Elon vs Twitter update: Elon helped America win , Tesla stock through the roof

Good to see Althouse jump in on the smear. I looked over his thesis this morning, a total waste of a morning by the way and one of the reasons I haven't posted on here *as much* as I used to as I don't see any impact from it...

But I took a look and what I got out of it wasn't that Roth was advocating for teens to be on Grindr but rather that you can't stop teens from getting on Grindr as they will find a way to subvert whatever age restrictions you place on there, therefore you still content providers to address these issues in order to make it a safe place given they are ending up on the platform anyway:

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3771&context=edissertations

He's arguing that service providers put an age screen and then absolve themselves from responsibility under Section 230, and Roth is in fact saying this isn't working to protect youth. He isn't arguing for "greater access" rather that these platforms already have youth on them and therefore content providers have to take that into account.

 

honestly I haven't paid much attention to the Yoel Roth dissertation part of the story. Too easy to take something out of context and blow it up into something that it's not. I'll wait for others to sort out the details and write about it

 

They should be so embarrassed.

 

So do we have a tl;dr about all this yet?

What are the big hitters that incriminate people?

 

Elon and the right are doing essentially what Bolsonaro in Brazil did to gain popularity.

Spam endless diatribes about opposition corruption many of the corruption being trivial and having no impact on the daily loves of Brazilians as not only a method to gain rabid fanbase but for those rabid fanbases to ignore the entire economic systems that are causing everyone's frustrations.

 

So far the smoking gun is that apparently Twitter had internal debates about decisions. I could see what this would seem crazy to Elon Musk.

 

don't forget that the FBI was involved

 

Oh spooky.

 

it's not like you harness the power of the state to silence your opposition

 

Truth to power! Big tranny industry is out to get you.

You wouldn't know an actual sincere fight for speech if it knocked you upside the head.

 

The FBI met with Twitter execs in the months prior to the election and warned them that any upcoming news story relating to Hunter Biden might be Russian disinformation. Other than that, the decision to censor that story was internally somewhat contentious and debated, as was the decision to permanently suspend Trump's account. It seems like they were looking for reasons to do both without coming across as overtly biased. Twitter employees really disliked Trump and were concerned about the platform amplifying his lies regarding the election.

I haven't followed it super closely since the first few Twitter files dump, but that's what I've taken away from it so far. Not much there that is really surprising or incriminating, from what I can tell.

 

but don't take my word for it

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitte...als-11670360232?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

Twitter and Disinformation Wars
Intelligence-agency meddling in elections is no Trump-era aberration.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Dec. 6, 2022 5:26 pm ET

Each day the world throws up a novel set of facts that beg to be understood on their own terms, and each day the press shoves them into a familiar formula.

It ought to be with some chagrin, though, that where we once expected the press to keep the government honest, we’ve had to rely on civil servants like Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz and special counsel John Durham to do the job because, to put an indelicate point on it, the press has been part of the coverup. That coverup concerns perhaps the most important trend of our age—the entry of U.S. spy agencies and their disinformation as a factor in our domestic politics.

Those who appreciate a complete record can now thank Elon Musk for releasing Twitter’s internal deliberations on the Hunter Biden laptop, which produced an unexpected hero in Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna. Twitter is seen, meanwhile, straining to justify its censorship under its “hacked materials” policy, despite having received no complaint from Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign that the material was either hacked or illegitimate (because, of course, it wasn’t).

Just out of sight remains the elephant on the sofa, the intervention of Obama-era intelligence officials to promote the lie that the laptop was a Russian intelligence operation. Their intervention may well have changed the election, decided by a mere 44,000 votes in the Electoral College, less even than the 2016 margin, which was also influenced by a late intervention of the intelligence community in the person of then-FBI chief James Comey.

In a practical sense, 2016 and 2020 are the same story. In 2016, protocol and procedure left the Obama Justice Department no way to finesse the Hillary Clinton email matter, until Mr. Comey invented a solution by citing secret “Russian intelligence” in a way that still frustrates accountability today.

In 2020, intelligence veterans again used their presumed access to secret knowledge to protect Joe Biden from the laptop revelations.

The story applies to 2017 and 2018, when the FBI and Robert Mueller used their control of secret information to hide for two years the fact that no real evidence of collusion existed.

There’s a pattern here. You might tell yourself it’s a Trump-era aberration. Get ready to be disappointed. The genie won’t be stuffed back into the bottle, especially when no one is trying.

Lately the media have sought to recover their virtue by acknowledging that the laptop exists, in the form of belated reporting from the Washington Post, the New York Times and CBS. Nowhere seen, though, is the journalistic curiosity to investigate the calculated effort at deceit, which eventually involved 51 former officials, how it came to be organized, by whom, etc.

The reason is obvious. The press itself is implicated.

Disinformation doesn’t have to be persuasive. It only has to confuse. In 1941 how did Stalin miss 151 divisions massing on his border? He didn’t. He was swamped with intelligence saying the Germans were about to invade—and also intelligence that the Germans thought Stalin was about to invade, and intelligence that the Germans were trying to trick Stalin into invading.

This is your model of how disinformation operated in the laptop smokescreen too, which wasn’t even slightly credible to anybody who thought about it for a moment. But it worked and now will come the deluge. The technological moment guarantees it. The sudden, dramatic increase in the geopolitical stakes guarantees it. Our information environment will fill with the disinformation of intelligence agencies, ours included, which won’t be able to leave these opportunities alone.

The alleged Russian meddling of 2016 was already a drop in the ocean compared with the flogging of Russian meddling by domestic agents trying to influence our politics. This column got interested in UFOs for one reason: the intelligence community report of June 25, 2021, when officials with access to classified information told us what they might believe about UFOs if they didn’t have access to classified information, a situation that can only lead to mischief, and has, which smarter officials, especially at NASA, are trying to fix.

Our media needs to up its own game; from personal knowledge, public servants involved in exposing FBI misdeeds during the 2016-19 era and who are by no means Trumpistas are nevertheless appalled by the media’s refusal to acknowledge reality, and rightly so.

Which brings us to Matt Taibbi, the independent reporter selected to receive the gift of the Twitter files. He never struck me as a journalistic lion, but I happily named him in several columns for being a rare scribe willing, amid the febrile, herd-like embrace of the Steele dossier, to say the emperor had no clothes.

Mr. Musk would have done better to release the Twitter documents widely, not least to provoke a healthy variety of reactions. But at least he picked a reporter who has been generous in his contempt for Rachel Maddow, which ought to be a requirement for employment in the news organizations we’re going to need in the future, equipped with nonconformist spine and conviction.

Appeared in the December 7, 2022, print edition as 'Twitter and Disinformation Wars'.
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Can you summarize relevant points in you own words?

It really hard to have a discussion like this.

 

If the FBI was letting Twitter know what accounts were suspected of being foreign entities spreading misinformation, I don't think that's the power of the state silencing opposition.

 

that doesn't sound at all like what they were doing though

 

related:

https://thehill.com/opinion/3772593-feehery-i-miss-the-old-left/

2 hours ago
Feehery: I miss the old left
TheHill - The Hill News
by John Feehery, opinion contributor

Rep. Ted Lieu, the liberal Democrat from California, shocked me the other day: He said something I agree with. He tweeted, “The Constitution prevents government from regulating speech on Twitter.”

His comment reminded me how much I miss the old left.

When I was studying history at Marquette University, one of my favorite professors was Athan Theoharis, a distinguished historian who specialized in the abuses of the FBI during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover.

Theoharis perfected the FOIA request, with which he would badger the bureau into revealing to him the manifold files of Hoover, the longest-serving and most-feared bureaucrat in American history.

As students, we would plow through the files and would learn about how Hoover’s FBI would investigate such important figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Joe Louis, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and just about every other major political and entertainment figure of the mid-20th century.

With those files, Hoover, effectively using the media, would spread misinformation, blackmail opponents, and intimidate members of Congress, senators, even presidents to achieve his goals, some of which were laudable but all of which were extra-legal.

The FBI was notorious in those days for infiltrating political groups that it found objectionable, sowing discord within those groups, and finding ways to disrupt their free-speech rights as supposedly guaranteed under the Constitution. The COINTELPRO, started in 1956, was especially effective in undermining all kinds of groups on the left and the right.

While Theoharis spent most of his research investigating the FBI, he also taught us some of the more nefarious activities of the CIA, which did internationally what Hoover did domestically: undermining movements that it saw as a threat to America.

I am not naïve and I know that it’s a complicated world where competing interests require not just statecraft but spycraft. But when America doesn’t live up to its best principles, it is usually counter-productive to American interests.

In 1971, a group of left-wing activists broke into a local FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole a thousand surveillance files held there, which they later sent to national media outlets, including The Washington Post. The Post would end up publishing a front-page expose of some of J. Edgar Hoover’s most nefarious activities. I wonder if the Post would bother to report on those files today.

Back in the old days, the left distrusted big-government institutions, like the FBI and the CIA. They didn’t trust big corporations or big pharmaceutical companies. The American Civil Liberties Union vigorously defended free speech, even free speech that it desperately opposed.

Those days seem to be gone.

Now, the progressive movement is so afraid of free speech that it condemns those, like Elon Musk, who go out of their way to protect it.

Unlike the old left, the new left embraces the collusion of big-tech platforms and the intelligence community to stop the reelection of Donald Trump and to silence conservative voices.

The old left would have applauded Elon Musk for opening the files and letting the American people see how far the government would go to squash political and scientific speech that it didn’t like. The new left sees Musk as a trouble-maker who must be destroyed.

I am a conservative and have been since my college days. But I appreciated the old left because it believed in free expression, it often battled against big corporate monopolies and it didn’t trust big government and an unaccountable intelligence community.

But the old left is gone and now we have a new left that is more than happy to upend revered constitutional protections, all in the furtherance of a woke agenda that is, at its core, profoundly anti-American.

I miss the old left. I may have disagreed with them, but at least they believed in the value of free speech and were aware of the dangers of unaccountable government.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).
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So that would imply they wanted Twitter to specifically do something.

What was the way they were going to enforce it? Soft power through working with Congress to remove any tax incentives? Criminal charges?

You start off at the first page of these conspiracies but never can flesh out these conspiracies with motive, opportunity cost, realistic means etc.

Flesh it out this time. What was the FBI specifically doing

 

My daughter is 6 years old. She constantly tries to involve herself in conversations the adults have around the table, even though she understands quite little when it comes to most of it.

fchowd reminds me a bit of that.

Except that she is a quick learner.

I commend you for trying though.

 

Sound like? Where are the fact?. As conservatives would call it, why would "Trump's FBI" secretly collude to get rid of him?

 

Solid. Thanks.

This is what my takeaway was, but it was so mild that I thought I was surely missing something given how absolutely rabid this is making some people.