Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

Trump Won


A Dark Alliance: Musk's Twitter Files Exposed The Fifth Estate

by Mike Solana
https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-fifth-estate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
https://www.piratewires.com/p/one-party-state
https://www.piratewires.com/p/readable-twitter-files
https://www.piratewires.com/p/readable-twitter-files-part-2
https://www.piratewires.com/p/what-the-hell-is-going-on-at-the
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1601720455005511680
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515
https://nypost.com/2021/12/04/data-shows-twitter-employees-donate-more-to-democrats-by-wide-margin/
https://www.piratewires.com/p/jack-be-nimble-jack-be-quick

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three
Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there
[sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of
some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World,
and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is
no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of
congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th
Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the
dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants
largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the
ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than
critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very
close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single
state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a
fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology
industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were
for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today,
on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the
One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political
bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk
opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of
journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major
stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story
short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years,
and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform
was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship,
with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical,
joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal
is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the
public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts,
they have mostly been succeeding.

On December 2nd, Matt Taibbi shared conversations from the company’s
“trust and safety” team that led to Twitter’s suppression of the New
York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. While interesting,
Taibbi’s most notable revelation came almost as a side: both major
political parties, as well as the White House, maintained direct lines
of communication with Twitter, which they used to formally request
content be removed from the platform. The company responded
enthusiastically to many of these requests, and the examples we have
(for now) come from the Democratic Party. Critics have been quick to
point out Trump was in the White House at the time, though less
interested, for some reason, in what — if anything — he removed from
the site.

On December 6th, Bari Weiss and her colleagues reported out proof of
Twitter’s secret blacklists, in which both specific topics and, more
problematically, people were de-amplified by the “trust and safety”
team. The blacklisting was done for a nebulous host of reasons that
generally amounted to something like ‘this feels dangerous.’ Danger
was, of course, defined by partisan operatives, and exclusively
targeted right-coded positions. Skepticism of radical gender ideology,
distrust of public Covid policy, and almost anything having to do with
the integrity of our last election were at the top of the list.

Separate from any opinion concerning whether such topics, or the
purveyors of such topics, should have been “shadow banned,” the
revelation that they were is immensely important on account of
Twitter’s censors, with their many supporters in the press, have
denied the existence of these tools for years.

Finally, over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and
Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming,
which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is
also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to
finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone
assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned
because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their
political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done
regardless of their own rules.

Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait of
clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech
platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives,
who naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous,
worked tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to
censor “unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared
their political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and
decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship
apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at
Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to
operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an
industry-wide affliction.

But I do have questions.

Where is the full list of shadow-banned accounts? Which political
campaigns, specifically, communicated with Twitter, and what
specifically was taken down? What about requests from foreign
governments? What about requests from our own government? We need to
know which of our government agencies, if any, had content removed
from the platform, and we need to know the nature of this content.
Taibbi alluded to Trump’s White House — did someone from the Trump
administration request a takedown? Who made the request? Who received
the request? Was it answered? What, if anything, was removed?

The Trump line of questioning is, in particular, something you might
assume attractive to the media, which has waged all-out war on the
populist clown king for the last seven years. Alas, the press seems
broadly disinterested. Is this because they don’t believe the former
president ever made such requests, or is their lack of interest rather
stemming from a fear of validating a major story most of them are
currently trying to frame — for their own obvious political reasons —
as not worth reading?

A brief selection of positions from our cherished Fourth Estate: This
entire story is a “dud” (The Washington Post) — no bombshells here!
(Forbes). The Twitter Files, in which a handful of committed partisans
enthusiastically censor large swaths of the conservative base,
including a former president, actually prove the company was not
politically biased. It is, however, now biased against Democrats (New
York Magazine). Elon’s exposé is a flop that doesn’t matter. It has
also placed multiple “trust and safety experts” in mortal danger (The
Verge, predictably). Then, my favorite: it is good to finally see the
blacklist tools I have been curious about for many years, which we
have by the way always known existed, and therefore don’t matter (The
Atlantic).

The charge of shadow banning evoked uniquely loud jeering from the
press, including Charlie Warzel in particular, a man formerly of the
position “Twitter isn’t shadow banning Republicans.” Now, in the face
of evidence the company absolutely shadow banned Republicans, the
official position is we are using the term “shadow ban” incorrectly.

It’s a game of semantics, in which the public is dragged through the
exhausting, useless question of how much invisible speech suppression,
precisely, constitutes a “real” shadow ban, rather than the glaringly
important questions of both ethics and, frankly, safety. In the first
place, is it right to run a decentralized censorship apparatus, and to
make your rules invisible? In the second, what happens to a free
country when the bounds of acceptable speech are set by a small cabal
of unelected partisan cops? Because my sense is the answer isn’t
“freedom.”

There have been a few notable, if cautiously dissenting opinions from
prominent voices in media. Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos, the Los
Angeles Times’ Jeff Bercovici, and the New York Times’ Mike Isaac all
took somewhat risky positions in favor of transparency, apparently no
longer in vogue among journalists, with Jeff explicitly acknowledging
the important nature of the revelations. But I’ve only seen one actual
piece, drafted and published by a reasonably mainstream media entity,
embrace any aspect of the Twitter Files.

Anthony Fisher, an opinion editor at the Daily Beast, danced around
the subject, and awkwardly tried to obscure his overall agreement the
story mattered behind many paragraphs demonstrating his
conservative-hating bonafides. But in addressing Twitter’s censorship
he did include the following important line:

    And that lesson is “Don’t trust (or demand) billionaire tech bros
to be the arbiters of truth and news.”

It was a flashback to the position most journalists and activists
shared in the days before Donald Trump. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long
before they realized they had a political ally in tech industry hall
monitors, and set about a national power grab. In any case, if you
were to strip the above position from all its obnoxious tribal
language, it would really just be: no few people should control the
bounds of acceptable discourse. I agree. But narrowly focused on the
“tech bro,” the point not only betrays a bias, but misses a defining
aspect of technology.

The Fifth Estate is a fundamentally different kind of power. It’s more
difficult to consolidate than media, and more difficult to control
than even our government divided by design. Its impact is also far
more difficult to predict. This is because technology is above all
things defined in terms of newness, which not only makes it disruptive
of pre-existing power, but destructive of itself — a sort of
anti-power that only guarantees change. The true failsafe. Our
ultimate reset. Tremendously empowering of tyranny in times of
stagnation, technology is also our most powerful weapon against
tyranny in times of innovation.

While many tech giants have gone the way of media in consolidating
power, centralizing, and aligning with the state, the future of
technology is always change. From encrypted chats and blockchain to
artificially intelligent search, every tech giant that amassed power
over the last two decades will be facing existential threats in the
years to come — not only from the government, but from the industry.

In terms of Twitter, Elon is already leveraging Fifth Estate
properties, and not by employing current tools to amplify his own
opinions (an emerging conspiracy). He is iterating product more
rapidly than we’ve seen from any major, consumer-facing tech company
in years. The trial and error here has largely been ridiculed by
people who have never built a technology company. But while detractors
are obsessed with his censorship abilities, Elon’s platform
experiments are the things actually capable of root-changing the
national discourse. The medium is the message, and the medium is
evolving. Whatever works on Twitter will be cloned. The bounds of
acceptable discourse will change, and none of this will have anything
to do with Elon’s spicy tweets.

But about those spicy tweets —

As the former lords of Twitter descend into hysterics with outlandish
comments declaring Elon a Nazi, or a proponent of the QAnon
conspiracy, or whatever other bit of unhinged loser bullshit, he faces
two significant threats. First, he’s clearly made an enemy of every
other major fount of power, including in particular the Fourth Estate.
This will impact all of Elon’s companies, as they all require support
from the government and public, and the opinions of our government and
public are still shaped, to a large extent, by the media. It’s no
coincidence most powerful tech executives, from Mark Zuckerberg and
Jeff Bezos to Jack Dorsey, share a carefully-crafted language of
neutrality. This air of neutrality is how a king behaves, because the
air of neutrality is how a king survives. In flaunting his power,
rather than obscuring it, Elon is asking to be attacked, and his
enemies are happy to oblige, even while more dominant platforms go
unbothered.

Something like 80 million Americans are using TikTok, a company
hopelessly compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Do you even
know the name of its CEO?

For a man who controls the bounds of acceptable speech for a third of
the country’s adults, he sure doesn’t seem especially interested in
speaking.

Elon’s second danger is the far more formidable danger of himself.
What the Twitter Files prove beyond doubt is censorship in the age of
social media is power — a real and dangerous power that corrupts.

Last year, Dorsey appeared before Congress, and declared neither he
nor anyone else, and certainly not anyone in government, should be
allowed to set the bounds of acceptable speech for the entire country.
But with no viable alternative, someone does need to bear the ring. In
leaked texts from the recent Twitter legal saga, it’s clear Jack
believed Elon a worthy steward of this tremendous power, and, for what
it’s worth, I agree. But provided the nation remains free, the rules
of the Fifth Estate are immutable. Power comes in dramatic upward
swings, and resets the status quo. It will not — it can not — last
forever. So change the world, but be mindful of temptation, and make
good use of your god mode powers while you have them. Because they
never last forever.

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