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So we have a company headquartered in SF, and I think something like 98% of twitter's political donations went to democrats, and the employees acted as constant activists whenever the executives didn't take action against high level conservatives (I'll leave aside whether that action was justified or not).

Also, if you read the twitter files, the enforcement was fairly lopsided. Look what happened to @libsoftiktok -- constant labels and suspensions even though they admitted that they couldn't actually find rule breaks. They just didn't like the "intent". And when that account got doxxed -- which is dangerous and malicious -- the company did nothing.

I don't think you need to call it a liberal conspiracy, it's just very clear that twitter has/had a very particular bias based on the facts alone.



> (I'll leave aside whether that action was justified or not)

Seems like an important detail to consider!


The reason it's unimportant is that these same activist employees never bothered to protest other heads of state/terrible people in other countries doing worse things. It was very specifically about US politics and guys they personally disliked, not the application of a fair policy.


Yes shockingly people are more concerned about what's going on in the place they live in than another country on the other side of the world. How many people who work at Twitter could even name the former PM of Malaysia that you mention?


It's not shocking at all, my only point is that twitter has a very specific political bent and their actions obviously reflect this. Why is this controversial at all?


Because if those actions are justified, what's the problem?


It becomes a problem if you do not apply the letter of the law universally.

If you turn a blind eye to the behaviour of someone you agree with, even if they're doing something that is against the rules (or the spirit of the rules) but you come down hard on someone else for actions that are the same (or lesser); then it's a problem for me.


> And when that account got doxxed -- which is dangerous and malicious -- the company did nothing.

you know Elon was running the company when this happened, right? which makes it completely orthogonal to your point.


That is factually untrue, the doxxing happened in april.


It's ironic to observe flawed humans being angry at other human(s) who are also flawed.


If you're suggesting I'm angry, I'm not, I'm just pointing out something that I think should be fairly obvious: twitter has a very specific political bent and their actions reflect that.


I was agreeing with your comment. I wasn’t clear enough.


> twitter files

Was there much interesting in there? I mostly remember it opening with the Dems having a direct line for reporting, with the examples shown of it being used being mostly nudes of Hunter&company, that i assume won't surprise anyone when being acted upon. Now there shouldn't be direct lines, but a fair report&enforcement system instead. But i somehow doubt that will get any better under musk...


You're going to mislead a lot of non-Americans here with the bit about political donations. In America, you can donate to one party to benefit the other party by virtue of candidate selection during primary elections. Who one donates to does not necessarily match their preferred party.


Uh, so your thesis is that twitter was donating to the democrats to help the republicans by choosing bad democratic candidates?

Yeah, I'm not convinced.


Yes that happens, but how common is it really? I've never heard of anyone actually doing that.


Yes that happens, but how common is it really? I've never heard of anyone actually doing that.

It's becoming more common. I wouldn't say it's fully "common" yet.

I think the most public example was the recent gubernatorial election in Illinois. Incumbent Governor Pritzker donated money to a very far-right candidate, Darrin Baley, so that he would get the Republican nomination, and push moderate voters toward Pritzker in the general election.

It was all very well documented in Illinois newspapers during the election, and the New York Times did at least one piece about it, too.

The Times also noted that after the election, Biden gave a speech where he made a statement that this was not an acceptable practice. He didn't call out Pritzker by name, but if you were following the Illinois election, you know who he was talking about.


How many major campaign donors do you know? Is your anecdotal knowledge particularly meaningful in this context?


I know quite a few donors, though none major. But why the "major" qualifier? The conversation context here seems to be normal employees, not major donors, so I would challenge that knowledge must be of "major" donors to be relevant. We're talking about "98%" of employees, not just a few high ranking execs that donate to both parties (which, btw, absolutely is common).


> But why the "major" qualifier?

The original comment is referencing Twitter having donated to Democrats. This would be a 'major' donor in my estimation.

And you never answered my ultimate question -- is your anecdote particularly useful here?


> The original comment is referencing Twitter having donated to Democrats.

This is the crux of our disagreement. You are considering "Twitter" as a singular entity making donations, while I consider employees of Twitter as individual entities, 98% of whom donated to Democrats. I believe the latter is the context, while you do not. If you're correct on the context, then I would agree. As I mentioned before, it's very common for organizations/big business to donate to both parties.

I would direct you to the grandparent where the context was set:

> So we have a company headquartered in SF, and I think something like 98% of twitter's political donations went to democrats, and the employees acted as constant activists whenever the executives didn't take action against high level conservatives (I'll leave aside whether that action was justified or not).


> I think something like 98% of twitter's political donations went to democrats

That reads to me as 'Twitter the organization', not 'Twitter the people in the organization'. I suppose it could be either, but I have never heard that kind of wording for a company as its constituent employees instead of as a monolith. I am open to a different interpretation if you can guide me through it and it seems plausible to me, but if there is no reconciling the disparate readings then I suppose we shall have to admit to an impasse.


Ah indeed, I can definitely see that interpretation. I agree it's ambiguous enough that we don't know. Thanks for the discussion!


I think it’s worth digging into that LibsOfTikTok issue, because even the limited information we’ve got is being misinterpreted. It is a real shame that Elon decided to do a selective release.

The text shared was this:

===== Site Policy Recommendation Site Policy recommends placing @LibsOfTiktok ([LTT] 1.3M followers, not verified) in a 7-day timeout at the account level meaning, not for a specific Tweet] based on the account's continued pattern of indirectly violating Twitter's Hateful Conduct Policy by tweeting content that either leads to or intends to incite harassment against individuals and institutions that support LGBTQ communities. At this time, Site Policy has not found explicitly violative Tweets, which would result in a permanent suspension of the account. This type of enforcement action [repeated 7-day timeouts at the account-level] will not lead to permanent suspension, however: should LTT engage in any other direct Tweet-level violations of any of Site Policy's policies, we will move forward with permanent suspension.

Assessment Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy, the user has continued targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community for alleged misconduct. The targeting of at least one of these institutions =====

It’s inaccurate to say that LoTT didn’t violate the rules. LoTT didn’t directly violate the rules. Weiss chose to cut the text off before getting to the description of what happened as a result of LoTT’s tweets.

So at this point you can ask a more nuanced question: what do you do about indirect violations which you believe in good faith have potentially harmful results? Such as, say, bomb threats?

I’m not going to try and answer that here because it’s a really difficult question and I don’t think we’d reach an answer. I will say that I think it’s important to acknowledge that the question itself is reasonable. The Twitter Files fail to acknowledge that.

I will also note that Weiss selectively quoted the text in her screenshot. “Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy…” became “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” That changes the meaning of the sentence and obscures the question I raised above. I would also like to know if Twitter determined that LoTT directly engaged in such behavior before the most recent timeout; it seems very relevant.

Finally, we have no idea how lopsided the enforcement was because we don’t have the complete dataset. Showing us a handful of cases selected by unclear means is hardly enough data to form conclusions!


A shame this is downvoted, since it's quite reasonable.


This is going to sound specious, but I honestly never stress about downvotes. It tends to even out to the overall tenor of the forum, whether that’s here or Reddit. If I’m always getting downvoted it’s a sign that I’m out of tune with the forum and I should think about whether or not I should hang around.


No, that’s fair enough. I’ve tried to take on a similar attitude. Thankfully the community has made me feel a bit better about what it tends to upvote lately. For a while there I was questioning my place here.


You should look carefully at what Bari Weiss misquotes. Twitter's statement is about Libsoftiktok not doing something suspendable was limited to a short time period, not a blanket statement.

But "they got suspended 6 times for legitimate reasons and then the continued to behave badly while staying just inside the written bounds of the rules" isn't really a story.


I've yet to hear a legitimate reason. As far as I can tell, they just angered liberals by reposting their own (ridiculous) content. I'm liberal and even I think that's funny!


Perhaps you should take in information from sources more diverse than Weiss and Taibbi.

Like the Wikipedia page does a good job of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok#:~:text=terro.... Summarizing the suspensions, which were for misgendering and harassing trans people, primarily. That's the majority of what LTT produces, banal anti-trans propaganda. If you think that's funny, well, that's on you.


All I've seen is they repost cringe videos that are sometimes made by trans people


Wikipedia has the same bias as Twitter did. It's become worthless for anything political:

"Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" by founder Larry Sanger: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/


Ah yes, the idea that remaining objective is biased, and that instead one must simply uncritically reiterate what both sides say, with no regard for independent verification.


> That's the majority of what LTT produces, banal anti-trans propaganda.

To put this another way: they're providing a useful service to document the absolute nonsense that some trans activists spout.


No. Calling family friendly events where people read to kids "grooming" isn't documenting "nonsense that some activists spout". It involves neither nonsense, nor trans activists.


They post about a lot more topics than this cultural oddity of drag queens wanting to read books to young children.

But on the broader topic of what the drag queens are up to, just look at this for example: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1581050195399561217 - why should this type of performance be considered acceptable to show to kids?

I'm glad this account is holding these people to account.


Flawed humans being angry at other human(s) who are also flawed. So ironic :)


>> They just didn't like the "intent".

She was instigating acts of extreme violence. Surely you’re joking. Or tell us how you really feel about certain extremely vulnerable & marginalized members of our society more, I guess.


Can you link to one of these instigations?


No, I’m not going to take the 10 seconds of time in which the search engine of your choice will suffice for this.

If you’re trying to insinuate the Charles Manson defense, which has been a common theme regarding one side of the political spectrums views on LibsofTikTok, I do not particularly wish to engage in any further discussion.


So there aren't any.

I follow that account and have never seen any instigation of any violence of any kind. More likely, a certain "side of the political spectrum" has decided that redefining language is a good idea, and making anything they disagree with "violence" seems to be a defining characteristic of that group. You added "extreme violence" to double down on it, but faking outrage doesn't help the discussion any.

It isn't true, it's sophistry.


Twitter (in my experience, everyone seems to have a different one) was very left-leaning..

Not the kind of left that the rest of the world see's as left, but that weird US-coastal left leaning that sometimes depicts some races as inhuman and other races as infantalised.

So believe me when I say: What Elon is doing is not better, it's more of the same, but towards the right wing and his interests.

The answer to bias is not bias in another direction, the answer is neutrality, and he has proven he can't be neutral.


[flagged]


If stochastic terrorism is speech that makes violent acts against an individual or group more likely, isn't ElonJet engaging in stochastic terrorism by making it easier for a radicalized crazy person to find Elon and harm him in real life?

I personally think the concept of stochastic terrorism is a rhetorical trick to associate legal speech with terrorism, but I think the argument applies just as well to ElonJet.


This would be a believable argument iff Elon had to deal with legitimated threats on his life in direct connection to ElonJet's operation. Since there's no evidence to back this up, it's a false equivalence.


He is alleging that is exactly what happened: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944


Sorry, but I only see cars in this clip. I'm not sure how jet tracking relates so you're going to have to explain that part to me. Until then I'm going to continue to justifiably assert that the two are unrelated.


Stochastic terrorism is a such bullshit concept, only designed to prevent examination of some political ideologies.


Surely you need to provide some details to justify such an accusation.


Hahahaha is this a joke?


> stochastic terrorism

This is an interesting term that is worth exploring. A problem with it is that it could apply to huge swaths of people and organizations, e.g. Fox News, the Republican Party, CNN, Democratic Socialists, etc


What absolute garbage.

Basically anything that you don’t like is now considered terrorism.

Free speech is completely dead under this logic.


It wasn't fairly lopsided, it was extremely lopsided.

Glenn Greenwald:

"This thread proves 3 things:

1) Twitter execs were regularly meeting with FBI over what to censor.

2) Twitter's censorship was almost 100% aligned with the Dem Party.

3) Twitter's chief censors were deranged ideologues abusing their power over our discourse to silence dissent."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1601591994165256192

If Greenwald isn't credible enough, I don't know what to say.


Every time I read one of these threads I wonder if I'm somehow seeing different screenshots that what the author is talking about, because they're always full of some of the most uncharitable interpretations possible. The tweet linked reads like a biased summary of a biased summary.

I don't know people expect moderation to work, but it's inherently messy and imperfect because humans are messy and imperfect, and past a certain point you always end up having to trust the instincts and judgement of moderators.

As someone who has moderated large group before, my main reaction is "this stuff is surprising to people?"


>the most uncharitable interpretations possible

The bias and hand wringing about censoring people whom they even admitted hadn't actually broken any rules disclosed in by Taibbi and Weiss deserved no charity. It was worse than people had imagined.

And you're just going to ignore this part?

>2) Twitter's censorship was almost 100% aligned with the Dem Party.

That's not "moderation". That's "partisan censorship".




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