Twitter has now explained its decision, hours later, and the explanation is as stunning as the original act. First, it claims information whose obtainment has not been authorized - by those affected by it? - cannot be communicated on the platform
This by itself would undermine the foundations of a democratic society: the powerful and the privileged would be safely protected from every kind of scrutiny
Second, the cynicism is extraordinary: a network built and organized for the dissemination of unauthorized content has discovered it has reservations about it only in the case where the political stakes are exceptionally high
Everyone understood what the rationale for the decision was
Third, @jack admits twitter cannot explain its decisions. But on issues of fundamental importance for democracy making a decision and explaining it are exactly the same. You cannot decide if you can’t explain

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More from @MacaesBruno

15 Oct
America is run by lawyers; China is run by engineers. Engineers are pragmatic. Their key text is the science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which, as in most of his books, survival is everything, and scientists make tough choices lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/…
Quite an interesting article, showing some popular arguments inside China, but also pointing out their contradictions
Chinese liberal Trumpists celebrate whenever he targets a big Chinese enterprise – Huawei or TikTok or WeChat – just as they approve ‘herd immunity’ as ‘the ultimate humanity’. Like Trump, they think the cure can’t be worse than the disease.
Read 7 tweets
15 Oct
Those people in Europe arguing for strong content moderation in tech platforms should look to yesterday’s episode as a cautionary tale. Sure we want to go down this road?
Imagine for the sake of argument that the rule announced by Twitter was applied across the ten largest platforms. Information about a public official not authorized by him could not be accessed on Google, FB, Amazon, Twitter, etc, etc
Could we still call this society a democracy? What would distinguish it from, say, China of the critical matter of free speech and information access?
Read 5 tweets
14 Oct
My article on seven months ago on why Europe would struggle to fight Covid

quillette.com/2020/03/14/con…
Seven months later Europe is once again the epicentre of the pandemic
Yesterday: 117 deaths in France, 80 in Spain, 143 in the UK, 41 in Italy, 35 in the Netherlands, 63 in Poland, 55 in Czechia, 68 in Romania, 20 in Belgium...
Read 4 tweets
12 Oct
This is important
Well, if you pay fixers in Syria $250 a day to find you the story you want, they will find it - but none of this has anything to do with journalism
Terrorism coverage in the US was gradually turned into Hollywood scriptwriting - with devastating consequences for Muslims worldwide but also for US foreign policy
Read 4 tweets
10 Oct
What is the opposite of a simulacrum? Not an imaginary copy of reality, but a piece of reality that copies the imagination. Because Baudrillard was wrong. We do not live in the age of simulacra. We live in the age of their opposite
Americans no longer ask whether a book or television series would work in real life, they ask whether real life would work in a movie or television series.
Read 4 tweets
3 Oct
Josep Borrell about to speak in La Toja. Should be an interesting debrief on Turkey and Belarus
Borrell like almost every voice from the Commission speaks of Europe as a third model between China and the US. @RobinNiblett would not approve
Two main geopolitical questions today for Borrell: US-China rivalry and the future of Africa
Read 6 tweets

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