Quotulatiousness

April 14, 2023

Twists and turns in the “Twitter Files” narrative

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi recounts how he got involved in the “Twitter Files” in the first place through the hysterical and hypocritical responses of so many mainstream media outlets up to the most recent twist as Twitter owner Elon Musk burns off so much of the credit he got for exposing the information in the first place:

I was amazed at this story’s coverage. From the Guardian last November: “Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy.” From the Washington Post: “Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda dismantles safety work at Twitter, insiders say.” The Post story was about the “troubling” decision to re-instate the Babylon Bee, and numerous stories like it implied the world would end if this “‘free speech’ agenda” was imposed.

I didn’t have to know any of the particulars of the intramural Twitter dispute to think anyone who wanted to censor the Babylon Bee was crazy. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, going to war against a satire site was like dressing up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. This was an obvious moral panic and the very real consternation at papers like the Washington Post and sites like Slate over these issues seemed to offer the new owners of Twitter a huge opening. With critics this obnoxious, even a step in the direction of free speech values would likely win back audiences that saw the platform as a humorless garrison of authoritarian attitudes.

This was the context under which I met Musk and the circle of adjutants who would become the go-betweens delivering the material that came to be known as the Twitter Files. I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter, but I actually liked Musk. His distaste for the blue-check thought police who’d spent more than a half-year working themselves into hysterics at the thought of him buying Twitter — which had become the private playground of entitled mainstream journalists — appeared rooted in more than just personal animus. He talked about wanting to restore transparency, but also seemed to think his purchase was funny, which I also did (spending $44 billion with a laugh as even a partial motive was hard not to admire).

Moreover the decision to release the company’s dirty laundry for the world to see was a potentially historic act. To this day I think he did something incredibly important by opening up these communications for the public.

Taibbi and the other Twitter File journalists were, of course, damned by the majority of the establishment media outlets and accused of every variant of mopery, dopery, and gross malfeasance by the blue check myrmidons. Some of that must have been anticipated, but a lot of it seems to have surprised even Taibbi and company for its blatant hypocrisy and incandescent rage.

But all was not well between the Twitter Files team and the new owner of Twitter:

We were never on the same side as Musk exactly, but there was a clear confluence of interests rooted in the fact that the same institutional villains who wanted to suppress the info in the Files also wanted to bankrupt Musk. That’s what makes the developments of the last week so disappointing. There was a natural opening to push back on the worst actors with significant public support if Musk could hold it together and at least look like he was delivering on the implied promise to return Twitter to its “free speech wing of the free speech party” roots. Instead, he stepped into another optics Punji Trap, censoring the same Twitter Files reports that initially made him a transparency folk hero.

Even more bizarre, the triggering incident revolved around Substack, a relatively small company that’s nonetheless one of the few oases of independent media and free speech left in America. In my wildest imagination I couldn’t have scripted these developments, especially my own very involuntary role.

I first found out there was a problem between Twitter and Substack early last Friday, in the morning hours just after imploding under Mehdi Hasan’s Andrey Vyshinsky Jr. act on MSNBC. As that joyous experience included scenes of me refusing on camera to perform on-demand ritual criticism of Elon Musk, I first thought I was being pranked by news of Substack URLs being suppressed by him. “No way,” I thought, but other Substack writers insisted it was true: their articles were indeed being labeled, and likes and retweets of Substack pages were being prohibited.

March 14, 2023

QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Imagine that you came up with something amazing to share with people. Let’s pretend that you created the most amusing video in the world. Or came up with the funniest joke anyone has ever heard. Or maybe you have just experienced something remarkable that millions of people would want to know about. Or let’s assume you took a photograph that would blow people’s minds. Or perhaps you have just composed the catchiest tune ever.

You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.

That’s what going viral is all about.

Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.

At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.

But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.

This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.

And it certainly can’t be good for business.

So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.

I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.

It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.

When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”

The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.

Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.

Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.

March 13, 2023

When did the “elites” of the West become so bumbling and incompetent?

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the blatant decay of western political leadership on display at the #Twitterfiles hearing in Washington D.C.:

I should probably just go back to sleep for a decade, because Walter Kirn always has it covered:

I was trying to be clever about this yesterday, but it should be said plainly for the space aliens who eventually find the ruins of our former civilization and have to use the surviving digital evidence to report to their superiors on the collapse of the earth losers.

The most striking thing about the average member of the contemporary political class — the “elite”, and yes, I know — isn’t that they’re almost invariably wrong, or that they’re never interesting, or that they have no wisdom of any kind that ever shines through anything they do, ever. Instead, the most striking thing about the contemporary political class is that most of them can’t actually speak, in the sense that you ask them something and then they think and then words come out. Here, watch:

Even in the screenshot, her face is pointed downward at a piece of paper. She’s only ever reading. She’s looking at prepared questions and giving voice to a script, like a much dumber Anne Hathaway. And, yes, what the script says is idiotic — Matt Taibbi gets paid for his journalismz!!!!! (unlike members of Congress, who take a vow of poverty and work for free) — but the more interesting thing to me is that this person, in her fifty-trillionth term in Congress, can’t say what she thinks without reading it. Mr. Taibbi, it says on this piece of paper that you are a very bad person.

They don’t know anything. They don’t think anything. They have no ability, no insight, no value to offer. So they make our laws.

March 5, 2023

“Natural Woman” – classic hit song or hate crime in progress?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the hoax “cancellation” attempt on the late Aretha Franklin’s hit song:

For at least a few hours, it looked as if the 1960s soul classic “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman“, memorably performed by Aretha Franklin, was imperiled by woke attack. Various conservative and right-wing media reported in late January that a trans awareness group was demanding via Twitter that the song be canceled because of its exclusionary emphasis on “natural” womanhood. It was dutifully noted that this was the latest salvo in the trans “assault on women”, and a women’s activist was reported as saying, “I don’t think many women really know how much we’re hated”.

It turned out that the complaint about “Natural Woman”, which received well over one million views and provoked thousands of responses, had been made by a parody account. Aretha Franklin was safe — at least for now. But commentary on the song has a surprising history, as we’ll see, that complicates the standard claims about the trans erasure of women.

The Twitter account at the center of the faux controversy was TCMA, the Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance, which began tweeting in January of 2023 to highlight the lunatic fringe of trans advocacy. Many of the tweets by TCMA exaggerate actual trans activist positions so adroitly that even on a second or third reading, they seem plausible. On January 20, for example, TCMA tweeted that “Many children learn gender from their pets”, and advised parents that “Just because you bring home a ‘gendered’ pet, allow your child to choose the gender of the pet — don’t assign it one ‘at will’.”

A day later, TCMA tweeted that it would be petitioning the Norwegian government “to no longer include gender on birth certificates” and it condemned media, in another tweet, for emphasizing child abuse by same-sex couples while failing to cover the “wonton abuse” (steamed or deep fried?!) in the church.

The purpose of the account seems fairly clear: to show how dogmatic statements by activists are often hard to tell apart from parodies of the same. Something strange is going on when people in positions of cultural power not infrequently express themselves in a manner indistinguishable from parody.

March 3, 2023

Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.

Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?

Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.

February 16, 2023

A modern irregular verb: I mis-spoke. You spread misinformation. He has been banned from social media

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

[…]

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

January 8, 2023

Conservatives “vote harder”, progressives take advantage of “procedural outcome manipulations”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton on a key difference between progressives and conservatives in how they address perceived problems with “the system”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes”. Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure — a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm — and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction — Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so … right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed — and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field — FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure”.

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union”, as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

December 31, 2022

The Twitter Files – “Let’s at least try to stop lying for a while, see what happens. How bad can it be?”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi on the continuing revelations about Twitter’s deep entanglements with agencies of the US (and probably many other) government:

In the coming days you’ll find a new thread on Twitter, along with a two-part article here at TK explaining the latest #TwitterFiles findings. Even as someone in the middle of it, naturally jazzed by everything I’m reading, I feel the necessity of explaining why it’s important to keep hammering at this.

Any lawyer who’s ever sifted though a large discovery file will report the task is like archaeology. You dig a little, find a bit of a claw, dust some more and find a tooth, then hours later it’s the outline of a pelvis bone, and so on. After a while you think you’re looking at something that was alive once, but what?

Who knows? At the moment, all we can do is show a few pieces of what we think might be a larger story. I believe the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald Trump to get elected, and whose subjugation and takeover by a furious combination of politicians, enforcement officials, and media then became a priority as soon as Trump took office.

These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.

In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).

The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that”, offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.

What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked”. As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news? Former baseball analytics whiz Nate Silver chimed in on this front:

December 28, 2022

The Twitter Files – “How does anyone run a business under these conditions?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the sheer magnitude of government(s) meddling in Twitter’s business (even though, yes, Twitter’s management was totally on-board politically with most or all of this meddling):

[…] Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and the FBI wants a meeting this week and the White House wants a meeting this week and DHS wants a meeting this week and DOD wants a meeting this week even though CENTCOM already has one, and several members of Congress have some concerns they want the senior team to address this week, and …

Now: Twitter is a global platform. I would bet a kidney that there’s a Twitter Files equivalent for the Ottawa Police Department during the Freedom Convoy, and an RCMP file, and a Trudeau government file, and that Chrystia Freeland had some thoughts to share about some tweets she didn’t like. I would bet the other kidney that Twitter has equivalent files, in dozens of languages, from multiple government agencies in Iran and New Zealand and Australia and the Netherlands and the UK and Brazil and on and on an on.

As for my third kidney — just go with it, and we’ll clean up the biological metaphors later — state and local governments also expect Twitter to act on their content concerns and complaints about disinformation, which means fifty governors and attorneys general and state directors of public health and state police commanders picking up the phone, and 3,243 sheriffs and district attorneys and public health directors expecting to be able to reach out to their partners at Twitter, and close to 20,000 mayors and police chiefs, and thousands of state legislators and tens of thousands of city councilmembers, and on and on and on. “You tell this Jack Dorsey that I’m the damn mayor pro tem here in Glendale, and I want my concerns to be dealt with.”

And so, if we accept the premise that governments have special rights to demand content moderation, if the staff director of a legislative committee in the Arkansas state legislature and a sheriff in Maryland and the flag officers at all the MACOMS and Jen Psaki’s deputy assistant and a member of a county board of supervisors in Oregon and the chief of staff to the governor of Rhode Island, being Very Important People, all expect to by God get a direct meeting with Twitter executives because @buttchug623 is saying some things that they do not like at all, and oh by the way the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is holding on line 6 and he’s pissed and when can you pencil in a half-hour with Turkmenistan’s finance minister, then how much does it cost to manage all of those relationships?

The regulatory affairs staffing buries the business — you can’t pay for that much face time with that many self-important officials. We need to schedule the senior management team for a meeting with the White House this week, ’cause they don’t like Alex Berenson. How does anyone run a business under these conditions? “Before you cook that cheeseburger for order number seven, the deputy assistant secretary for sustainable agriculture would like to share some thoughts on the environmental trajectory of industrial protein cultivation. And about that milkshake …”

In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches.

Twitter’s path to bankruptcy runs through the premise that every government official who doesn’t like a tweet deserves a meeting.

December 19, 2022

“Both sides have their crazy folks … But usually, they’re on the semi-fringe”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on the increasing difficulty of taking some people seriously:

There are some people who are completely unhinged. We all know this and have seen it ourselves throughout our lives. This is especially true if you spend much time in the political space.

Both sides have their crazy folks. They exist in the realm of conspiracy theories, rationalizations, and fearmongering with absolutely no basis in reality.

But usually, they’re on the semi-fringe.

Or, at least, they used to be.

However, I came across this tweet from an account with over 400,000 followers and reportedly run by a group of mental health professionals, and if this isn’t the height of unhinged, I don’t know what is.

Now look, I know that the official reason these journalists were suspended was because of doxxing, but I don’t know just how valid that is. I didn’t see their tweets so I can’t say.

I do know that they caught a seven-day suspension, so they’ll all be back.

But for these jackwagons to claim it reminds them of Kristallnacht …

At least 91 Jews were murdered during Kristallnacht. Some experts say the actual death toll should be higher due to post-arrest maltreatment with at least one saying over 630 people died as a result of Kristallnacht.

I looked to see if this was a parody account, but it doesn’t look like it, which means these dipsticks are serious.

And that’s terrifying.

See, if they’re mental health professionals, then it means at least some in our mental health system are crazier than most trying to get help in the first place. This is beyond deranged.

And yet, it’s unlikely that those more than 400,000 followers are hate followers. They’re people who actually like what these people say and take it seriously. That’s downright terrifying.

December 16, 2022

“To hear Musk tell it, his motivation is obvious: It’s about saving the world”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Bari Weiss at The Free Press (formerly known as Common Sense) on what went on in preparing to reveal the “Twitter files” and what Elon Musk is hoping to accomplish with Twitter:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

“I’m not going to spend $44 billion to reinstate a satire blog”, Musk said about the Babylon Bee, which had been banned from Twitter in March 2022. “I did it because I was worried about the future of civilization”, he told us late one night. 

As far as Musk sees things, “birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power, and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned. We are trending in a bad direction.”

He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out. 

“If there is one information source that breaks ranks, then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative”, he said. “If even one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow.” 

To win back that trust, Musk figured it would require being honest about what had, until very recently, been going on at the company he had just bought: the suppression of disfavored users; the curtailing of certain political views; the censorship of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop; and the extent to which the government had tried to influence such decisions.

“We have a goal here, which is to clear the decks of any prior wrongdoing and move forward with a clean slate”, Musk said in one of many conversations that took place over the course of a week. “I’m sleeping at Twitter HQ for a reason. This is a code-red situation.” (He put it even more forcefully on Twitter, where he said that the company was a “crime scene”.) And so he has been sleeping there on-and-off, claiming a sofa. His 2-year-old son, named X, was almost always nearby. 

Musk, who is a South African native, analogized the work of cleaning-house at Twitter several times to a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what looks to some like truth and reconciliation can look to others like revenge.

At one point after midnight, as Musk showed off a closet of swag, including t-shirts left by the previous crew that said “Stay Woke”, he joked: “The barbarians have crashed through the gates and are pillaging the merch!”

Remember: After Musk made his offer to buy Twitter in April, he tried to get out of it in July, arguing that the company had not been honest about the percentage of fake users and bots on the site. But the company sued to force the deal, and he went ahead with it. 

Musk estimates that he paid at least twice what it was worth but that he had to “chew down this hairball” — which is to say, he had to buy Twitter. 

The price tag isn’t his only grievance. There’s also the fact that the company, to hear him tell it, wasn’t really a functioning company at all.

When Musk took over, he said, he found Twitter in disarray. Employees had unlimited vacation time and permanent work from home. The company had stopped doing performance reviews altogether, according to a long-time Twitter employee. “As long as Twitter could just keep its head above water and be roughly cash-flow break-even, then that’s all that they cared about”, Musk said. 

Musk calls the Twitter he purchased a “non-profit”. Twitter, as it existed, wasn’t pursuing net earnings but “social influence”, he said. “This was fundamentally an activist organization”. 

Since he took the helm at Twitter, he has fired 80 percent of the staff. He has insisted that those not prepared to be “extremely hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity” show themselves out. Several engineers I spoke to had been working 18-hour days for the past month. They looked like it.

“It’s like if an aircraft was going in one direction and then suddenly pulled a U-turn and hit the afterburners in the other direction. That’s what happened to Twitter”, Musk said, making a vroom noise and laughing. 

December 10, 2022

“Notes from the administration of a private social media company: ‘Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI'”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the tendency of people in a group to “go along to get along” with the group consensus:

Elon Musk has gone from letting us in on some very interesting things to holy shit somebody just dropped a bomb, with a little help from Matt Taibbi:

Especially:

Notes from the administration of a private social media company: “Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI“. Re: election security, they say, in a discussion about killing a story that harmed one political party and helped the other political party.

This isn’t left and right, anymore — if you regard yourself as a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, or any other related identity, surely you agree that the national security state shouldn’t be intervening in our political discourse, even though in this instance the person who was harmed was Donald Trump. Surely this is something we can all agree on, across lines of identity and party politics. Right?

“We blocked the NYP story”, of course, means that they blocked the story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, wide public awareness of which could have changed the outcome of the election. So the alphabet-soup agencies were shaping the public discourse around partisan politics during the run-up to an election, at least sometimes telling private social media companies what posts and accounts they wanted limited, silenced, and removed. And Twitter was glad to comply. (See Taibbi’s complete thread for more.) Federal agencies intervened in our politics, for what the available evidence strongly suggests to have been partisan ends.

I suspect the statement “could have changed the outcome of the election” is overstated. From everything I’ve read, the election results were “fortified” enough to survive any amount of unwelcome fact leaking through to the voters. I mean, really: who would want to live in a country where the unwashed voters might have a say in what went on with the government?

November 23, 2022

The potential mass-casualty event of Trump being re-instated on Twitter

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You can almost hear Tom Knighton‘s eyes rolling here:

I’m not the biggest fan of Donald Trump. Most of his policies — the things he enacted quietly as he went — were pretty decent, including criminal justice reform and reducing federal regulations.

He just couldn’t stop tweeting.

I joked more than once that I wish someone would lock his phone so he couldn’t get on the app. However, I never once thought he should be banned from the platform.

But he was.

Now, he’s back.

Sort of.

His account isn’t banned anymore, though as of this writing, he doesn’t appear to be using it.

Yet this is, apparently, something just short of genocide if you listen to some journalists.

No, seriously.

I hoped this was a troll, but it’s not.

He apparently actually believes this is a thing, too, because it’s not the only time he claimed Trump being on Twitter will result in people’s deaths.

Again, there’s no word whether Trump will return to use the platform. As of this writing, his last tweet is from January 8th, 2021, so even if Trump’s tweets somehow could result in people’s death, it doesn’t seem like it matters since he’s not back on the platform.

But this unhinged individual has the old-school blue checkmark, the one given because an individual is “notable”.

Yet he also has his cover photo set to a screenshot of him being blocked by Trump. In other words, it looks like the boy is a might obsessed with the Orange One.

And this is the problem.

It’s not about Trump, but the media. This is a guy with mainstream media bylines aplenty. He’s got the old Twitter mark of approval, and he’s literally arguing that a former president having the ability to voice his thoughts on a social media platform will result in people’s deaths.

Does he think Elon Musk has weaponized tweeting and only given the launch codes to Trump?

The Babylon Bee (or as Instapundit says, “America’s Newspaper of Record”) is already on this hot new calamity:

November 18, 2022

“WOLLT IHR DEN TOTALEN TWEET?“

Filed under: Germany, History, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When German public TV is willing to invoke literal Nazi imagery, you know the Twitter situation has gotten out of hand:

After Germany’s “first” public television network, ARD, compared Elon Musk reducing Twitter censorship to “letting rats out of their holes”, Germany’s “second” public television network, ZDF, has now compared Musk to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels! (The network’s name Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen literally means “Second German Television”.)

Thus, last Friday, ZDF’s would-be comedy program, the “Heute Show”, posted the below tweet and photoshop.

The Tweet reads: “Thanks to Elon Musk, you’re allowed to say anything again on Twitter! Total freedom of speech! #heuteshow.” The caption, whose color scheme and font invoke Nazi-era propaganda, reads “Do you want total tweet?” It is an allusion to Goebbels’s 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, in which the Nazi Minister of Propaganda famously shouted, “Do you want total war?” – in response to which audience members leapt to their feet shouting “Yes!” and raising their arms in the Hitler-salute.

The background image appears to show a Nazi Party rally with the swastikas replaced by the Twitter bird logo. Two smaller swastikas are still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the full-size image.

Leaving aside the extreme mental contortionism required to associate freedom of speech with Nazi Germany, if ever there was a don’t-throw-stones-in-glass-houses moment, this was it. For, as so happens, during the Second World War, the founding director of ZDF, Karl Holzamer, himself served in one of the propaganda units that none other than Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda embedded with the different divisions of the Germany military.

Holzamer served in a propaganda unit of the Luftwaffe or German air force. As noted in a 2012 article titled “Goebbels’s Soldiers” in the German daily Die Frankfurter Rundschau, Holzamer was embedded with the Luftwaffe during its April 1941 bombing of Belgrade and was “the first” to report on the German subjugation of the Yugoslav capital.

November 3, 2022

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory — or at least he was doing much better than predicted — and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown — Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory — but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional — that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

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