Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
1. Thread:
THE TWITTER FILES
5:34 PM · Dec 2, 2022
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Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
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Dec 2
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2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
Dec 2
8
. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
...
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
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OPINION>JUDICIARY
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Censorship by surrogate: Why Musk’s document dump could be a game changer
BY JONATHAN TURLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/03/22 10:30 AM ET
...
The internal company documents released by Musk reinforce what we have seen previously in other instances of Twitter censorship. A recent
federal filing revealed a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford’s back-channel communication sought to censor other “unapproved opinions” on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before Congress this week [it] is tricky.”
At the time, Twitter’s Dorsey and other tech CEOs were about to appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media and their “content modification” policies. I had just
testified on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “‘little brother’ problem, a problem which private entities do for the government that which it cannot legally do for itself.” In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.”
The implications of these documents becomes more serious once the Biden campaign became the Biden administration. These documents show a back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state censorship.
As I have previously written,
the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.
That is precisely what Musk is now alleging. As the documents were being released,
he tweeted,
“Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”
...
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciar...-game-changer/
