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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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You must be from another universe's themotte.org, because you're referring to some comment not present in this thread that would suggest my motivation is to paint Twitter's staff as Trump supporters by a large percentage. I invite you to demonstrate what I've said that would in any way support your argument because I can tell for a fact you didn't read any of my comments, and if you did, you assigned maximum uncharitability to them.

As you wish.

In a bizarrely pro-Trump interpretation of his tweets,

Hell, the decision of the Trust and Safety team was that no, Trump's tweets about patriots or not going to the inauguration.

Hell he says, an exclamation, because that's how outlandish it is to suggest bias at Twitter.

An official named Anika Navaroli is cited as declaring the tweets acceptable for Twitter's policies, but Weiss tries casting bad faith on her testimony to the Jan 6th committee when she said that she had been trying for months to get people to realize that if Twitter did nothing, then "people were going to die". I don't know why Weiss thinks this is a contradiction, you can believe that someone skirts the line for incitement and that particular tweets don't cross the line.

Accusing Weiss of trying to cast her as a bad faith actor for telling the house that she had struggled for months to get Trump banned, which by necessity implies that she is in fact acting in good faith. Which maybe doesn't make her a Trump loving deplorable, but sure looks like an attempt to paint the woman lying to the house about how dangerous Trump and his supporters are as neutral - shifting the balance away from Twitter leaning left.

A point of interest to me: the TTS team's refusal to declare Trump's tweets to be in violation of policy, with agreement from some key staffers that no coded incitement was present.

At this point I was growing suspicious of your motives. I can see reasonable alternative explanations for every point I've mentioned, in isolation at least.

We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way. This is why I said not having the full logs to comb through makes this frustrating - we literally cannot assess accurately how many people wanted Trump gone. We can only speculate about it based on things like political donations, and we have no reason to assume the process-oriented people weren't also left-leaning or anti-Trump. The phrase "vocal minority" exists for a reason.

My charity begins running out here. I am suspecting your goal is to downplay the left lean at Twitter.

There were clearly people in power who didn't agree with the narrative. That they were overruled doesn't mean they don't exist.

I don't think most companies rely on democratic voting to determine policy, so it shouldn't surprise us that a small number of vocal people can have an effect much larger than themselves. But there was clear pushback, that pushback just wasn't enough. If we consider it as reasonable that voters get to decide what happens, then the people who "voted" in this case to ban him seem to be much more in number than those who don't. A democratic outcome, even if it conflicts with the morality of others.

There could have been a vocal minority. We don't know because the slack logs aren't available for us to peruse. There was also pushback from the TTS team and a few others who didn't see the tweets as violating any rules.

I honestly can't figure out what you were trying to do with all of these posts if not obfuscate the level of left wing bias at Twitter. Just rampant contrarianism?

In a bizarrely pro-Trump interpretation of his tweets,

That one's on me. It was about a less-likely interpretation of what that person said that also gave an odd conclusion about how this person was thinking. I don't think this person is a Trump supporter.

Hell he says, an exclamation, because that's how outlandish it is to suggest bias at Twitter.

This is what I mean by not being charitable. I made a very specific claim about what that point contradicted in a prior TF, I said nothing about what it said about bias overall. I've never argued Twitter isn't biased in general. But you can't use "Someone is biased" to claim "Someone is being biased in this specific case".

which by necessity implies that she is in fact acting in good faith. Which maybe doesn't make her a Trump loving deplorable, but sure looks like an attempt to paint the woman lying to the house about how dangerous Trump and his supporters are as neutral

...

My charity begins running out here. I am suspecting your goal is to downplay the left lean at Twitter.

Unless you have access to the unfiltered slack/chat logs from Twitter, what Weiss and the others are showing us amounts what they think is relevant proof. It may be that they've honestly captured internal sentiment at Twitter, but we fundamentally cannot know this regardless, and the lack of posting the logs or any ban lists as mentioned in previous Twitter Files means we're forced to evaluate how reliable the reporters are. I don't think they're above letting bias infect their reporting.

Bias is not a substitute for an argument, only an initial evaluation metric.

I honestly can't figure out what you were trying to do with all of these posts if not obfuscate the level of left wing bias at Twitter. Just rampant contrarianism?

I'm giving my opinion on the Twitter Files based on my evaluation of them. That my evaluation disagrees with a popular right-wing view of the files is because those people and I see different things. I consider it important to be contrarian even if I agree with someone overall, yes, but you'll find a long history of me supporting the view of major institutions as biased against the right on multiple occasions. Importantly, no one is even disagreeing with most of what I have to say on the Twitter Files, they're trying to argue that I've misunderstood Trump's tweets (and based on the downvotes, I seem to have struck a nerve even when I agree with my opponents).

If I posted an argument that it was absurd to use a specific outcome from interacting with an institution to conclude it was racist against group A, I suspect I'd get lots of upvotes and supporting comments. But if I do the same against the anti-institution narrative, I get downvoted and accused of trying to hide said institution's bias.

It is this behavior that I especially despise because it indicates to me that people are abandoning the importance of being strict and conservative with their claims about something in favor of accepting more pleasing narratives. If I didn't accept that from the left, why would I accept that from the right (or anti-left)?

After my reply to you someone pointed out that Freddie Deboer recently wrote an article on this topic, eloquently saying what I've been stupidly grunting and pointing at for the past few months - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-twitter-files-and-writing-for

To use Freddie's term, it appeared to me like you were writing for the maw. You are right that people aren't arguing with what you say - nobody around here is going to argue against more transparency and more data. But you also surely know nobody is ever going to dump every slack log and email made by twitter staff. So you have an unassailable position - never mind that the Twitter files are infinitely more transparent and accountable than anything Twitter - or any other tentacle - has ever done, it is not perfectly transparent and accountable and that's bad.

Which would by itself not be enough to put me on guard, but it wasn't by itself. It came with what looks like an attempt to downplay the bias, plus an insane bit of pilpul about a tweet nobody but you interpreted as pro Trump. It all combines to look like rank dishonesty (which I suspect is why you have gotten downvotes even when you are agreeing with consensus) and while you might be right about upvotes and downvotes, what I care about is that the vast majority of the discussion about the Twitter files here this week was either confusion over pedantry or buried beneath pages of confusion over pedantry.

That's what got to me - I don't want people abandoning the truth for pleasing narratives either, but most importantly I want to read smart people having conversations about interesting things, not getting bogged down by lunacy they'd dismiss as trolling had it not come from someone with a history of intelligent and insightful comments.

Which is to say I really want to believe you man, because aside from our ideological differences I have always appreciated your opinion, even when I don't agree with it. But I feel like I keep getting burned when I do that. You do deserve the benefit of the doubt though, so I am sorry I accused you of being dishonest.

Which is to say I really want to believe you man, because aside from our ideological differences I have always appreciated your opinion, even when I don't agree with it. But I feel like I keep getting burned when I do that. You do deserve the benefit of the doubt though, so I am sorry I accused you of being dishonest.

Yeah, it's cool. I get it. It's not easy to discern whether your opponent is a mistake theorist insisting on strict claim-making or just playing defense.

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