Mainstream outlets try to grind every news story into grade D partisan hamburger and Twitter Files coverage is no exception. The Washington Post even called me a “conservative journalist” for a few minutes.
This isn’t a left or right project. The question that interests me, how these companies have been absorbed as intelligence arms, is more future/dystopia than blue/red. But that story is hard to sell, se we’re getting the usual stupidity.
But we’re all trying to triage time and instead of looking up individual accounts, most of us have been looking at broader search terms to start, like “FBI,” “Covid,” “DHS,” etc.
I did look up account(s) connected to Julian Assange. His “PV2” page doesn’t show anything unusual, just automated suspensions of an abandoned account, and I found no record of, say, a government-initiated action.
That doesn’t mean such intervention doesn’t exist. It may be in a Slack or an email somewhere. It’s a big haystack. We’ll keep looking.
A few actions hit both Republicans and Democrats. Some FBI offices were clearly running searches of “November 4” to catch people trying to trick others into not voting, and this snared both Biden and Trump voters in silly numbers.
There are interesting/ambiguous details, like a decision we found in which the company considered restricting all moderation decisions involving Biden or Trump to four senior executives:
But Twitter did have a clear political monoculture. I ran searches for both “RNC” and “DNC,” cross-referenced against senior executives. “RNC” turned up pages about Republicans suing the company. “DNC” returned mountains of insistent moderation demands.
Some of the latter were quite funny and revealing.
In multiple instances Twitter initially decided not to remove videos lampooning Joe Biden because they were obvious parodies “unlikely to cause offline harm or generate confusion.”
These included a "deceptively edited" video of Biden coughing: reuters.com/article/uk-fac…
And a "Todos Con Biden" Trumo spoof:
Usually Twitter was responding to complaints from one very voluble DNC staffer and still applied warning labels to such content. In one case, they refused to do either.
“Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President's speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the staffer, who fumed, "These rules need revision."
In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup.
If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers.
People will try to make this story about who did and did not benefit and argue this endlessly. But the utility of the project is showing everyone how the machine worked - which we're trying to do.
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Not only is the @nytimes is totally wrong implying @mirandadevine’s reporting hasn’t held up, the paper ignored its own multi-level failure on that same story in 2020, which included ignoring their own reporting. It’s almost actionable — they owe a huge apology (1/6):
First of all the Times in 2020 tried to use the unprecedented censorship of the story by Facebook and Twitter to call Miranda’s story “dubious,” without saying what was dubious. (The censorship angle they of course ignore entirely.) It got worse (2/6):
Just a few paragraphs down, the Times contradicted itself, saying Twitter didn’t block the story because it was “dubious,” but because it was supposedly “hacked materials.”
The laptop contents were not even “hacked materials,” as Twitter quickly determined. But also (3/6):
1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#Walkaway" from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021. washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…
3. The #TwitterFiles contained material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory Twitter analyses that contrasted with coverage describing #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” These documents should have been published earlier. I apologize to @BrandonStraka.
You obviously didn't read the reports (@lhfang is a right-wing ideologue?). We went out of our way to show censorship/manipulation taking place across the spectrum, mentioning everyone from the Green Party to the Yellow Vests to Truthout and Consortium News. (1/5)
If you read the reports there was very little about which "side" was suppressed more. There was some chatter within the company about it, and some current and former executives talked about it with us, but mainly we focused on the who/how of censorship (2/5)
The main revelations were about roles the FBI, DHS, GEC, ODNI, DOD, HHS etc. played in flagging content. Lee's reports were about DOD creating fake accounts abroad. Other projects put USG agencies in the middle of flagging election or Covid-related content (3/5)
1. TWITTER FILES (DEAMPLIFIED)
How the Censorship Industrial Complex Case Was Built
2. I made a deal with the owner of this platform to publish new #TwitterFiles material only on this site. However, since this account is denylisted, I don't feel obligated to add the context, since no one will see it. Full explanations for images on Racket.News
1. UK FILES EXTRA:
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, the IRS, and 501 (c)(3) status
2. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, is one of the most powerful players in the global "anti-disinformation" space, with a reputation for successfully pressuring Internet platforms to remove disfavored speech:
3. CCDH is currently being sued by this platform, X, which has accused it of manipulating X data to make it "appear as if X is overwhelmed by harmful content":
1. FOIA FILES EXTRA:
STATE DEPARTMENT "TARGETING AMERICANS"?
2. In late May and early June, 2019, a story hit the news: Donald Trump's State Department had been caught trolling people, including a Washington Post reporter, deemed insufficiently tough on Iran. Outrage was universal:
3. Similar stories at The Intercept and Guardian ripped State's Global Engagement Center for funding @IranDisinfo, which was said to have dubbed critics of of Trump's "Maximum Pressure" policy “‘mouthpieces,’ ‘apologists,’ ‘collaborators,’ and ‘lobbyists’” of Iran: