#twitter files

[chawsl]

Trial of twitter files.

#trial #twitter #twitter files #testify #usa #covid #covid vaccine #censorship

[probablyasocialecologist]

Twitter worked with the Pentagon to amplify propaganda about the United States military’s activities in the Middle East, allowing fake accounts to push pro-US narratives despite pledging to shut down covert state-run influence campaigns, according to an investigation based on Twitter’s internal files.

Twitter secretly created a special “whitelist” exempting accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM) from spam and abuse flags, granting them greater visibility on the platform, according to the investigation by Lee Fang, a reporter with The Intercept.

Twitter quietly introduced the feature in 2017 after US military officials asked the company to improve the visibility of 52 Arab language accounts used to “amplify certain messages”, according to the investigation, which was published on Twitter and in The Intercept.

CENTCOM’s “priority accounts” promoted information in support of US military narratives, including criticism of Iran, support for the US and Saudi Arabia-backed war in Yemen, and claims about the superior accuracy of US drone strikes, according to Fang.

CENTCOM subsequently concealed its ownership of the accounts, Fang said, in some cases using fake profile pictures and bios to give the impression they were run by civilians in the Middle East.

While Twitter has said it does not allow deceptive state-backed influence operations, the social media company was aware of CENTCOM’s covert activity and tolerated the presence of the accounts on the platform until at least May 2022, Fang said.

#twitter #social media #military #propaganda #middle east #Twitter files

[beardedmrbean]

This is getting interesting, let's see where the rabbit leads.

#twitterfiles #twitter files

[theculturedmarxist]

The Tumblr Files

Tumblr has a habit of disappearing blogs that it seems to find objectionable. Alas, if only they were full of reactionary content they'd probably have been allowed to stay, but instead they're Leftists of various stripes, which makes them uncomfortable for the owners of Tumblr at best and dangerous at worst.

Regardless of what you think of Musk's purchase of Twitter, one good thing that came out of it was the release of the Twitter Files. Therein we learned of just how closely social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have integrated with the US government and its spying agencies.

Does the FBI have a direct line to TumblrHQ? I can't say for certain. I haven't seen any evidence of it yet, but Tumblr is a massive platform with a lot of reach. Its size alone makes it a prime target for surveillance if only because were the community left to its own devices it might start to develop its own ideas about how the world worked contrary to the bourgeois narrative, or what the US government currently calls "misinformation."

Some things to consider:

First, in the wake of the Democrats' 2016 presidential loss, the Professional-Managerial Class which make up its primary constituencies freaked out. The development of Russiagate was the response. This wasn't just about Trump winning the presidency though. The source of bourgeois terror was that the internet was an unregulated source of information, and people were starting to get the "wrong" ideas, as evidenced by Bernie Sanders immense popularity at the time, and Trump's victory.

Second, Russiagate triggered a concerted spy agency response to root out basically nonexistent "Russian influence" on social media "promoting misinformation." Pressure was put onto SM companies to "do something about Russian election meddling." Twitter's internal research found that there was basically nothing of the kind. This was the wrong answer, so Twitter was compelled by propaganda outlets and the threat of expensive legislation to "do something," and that something was to basically turn over its moderation process to US spy agencies.

30.“REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS” This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. 31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture. In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” 32.Twitter let the “USIC” into its moderation process. It would not leave. Wrote Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders: “We will not be reverting to the status quo.”

Why is this relevant to Tumblr? Because it has a large, influential community, which alone would necessitate its surveillance if not control, but especially because Tumblr is hemorrhaging money and is failing to gain ground against its competitors.

TechCrunch reported that CEO Matt Mullenweg spilled the beans during the Q&A, which was cohosted by COO Zandy Ring and attended by a meager 800 users, despite being plastered across every Tumblr account’s dashboard. According to Mullenweg, the platform is spending $30 million more than it’s making as it tries to desperately cling to relevance in its fight against Instagram and TikTok. Moreover, COO Ring explained that the platform is not seeing much of an increase in its userbase.

“People have this impression that we have massive growth right now, and we really don’t,” Ring said during the Q&A.

None of this necessarily means that it's Langley that's getting Leftist users booted off the platform. It could merely be personal biases on the part of the staff, against transsexuals, against pro-Palestinian activists. It does seem arbitrary and capricious enough. If the goal was, say, combating antisemitism by banning pro-Palestinian users, would there be so many fascists and outright Nazis on tumblr? Why does it seem like the majority of those that get banned just happen to be on the side which opposes imperialist Western narratives?

In any case, this markedly underscores that if the Western Left wants any hope of surviving on the web, it can't rely on corporate resources to do so.

#internet censorship #twitter files #spy agencies #social media

[constantly-deactivated]

The Twitter Files 🤔

#pay attention #wake the fuck up #wake up #wake up america #wake up people #wake up world #educate yourself #educate yourselves #do your homework #do your own research #do your research #government tyranny #government lies #government corruption #biden laptop #twitter files #latest news #news #corrupt news #exposing corruption #exposing the truth #exposing evil #exposing lies #lies exposed #lies lies and more lies #lies lies lies lies lies #truth will set you free #raw truth #truth shall prevail #god wins

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

For all the talk of the “Twitter Files,” as we’ve detailed, they’ve mostly been, at best, misleading, and frequently actively wrong. One of the big reveals, we were told, was that the Files were going to expose the political machinations of how Twitter banned former President Trump. And, indeed, Bari Weiss’s “Part Five” of the Twitter Files, back in mid-December, purported to reveal the big secret reckoning. But if you haven’t heard much about it since then, it’s because… they were a complete flop when it came to anything of interest. Basically, it was exactly what some of us said the day it happened: a difficult decision with a number of competing factors going into it. One that could have gone either way, but recognizing the gravity of what happened on January 6th, and the genuine concern that Trump would continue to whip his fans into an insurrectionist frenzy, one that you can see a reasonable argument for making.

And while Musk (falsely) insisted that the big reveal was that Trump didn’t actually violate Twitter’s policies, that’s also a misreading of what happened. What we’ve learned is that Trump and other Republican leaders were actually given special treatment over the years, because they tended to violate policies way more often than Democrats. But, knowing that Republicans would flop to the ground and fake injury any time they were faced with even having to take the slightest bit of responsibility for violating policies, all the big social media platforms went above and beyond to better protect the high profile accounts of Republican rule breakers.

And while many people tried to paint the decision to finally ban Trump as some sort of “proof” that the company leadership was a bunch of left-leaning censors, the reality seemed to be quite different. Even Weiss’ big reveal was simply that there was strong and heated internal debate about what to do, with many employees (mostly not directly engaged in content moderation issues) calling for the company to ban him, while executives and trust & safety folks questioning whether or not that would be appropriate.

Right at the end of last year, though, as the House Select Committee investigated January 6th was wrapping up, some of the details of what they discovered about Twitter’s debate was leaked to Rolling Stone, and presents an even more detailed picture of how the company strongly resisted calls to ban Trump.

"In the draft summary, written by the Committee’s 'purple' or social media team, staffers were more pointed about what they saw as the failures of big social media companies.

‘The sheer scale of Republican post-election rage paralyzed decisionmakers at Twitter and Facebook, who feared political reprisals if they took strong action,’ the summary concluded."

The report shows that, again contrary to the public narrative pushed by Musk and friends, Twitter’s leadership wasn’t as deeply engaged in the various political happenings:

"And even days after the insurrection, former Twitter employees told the Committee that executives were still slow to recognize the risk Trump could pose in inciting future violence. After Trump tweeted that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration, Safety Team employees testified that they saw ‘the exact same rhetoric and the exact same language that had led up to January 6th popping underneath’ his tweets, leading to fears of another act of mass violence."

Some of the people who worked on that social media report, separately wrote an article for Tech Policy Press, talking about some of what they saw, which didn’t make it into any public report. They note that their research debunked the widely held notion that the social media companies acted with their bottom line in mind in refusing to limit disinformation, and again found that fear of angering Republicans was a key motivating factor:

"At the outset of the investigation, we believed we might find evidence that large platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube resisted taking proactive steps to limit the spread of violent and misleading content during the election out of concern for their profit margins. These large platforms ultimately derive revenue from keeping users engaged with their respective services so that they can show those users more advertisements. Analysts have argued that this business model rewards and incentivizes divisive, negative, misleading, and sometimes hateful or violent content. It would make sense, then, that platforms had reason to pull punches out of concern for their bottom line.

While it is possible this is true more generally, our investigation found little direct evidence for this motivation in the context of the 2020 election. Advocates for bold action within these companies – such as Facebook’s ‘break glass’ measures or Twitter’s policies for handling implicit incitement to violence – were more likely to meet resistance for political reasons than explicitly financial ones."

As the report’s researchers found, Twitter was extremely resistant to putting in place policies that might make Republicans mad:

"For example, after President Trump told the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ during the first presidential debate in 2020, implicit and explicit calls for violence spread across Twitter. Former members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team told the Select Committee that a draft policy to address such coded language was blocked by then-Vice President for Trust & Safety Del Harvey because she believed some of the more implicit phrases, like ‘locked and loaded,’ could refer to self-defense. The phrase was much discussed in internal policy debates, but it was not chosen out of thin air – it was frequently invoked following the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha the previous summer. But the fact it appeared in only a small fraction of the hundreds of tweets used to inform the policy led staff to the conclusion that Harvey’s decision was meant to avoid a controversial crackdown on violent speech among right-wing users. Ironically, elements of this policy were later used to guide the removal of a crescendo of violent tweets during the January 6th attack when the Trust & Safety team was forced to act without leadership from their manager, whose directive to them was, according to one witness, to ‘stop the insurrection.’"

The authors noted, explicitly, that people reading the Twitter Files to say that Twitter was controlled by a bunch of coastal liberals trying to silence conservatives have it quite backwards:

"One clear conclusion from our investigation is that proponents of the recently released ‘Twitter Files,’ who claim that platform suspensions of the former President are evidence of anti-conservative bias, have it completely backward. Platforms did not hold Trump to a higher standard by removing his account after January 6th. Rather, for years they wrote rules to avoid holding him and his supporters accountable; it took an attempted coup d’état for them to change course. Evidence and testimony provided by members of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team make clear that those arguing Trump was held to an unfair double standard are willfully neglecting or overlooking the significance of January 6th in the context of his ban from major platforms. In the words of one Twitter employee who came forward to the Committee, if Trump had been ‘any other user on Twitter, he would have been permanently suspended a very long time ago.’"

None of this should be a surprise to anyone who has been reading Techdirt throughout all of this. For years, we’ve pointed out that the whining from “conservatives” that social media was biased against them was nothing more than an attempt to “work the refs” and basically lean on the decision makers to make sure the opposite was true. It was designed to make sure that the trust & safety teams at these companies were so frightened about the potential for politicians and the media to make a big deal out of any decision that it effectively gave them free rein to ignore the rules and push the boundaries, and the companies (beyond just Twitter) were too scared of the potential reaction to react.

This is especially ironic, given all the nonsense we’re hearing now about how the FBI was supposedly “censoring” people via Twitter. The truth is that it was actually Republican politicians, media, and influencers who scared Twitter away from taking actions against rule violators who were deemed to be prominent conservatives.

#us politics #news #techdirt #2023 #donald trump #twitter #censorship #twitter files #Bari Weiss #elon musk #Republicans #conservatives #gop #Democrats #liberals #capitol riot investigation #house select committee #Rolling Stone #Tech Policy Press #Facebook #youtube #Trust & Safety team #FBI

[bighermie]

Dictators don’t like the peasants communicating.

#twitter files

[thisisabernieblog]

This may be one of Lee Camp's best episodes, as it covers the #TwitterFiles and the censorship by the US government, gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the Washington Post actually covering Israeli war crimes! With the addition of Mexican President AMLO calling the US an oligarchy.

@lordandgodoftheobvious @brendanicus @apas-95 @petalsbleedingbeak @cavern-creature @missedthestartgun @whatevergreen @dicknouget @definitely-ellie @reinforced-fear-be-damned @they-will-not-contain-us

#Twitter files #Matt Taibbi #Lee Camp #Censorship #Oligarchy #Police gangs #LASD #Los Angeles Sheriff's Department #Israel #Israeli war crimes #Palestine

[tilos-tagebuch]

Facts:

1. FBI took Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019 and knew he wasn't from hackers

2. The FBI spent the year 2020 telling Twitter that a "hack-and-leak" with Hunter would occur in October 2020

3. The FBI spied on Giuliani when he gave the NY Post the laptop.

#hunter biden #laptop from hell #fbi #twitter #twitter files

[yeahiwasintheshit]

Mehdi Hasan makes Elon musk’s bitch boy Matt taibbi look like the right wing lackey fool he is. Mehdi completely destroys this idiot, in a way christopher hitchens would be proud lol

#mehdi hasan #matt taibbi #twitter files #Youtube

[wakewithgiggli]

Click through to read the thread.

Edit: The link doesnt always show up, so here it is: https://twitter.com/AvidHalaby/status/1602127460677844993

#twitter #twitter engineering #twitter security #twitter files

[commonsensecommentary]

“An organization with ties to the U.S. national security apparatus falsely portrayed a bunch of mostly right-leaning, Trump-supporting Twitter content as nefarious and Russian in origin. The mainstream media eagerly peddled this incorrect narrative.”

Not a surprise!!!

#twitter #twitter files #twittergate #russiagate hoax #media stooges #Journalistic malpractice #Official lies #election fraud

[constantly-deactivated]

TwitterGate ... 1st Amendment 🤔

#pay attention #wake the fuck up #wake up #wake up america #wake up people #wake up world #educate yourself #educate yourselves #do your own research #do your research #do your homework #twittergate #twitter files #1st amendment

[noturtlesoup17]

Whoa! Personal direct access! Someone tell Taibbi!

#twitter files #elon musk

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

What many of us in the alt-media world suspected is now being proven true with the release of the #TwitterFiles. In 2018 Facebook and Twitter colluded to kill our accounts. Now we know why.

#the free thought project #big tech #twitter files

[bighermie]

#twitter files