A view contrary to the conservative narrative about Twitter (and social media in general) treatment of Trump and extremist right wing voices. Fascinating interview.
DAVIES: You know, it’s been alleged by conservatives for quite some time that social media are biased against them and that you can see that in their decisions. The investigators did test that in some cases, didn’t they, I mean, to see whether that was generally true with some of the larger social media platforms? What did they find?
HARWELL: Yeah, what they found was really contradictory to that point. I mean, and that point has been something that Elon Musk was sharing in the Twitter files that has been the main cause celebre of Republicans in Washington, which is that Silicon Valley is a bunch of Californian techies who are against us and are tearing us down. They’re using social media to silence and censor us. And it’s unfair, you know? And the committee tested that. And from the many interviews and the many thousands of pages of documents, I mean, what they found was, really, the opposite. I mean, people like Donald Trump, viewpoints like stop the steal, were given a huge amount of leeway.
I mean, in Trump’s case, he effectively was not punished for saying the same sort of things that would have knocked anybody else off the platform. He was really treated in a special way so as to keep his account on Twitter for years. And, you know, so he was really - instead of being sort of unfairly censored, he was elevated and promoted, which was, you know, totally the opposite of what people were conveying in the Twitter files. And so I think that was one big surprise from this whole investigation, which was that, really, these Twitter employees were worried that Twitter had not gone far enough and that some of that silence or reluctance to be more aggressive had contributed to what we ended up seeing happen at the Capitol.
Not yet! I will later. I agree Yoel Roth comes out looking OK in most of these episodes, trying to push back against ever-increasing and ultimately irresistible government encroachment.
Well, they knew what the Politicians/Hamilton group were doing was wrong, the Hamilton group and Democrat politicians were pushing a narrative about Russian interference in the 2016 election and the claims of Russian bots they knew were almost entirely ordinary Americans/Brits/Canadians and they knew this narrative was being pushed relentlessly into the MSM.
To their credit they did discuss internally and did toy with the idea of going public to set the record straight but suspect one of the reasons they didn’t was this was being used against Trump at a time the special council was in full swing and why go out of their way and tell the truth when they knew that would mean backlash against them from the political class.
Not as bad as the politicians but I would be too proud of myself either if I were one of them.
I’m less sympathetic to Roth et al. after processing all this, I’d say. He and Twitter should have done the right thing here.
Here’s some reporting from a variety of sources on this interesting matter:
Oh wait, there isn’t any. Oddly mainstream media or anyone except right-wing, libertarian, pro-free-speech sources, and the like aren’t touching this one. Huh! Surely they will soon. Maybe tomorrow? Next week? Sometime before the second coming? We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they were regurgitating this crap and serving it for breakfast for years. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll get it sorted out eventually. Once again, it is such a shame that some of our esteemed corporate journalists haven’t got access to these materials. Can you imagine the stories they’d be assiduously digging out if they were on the case? Oh, Elon. We’ll just have to go with the people actually reporting on it at the moment
Late last year, the company’s response time was more than double what it had been during the same period a year earlier under the prior ownership, even though the center sent it fewer alerts. In December 2021, Twitter took an average of 1.6 days to respond to 98 notices; last December, after Mr. Musk took over the company, it took 3.5 days to respond to 55. By January, it had greatly improved, taking 1.3 days to respond to 82.
Well, after majoring in economics I was kind of on that track. It may or may not have happened. Taiwan looked more attractive than other available options at that point