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Julian Sanchez Profile picture
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7 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The Trumposphere appears to be freaking out about the Clinton campaign having a messaging strategy around Russian interference, while folks on the left are bizarrely dismissing it as “disinformation.” This is all very weird. It’s both obviously true and totally fine.
The Russian interference campaign on Trump’s behalf was absolutely real. The Trump campaign was consistently downplaying and denying it long past the point of reasonable doubt and signaling gratitude in countless ways. Of course you draw attention to that.
Any comptetent politician would have done the same thing. And the FBI would have been utterly derelict not to open an investigation on those facts. The idea that this means the FBI was somehow taking orders from the Clinton campaign is ridiculous.
The underlying “intelligence” here is a banal observation that was obvious to anyone who was even minimally conscious of the news in 2016. The elaborate conspiracy fantasy being constructed AROUND that is nuts, and needless to say doesn’t actually follow.

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More from @normative

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
6 Oct
That’s... so obviously false I don’t even know where to start. Apple doesn’t even have majority market share in the markets it competes in.
The idea that Facebook has a social networking “monopoly” is ridiculous; the only way people don’t laugh out loud at that is if they’re defining “social networking” to mean “services that look and function exactly like Facebook”.
Google doesn’t have a search “monopoly”; they have a really popular search engine. I promise, Bing & Yahoo & DuckDuckGo all still exist, and they’re all exactly as easy to access as Google. You don’t have to drive to some obscure off-brand search engine store.
Read 9 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
6 Oct
This makes it harder for an unhinged cult to recruit new dupes, which is probably a net positive. But moved like this seem bound to read as validation, and potentially to further radicalize, the already brainwashed.
Which is always the tradeoff with these decisions: Arrest the spread, but shunt those already infected into other fora where they can go even crazier together.
It occurs to me, incidentally, that QAnon has to some extent been less harmful than it might be otherwise because of the core tenet that Trump and his allies have some master plan against their imaginary satanic cabal, for which they’re all meant to wait...
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
5 Oct
I AM THE VERY MODEL OF A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL! VOTE!
I’VE INFORMATION VEGETABLE, ANIMAL, AND MINERAL! VOTE!
I KNOW THE KINGS OF ENGLAND AND I QUOTE THE FIGHTS HISTORICAL! VOTE!
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
23 Sep
Every time the algorithm changes, the ranking of various sites is going to change. There’s ALWAYS going to be some conservative sites (and some liberal sites, and some My Little Pony fansites) that do worse after the change. That doesn’t tell you anything in itself.
This is the same mistake PragerU made in their failed YouTube lawsuit. They disagreed with some of their videos being flagged as restricted for minors with parental controls turned on, and cried “aha, bias!” without checking whether they got it any worse than other channels.
That said... there is no Ideal Platonic Objective Ranking. It’s not like Breitbart is entitled to the One True and Correct search visibility they had at some prior date, and all subsequent deviations from that baseline show bias.
Read 7 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
23 Sep
Here’s an irrational thing about the assault on §230 that I haven’t seen emphasized enough. You can’t actually forbid platforms employing their judgment to curate (or “censor”) content. That’s protected by the 1st Amdt, not §230. So nobody who knows anything is arguing that.
Instead, the argument is, effectively: “If you curate in a way I disapprove of, you should be liable NOT for the curation, but for *totally unrelated* speech that you DIDN’T restrict, in case it ends up being defamatory or otherwise tortious.”
But the people who object to the platforms moderation policies don’t make a substantive argument that it’s justifiable or good policy to make Twitter responsible when a user defames someone. It’s just a cudgel to discourage First Amendment activity they can’t directly prohibit.
Read 7 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
22 Sep
The Mesmer Commission
In the years between the American & French revolution, Ben Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier (“father of modern chemistry”) and a certain Dr. Joseph Guillotin are appointed by the French crown to investigate the theories of Austrian guru/pseudoscientist Franz Mesmer.
Mesmer is a crank with a cult of personality, but the pamphlets his disciples circulate on his theories of “animal magnetism” popularize a sort of radical Rousseauian politics embedded in all the woo.
Read 4 tweets

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