you on about?". Rinse and repeat.

Jack Dorsey and Rho Khanna. That’s who benefitted the most.

Amazingly the democrats are upset about this. It tells me what I need to know about those people.

Also, nothing that Snowden released was publicly available, but Biden's staffers were using tools that were available to the general public in the way they were intended. They're completely unrelated.

Some of those changes should have happened anyway. Snowden's revelations pushed people to use https ubiquitously. It doesn't just protect against NSA spying but other countries do stuff like that too as well as non state actors. (There was that time I switched on wireshark on WiFi for 5 minutes and was like damn... I've got a lot of email passwords.)

Like it or not, driving from DC to the airport in Baltimore you drive past the puzzle palace at Fort Mead and it's got a huge parking lot and one of the worst traffic jams in America when the quitting bell rings at the end of the work day. If they weren't spying on people but instead spending the money on ski chalets or beautifying the inner city or something, that would be a real scandal.

The scandal is that these very same policies and tools were being lent to the rich and powerful to distort the publics perception. The very thing Twitter wanted us to trust it was not doing, was exactly what it was doing.

It raises important questions on ethics and no amount of “we already know” makes this ethical.

The news worthiness of this is that, just before a very close election, Twitter was used to hide information for political purposes. Not only that, the White House press secretary had her account suspended for calling Twitter on it. And not just the press secretary, but many others were labeled as consipiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders, and had their accounts suspended.

In other words, Twitter was used for hateful purposes by the people who ran it. Isn't banning people, censoring them, and labeling them as nutjobs the worst kind of hate speech?

The only way forward for things like Twitter is transparency. If someone lodges a complaint about someone else, that should be completely known and published. If some politician wants to tell Twitter to take something down, everyone should be able to know who did the asking.

Some emails have been verified, many others have not been, and we still don’t know the origin of the laptop itself (allegedly Hunter handed to a blind computer repair man and said “I am Hunter Biden.”

This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs.

The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics.

What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON.

This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together.

We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.

Plus it’s too easy to divide this battle along red/blue lines rather than ruler/non-ruler lines.

Yes, most of this was known…but the big (ugly) revelation is that it confirmed something that was suspected—Primarily the direct coordination with the Biden campaign to suppress the story and lock specific accounts that referred to it.

FWIW, by saying “we updated our hacked materials policy but we will not retroactively apply it to the event that required the update”, I think Twitter rubbed salt into a wound they created. It basically underscored that they were content to play a part in the current election manipulation (likely because of the big baddie they opposed) even though they knew it was wrong enough to change the policy.