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Imagine the scene in the FBI’s San Francisco office last November 6th.
“Boss! Got a call from head office. There’s false information about the election on Twitter!”
“It’s in progress. Agent Chang, we need Billy Baldwin’s location data. We need it yesterday!”
The “Twitter files,” which Twitter owner Elon Musk continually publishes, show government involvement, from intelligence agencies to members of Congress, through social media censorship on issues such as elections and COVID-19. It exposes the level of horrifying absurdity that exists. Most of the coverage rightly focuses on the moral (and possibly legal) scandal this represents.
Publisher of Twitter files says government was ‘massively’ involved in censorship business
Officials always demand censorship powers for the greater good and abuse it for their own gain. But what these censors do, and has always been, is the job they claim to be doing, keeping no one from reading or hearing “harmful” or “inaccurate” information. It’s worth spending a little time to understand.
History is full of these failures. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, and Mandela were killed or imprisoned for saying what authorities at the time considered to be false, harmful, or both. (And never heard of their idea again. Oops.)
Today’s censors are at least as incompetent as historical censors. As Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi pointed outa list of 25 accounts disseminating “misinformation” involving the unfortunate Baldwin brothers, many of which are “satirical in nature” and “with the exception of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork, nearly all have relatively low engagement.” bottom”.
Outrage in MUSK-TAIBBI Twitter file dump reveals media are true ‘bots’, critics say
Even if you believe the federal government should crack down on Twitter’s bad ideas, do you really think that two days before the election, avoiding being misled by user @Ronsmit49336969 is a top priority? Number of followers: 13)
That said, Twitter probably appreciated the relative selectivity of its listings. In May 2020, the State Department sent a list of his 5,500 accounts to Twitter. This is a sample of a large database of 250,000 suspicious accounts of him that appear to be “inorganic” that track two or more of his Chinese diplomats, including CNN and Canadian military users.
As the 2020 election approached, the FBI bombarded Twitter with requests to investigate the account for policy violations, sending a flurry of emails with attached spreadsheets of alleged violators.
A competent censor realizes that sending so much information to an overburdened company is a recipe for paralyzing employees begging for guidance on what to censor in the first place. About two weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter attorney Stacia Cardill wrote, “Is there a way to find adjustments to prioritize escalating reports?”
James Woods hits back on Twitter, threatens to sue DNC over censorship
The 80 FBI agents tasked with monitoring social media didn’t flood Twitter with classified information from the Interpol database. As Cardille observed, “They have people in their field offices and headquarters in Baltimore who are just doing keyword searches for violations.”
Was their decision at least correct?
On simple issues like Election Day, they can be pretty trustworthy, but so is asking someone out on the street. escape from
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COVID-19 was another hot spot for errors. Early on, the Trump administration enlisted Twitter’s help to quell “misinformation” about panic buying at grocery stores, but as journalist David Zweig noted, it was Runs in a grocery store.
In August 2022, citing CDC data, reply tweets proving that COVID is not (and was not) the leading cause of death among children will have their replies and likes disabled to prevent the spread. Labeled as false alarm.The tweet it was actually replying to was I was left alone by mistake. There are many such examples. And to keep up with demand, Twitter hired foreign contractors to screen complex medical arguments with predictable results.
And then there’s Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Reporting on this was infamously banned from the New York Post’s Twitter account for violating its policy of reporting on “hacked materials,” but the hack did happen. I didn’t. ‘
It’s now that “Twitter got on the hack-and-dump wild tale” that Biden’s embarrassing data was stolen via hack (presumably by the Russians), loaded onto a laptop, and planted in a computer store in Delaware. I already know.
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This Rube Goldberg story was highly questionable even at the time. If we accept that the high-stakes decision to censor this article was not politically motivated, we must accept that the censorship was incredibly wrong.
Thankfully, most Americans consider this kind of censorship morally wrong. Nonetheless, those who continue to advocate or embrace it, whether big tech or government, have an obligation to explain why those they come to do their dirty work always fail miserably. I have.