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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.
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".
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'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.
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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