Conservatives on like year 2 of staring at Hunter Biden's dick and Trump has yet to be named president. They'll keep trying though, scanning that thing like they're looking for the directions to treasure on the back of the declaration of independence
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) December 5, 2022
The Washington Post shows the NYTimes how to handle a deliberately confusing story responsibly — “Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds”:
It was billed as a bombshell: Elon Musk, after rifling through his new company’s internal files, would finally expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the critical run up to the 2020 election…
But by the time the dust settled Saturday, even some conservatives were grumbling that it was a dud. Musk’s Twitter Files produced no smoking gun showing that the tech giant had bent to the will of Democrats.
A handful of screenshots from 2020, posted over the course of two hours Friday evening in a disjointed, roughly 40-tweet thread, show the San Francisco company debating a decision to restrict sharing of a controversial New York Post story about the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party…
In the process, Musk took the extraordinary step of promoting the leak of internal company communications to Taibbi, exposing the names of several rank-and-file workers and Khanna’s personal email address.
The online mob descended on the Twitter workers on the chain, threatening them and circulating their photos online.
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was among the employees named in the tweets, said in a social media post…
Musk’s promotion of the internal screenshots including employees’ names is largely unprecedented, and comes as he repeatedly says he will bring transparency to the platform. Taibbi said that he had to “agree to certain conditions” in exchange for the opportunity to cover the files in a message to his Substack subscribers, asking for their patience and acknowledging that his customers may be angry that the information appears on the social network first…
Worth reading the whole thing, but TL;DR: Both men further debased their already shaky reputations with both tech specialists and journalists.
Bulwark writer Tim Miller — “No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter”:
While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago…
As someone who once consulted for social media companies on content moderation issues, let me tell you, the amount of eggplant-related terms of service violations that these platforms review in a given year is so voluminous that we have not yet invented an artificial intelligence machine capable of counting them.
Yet Taibbi and Musk are trying to turn this mundane moderation matter into the story of the century by emphasizing a few misconceptions about how platforms work with political campaigns and what First Amendment obligations they do or do not have. To debunk a few of them:
1. Campaigns of all ideological stripes have direct lines into social media companies and make requests about offending content. There is nothing at all strange about what is shown in these emails. If Jeb’s kid’s grundle was posted by a Chinese troll, we surely would’ve flagged that for the company in the hopes they deleted it, and I suspect their internal correspondence on the matter would’ve been identical. This would not have been a “demand” or a “dictate” from our campaign, mind you. Companies can do what they want.
2. In this specific instance, the requests came from a campaign that has absolutely no government authority at all. At the time of the correspondence in question, Joe Biden was a private citizen running for office, while Donald Trump was the president. Taibbi acknowledges that Trump’s White House made requests that “were received and honored” and that “there’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.” So if there are any First Amendment issues at play here—and I don’t believe there are since neither Musk nor Taibbi have demonstrated that the government made any mandates on Twitter—they would, in this case, only relate to the material that Trump wanted removed…
To sum up what we learned: Big penis, little news, First Amendment not under threat.
Musk and Taibbi have promised more editions of the “Twitter Files” in the coming days, maybe next time they won’t come up so limp.
The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.”
Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election.
(1/x)— dave karpf (parody account) (@davekarpf) December 3, 2022
Dave Karpf has the most coherent explanation of the GOP ‘reasoning’ I’ve seen to date:
They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing.
And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since. (2/x)
They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators.
Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will.
But they’re actual just blunt instruments. (3/x)
Trump got impeached the first time for trying to condition congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine on Zelenskyy announcing an “investigation” of Biden corruption.
He wanted the appearance of corruption, so he could wrap the media’s attention around it. (4/x)
The laptop was basically Plan B.
They wanted everyone to freak out about it for a few weeks. Normally what happens is conservative media shouts about it, mainstream media genuflects and “covers the controversy,” and Bannon and co high-five each other for setting the agenda. (5)
It didn’t work this time. They’ve been pouting ever since.
It’s a lot like a kid who loses a video game and starts slamming the controller, insisting it’s rigged or the system is cheating.
It’s NOT FAIR! Their plan was supposed to WORK! (6/x)
Musk and Taibbi are tapping into that well of resentment.
Why should we care about the President’s adult failson who doesn’t work in the administration? Two years later, what’s the scandal supposed to even be?
The media didn’t take the bait. No fair. That’s the scandal. (7/x)
They’re gonna keep bitching about it for years. It’s going to be louder and emptier than the Benghazi hearings.
The scandal is that their clever propaganda effort sank like a lead balloon. And that has to be SOMEONE ELSE’S fault.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. (Fin)
As we saw again last night, most right wing media moments involve a group of professional liars getting a bunch of idiots ramped up into a high speed digital circle jerk with various Ian Miles Cheong style degenerates providing what amount to toasting vocals while it escalates.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 3, 2022
Obviously Trump is a prissy old gossip and thought Biden's son being an addict would be scandalous enough. His people pushing it, the Giuliani types, are washed old drunks. But also there's this corps of grifters and maniacs who'll come up with some perverse shit, mostly for fun.
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) December 5, 2022
They opened Pandora’s box just b/c Elon wanted to stop people from talking about all the Nazis he has put in his life
This has flipped on them, hope it was worth it
— Elon lol (@elonolololol) December 5, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 285: Attack, Counter-Attack, & Air Defense
Martin
Hope current Twitter employees recognize the future harassment campaigns they’re opening themselves up to by working there.
Chetan Murthy
Those former employees who got doxxed — I hope they get good lawyers and sue Musk (and Taibbi too) into penury. Jesus.
Brachiator
How is this a story at all, since this is about sharing a story that apparently was available at the NY Post site? Musk seems to be saying that he paid $44 billion for a gossip network.
I am not impressed.
And on top of it all, Musk ends up hurting his own employees. Jesus!
Odie Hugh Manatee
I’m sure that Hunter is disturbed to know that Republicans believe that his dick is bigger than the Constitution.
Martin
@Brachiator: Supposed proof that Twitter was a leftist organization. It’s going to be lib-owning the whole way here. NYT will happily play along.
Twitter is just a culture war battlefield for Musk, one that he can shape in the GOPs favor. That’s why I won’t go along with this shit. There’s no fighting it from the inside – Musk is not available to have his mind changed.
N M
It’s been amusing, while also disheartening, watching people in tech that I thought were pretty serious and intelligent “genuflect” to the “story” of the “twitter files” (via tweets, natch) despite it being a damp squib nothinburger. One’s a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company adjacent to my industry, a guy I’ve met in person and previously somewhat respected (though, in retrospect, he got caught up in crypto quite heavily…).
One of those “I laugh cuz otherwise I’d cry” moments, along with a strong episode of “when people show you who they are, believe them.”
piratedan
for me the nontroversy is the embodiment of GOP hypocrisy…
If the GOP spent as much effort on cleaning out their own house as they have regarding making Hunter Biden a “thing”, we might be halfway to political sanity by now… alas….
Jim Appleton
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Golf clap.
Wyatt Salamanca
This is the biggest goddamn nothingburger of alleged political scandals. Any so-called journalist who writes another article on this subject is a fucking moron.
The NY Post is the most pathetic excuse for a newspaper in America and Rupert Murdoch deserves to rot in Hell.
Ken_L
Behold the extent to which the story was “suppressed”. From the New York Post two week before the 2020 election:
“Twitter and Facebook’s censorship of The Post’s exposé about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine propelled the story to the top of those platforms last week, according to a report Tuesday.
The story generated 2.59 million interactions (likes, comments and shares) on Facebook and Twitter — more than double the next-biggest story about President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, Axios reported, citing data analyzed by NewsWhip.
Stories about Hunter Biden, the reactions and how social media responded were five of the 10 biggest stories.
It was the sixth-most-engaged article for the month — behind Trump testing positive for the coronavirus and rocker Eddie Van Halen’s death.”
MisterForkbeard
Speaking of Twitter screwups, the embeds aren’t working right for about half of them. Sometimes flickers of the profile pics of the posters and that’s it.
It’s going great though, the rocker guy sez so.
patrick II
The first impeachment took much out of the potential impact of using Hunter’s problems as a cudgel during the election. It was hashed out at the hearings and shown to be a canard, taking the steam out of it before it could be used as an October surprise. The NYTimes had a reporter, whose name I forget, ready to do a series on the Biden scandal but canceled after the impeachment. The whole affair became less of an indictment of Hunter Biden than it was of Giuliani working with a Russian agent in Ukraine to create false “facts”.
We owe an anonymous whistleblower somewhere big time.
Chetan Murthy
@patrick II: ken fucking vogel
Birdie
At the moment I’m feeling far more upset and sickened by this:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink-animal-testing-elon-musk-investigation
Apparently being a demanding, terrible micromanager extends to driving employees to kill pigs and sheep (and even a couple of monkeys) for no informational benefit.
patrick II
@Chetan Murthy:
Thanks. That is him and an apt description.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
Ro Khanna is well on his way to follow the foot steps of Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich to become the next Fox News “Democrat”
Darkrose
@Birdie: I’m very glad the USDA is involved. UC Davis is trying to claim that Neuralink is a private company to avoid public records requests, even though the work is being done on campus.
Baud
The reason we stand up against anti-Dem media bias is to prevent fake scandals like Hunter Biden’s Laptop from becoming a mainstream media obsession.
Constant vigilance is the lesson of Hillary’s Emails.
I’m happy for Hunter.
Mai Naem mobile
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: that is being unfair to Ro Khanna. Actually its kind of offensive. I’ve heard enough interviews with Ro Khanna. He is pretty much your typical liberal California Dem who doesn’t understand why the rest of the country is so backwards. Definitely not a Russian asset or useful idiot.
Anyhow, I don’t understand how you can even trust the laptop beyond the dick pics and even those could be fake. The Russians are known to insert files into computers and you are to assume nothing was done to this computer even though Hunter didn’t have it in his hands for a few years. I want to know why none of the stuff that you damn well know has been swiped from the GOP by the Russians has never been released.
Kay
@Mai Naem mobile:
I heard him interviewed by Erin Burnett on his email to Twitter. Burnett made it all about a supposed Biden scandal – you could hear the excitement in her voice that she has one to promote, even if she has to invent it – and Khanna completely failed to get his point across, which was something about censorship.
Lol. Good luck with that, Ro. They’ll treat this like they treated the Clinton email server story. The ony difference is the public probaby won’t buy it this time.
Kay
Incidentally, the deliberately deceptive headline on the NY Post story, published right before the 2020 election, was “Biden’s Secret Emails” – journalism!
All of you have “secret emails” too, UNLESS they’re published in the NY Post.
Kay
Always interesting how closely the US Right follows Putin:
Much like Governor DeSantis!
Betty Cracker
@piratedan: Nailed it. When Biden won the nomination, I braced myself for an onslaught of negative ads targeting key Dem constituencies. There was plenty of video material! But as you said, the opponents were/are not serious people. They went for gross family stuff that an asshole like Trump would find embarrassing but ordinary people find sympathetic.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
@Mai Naem mobile:
Now that’s “offensive”.
When Dump sold out the Kurds who were fighting ISIS in Syria to please Putin:
He defends Dump from Democrats and joins republicans to attack Biden:
Now that’s what you call team work; the question is for which team.
WereBear
@Kay: No surprise. Our conservatives want to be ruthless tyrants riding a bear shirtless, but they don’t have any of the vital internal organs which would be necessary, like guts and heart.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Gotta gin up moral panic to manufacture consent for authoritarianism.
Geminid
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: I tend to lump Khanna in with what I think of as the Justice Democrats/Brand New Congress party faction. To me, this doesn’t neccesarily make him a bad Democrat, just a suspect one who bears watching.
And as the stories you point out indicate, Khanna is “horseshoe” adjacent. More recently, when gasoline prices were peaking, he called for a ban on exports of petroleum products, a proposal that I thought was supported by political, populist reasoning more than economics.
Last October, when elements of the House Progressive Caucus floated that ill timed, quickly withdrawn Ukraine policy letter, Khanna was the one signer who defended it on cable news shows. Most of the other 19 signers were like, “WTF! I havn’t seen that since a draft of it in late June!”
And I’ve seen that some California Democrats are still mad at Khanna for some sharp practice during his successful campaign to unseat Rep. Mike Honda a few years ago.
Geminid
Polls in Georgia opened a few minutes ago. The weather forecast for Atlanta is cool with showers.
Polls close at 7pm. I will probably sit in my car some this evening and listen to runoff coverage on Atlanta radio station WSB 750AM. They had good election night coverage last January, and come in clear as bell here after dark.
Warnock’s and Ossoff’s races were too close to call late that night. But one reporter had spoken to some county Republican leaders and said they were “chagrined” at turnout, and that was a good sign.
Princess
@Geminid: those Republican leaders should be chagrined to be supporting Walker. And he’s their choice. They can’t blame Trump. There was a primary and he won.
I know, I know.
ReTwitter, I know it has its defenders around here but if you’re still on it, you’re complicit in what Musk does with it in my view, because you’re helping him prop it up. He’s not hiding it; it’s all out there in the open for everyone to see.
WereBear
@Geminid:
THIS.
I knew of only one thing (Scopes trial lessons) that will truly beat back our fanatical right wing, and that is Sufficient Public Humiliation.
Ruthless mockery and disparagement from all quarters of the earth until they withdraw to lick their wounds and seethe. Which they would do in any case, but we can’t allow them to infest the commons.
They are the bedbugs of political life.
lowtechcyclist
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch:
Could you re-do that comment and add some links, or maybe take out the double quote box or something? I honestly can’t tell (a) when Khanna is being quoted directly, (b) when someone else is paraphrasing Khanna or just giving their own opinion, and (c) when most of the above was said. It’s just a real mish-mash that I’m having a hard time making sense of.
Geminid
@WereBear: Well, that was January 5, 2021 but I am hoping to see a similar pattern tonight. I was hoping for a rainier day, since I believe Walker’s voters are less motivated than Warnock’s. But Walker would be a crappy candidate even on a sunny day.
The key factor in this election will the relative dropoff in votes between last month and today. Last time, David Perdue’s total dropped 247,000 from November to January while Ossoff’s dropped only 94,000 (Warnok was in a jungle primary so comparisons are tougher). One difference this time: Ossoff had to come from behind to win, while Warnock led Walker in votes last month.
Kay
@WereBear:
2017:
The “substantial bodily harm” language tracks that used by anti-choice lobbying groups who draft legislation. Women submitting to domestic violence is also what JD Vance ran on.
They’re not done with womens rights yet- they’re just warming up.
lowtechcyclist
@WereBear:
Also, to borrow from Karl Rove, hit ’em at their strength. In this case, their supposed patriotism, which at this point is as hollow as a termite-infested log.
They may have objected to what Trump said about terminating the Constitution, but other than John Bolton(!), nobody’s said this is something that would keep them from supporting him if he’s the nominee.
Ultimately they are not loyal to the United States of America. They’re loyal to their political and cultural tribe, and they feel their tribe owns or should own the United States of America to the exclusion of those of us who see the world differently from they do. That is of course a very different thing. They may call it ‘patriotism,’ but it’s not. And it’s time to call them out on that.
Kay
I love “somebody”. It’s typical in anti-choice rhetoric and laws- they remove the woman involved completely. And now you see why! She’s completely expendable and will be sacrificed every time and they don’t want you thinking about her. She must be erased.
Geminid
@Geminid: The Washington Post had an article on the Georgia Senate runoff in its Sunday edition. Two interesting items: Washington Democratic Rep Pramila Jayapal appeared at a suburban Atlanta event intended to boost turnout in the Asian American community.
And a youngish man interviewed outside the Atlanta stadium where the SEC championship was played expressed surprise that there was another election Tuesday. He said he had voted for Trump in 2020 and for Warnock last month, but the runoff was news to him.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: If you look, there are plenty of other Republicans, including members of Congress, besides Bolton who’ve said that Trump’s remarks are disqualifying. Of course, that could just be for pragmatic reasons. Trump is looking more and more like a loser who would drag down other Republican candidates in 2024 if he is the presidential nominee.
Denali
@Geminid.
To those of us who haven’t had time to look, please provide names of the other Republicans who have said that TFG’s remarks are disqualifying. TFG caused too much harm to this country to disregard what he said.
Geminid
@Denali: I think you have time to look, and it would be good mental exercise.
But I’ll drop a couple breadcrumbs: Mike Turner, prospective chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is one. And Politico has an article about reaction to Trump’s remarks among Senate Republicans.
Josie
@Geminid:
;-)
Denali
@Geminid,
Thanks, I am following the trail.
J R in WV
@Martin:
I love this, but have a suggestion to improve it: “Musk’s mind is not available to be changed!”