Elon Musk Becomes Twitter’s Largest Shareholder…

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Who is Matt Taibbi?

 

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthew Colin Taibbi[3] (/taɪˈiːbi/; born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on Substack.

 

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I don't have Twitter. Not asking for a play-by-play, but is there anything to this, or just another Kraken release?

 

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I don't have Twitter. Not asking for a play-by-play, but is there anything to this, or just another Kraken release?

I'm waiting for those smarter than I to analyze and report back.

As I understand it, Taibbi is releasing a document at a time, with comments in between.

Plenty of FNC annalists are monitoring this closely. I'll let them sort the wheat from the chaff for me.

 

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FYI, you don't need a twitter account to follow this thread. It is interesting many of the comments.
Heads are exploding as I type this.

Good tweet. It's getting pretty lively in there.

 

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I have never had a Twitter account and don’t use it but watching this unfold is fascinating.

I’m tempted to sign up so I can watch it in real time.

 

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Here is a current synopsys. A new tweet arrive every few minutes:

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

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

11. 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. opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/s…


Twitter Profile: Summary Twitter organization profile. Contributions in the 2022 cycle: $185,267. Lobbying in 2022: $970,000. Outside Spending in the 2022 cycle: $0. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D000067113

12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.

Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let's jump forward

16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine in… https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/

18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.

19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”

20.This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:

21. Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy: web.archive.org/web/2019071714…

22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...

23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.

24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

25.You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:

26. By this point “everyone knew this was ****ed,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.

27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”

28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:

29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:

30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.

Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:

32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:

 

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If you don't want all the "noise" of replies, check here:

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App

@mtaibbi: 1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES 2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter. 3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incr...…

threadreaderapp.com

 

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Should be people going to jail for election interference

 

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Then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker appears to acknowledge that they don't know whether the Hunter Biden laptop materials had been obtained through hacking. Before going to Twitter, Baker was the controversial FBI General Counsel whom some internal FBI agents and employees blamed for inappropriate anti-Trump leaks and other alleged wrongdoing. The Dept. of Justice at the time opened a criminal investigation against Baker. However, Baker left the FBI and was not charged with any crimes. The idea of an anti-Trump intelligence official being hired to work at Twitter, which was pursuing an anti-Trump agenda, was controversial but not widely-reported.