Elon Musk Buys Twitter

[Cthulhu 2020]

Yes, the multitudinous Republican back channels to Twitter, whose employees donate in excess of 99% to Democrats.

Let me know if you ever tire of content-less insults.

Likewise. I can give you links to the Twitter Files if you're having trouble sourcing the Twitter company emails to government agencies and Democratic politicians. If you've already read and intend to dismiss them as innocent, then we do have nothing further to discuss.

Outside of the Twitter Files being hilariously over-blown political theater by Elon Musk, how do you know Elon Musk and his reporters of the Twitter files aren't lying to you? The conservative line is that "everyone on the left is lying to you" and yet you just blindly believe every single source you like? Come on man, you can't be that dumb. At the very least you should at least have thought "What if Elon Musk is pruning the evidence to make it look particularly bad for Democrats and good for Republicans?" But shit, guess you're not very critical of sources you worship.

[Edge-]

Outside of the Twitter Files being hilariously over-blown political theater by Elon Musk, how do you know Elon Musk and his reporters of the Twitter files aren't lying to you?

Why on earth would Elom every lie about anything?

[Cthulhu 2020]

Why on earth would Elom every lie about anything?

You forgot your /s again

[postman1782]

I would have made a new thread for this but I guess I can post it here to keep the site clean. Facebook has unbanned president Trump!

Going to be a short time for him to be on there before he gets indicted.

[tehdang]

Nick Fuestes suspended less than 24hrs after return to Twitter. So, please put your spin on this @tehdang.

It has very little to do with my previous argument in this thread. I'm linking the post here.

Please do, the specific citation to your claims. Because I've kept an eye on them and haven't seen them, but would love to finally see what everyone is talking about.

Reminder that I'm referring to government agencies and elected officials going crazy on attempts to censor parodies, contrary opinions, journalism, and jokes. These are all sourced from emails and documents Musk authorized to release to individuals outside Twitter.
Schiff:
The joke that "You can tell it's a deep fake because Jill Biden isn't covering for him is censor worthy.
When told about its obvious humorous content/would be left up, Schiff's staff persisted.
Schiff and his staff fought to ban any and all content about his staff, including "quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content" and "suppress[ion of] any and all search results about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff."

Schiff's office tried to cover up meetings between his staff and leaker Ciaramella (reminder that Schiff and Ciaramella lied about contact prior to whistleblower complaint) and Steele dossier takes

FBI/other government agencies:
Pressure from one government partner demanding Twitter action, without Twitter verification of the complaint, was marked as "government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution" and confessed a feeling that "our window on that is closing" for continuing to not act.
Yoel (former head trust and safety) characterized the requests as "more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau." and "I'm not particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers here"
FBI seeks to censor accounts over jokes, like Republicans go vote Wednesday, Democrats thursday and "I'm not gonna count your vote if you're not wearing a mask" or "For every negative comment on this post I'm adding another vote for the democrats.
FBI seeks censorship of a lot of obvious satire, "I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter."

They go on, but I only want to show enough evidence to see if anybody is willing to bite on "maybe the FBI and at least one congressman overstepped." Because, I do believe government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor their user's speech goes too far against first amendment principles and their proper remit such as terrorism conspiracies, wire fraud, impersonation of officials. Say what you want about misinformation, but I want the actual state to not declare what is truth and censor speech on those lines, but instead publish their own views alongside and seek display of their preferred information.

You mean we disagree?

Obvious "we disagree" is noted.

Citation please.

Bear in mind that a conservative donor bought a social media company so his conservative posts wouldn't be censored. I can't imagine the employees banding together to do the same.

Strange thing to doubt, considering silicon valley:
Open Secrets

I have my ultra-cynical worldview, but maybe you can break the trend by confirming "Yes, it appears that Twitter employees did donate in excess of 99% of their political contributions to Democrats. This might possibly have affected how favorably they'd look upon politically partisan requests."

how do you know Elon Musk and his reporters of the Twitter files aren't lying to you?

He really has everything to lose by painstakingly manipulating thousands of internal company emails, to be pored over and examined for interesting content by multiple individuals and their helpers, and all under released staff like Yoel Roth, former FBI official/Twitter employee Jim Baker, and the other dozen former FBI analysts/etc free to accuse him of faking parts or the entirety. Would-be-conspiracy-theorists are better off admitting they are real Twitter documents, but they like their government doing what they did, or claim it was just mistakes by overzealous government employees. Secondarily, there isn't a vast right-wing conspiracy to help Elon fake thousands of emails between Legislative and Executive branches of government and Twitter. He doesn't have a massive right-wing operationally-secure troll army to forge documents at this level. Thirdly, the section of the Twitter Files that concerns the actual censoring of the Hunter Biden Laptop Story actually was the subject of lawsuit and deposition (sworn declaration). The sworn statement matches internal company files released by Twitter.

[Endus]

It has very little to do with my previous argument in this thread. I'm linking the post here.

Reminder that I'm referring to government agencies and elected officials going crazy on attempts to censor parodies, contrary opinions, journalism, and jokes. These are all sourced from emails and documents Musk authorized to release to individuals outside Twitter.

And the complaints about literally all of this are intentionally disingenuous bullshit. Including yours.

All of this is requests for moderation by Twitter. Which, as a private corporation, was free to choose whether or not the posts in question were worth moderating.

They go on, but I only want to show enough evidence to see if anybody is willing to bite on "maybe the FBI and at least one congressman overstepped." Because, I do believe government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor their user's speech goes too far against first amendment principles and their proper remit such as terrorism conspiracies, wire fraud, impersonation of officials.

And you'd be wrong. There's literally nothing the least bit objectionable going on here. Twitter was not forced or even unduly pressured to remove anything. Requests were made, which Twitter was free to refuse. Which they often did.

Say what you want about misinformation, but I want the actual state to not declare what is truth and censor speech on those lines, but instead publish their own views alongside and seek display of their preferred information.

What you're pushing here is misinformation. There was no "censoring", beyond completely normal private-site moderation practices.

You are not owed a platform. That is not part of your First Amendment rights. Twitter can ban the fuck out of you because "it's Tuesday", and you've got no real recourse (other than appealing to Twitter to change their minds) and it does not infringe on your rights and freedoms in any way whatsoever. The entire position you're pushing is intentionally dishonest, meant to backdoor some bullshit "right to a platform" into the right to free speech, and that's simply not something you're guaranteed. Nor should you be.

I have my ultra-cynical worldview, but maybe you can break the trend by confirming "Yes, it appears that Twitter employees did donate in excess of 99% of their political contributions to Democrats. This might possibly have affected how favorably they'd look upon politically partisan requests."

Maybe. And? They'd free to ban people for "being Republican" if they want to. That's what freedom looks like, dude.

Like, I have no actual interest in whether Twitter staff did any such thing. Even if they did, so what? You're not owed anything. They're free to do exactly that. It doesn't infringe on anyone's rights or freedoms. The best you might argue is whether it's against Twitter's policies, but that's up to Twitter and no one else.

This is such a whopping level of utterly unwarranted entitlement and disinformation.

[Breccia]

Reminder that I'm referring to government agencies and elected officials going

*LOUD ANNOYING BUZZER*

Hypocrisy has been detected. I personally linked an article where 41 elected government officials lobbied AT&T to agree to Newsmax's demands and pay them more money to keep them on the air, claiming Republicans were being silenced and it was a First Amendment issue.

Your argument is invalid. You have no standing here. And if Elon Musk really thought the FBI overstepped, he would do something more than retweet.

[Edge-]

Reminder that I'm referring to government agencies and elected officials going crazy on attempts to censor parodies, contrary opinions, journalism, and jokes. These are all sourced from emails and documents Musk authorized to release to individuals outside Twitter.

It is a little different than the FBI or elected Democratic congressmen asking to ban their enemies or humorous parody accounts.

Alright, keeping consistent here. Note: I don't qualify, "Hey do you mind reviewing this?" as much more than a standard user report. They're using no powers of government outside of a government email, which as we all know means dick in this context to Twitter.

Schiff:
The joke that "You can tell it's a deep fake because Jill Biden isn't covering for him is censor worthy.
When told about its obvious humorous content/would be left up, Schiff's staff persisted.

Jesus, didn't he get the fucking source materials? Why the fuck is he posting such hilariously low quality images that are hard to read?

Either way, so she used an argumentative fallacy, and was politely rebuffed by the Twitter representative who offered to walk her through their policies. I'm not seeing anything remotely nefarious here. The email doesn't appear to be from a government one even with the addresses blocked out (I believe those usually have signatures, but correct me if I'm wrong here) so a political staffer reaching out on a personal account in a political capacity and being told to stuff it isn't exactly the most sensational sequence of events.

One would argue that's actually things working as intended, with Twitter not simply accommodating the requests of their Democratic masters as is so often alleged.

Schiff and his staff fought to ban any and all content about his staff, including "quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content" and "suppress[ion of] any and all search results about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff."

Assuming this is the same email, Taibbi's sourcing is fucking illogical if he's actually intending things like those screenshots to be remotely useful, which makes me sure think this terribly presentation of the materials is intentional. But I digress...

Assuming this is the same email, from a personal/political email account of a staffer reaching out with requests.

And again, Twitter - at least according to Taibbi who does not provide a screenshot for this for some curious reason - strongly rebuffs the request. Still curiouser that these supposed lapdogs who are so happy to do the bidding of their Democratic masters, especially those from California, would say that such a request would not be conceivable.

Schiff's office tried to cover up meetings between his staff and leaker Ciaramella (reminder that Schiff and Ciaramella lied about contact prior to whistleblower complaint) and Steele dossier takes

We have 4 screenshots here and a story from Matt that let's just take at face value, because the real meat and potatoes is his next tweet -

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613932031142133761



So the four accounts in question -

One was suspended for...ban evasion. So violating a completely separate and unrelated policy, not gonna cry over that.

The other three? Read that

We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification.

Key phrase, as in no new action was taken as the accounts had separately been deamplified previously. A practice we know Twitter has used in the past and continues to use today. Given that these all do appear to be Q accounts, and their policy was to deamplify those accounts, this makes total sense.

So again, we have Twitter declining to take the requested action of a Democratic Representative. They took one action that was completely unrelated, and otherwise did nothing. Still not exactly sure what the big problem here is beyond "politicians and their staffs have access to Twitter staff for this kind of stuff" which like...yeah? They all do.

FBI/other government agencies:
Pressure from one government partner demanding Twitter action, without Twitter verification of the complaint, was marked as "government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution" and confessed a feeling that "our window on that is closing" for continuing to not act.

I'm gonna need more than this, this seems fairly vague honestly. It's an internal email about a request to label an account as state-actor? And now the request is more specifically requesting it being listed as Russian, which the internal guy doesn't find remotely surprising but doesn't have the evidence to prove. And per his own words has left it alone while waiting for more.

What government partners, though? Just US? International? This is one snippet of one email that seems to be part of a much larger discussion, leaving us with a wholly incomplete picture to make any real assessments on. At face value, it's simply a look into what any major social media organization deals with in its relationships with the various governments of the world. Again, a lot of this, as I've said, is fairly "boring" day to day shit that happens at millions of companies every day and is no more nefarious there. Folks freaking out because they're seeing it for the first time is no more significant than someone losing their mind because they just saw an ocean for the first time in their life.

Yoel (former head trust and safety) characterized the requests as "more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau." and "I'm not particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers here"

Alright, so we have here what appears to be some communications between the IC and tech companies about Russian propaganda activities they felt they should be aware of (back to #42). However in #45 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701493947887616

45. Many people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the FITF/FBI.

He in no way, shape, or form proves this. He shows the declassified cover page of one such report which I'll note reads ONLY FOR INTELLIGENCE PURPOSES, mentions a whistleblower, and suddenly these reports are "directing".

He doesn't prove this in the slightest. Any reasonable reader would instantly see that he's made leaps in logic that would shatter every world record.

This is precisely the shit I'm talking about. The only way to come to this conclusoin is to have began with this conclusion, and the only way to read these tweets and agree with this conclusion is because it's the conclusion you want. There is no evidence to support this, instead the very cover letter Taibbi shares contradicts his "conclusiion"

FBI seeks to censor accounts over jokes, like Republicans go vote Wednesday, Democrats thursday and "I'm not gonna count your vote if you're not wearing a mask" or "For every negative comment on this post I'm adding another vote for the democrats.

Let's kick this off - https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857566894809103

To answer his question: I imagine when they're using Twitter as part of their investigations or monitoring and come across something potentially worth flagging they simply make a note of it. Not exactly rocket science, but let's go on.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857573219819529



You're...going to have to explain this "master-canine" thing to me. All I see here is the FBI flagging a few accounts that may have violated Twitter's ToS. They've requested no action, and instead wrote

...for any action or inaction deemed appropriate through Twitter policy."

Which like...literally not censorship, but whatever.

So what action did Twitter take?

Three suspended for multi-account use and ban evasion. Violations of Twitter's policies.

Is the problem that the reports are coming from the government? Because that's not like, actually a problem. The government isn't requesting action or compelling Twitter to do anything. Twitter has 100% agency to choose to take any action, and upon reviewing the accounts confirmed that the accounts all violated Twitter's Term's of Service.

Is the complaint that "our people are getting caught"?

The worst potential action is an account being escalated for review. Though I'm not sure what showing two tweets from @fromMA is supposed to significy? Are those the only tweets the account ever tweeted or something?

FBI seeks censorship of a lot of obvious satire, "I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter."

The final one!

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857603867598859

Again, starting off with...an email request to see if

1. The accounts have violated Twitter's ToS, not exactly scary
2. Issuing preservation letters for those accounts, which is a very standard legal procedure should pending legal action be on the way. Again, not nefariouos, very standard legal shit.
3. VOLUNTARY submission of location data to the FBI for followups. Again, we have Twitter here with the ability to say, "We volunteer no such information until you have someone serve us a legal document compelling us to do so."

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857609118859264

Which was simply passed on with no order compelling them to do anything, and a request in case Twitter wanted the formal preservation letters. Not exactly scary stuff.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857615456534529

Heyyyy, they banned folks!

Oh, for violating Twitter's ToS, not because the government even asked them to. FYI it's really easy to spot a lot of accounts violating ToS, trolls have really obvious patterns.

And removed some tweets that were apparently spreading misinformation in violating of Twitter's then-policies. And then they confirm they would like the formal preservation letters, which is standard legal stuff. Twitter not taking action against a "celebrity" account? not surprisng.

To the post you linked - satire does not protect accounts from violating Twitter's ToS in regards to ban evasion, multiple-account use, spam, or misinformation. That these accounts were low engagement shows that Twitter likely already deamplified them and they were flagged in their internal systems.

Really not sure what the pictures are supposed to show though.

They go on, but I only want to show enough evidence to see if anybody is willing to bite on "maybe the FBI and at least one congressman overstepped."

Not at all. I see a bunch of requests to Twitter, most of which Twitter declines, followed by Twitter simply taking action in accordance with their policies. As well as some fairly boring and standard corporate and government communications, which if you're familiar with either are super fucking boring like this shit. If you're not, then I guess it's probably super sexy and provocative and exciting but really, reading through your linked tweets and the context surrounding it has only confirmed my previous position.

Taibbi is a dishonest hack who was somehow given full access to Twitter's internal documents, and the best he could do was some quickly and poorly cropped screenshots, Olympic level leaps of logics, and a reliance on innuendo to reinforce a narrative that conservatives have been spinning for years. And even with this "treasure trove" of evidence, he still can't actually find any.

Again: Almost all of the requests from Adam Schiff and other Democrats were denied, or no action deemed necessary by Twitter. Not exactly very "Democrat controlled".

government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor

This did not exist anywhere in any of the tweets you linked, nor those surrounding them.

first amendment principles

The First Amendment has nothing to do with anything linked above, and this continues to reinforce that conservatives struggle to understand The Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

I want the actual state to not declare what is truth and censor speech on those lines

I have great news for you: None of that happened here.

[Breccia]

Heyyyy, they banned folks!

Oh, for violating Twitter's ToS

Yes, this needs to be absolutely clear: if someone is banned from a private company for not following that private company's rules and contracts, it does not matter who reported them. What matters is they broke the rules, and got caught. They could be reported by me, the FBI, Sen. Graham, Sen. Graham's wife, Arthas the Lich King, or accident. The motive for hitting the "report" key may vary, but if they broke the rules and get caught, the motive isn't the key feature.

Also, for shame @tehdang claiming to want "the actual state to not declare what is truth" you backed Trump. Trump supporters have zero legs to stand on when complaining about the government declaring what truth is when Trump invented election fraud out of thin air and still claims he won in 2020.

That's pathetic. That's deplorable. It's not even funny how hypocritical that is. I've met rodents with more self-awareness than that statement.

[Ivanstone]

Strange thing to doubt, considering silicon valley:
Open Secrets

I have my ultra-cynical worldview, but maybe you can break the trend by confirming "Yes, it appears that Twitter employees did donate in excess of 99% of their political contributions to Democrats. This might possibly have affected how favorably they'd look upon politically partisan requests."

My realistic world view is:
The number of total contributors is unknown. $900k is chicken scratch. What percentage of Twitter employees actually donate at all? And how many of those employees work in moderation? And does corporate policy curb partisan moderation?

But hey at least you get conspiracy theories. Shouldn't you be happy with a capitalist conservative president and a capitalist conservative governor?

[Edge-]

My realistic world view is:
The number of total contributors is unknown. $900k is chicken scratch. What percentage of Twitter employees actually donate at all? And how many of those employees work in moderation? And does corporate policy curb partisan moderation?

But hey at least you get conspiracy theories. Shouldn't you be happy with a capitalist conservative president and a capitalist conservative governor?

What's funny is that every "partisan" request he cited was either ignored or only actioned on for completely unrelated reasons. It's all fuckin innuendo and suggestion without every connecting the dots to draw the cow.

Yeah, money talks in politics. But $900K in 2020? Let's go to Open Secrets, the experts on the matter - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/202...n-doubling-16/

Most expensive ever: 2020 election cost $14.4 billion

Now please check my math here, again, I suck at this (like really, I'm bad at math), but is that around .00625% of total spending on the election? Also known as generally not even a rounding error?

@tehdang, would you bend over backwards for someone who paid you .00625% of your bi-annual income?

[bladeXcrasher]

I didn't answer that which I cannot spin.

At least your non-attempt to spin the almost immediate suspension of Nick Fuentes because he broke the ToS of Elom's Twitter proves you don't have a leg to stand on here. Do you possess a single thought that is your own, or is everything in your life passing along garbage you are spoon feed, re: Twitter Files, that is thoroughly picked apart with the smallest amount of effort?

[Orange Joe]

Obvious "we disagree" is noted.

There is no disagree about it. There is just you trying to lie about it.

[Hypasonic]

https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/st...84256634097664
Since twitter is having a meltdown over this, perhaps someone here could debunk this nutjob for what he is? I mean, he has to be a paid actor or something.
Bizarre behavoir.

https://twitter.com/hodgetwins/statu...67434613411840

It's like, parody. Legit no way this is genuine.

[unfilteredJW]

https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/st...84256634097664
Since twitter is having a meltdown over this, perhaps someone here could debunk this nutjob for what he is? I mean, he has to be a paid actor or something.
Bizarre behavoir.

https://twitter.com/hodgetwins/statu...67434613411840

It's like, parody. Legit no way this is genuine.

Have you met Project Veritas?

[Xyonai]

It's more Veritas bullshit, that's really all you need to glean from it to determine authenticity.

The fact that, so many years and lawsuits later, anyone still takes them seriously is fucking depressing.

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/st...84256634097664
Since twitter is having a meltdown over this, perhaps someone here could debunk this nutjob for what he is? I mean, he has to be a paid actor or something.
Bizarre behavoir.

https://twitter.com/hodgetwins/statu...67434613411840

It's like, parody. Legit no way this is genuine.

It's Project Vertitas, a right wing "spy" organization (seriously, they want to be spies) with a long history of "stings" that end up just being videos with intentionally deceptive edits and cuts to create false narratives.

This is the outfit that got ACORN shut down based off one of those completely false videos. This is the outfit that tried to send one of their own WashPo to tell a fake story about how Roy Moore sexaually harassed her during his Senate bid when other women came out with stories, but was quickly caught because their "agent" bragged about getting hired by Project Veritas on her public, personal social media accounts. This is the same outfit that calls people to leave a message on their voicemail as part of a "sting", forget to hang up, and then leave a long voicemail of their planning session. This is the same outfit that lurks LinkedIn - which shows subscribers exactly who is looking at their account pages - while logged in with one of their personal accounts before remembering they needed to log out first to avoid suspicion.

There's absolutely no reason to believe anything in these videos given their long, long history of deception and ineptitude.

[Hypasonic]

So this "guy" in the video is just an actor of sorts then? He sure seems it, well over the top in every sense. (Talking about his reaction) First thing I thought was "he isn't behaving proportionately to what I'm watching". Literally soap opera-ish.

[Edge-]

So this "guy" in the video is just an actor of sorts then? He sure seems it, well over the top in every sense. (Talking about his reaction) First thing I thought was "he isn't behaving proportionately to what I'm watching". Literally soap opera-ish.

Nope, probably an employee. And undoubtedly super selectively edited and misleading.

They're not worth wasting time on or taking serious. They're red meat for the crowd that wants to believe this kind of bullshit even if it's bullshit.

[Cthulhu 2020]

He really has everything to lose by painstakingly manipulating thousands of internal company emails,

LMAO no he doesn't. He's fired

to be pored over and examined for interesting content by multiple individuals and their helpers, and all under released staff like Yoel Roth, former FBI official/Twitter employee Jim Baker, and the other dozen former FBI analysts/etc free to accuse him of faking parts or the entirety.

It's amusing that your mind immediately went to "faking" as in forging, when you can't seem to comprehend that he could be (and basically is) cherry picking information that's favorable to the narrative he's spinning. If you can't possibly comprehend how one could cherry pick information for the Twitter files to make the government look bad, you don't know how information manipulation works. But also, never claim the main stream media lies ever again. It's nice of you to admit your own biases though, not even questioning how you're being manipulated and gladly swallowing all you're given like a good obedient conservative.

Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Anyone who seriously think there's anything more to the Hunter Biden story than dick pics is a fucking idiot. Get over it.

- - - Updated - - -

Man why do conservatives hate the first amendment so much? Twitter was exercising their first amendment rights to freedom of association, and conservatives cry that they should be controlled by the government like a utility. That's socialism!