We’re in agreement there. J.R. was good enough to reproduce it here in a single post, which is how I read it.
Old news, though. Did we learn anything yesterday that somehow makes this worse? We did learn that Trump officials also communicated with Twitter to take down stuff, and their requests were honored. Strange, if we’re to believe that the Twitter cooperation with government officials was just rank partisanship.
A broken clock is right once a day. Why do you think the WSJ also refused to post the Hunter Biden story and it was only the NY Post (Murdoch’s lowest tier news)?
I am still trying to figure out how people are still okay with and totally ignoring #10. You know the part where the actual government was sending stuff to twitter to have it removed. The Trump Administration. The government. First Amendment violation. Nah let's just ignore that.
and rank partisanship and the attempt of a malign foreign government to influence our political system, as well as that of the Europeans. That story doesn’t fit your own rank partisanship, does it.
not completely, but yea 2016 - media failed to stop election interference through their platform from the Russian gov 2020 - media made difficult decisions on what looked like another election interference
this is the problem, via Althouse: December 3, 2022 How elite media is covering Elon Musk's dumping of information about how Twitter helped the Democratic Party in the 2020 election. First, let me say, I would like a well-written, organized, comprehensive piece of writing explaining this material. Alternatively, show me everything — all the raw material. Instead, Elon Musk directed us to the Twitter account of Matt Taibbi, and we were expected to receive a long series of tweets and to puzzle through it. Was that to drive massive traffic to Twitter? Was it supposed to be better all fragmented like that? It certainly wasn't a way to get quick updates to news that was suddenly breaking. It's an old story: Twitter was skewed to favor Democrats. Now, presumably, there's impressive proof. Present the proof in a clear organized fashion! Musk enlisted Matt Taibbi, so why couldn't Matt Taibbi create a readable document and then just tweet a link to that document? Tweet #10: "10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:" "However:" sets up the next tweets, the ones that (supposedly) show the Democrats using the tools and receiving a sympathetic response from Twitter insiders. Most of this seems to be about the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. What I'd like to see this morning is a clear presentation of what was dribbled out last night. I look first to my favorite source for half a century: The New York Times. There's nothing at the top of the home page, so I search the page for Twitter. I get one article: "Twitter Keeps Missing Its Advertising Targets as Woes Mount."That's been a theme at the NYT: Twitter is doing badly under Musk. Woes Mount! But it doesn't say advertising is crashing or even down at all, just that there were "targets" and then those targets were missed. These were internal targets, so maybe they were very aggressive. I can't easily tell how woeful it is that these targets were missed. I search the whole site for "taibbi" and "twitter" and easily see that the story I'm looking for is, at least at the moment, nonexistent. I relocate to The Washington Post. Its home page is loaded with Twitter stories: "Gio Reyna has played seven minutes. This World Cup, he's the talk of Soccer Twitter," "TikTok, not Twitter, is the real menace," "From quitting to blocking: How to protect yourself on Musk’s Twitter," "Elon Musk says Kanye West suspended from Twitter after swastika tweet," "Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter." Five stories, but not the one I'm looking for. I do the site search for "taibbi" and "twitter." Nothing! I try NPR, BBC, CNN. Nothing. Nothing. Aha! CNN comes through for me: "Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story" by Brian Fung: For days, Twitter owner Elon Musk had teased a massive bombshell disclosure based on internal company documents that he claimed would reveal “what really happened” inside Twitter when it decided to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. But on Friday, instead of releasing a trove of documents to the public, Musk’s big reveal pointed to a series of tweets by the journalist Matt Taibbi, who had been provided with emails that largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.That closely tracks my perception of what happened. *** Twitter is a private company, but you can still argue that it ought to behave consistently with free speech ideals. This is a difficult concept for many people to understand, and I appreciate the precision of the language CNN is using here. The tweet thread also highlighted how officials from both political parties routinely wrote to Twitter asking for specific tweets to be removed.... Taibbi said the contact from political parties happened more frequently from Democrats, but provided no internal documents to back up his assertion. He also did not say that Democrats requested that Twitter suppress the Post story, and his account did not suggest that the US government had ever pressured Twitter to suppress the story. Thanks, CNN! That strikes me as a clear and balanced summary. If it's wrong, tell me exactly why. It's my touchstone at this point. more at the link
So the damning news is that Twitter suppressed tweets about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Not a good look for Twitter but hardly evidence of wrong doing by Joe Biden.
Althouse's comments about coverage of the story in the NY Post: And, yes, I've known all along that I could find coverage in The New York Post. The New York Post is all over it: I had little hope this is going to be the kind of story I want. But the story in writing is not as sensationalistic as the front page graphics, and it helpfully brings out aspects that are missing from the CNN presentation. Highlights: The chaos and confusion behind closed doors at Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the October 2020 Hunter Biden expose show that a small group of top-level execs decided to label the Post’s story as “hacked material” without any evidence — behind the back of then-CEO and founder Jack Dorsey. ... According to Taibbi, Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde played a “key role” in the censorship decision. Damning emails and comments from former Twitter employees showed that “everyone knew” the social media giant’s suppression of The Post’s scoops about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. “was f—ed.”... “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it,” the ex-employee added. “They just freelanced it,” a former employee told Taibbi about how the decision came about. The decision left high-level executives puzzled. “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” Trenton Kennedy, a communications official wrote in an apparent internal email to colleagues. To which former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker responded that it is “reasonable” to assume materials were hacked and that “caution is warranted.” “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” former Twitter Vice President of Global Communications Brandon Borrman asks in another missive. “Everyone knew this was f–ked,” a former worker told Taibbi about Twitter’s official stance of on the Hunter story. According to Taibbi, the social media company “took extraordinary steps to suppress”... Twitter’s censorship of the story led to then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany getting locked out of her account with just weeks to go before the 2020 election.... Taibbi also tweeted: “Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.” But the former Rolling Stone writer said the “system wasn’t balanced” and “was based on contacts.” Posted by Ann Althouse at 5:06 AM
I wish as a society we cared less about these "who's more corrupt" poo flinging battles and actually cared about real issues like rental price fixing. If you want to know how flimsy, hypocritical and empty anti- corruption politics is look at Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro ran on "anti-corruption" while not giving a **** about basic things like wealth inequality. And turns out he was even more corrupt.
related: Musk Reveals What Caused Twitter To Bury The Hunter Biden Laptop Story, And Trump’s Claim That The 2020 Election Was “Stolen” Is No Longer “Baseless” [Updated!] https://ethicsalarms.com/2022/12/02...20-election-was-stolen-is-no-longer-baseless/ excerpt: So far, not surprisingly, the mainstream media isn’t covering the story encompassed by Musk’s internal records about how Twitter helped bury the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. It is continuing to concentrate on Kanye West’s Nazi affection and his banning by Musk as its Twitter story of the day. This reflects poorly on Trump, you see. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! *** So we now know, those of us (not me!) who weren’t convinced already, that the decision on Jack Dorsey’s social media platform to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story as long as it might adversely affect the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump was not made in good faith, was politically motivated, and was engineered by partisans in the Twitter management. I don’t want to read any more about how Donald Trump’s belief that the Presidency was stolen from him is “baseless,” as the official talking point goes, and that his saying so is a “Big Lie.” No one knows or can know if the laptop revelations would have changed enough votes to elect Trump had they been fairly reported; personally, I doubt it. Nonetheless, relevant and potentially influential information was deliberately withheld from voters by the social media companies, Big Tech and the news media with the clear intent of assisting Joe Biden’s campaign. This was a far more consequential interference with our elections than anything Russia did in 2016. If the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, it unquestionably was corrupted. more at the link
