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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

Through any of these communications. Ah-hah!

I don't think we need to get conspiratorial though. The absence of any direct communications does mostly confirm that the decision to censor the story based off the "Hacked Info" policy was kinda-sorta just made up by Twitter employees. We find out in the string of posts that previous implementation of the Hacked Info policy required authorities to say some content was h4x0r3d in order for Twitter to remove it. Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

It sounds like Twitter staff made the decision to censor the laptop story and suspend the NYPOST based on personal political leanings. This was in direct contradiction to company policy. I believe "not 2016 again" was mentioned by at least one exec in these communications. I'd be more willing to cite the thing if it was in a dang news article or substack.

"The first amendment isn't absolute" bit is a conspicuous wink wink, nudge nudge vote of approval. I agree it doesn't exude the air pressure. To characterize it as a coordinated campaign of governmental interference or conspiracy would not be accurate. One thing I thought about after seeing was the Moldbuggian Cathedral essence of it all. When you look at the event as a whole it's pretty convincing. It all worked swimmingly.

Truthful October Surprise smear campaign targeting favored party candidate gets censored by employees of the largest politically relevant social media platform in the world. No direction between between favored party and party loyalists required. My recollection is the "Hunter Biden laptop story = Russian hackers" narrative went on for some weeks as the premier explanation and deflection. The media cover for a Biden win was total, complete, and impressive. So impressive that Ro Khanna thought it was too impressive and not a good look.

Maybe that theory of decentralized coordination can't ever be disproven as a convenient explanation, or we can accept this result as a logical, realistic end in a string in decisions. Of course the Twitter staff wanted to, and then did, successfully censor the story! Why wouldn't they?

EDIT: Tangential, but I checked out of curiosity. NYPost was suspended on the 14th of October. The account was reinstated 2 weeks later on the 30th and Twitter made this announcement.

This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.

There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.

Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.

Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

By "WH" do you mean the Trump White House?

"WH" is a personal nickname I have for what can broadly be described as the Deep State. It stands for "Werm Hat."

Okay, that part is a lie. This could not be possible. The WH today could have possibly have strong armed Twitter so long as they had a time machine. Not a good or accurate sentence, yeah.

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