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

Xopher · Dec 26, 2022

AroundTheWorld said: ↑

I have an American Master of Laws degree and got admitted to the New York Bar.

What do you have to offer in terms of expertise?
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Then please explain the first amendment violation, in detail, because there isn't one here.

Space Ghost · Dec 26, 2022

This is how its going with Twitter 1.0 logic
-We must stop Russian propaganda and russian influence on election
-We must stop misinformation
-We know there is a left bias because right is bigots and racist
-nothingburger
-everyone knew what was going on
-The right is just cherry picking
-We didnt know because it was something new and twitter was doing its best.
-Twitter 2.0 is worse. They are doing everything Twitter 1.0 was doing but Twitter 1.0 didn't know any better.

The logic is mind numbing. These same people defended the Patriot act using the same exact logic. Gullible and naïve.

Os Trigonum · Dec 26, 2022

Xopher said: ↑

Then please explain the first amendment violation, in detail, because there isn't one here.
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straw man straw man straw man

AroundTheWorld · Dec 26, 2022

Xopher said: ↑

Then please explain the first amendment violation, in detail, because there isn't one here.
Click to expand...

AroundTheWorld said: ↑

Also, the legal argument is made in possibly easier to understand terms here (even before Elon Musk unveiled a lot more evidence of government collusion with Twitter (which is undoubtedly happening with other social media platforms as well)).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitte...saki-murthy-section-230-antitrust-11660732095

Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censorship
Alex Berenson was kicked off the site at the White House’s urging. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.

By Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld
Aug. 17, 2022 1:47 pm ET

Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrote last week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

OPINION: FREE EXPRESSION
The Left's Suppression of Speech

36:02
Facts that Mr. Berenson unearthed through the discovery process confirm that the administration has been secretly asking social-media companies to shut down the accounts of specific prominent critics of administration policy.

On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden: “On Covid misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook.” Mr. Biden replied: “They’re killing people.” (The president later said he meant users were killing people.) Later that day, Twitter locked Mr. Berenson’s account, and on Aug. 28 it banned him permanently.

Last Friday Mr. Berenson published conversations from an internal Twitter Slack channel. Referring to an April 2021 meeting with White House officials, one Twitter employee noted that the meeting overall was “pretty good,” but added that the White House “had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”

Another employee asked: “Any high level takeaways from the meeting? Anything we should keep an eye out for?”

The first employee responded: “Yes, they really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.” The employee wrote that Andy Slavitt, then a senior White House Covid adviser, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” (“Viz” probably stands for “visualization” and “disinfo” for “disinformation.”)

Mr. Berenson wasn’t the only target. At a July 15, 2021, White House press briefing with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, press secretary Jen Psaki said: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. . . . There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of antivaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” This was a reference to the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” 12 named individuals identified in a report by the U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate—a report that Facebook disputed even as it said it had taken action against its targets. Ms. Psaki went on to say of the 12 that “all of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including . . . ones that Facebook owns.” That might have been a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccination, who had been deplatformed by Facebook-owned Instagram.

At the same briefing, Dr. Murthy called on social-media companies to purge more Covid posts: “We’re asking them to consistently take action against misinformation superspreaders on their platforms.” At a briefing the next day, again possibly referring to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Psaki said that if you post misinformation, “you shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

Recent Freedom of Information Act disclosures show that a week later, on July 23, 2021, Nick Clegg—a former U.K. deputy prime minister and now Facebook parent Meta’s president for global affairs—emailed Dr. Murthy to thank him for meeting with Facebook and to report on “the steps we took just this past week” to “further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the ‘disinfo dozen’ . . . resulting in every member . . . having had at least one such entity removed.” He added that Facebook was “continuing to make 4 other Pages and Profiles, which have not yet met their removal thresholds, more difficult to find on our platform.”

This goes even beyond what was happening when we wrote the week before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. At that time, lawmakers had repeatedly threatened tech companies with catastrophic consequences if they didn’t more aggressively censor speech the government disfavors. Congress had immunized these companies from liability if they remove “objectionable” but “constitutionally protected” content, to quote Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

In response to these and other inducements and threats, social-media companies were already suppressing speech about Covid that was well within the bounds of legitimate debate and sometimes proved accurate. Facebook had banned anyone from saying that Covid might have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, or that the Covid vaccines didn’t prevent infection.

When the government exploits these legislative inducements to target specific critics for censorship, it has crossed a constitutional Rubicon. Targeting, punishing and silencing dissenters is the paradigmatic First Amendment violation. The Biden administration is using Big Tech as its private censorship arm, and that violates what the Supreme Court, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), called an “axiomatic” principle: The government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The administration’s behind-the-scenes use of social-media companies to evade the First Amendment seems to be continuing unabated. In April this year Ms. Psaki, who was still the White House press secretary, said: “We engage regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken . . . and I’m sure that will continue. But there are also reforms we think Congress could take and we would support taking, including reforming Section 230 [and] enacting antitrust reforms.” The unexplained pivot to “antitrust reform” here is telling: Censor the “problematic” posts and people we identify, Ms. Psaki implies, or we may break you up under the antitrust laws.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. If in November 2020 President Trump and Republican lawmakers had used threats and private communications with tech companies to remove what they considered “misinformation” about election results, Democrats would have instantly and rightly identified a threat to democracy.

Democracy depends on free and open debate. If government officials continue to deputize private companies to stifle dissenters, it’s high time for federal courts to deliver them a reminder: If it’s state action in disguise, the Constitution applies.

Mr. Ramaswamy is executive chairman of Strive Asset Management and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” forthcoming in September. Mr. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale Law School and a First Amendment lawyer. His clients include Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Appeared in the August 18, 2022, print edition as 'Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censors'.
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AroundTheWorld · Dec 26, 2022

AroundTheWorld said: ↑

It WAS a first amendment issue, because the government instructed Twitter specifically which speech to curb - which tweets to delete, which accounts to ban.

That's what you don't seem to be able to comprehend.

If it had just been Twitter's previous ownership's bias as a private company, it would not have been a 1st amendment issue.

Just by repeating your evidently false statements again and again, that doesn't make them right.
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AroundTheWorld said: ↑

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fb...ment-twitter-moderation-requests-experts-warn

Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital that while Twitter is a private company that is free to moderate content, the company could be viewed as an agent for the federal government if it is found to be taking its direction.

"The First Amendment applies to the government and prohibits censorship by government agencies and entities, not private actors," Von Spakovsky said.

"However, when a private company is censoring information based on direction, coordination and cooperation with the government, then legally it may be considered to be acting as an agent for the government, and it may be found to be violating the First Amendment."

RATCLIFFE: NO ‘COINCIDENCE’ JIM BAKER GOT TOP TWITTER JOB AFTER PUSHING RUSSIAN COLLUSION NARRATIVE

Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital the Twitter Files controversy is "worse" than cases he’s previously covered regarding government and Big Tech "collusion," because "when the FBI ‘asks’ for something, that’s pretty serious."

George Mason University professor David Bernstein told Fox News Digital that "absent a true national security emergency, it's inappropriate for anyone with a political role in the government to be exerting pressure or even lobbying Twitter regarding content."

"The FBI is a trickier case," he said. "If there is no political interference, the FBI sharing information with Twitter is not inherently inappropriate. For example, the FBI could share information that a Twitter account is linked to a known terrorist group. However, there is obviously a line between properly sharing information and a government agency unduly pressuring an agency, especially if there is a threat of retaliation attached. Without knowing more about exactly what the FBI was doing, I can't say which side of the line it was on."

Elon Musk acquired Twitter Oct. 27, 2022. (Getty Images)

Robert J. Delahunty, a senior distinguished fellow at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, told Fox News Digital there isn’t enough information yet to determine whether Twitter acted as a government agent and that a congressional investigation is needed.

"We now know from the [Twitter Files] that the intelligence community interacted on a regular basis with Twitter and other platforms, seemingly to ‘advise’ them to monitor what the IC considered objectionable content," Delahunty said. "We do not yet know enough about the nature of those interactions to be able to say whether the platforms in effect became agents of the government. They may have.

"The next Congress must make it a top priority to investigate the (apparently extensive) contacts between the intelligence community and the platforms to determine whether what amounted to governmental censorship of political speech took place."
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larsv8 · Dec 26, 2022

Xopher said: ↑

Then please explain the first amendment violation, in detail, because there isn't one here.
Click to expand...

He isn’t able to articulate opinions, he can only post articles by others.

fchowd0311 · Dec 26, 2022

Space Ghost said: ↑

This is how its going with Twitter 1.0 logic
-We must stop Russian propaganda and russian influence on election
-We must stop misinformation
-We know there is a left bias because right is bigots and racist
-nothingburger
-everyone knew what was going on
-The right is just cherry picking
-We didnt know because it was something new and twitter was doing its best.
-Twitter 2.0 is worse. They are doing everything Twitter 1.0 was doing but Twitter 1.0 didn't know any better.

The logic is mind numbing. These same people defended the Patriot act using the same exact logic. Gullible and naïve.
Click to expand...

Wut? You taken your meds?

Xopher · Dec 26, 2022

larsv8 said: ↑

He isn’t able to articulate opinions, he can only post articles by others.
Click to expand...

Pretty much. There is a HUGE difference between the POTUS saying "They're killing people" when referring to disinformation and social media and the POTUS saying "Remove this account or else." Any 3rd rate lawyer would know this.

Also the government said "This may be a violation of your ToS. Please look at it." Twitter did and did what they chose to do. Now had Twitter not banned or restricted the accounts, or removed the tweets. Then the government retaliated against Twitter. THEN and ONLY then would you have a first ammendment issue. However, Twitter took actions on the accounts. Actions TWITTER chose. Please direct me to ANYWHERE where the government explicitly said "BAN THESE ACCOUNTS. REMOVE THESE TWEETS!" Again even a 3rd rate lawyer would know this. A first year law student would know this.

gifford1967 · Dec 26, 2022

J.R. said: ↑

24. In my review of internal files, I found countless instances of tweets labeled as “misleading” or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.

25. A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.*

26. Internal records showed that a bot had flagged the tweet, and that it received many “tattles” (what the system amusingly called reports from users). That triggered a manual review by a human who– despite the tweet showing actual CDC data–nevertheless labeled it “Misleading”

27. Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation.

Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label.

28. Whether by humans or algorithms, content that was contrarian but true was still subject to getting flagged or suppressed.

This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” even though the owner of this account, @_euzebiusz_, a physician, was referring to the results of a published study.

29. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving multiple strikes for misinformation. One of his strikes was for a tweet referring to the results from a peer reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.

30. A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid.

31. The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.

32. That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day.

33. Another example of human bias run amok was the reaction to this tweet by Trump. Many Trump tweets led to extensive internal debates, and this one was no different.

34. In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy.

35. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.

36. Remember @KelleyKga with the CDC data tweet? Twitter’s response to her is clarifying: “we will prioritize review and labeling of content that could lead to increased exposure or transmission.”

37. Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was “The Science” . . .

38. Information that challenged that view, such as showing harms of vaccines, or that could be perceived as downplaying the risks of Covid, especially to children, was subject to moderation, and even suppression. No matter whether such views were correct or adopted abroad.

39. What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter and other social media platforms—not to mention the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, about lockdowns, about the true risks of Covid in kids, and much more?

40. Thanks to @ShellenbergerMD, @lwoodhouse, @lhfang and the team @thefp for their help reporting this story.
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lol

Space Ghost · Dec 26, 2022

Xopher said: ↑

Pretty much. There is a HUGE difference between the POTUS saying "They're killing people" when referring to disinformation and social media and the POTUS saying "Remove this account or else." Any 3rd rate lawyer would know this.

Also the government said "This may be a violation of your ToS. Please look at it." Twitter did and did what they chose to do. Now had Twitter not banned or restricted the accounts, or removed the tweets. Then the government retaliated against Twitter. THEN and ONLY then would you have a first ammendment issue. However, Twitter took actions on the accounts. Actions TWITTER chose. Please direct me to ANYWHERE where the government explicitly said "BAN THESE ACCOUNTS. REMOVE THESE TWEETS!" Again even a 3rd rate lawyer would know this. A first year law student would know this.
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Agreed!

Additionally Im perfectly ok with sending people to quarantine camps (as long as there is food, water and shelter) for those who refuse to get vaxxed

fchowd0311 · Dec 26, 2022

Space Ghost said: ↑

Agreed!

Additionally Im perfectly ok with sending people to quarantine camps (as long as there is food, water and shelter) for those who refuse to get vaxxed
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I just want private institutions to have the choice to deny service to anti-vax people but hey this is fine also

gifford1967 · Dec 26, 2022

related

Space Ghost · Dec 26, 2022

gifford1967 said: ↑

related

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Amazing being so ignorant and biased that you can't detect sarcasm.

gifford1967 · Dec 26, 2022

Space Ghost said: ↑

Amazing being so ignorant and biased that you can't detect sarcasm.
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bruh

AroundTheWorld · Dec 26, 2022

rocketsjudoka · Dec 26, 2022

Xopher said: ↑

Pretty much. There is a HUGE difference between the POTUS saying "They're killing people" when referring to disinformation and social media and the POTUS saying "Remove this account or else." Any 3rd rate lawyer would know this.

Also the government said "This may be a violation of your ToS. Please look at it." Twitter did and did what they chose to do. Now had Twitter not banned or restricted the accounts, or removed the tweets. Then the government retaliated against Twitter. THEN and ONLY then would you have a first ammendment issue. However, Twitter took actions on the accounts. Actions TWITTER chose. Please direct me to ANYWHERE where the government explicitly said "BAN THESE ACCOUNTS. REMOVE THESE TWEETS!" Again even a 3rd rate lawyer would know this. A first year law student would know this.
Click to expand...

The government has the same right to ask a social media company to remove people just as anyone here has the right to ask Clutch to ban a poster. the difference would be if there were laws or regulations that were made specifically targetting Twitter if they didn't take action. So far from what I've seen that wasn't done.

To keep repeating there is no right to be on social media. If there was Clutch would be in big trouble.

Also to note that while so much of the focus is on the Biden Admin.the previous President threatened social and other media officials for things that were very unflaterring to him. He even threatened to shut down Twitter and to change liable laws to go after journalists. Trump had the right to make those threats. While he was roundly criticized for them it doesn't appear that anything he did in that regard was a violation of Twitter of those journalist rights nor does it appear anything the BIden Admin has done rises to that level either.

rocketsjudoka · Dec 26, 2022

Os Trigonum said: ↑

straw man straw man straw man
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You like to use that term a lot
https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/...-believe-or-not.315260/page-166#post-14428575
"None of this is new, all of it was very wrong. The government violated people's first amendment rights by making private companies into agents of selective free speech violations."

Commodore · Dec 26, 2022

Buck Turgidson · Dec 27, 2022

Space Ghost said: ↑

I can't wait for Musk to fail at everything.

It will be glorious.

What will we b**** about next?

I've never seen so many people b**** so hard over products they refuse to use. Weird TBH.
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It'll be great fun when the Saudis or whoever end up owning SpaceX and Starlink and whatever critically to the US important parts of his empire he can't afford to control.

Having a petulant manbaby in charge of certain things...as we learned with our previous President...is a bad idea, I would think.

Buck Turgidson · Dec 27, 2022

Ubiquitin said: ↑

I am not a lawyer but my lawyer “friends” are all JDs. What’s an American Master of Laws?
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Don't worry, nobody in Florida has ever passed (up/by) a bar

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