Thread by @AntisocialJW2

Continuing my old thread on Tim Pool vs Jack and Vijaya on Rogan...

Tim argues that if Twitter is so important to the US political process, shouldn't it guarantee access under US free speech definitions (which it doesn't)?

Vijaya says she doesn't understand that argument and instead answers a different question: Twitter needs a global standard (75% of users are outside the US).

Aside from dodging the question, we know Twitter censors content for different countries so 🤔

Jack brings up the Indian election, Tim mentions Twitter is accused of bias against conservatives there too, and that Jack held up an anti-Brahmin poster. Jack grunts acknowledgement - he doesn't want to discuss it.

Vijaya says the situations and ideologies between the US and India are very different, but when Joe asks for clarification, says she doesn't really know what they're talking about.

🤔🤔🤔

Tim repeats his argument: if foreign actors meddling in US politics requires Twitter take action against them, why is Twitter taking a stance contrary to US legal definitions of protected speech?

Tim asks: Why are Americans removed from the platform where the US president speaks, for speech that's protected in the US?

Tim calls it a privately-owned public space, and says that it is too powerful, and will end up being regulated if it doesn't support free speech.

Neither Jack nor Vijaya can wrap their head around their argument.

Jack says that they want everyone to speak freely on their platform and Tim interrupts him, saying they don't allow constitutionally protected hate speech.

Jack says that people encounter some kinds of "conduct" that make them want to leave Twitter, and Twitter wants to prevent that.

Btw Jack, whenever I see an ignorant blue checkmark hot take I want to delete Twitter. Please ban them all.

Vijaya launches into a long spiel about how politicians want to stop abuse and harassment too

Tim has been a bit fuzzy on this, but there's offensive speech that's not conduct, not abuse or harassment, that's protected speech, and Jack and Vijaya don't want to admit it exists

Vijaya brings up totally-in-touch politicians wanting to protect people's children from online abuse

Because the crying about tweets by blue checkmarks who went after a bunch of MAGA highschoolers is really about protecting children from being ratioed for their hottakes

I think among Vijaya's (deliberate) verbal diarrhea she's saying that politicians want to regulate abusive speech (don't they always) so Twitter should be able to, and then she comes back to "rules are rules", a pretty empty legal positivist position

https://twitter.com/AntisocialJW2/status/1105151680948011008

Tim gets fired up: "You've monopolized public discourse to an extreme degree, and you say 'my way or the highway'"

Vijaya disputes that they monopolized anything. I can't stand her smirking 😑

Tim stands firm: "Twitter has become extremely powerful, but at a certain point you should not have the right to control what people are allowed to say. I'm a social liberal, I think we should regulate you guys."

Disingenuous libertarian arguments don't work on non-libertarians

Tim continues: "You are unelected officials running your system as you see fit, against the wishes of a democratic republic, and there are people who disagree with you who are being excised from public discourse because of your ideology."

Vijaya: "Tim are you saying we shouldn't have any policies against abuse and harassment on the platform?"

Vijaya is a lawyer, there's no way she doesn't understand the separation between speech and action, between repugnant statements and targeted harassment.

Vijaya brings up the threats Tim received, as if she doesn't know criminal threats are illegal and aren't protected speech

Vijaya asks Tim is he thinks Twitter shouldn't have acted on the threats against him, despite being frustrated Twitter didn't remove them

Tim pushes back: "I'm frustrated by the hypocrisy"

Tim: "I see you openly saying 'we recognize the power of our platform, and we are not going to abide by American norms'... I see Democrat operatives in Alabama using fake Russian accounts, and the guy that runs that company has not been banned from your platform."

Tim: "Even after it was written by NYT that he was doing this. So not only are people manipulating your platform, you have rules that remove honest Americans with bad opinions who have a right to engage in public discourse. So you recognize it but like having the power?"

Vijaya ignores all of that, and repeats her strawman of Tim not wanting any rules about abuse and harassment and hate speech

Notice she's sliding in a completely different category of speech there, because that's the only way she can """win""" this debate

Tim says it's simplistic and reductive but he seems to have been bamboozled, he goes to make his point again but Vijaya interrupts and tells him what he's asking for

Vijaya says Tim wants Twitter to apply US laws that would put people in jail for speech

What the fuck

I'm sorry Vijaya, it's not Tim who's telling people they're not in compliance with Pakistani blasphemy laws

Vijaya knows that Tim is arguing for the US's wide definition of free speech, but is trying to turn the world upside down because she can't rebut him

Tim: "If you incite death, that's a crime, you can go to jail for that. When you have people on your platform who commit a crime and you don't ban them, I say that's weird. When you have people on your platform who say a naughty word and you ban them, I say that's really weird."

Tim mentions people getting banned for tweeting single letters (collaboratively spelling out a naughty word), Joe hasn't heard of it, and Jack claims not to know what Tim is referring to, despite doing it himself

https://twitter.com/AntisocialJW2/status/1103114833023578118

Is Jack fucking smirking behind that hipster facehedge when he says "I haven't seen that, what are they trying to do"???

So Tim explains the threaded word thing or whatever you call it, people trying to push the envelope on the rules; he says where it gets dangerous is when Twitter assumes a harassment campaign

Jack claims they look at coordination of accounts, which is absolute bullshit

They get into a detour about whether Twitter reads DMs

Vijaya claims they "don't" "read" DMs unless reported

Joe asks if anyone has access outside these reviews, Vijaya says "not to my knowledge", which is lawyer-speak for "everyone in San Francisco"

Guess Vijaya realizes that anyone not born yesterday sees right through that because she pretends not to understand and reiterates that "we're not reading DMs", which is so full of loopholes a lawyer could fly a space shuttle through it

Joe explains to a grad of NYU Law School (ranked 6 in best law schools) what "are DMs accessible" means

Joe: "Can someone just go into Tim's DMs and read them?"
Vijaya: "I don't think so."

🤔🤔🤔

You don't have to be an NYU grad to see this is bullshit

Joe asks if he writes 'N', and Tim writes 'I', and Jamie writes 'G', can Twitter go into their DMs, Vijaya says she doesn't think so.

Joe: "So how can you know if there was a concerted effort?"

Jack interrupts to save Vijaya from the smackdown by putting his own face in the way

Jack: "If we do see this train of replies, then that is coordination."

Jack maybe check a dictionary first before making policies defining coordination

Tim says they know what people are doing

Joe asks: "But how do you prove it?"

Funny thing about secretly adjudicating your own rules enforcement process, all that stuff about proof is unnecessary.

Tim is trying to argue for Twitter. No Tim, don't bother. Let the CEO and lawyer flail around uselessly by themselves.

Tim brings up a YTer tweeting 'N' at Jack and getting a 12-hour suspension. Of course Jack mumbles "didn't see that" because ignorance is the safest policy

Now the infamous "LTC" hashtag, which I won't write because even after this interview Twitter still bans people for posting it - which is a good piece of context to watch this segment with

Jack claims "we did some research on this" - let me guess, reading some bluecheck crying in Verge or something

Vijaya claims journos received thousands of tweets with LTC and coded wishes of harm, some accounts tweeting were evading bans, and there was off-platform coordination

Tim immediately interrupts: "That's not true"

He then brings up how an NBC activist wrote the article Vijaya is referencing and then lobbied Twitter and got the EIC of The Daily Caller suspended

So their research was a bluecheck crying after all

Vijaya says she "has never talked to anyone at NBC about this issue", which implies that she absolutely communicated with this guy 😒

Tim spells out: this activist journo pushes a narrative, it circulates in Vijaya's bubble, then high-profile conservatives get banned for a joke

Vijaya argues that because some tweets to journalists contained death threats and other told them to LTC, LTC is equivalent to a death threat, and tweeting LTC obviously means you want to kill people

https://twitter.com/jack/status/306429142113611777

Vijaya says this is the "context", and reveals what she meant and how she decided those cases when she brought up context all those times previously 🤔🤔🤔

Joe: "Can we just clarify..."
Tim: "That's just not true! That's just not true!"

Tim: "The EIC of The Daily Caller was suspended for tweeting nothing but hashtag [LTC]."
There's a pause here, and Vijaya says: "Tim, can I finish what I was saying?"

Another tactic: Vijaya acts like Tim won't let her continue when he wants her to answer his point

Vijaya repeats how some tweets contained death threats and others just LTC, and says the journos felt very abused and harassed, and Vijaya describes this as dogpiling

Dear God those journo feelz! We must protect them while they're not dogpiling random members of the public!

Joe and Tim explain the history and meaning of the LTC meme

Joe: "So why is LTC so egregious?"
Vijaya doing an instant 180 with a straight face: "I don't think is so egregious."
Joe: "So was it something that got stuck in an algorithm?"
Vijaya: "No..." (waffles on lying)

Okay so what Vijaya actually claimed was:
* a specific set of journalists were targeted (doubtful)
* there were ban evaders (irrelevant to LTC)
* other violent rhetoric (irrelevant to LTC)
* recipients received hundreds of these

This appeared to Twitter as a coordinated harassment campaign

Meaning that Twitter did not verify coordination, but deemed it coordinated based on behavior indistinguishable from all the other times when bluechecks get ratio'd with the latest meme

Vijaya tries to appeal to Joe, asking if he's been dogpiled, getting hundreds or thousands of tweets, and says that it can be viewed as a form of harassment

Does Vijaya know what happens when any famous person on Twitter makes any kind of Tweet? Does she think that we don't?

Vijaya: "...it can be viewed as a form of harassment. It's not about the individual tweet, it's about the volume of things being directed at you"

Vijaya, please follow this made-up logic to its moronic conclusion and ban all the followers of Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Justin Bieber

Vijaya: "We made the judgement call to take down the tweets responding directly to these journalists saying LTC even if they didn't have a wish of harm specifically attached to them because of what we viewed as a coordinated attempt to harass them"

🤔🤔🤔

Vijaya you have to know about the latest coded language, "yasss queen slayyy", posted in high volumes to celebrities alongside negative tweets

We know you take down the accounts as well as the high volume tweets so please ban everyone who posts "yassss queen slayyyy" to a celeb

Vijaya: "We were worried that LTC was taking a different meaning in that particular context"
Joe: "But it seems there are alternative meanings."
Vijaya: "I agree, but it's really about the context and all those other things. In a very different situation we would not take action"

Joe: "The horrible things attached to LTC are the real issue. LTC is kind of a legitimate protest"

Tim: a left-wing activist lobbies Twitter about LTC, then writes an article saying 4chan is organizing it (they are talked about it, but so did Reddit and Twitter), he gets his own threats, Twitter commits to doing something

Tim: Twitter tells one journalist they are banning people for LTC, then a bunch of journos lie and say that's fake news, Twitter says it's part of a harassment campaign, then media falsely claims they are only banning people who are part of a harassment campaign

Now Vijaya and Jack get to the "we make mistakes" stage on LTC:

https://twitter.com/AntisocialJW2/status/1105151680948011008

Tim brings up a bunch of cases of inconsistent treatment, says it seems to be only going in one direction

Vijaya treats this as a problem of not explaining Twitter's decisions well

😒😒😒

No the problem isn't that Twitter is biased and its decisions don't make sense outside of protecting psychopathic progressive bluechecks, it's that Twitter didn't repeat its nonsensical rationalizations enough times