Nevertheless, after reporting that the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had been put on a “Do not amplify” list, Weiss bizarrely claimed that Twitter had long “denied that it does such things.”
Weiss did not try to reconcile that claim with Twitter’s long-standing terms of service; in fact, she did not even inform her readers of the existence of those terms. Rather, in justifying her assertion, Weiss wrote, “In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban,’” a term that she proceeds to define as “visibility filtering.”
But Gadde and Beykpour never denied that Twitter limited the visibility of some accounts. Rather, in their blog post, they wrote, “The best definition [of shadow ban] we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” And Twitter does not in fact “shadow ban” in that sense of the term.
Weiss ostensibly read Gadde and Beykpour’s blog post. So, she knew that they did not actually deny that Twitter limited the visibility of some accounts. Yet she led her readers to believe that she’d caught Twitter in a lie. In other words, she deliberately misled her audience.
Calling this a “lie” by Weiss seems like a reach. Chat logs from the various Twitter Files clearly show Roth, Gadde et al trying to figure out how to justify “filtering” certain stories and accounts (rather than doing so because clear justification existed). Dancing around different vague expressions doesn’t change that.
That’s pretty much the approach of the whole piece: Present opposite but not better-supported-by-evidence interpretations and call it debunking. Which is a big part of the reason people don’t trust media anymore.
Yeah I haven’t bothered reading them, one out of date piece from the Intelligencer, one from a tech blog. First and foremost here, the Twitter files have revealed certain facts. If the facts themselves could be shown to be false (the files were faked or something) I’m sure we’d be reading about it on the front page of the NYT, so that’s really out. Otherwise we’re going to be looking at best some kind of explanation of norms in the tech world, which I don’t care about (the inner working of tech companies as they seek to succeed in business aren’t what matters here), or some type of rationale about why the facts don’t matter (e.g. Weiss presented accurate facts but may not have been totally accurate in her characterization of them). Since most people seem prepared to casually wave aside the facts because they do not matter to them anyway, I don’t see any likely point to spending the time.
I was going to see if anyone else bothered and maybe reevaluate, but I guess my guess was correct about the latter article. I probably already read the first out-of-date article at some point.
My main gripe was about government involvement, and a discussion of technical stuff would probably quickly get above my pay grade, but that quote does sound disturbing. I trust Ms. Weiss in these kinds of things, and she equates “visibility filtering” with what others call shadow banning. She seems to find that practice unacceptable:
I think I’m okay with a private entity imposing the same kinds of restrictions which the Supreme Court allows the government to impose, although I haven’t made a study of those restrictions:
But as for Mr. Musk, I think he’s making a mistake if he intends to continue any of the old speech-suppression practices, except for those kinds of restrictions which the Supreme Court permits the government to impose, as discussed in the Britannica article linked above.
Anyway, I think a lot of people are going to be very disappointed if, after all this anticipation, Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter turns into “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I don’t know that that’s going to happen, but I’ll certainly grant that his statement about “reach” is disturbing.
Some topics covered
6:30 Russiagate, Nunes memo, non-existent Russian bots, failure of NYT to correct false stories
40:39 Schiff
48:00 Jim Baker firing
53:00 Media non-reporting on Twitter files, criticism of Taibbi
1:00:30 Russia and Ukraine, 2016 RNC platform controversy
1:16:00 Motivations of Musk
I lied, or rather, I went back on my word, and continued to goof around with the Notepad file, and then abandoned the whole thing and goofed off awhile, and then ate a bunch of CNY geedunk that the Taiwanese teachers gave me (an entire boxful of those tubular cookie things, and a big pack of something called “Chofers,” (I guess it’s a portmanteau of chocolate and wafer)).
Now I’m back on the Matt Taibbi video, and it’s getting really interesting. When Mr. Blumenthal presented the thesis that Russiagate was solely about “greasing the skids for a proxy war with Russia,” I became somewhat skeptical. However, it makes a kind of sense. I’m not yet prepared to fully accept it, but I’m not rejecting it, either.
Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté from about 1:00:24 to about 1:02:23:
Again, I’m reserving judgment on the “grease the skids” thesis, but it’s interesting.
(Edited to add: I didn’t eat both the pipe-shaped cookies and the Chofers in the same sitting. I do have some scruples. (Well, actually, each item was given to me on a different day, so I didn’t get to find out whether I have scruples.))
As you should, drawing sensible conclusions can only be done after the facts are known and with regards Ukraine and Russia there are a lot of questions and virtually no one in the western media seem interested enough to get to the bottom of things.
However the topic of Ukraine it seemed to come up with such a frequency that in the final days of the Obama administration it can be seen they were focusing a lot of effort in that direction, it was certainly on their minds as something that was of a lot more consequence to them than was on the minds of the public in general.
Maybe the new Republican led House might dig into it a bit to get some answers, but I wouldn’t count on it as Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham were and in the case of Lindsey Graham now are pushing for even more support for Ukraine than is being offered right now.
I hope they do some real investigating, the kind that leads to some definite conclusions in which we can be fairly confident. In the old, old days, some of these kinds of committees sometimes employed people who were actually good at this investigation stuff. I wonder if the House is gonna do that.
Anyway, I still want those young Russian guys to turn around and go home, but I don’t want young American guys (or gals, for that matter) to get involved in that mess, and I certainly don’t want a nuclear war.
Interesting to hear that Russia and Putin were turned into enemies, vs their actions, like invading their neighbors and down low threatening to use nukes, and russigate set the stage for a proxy war vs, you know, their prior invasion (as 1 example.of something else that might have set the stage).
I’m just posting this to let people know that the words that you seem to be attributing to me were actually said by Max Blumenthal in this video, beginning at about 1:01:00.