Twitter Files: The internal decision-making and journos skewing it

I wasn't a fan of Twitter until Elon Musk threatened to buy it back in March 2022. Then I started thinking of how convenient Twitter is to disseminate brief information or point people in a direction. So I have no interest in writing on Twitter or have a feed to look at or ignore, but I'm very happy to click on a Twitter link and find out the scoop in a limited number of characters and an easy-to-read format. 

So Twitter proved its value to me. I started thinking of it as a compact version of the internet. 

So what should the rules be for a compact version of the internet? We have to consider that Twitter is a private company, not the whole internet. It's here not because a bunch of countries got together and figured out how to do it and finance it, but because someone started up a company, and they are trying to stay in business. There are going to be business considerations, so they can't be as open as the entire internet. I strongly support media companies having standards, and that applies to social media as well. 

So the Twitter files were supposed to show how fucked up Twitter is. That message is favored by Musk, Twitter's new owner who is successfully soliciting adulation from conservatives. It's written by journalists with axes to grind with mainstream media, much of it warranted because mainstream media has got a ton of problems. They use journalistic methods, such as quoting primary sources like text communication between Twitter executives. However, they aren't exactly evenhanded in presenting the situation, particularly the decision to permanently suspend Trump's Twitter account. 

They focus on the internal decision-making, and ignore that Trump rallied thousands of people and got them to surround, break into, and intimidate Congress on the day that Joe Biden's election was to be certified. They seem to have zero problem whatsoever ignoring these extreme circumstances. It's so funny when Bari Weiss points to the words of others leaders and their threats, and leaves it at words. She doesn't mention if those other leaders managed to mass a mob that attacked a seat of government. Wow, just the words are a fair comparison.

That's the shoddiness of the Twitter files. 

Image: twitter.com

Extras: File 1, File 2, File 3, File 4, File 5. 

Twitter did screw up on its blockage of the NY Post article about the discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop, and they have admitted it. I agree it was wrong. Twitter also has left-leaning biases. However, I suspect that most if not all suspended accounts deserved it. Misinformation (lies) are a huge problem in media, and even larger if you do nothing about them but just let them propagate. 

The files misrepresent the reasons for permanently suspending Trump's account. Here is twitter's explanation, which the journalist somehow never link to.

My rant. Here is my stream of consciousness rant about the twitter files. Getting it out of drafts and making it available to all. 

The first big series of the twitter files has finished. I'm going to focus what was written about Trump being permanently banned from twitter after the Jan. 6 riot/insurrection/attempted coup. 

When you read about this in the twitter files, almost the entire focus is on the internal decision-making of twitter execs, and not what was happening on the ground in DC. How is it fair or realistic to isolate those? Twitter is criticized for not following the rules and procedures they had established, but what was happening in DC then? Well, for the first time ever, thousands of Americans surrounded the capitol to intimidate Congress into not doing its legislative and Constitutional duty. Those events were unique, but somehow twitter is supposed to ignore all that and continue with the same rules and procedures it had.

Bari Weiss repeats Trump's tweets of Jan. 8. They are:

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Then she focuses for most of the next 27 tweets on the twitter internal deliberations, especially how different work groups and officials in twitter can't find specific rule violations in those two Trump tweets. 

Weiss also goes into the violent rhetoric of leaders of other countries, and how they weren't thrown off of twitter for that rhetoric.

That all sounds logical, doesn't it? And it is logical......EXCEPT that some very major developments are completely ignored in that telling. And it's not logical to ignore major relevant developments unless you want a skewed argument to justify a skewed decision or viewpoint. 

So what are the major relevant developments? 

1. Trump encouraged thousands of his supporters to march to the capitol and intimidate Congress. And they did so with much violence. 

2. Trump did not call his supporters to cease for over 3 hours once the violence started. That is an extremely slow response when Congress was surrounded and violently threatened.

3. Trump did not condemn the violence that day. 

4. Trump made a conciliatory video and released in on the morning of Jan. 8. 

5. Trump backed away from his conciliatory tone with his two tweets, and again began to stoke anger. 

That is why Trump deserved to be permanently suspended. He wasn't ready or willing to give up his angry rhetoric even though it had already incited a high level of violence and threat to the legal processes of government. Twitter gave Trump the chance to back away from that kind of rhetoric, but Trump blew that chance. 

Weiss also didn't bother to quote twitter's explanation for the suspension that was published on Jan. 8.

Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks......

We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Based on this, twitter determined that the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.

I have to wonder why Weiss didn't bother to quote this readily available explanation in her twitter thread. Biased much? As a journalist, Bari Weiss should have considered this context too, but she didn't, probably because her biased viewpoint was the plan. Ignoring the reasons Trump deserved to be suspended was the plan.

There is also this info from a CNBC report: Twitter said it feared Trump’s most recent tweets were being interpreted as supporting the rioters and that plans for future armed protests had already been proliferating both on and off the platform, including a proposed attack on the U.S. Capitol and state capitol buildings on Jan. 17. 

The journalist writing that installment of the twitter files ignores all this context with a straight face and no apology. Definitely don't distract her with those pressing events----she's a watchdog on whether twitter is staying true to its rules.

Well, too fucking bad. For all the claims that Trump deserved to maintain his access to twitter, we really need to consider what Trump did on Jan. 6 and beyond. And the journalist, Bari Weiss, should have considered it too, but she didn't, probably because her slanted treatment was the plan. Ignoring the reasons Trump deserved to be suspended was the plan.

Is Roe v. Wade about to be overturned?

Yes, I was woefully late posting this. But that makes it more historical, capturing some of the sentiments before the event. 

A draft decision overturning the Roe decision has been leaked---perhaps the first leak of a decision in the history of the Supreme Court. But the leak isn't my focus in the least. There's so much to consider that has much more impact on people's lives. 

If Roe is overturned, it will become much harder to get an abortion in over half the states in the US. And it will stay the same in a lot of states, like mine. 

However it's hard to tell how much impact this will actually have because getting an abortion is much easier than it was back 50 years ago. Now you can take a pill. That pill can be shipped to you or to a friend. You and a group of friends can stock up and resupply as convenient. There's also going to other states, but that's not as easy as taking a pill, so the pills will probably be used more than anything.

Will states try to prevent this? Maybe, probably, but how successful can they be? We have a huge illegal drug issue in the US, and states and federal government haven't put an end to that. This would involve legally available pills and people who want the government to stop dictating to women. So I think flaunting the laws will be widespread. A few people may be imprisoned, and that will seem like an injustice of the most arbitrary kind. And life will go on without a lot of difference except perhaps some people will be more careful about contraceptive use. 

Image: i stock photo

Extras. Dems have been raked over the coals for not passing a national law protecting abortion rights. But they never had the votes in the Senate since the bill certainly would have been filibustered. They had only 54 votes, with 7 Dem senators being pro-life at that time in 2009. 

Annotated copy of the leaked draft opinion. 

The talking points for the Republican senators: stress how compassionate GOPers are and how horrible extremists Dems are. 

Fascinating article about the abortion business in New York City in the 1800s. Abortion was illegal, sort of, so it was advertised as restoring menstrual regularity. 

Fall-out in Ohio. A 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated. She had to go to Indiana to get the abortion. Big impact on the discussions in states. 

A gallery of day-by-day fetal development. 

Update 4/11/24. Long article about women taking abortion pills in states with abortion bans. They can often get the pills free, but they aren't getting a doctor's care, and that's a huge loss. Many are unsure what is normal and what are the danger signs that they should seek medical care. If they seek medical care, will they be prosecuted or targeted in some ways? There are some volunteer services of doctors on call who will answer questions, but it's not a substitute for physician care in person and in crisis. 

Clown show: The Arizona audit

Running list from the Secretary of State. 

PR/spin from the AZ senate here. 

Made-up numbers in the final report.

Ok, those are the links. Here's the short version and I'll post this very belatedly. The GOP idiots in AZ went with the Trump lies that the election was stolen, and tried to find the evidence of it in their state. Since they don't actually know the safeguards in elections, or they're lying bitches, the GOP state senators voted to confiscate all the ballots from Maricopa Country and recheck them. And since they didn't have a plan about how to forge evidence, they had to report that the numbers from the original count were good--well within the margin of error for counting ballots. 

Lesson 1: It's hard to prove rubbish is true. Or maybe impossible. 

Lesson 2: If you're not willing to totally lie, cheat, and forge evidence, you're going to disappoint the audience that doesn't care about truth and reality. 

Unfortuantely, the GOP in AZ don't seem much smarter for this experience. 

Image: seattletimes.com

History: When the GOP pissed off black voters

Black voters were very loyal to the party of Lincoln, which after all fought to end slavery and insisted on rights for the newly freed Americans. I haven't studied this extensively to know when it started changing, but I do know that black Americans were grateful to FDR, and maybe even more so to Eleanor. Many New Deal programs gave black folks a share, and that wasn't common or expected at that time. FDR was getting around 70% of black votes for president, which is quite impressive. 

In 1948, Truman integrated the military, and got 77% of the black vote and that carried over to 1952. Eisenhower must have been relatively popular with black folks because he raised his take from 24% in 1952 to 39% in 1956. 

But this didn't carry over to Nixon, and here's why. Nixon decided to court the white southern vote instead. Maybe this happened because in 1948, white southern Democrats rebelled and formed their own party, the Dixiecrats. This showed the cracks in their loyalty, and probably Nixon took notice, no doubt along with others. So Nixon hoped to court white southern votes, and he did it at the cost of the hopes for equality of black Americans. Martin Luther King felt betrayed. There's little doubt that others did too. Nixon was calculating, and let southern white folks know that they could run their schools their way. 

Also, Kennedy stepped up to support Martin Luther King when he was jailed in Georgia in October '60, and get him released. Be sure to read these last two links because the stories are more emotional than I can convey. 

Kennedy got 68% of the black vote in 1960. In 1964, that surged to 94% for Johnson, and it hasn't dropped back into the 60s yet. For the complex reasons why, ask black folks and read a lot. But I don't think it's an accident. There are reasons for electoral shifts, and it's wise to pay attention to them. 

Image: mashable.com

Covid updates and articles

Publishing another post that's been sitting around. Good links here. 

The year in covid - 2021. Lots of people got vaccinated. There were a few scares with the vaccines, particularly rare blood clots from the Johnson&Johnson (very rare), and heart inflammation (myocarditis), mostly in younger men (somewhat rare). Summer brought a wave of the delta variant. Vaxxed people had some breakthrough cases, but few hospitalizations or deaths. Stupid red states like Texas had a ton of hospitalizations and deaths. And the anti-vaxxers remained dubious even with all the real-life info. The omicron wave started in November and surged fast, wiping out a lot of Christmas and New Year's plans. It was very contagious, but having a recent booster turned out still be quite protective. My family all got booster by December, so we had no covid cases here. 

Now the links:

An article about how masks protect. 

But the best explanation has come from private communication with an acquaintance with a PhD in molecular biology and decades of experience in pharmaceuticals and drug testing. He writes how masks are very helpful even though viruses are so small, 

A respiratory droplet contains water proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and if someone is infectious, SARS-VoV-2 virus.

When they very rapidly evaporate, what gets left behind is a hydrated particle of proteins, glycoproteins, salt, and virus.

It's not naked virus. It is much larger than the cold virus, although still small enough to remain airborne.

And yes, those droplet nuclei can pass fairly easily through a mask. I pointed that out of my original extended reply to you. That's why masks do a poor job of protecting the person wearing them.

But the point is that masks do quite a good job of trapping large respiratory droplets at the source, before they have a chance to evaporate into airborne droplet nuclei.

That's the point. Respiratory droplets get caught at the source before they have a chance to evaporate into droplet nuclei, which remain suspended in the air, and are quite effective at infecting other people.

The heartache of being a covid doctor. How huge the omicron wave was.  What it was like in Kansas City. 

Excellent resource. The report from the independent panel reviewing the Pfizer vaccine test data. Loads of info, like how many subjects were hospitalized. 

So the big ivermectin guru, Dr. Pierre Kory, got covid even though he was following his preventative protocol. Why he didn't change his advice--bias, of course.

Image: pewtrusts.org

Canada's Freedom Convoy

 Catching up on this old story. 

So a lot of truckers in Canada got together to protest mandatory covid vaccination in late January. They convoyed across Canada and descended on Ottawa to protest at parliament. Like a lot of anti-vaxxers, they were long on shouting conspiracy theories and very short on data and realism. They ruined the quality of life in the neighborhoods where they lined the streets with their trucks idling and polluting, blowing their horns at high volume, and generally being annoying to the point that murder was conceivable. 

Of course they were cheered on by US anti-vaxxers. Their fundraising may have been largely from Americans. But at some point, the government shut down their fundraising and seized the money, if I remember correctly. 

This was perhaps the biggest showdown between anti-vaxxers and a national government, so the whole world watched. I hoped it would fail so that US truckers weren't encouraged to pull the same shit here. Eventually, the mild-mannered Canadians got fed up with the US-style raucous rednecks, and clamped down hard. Some police sabotaged extra vehicles, Police surrounded them and managed to get them to disperse. Oh, yeah, Trudeau (the baby prime minister son of a former prime minister) invoked some emergency powers to have the legal tools to arrest scofflaws and throw them in jail. After a bit of grandstanding, he won a vote backing the powers. 

So it went from a cause celebre to a fizzle. Americans tried to copy it, but it never ascended very far and then fizzled. The Canadian protest didn't launch an Arab Spring or anything close to it. But we didn't know if it might. Remember this as only a year after the Jan. 6 coup attempt in Washington DC, so rebellion was still in the air. It could have ignited, but luckily it didn't. No one needs a rebellion based on stupidity and ridiculous internet claims. Also, Russia invaded Ukraine a few weeks later, so Canadian idiots were no longer the biggest news story in the world. Real issues took over. 

Sources: Aggrieved entitlement. White nationalism among the protest leaders. The emergency declaration. The police tighten the circle around the protesters. The biggest outrage was a woman being trampled to death by a mounted officer, but that was a huge exaggeration of the incident. Not even a serious injury. I recognize this blowing issues out of total proportion. 

Image: nbcnews.com

More great assorted links

I'm a fan of history especially history that helps explain the world I live in today. One piece I got to see personally was the science-led ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). I did independent study on the issue while in college in the late 70s, and it's fascinating to look back. Back then, science was more respected and not just a ping pong ball in adversarial politics. 

A great, passionate talk about race relations in the US. Insight after insight. Watch and learn so much that you need to learn. 

Unusual mail-in ballot numbers in Wisconsin. Probably some fraud, but not huge amounts. And during covid, nursing homes were making sure residents got to vote. But that makes sense because residents weren't getting visits. 

Explanation of US oil production and the effects of covid. Demand cratered, pumping didn't slow, the market was over saturated, prices cratered, producers went bankrupt, production dropped sharply. 

The view from Twitter employees on the Musk takeover. Nervous. (Funny, this one fell apart, but here's a historical record.)

Fact-checking the 'blockbuster' expose movie about voter fraud. The premise is very weak--the Dems supposedly had 2000 ballot harvesters, based on cell phone tower ping data. 

The military has a problem with white supremacists. But according to some conservatives, the military is actually trying to censor conservatives. Here are some cases. 

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense, describes how Trump was unfit to be president. Maybe compare that with Rick Scott's reasons for calling Biden unfit. 

How were voting rights for black people secured? It was a long process, where the federal government ignored the problem for years despite having the mandate right in the 14th amendment to enforce those rights. 

A pilot project sent mental health teams to respond to minor police calls in Denver. It was successful, so maybe we'll see more diverse response teams become more common rather than relying so much on police. 

An software engineer at Google has been suspended for sharing private information. It concerns his opinion that an artificial intelligence (AI) application has achieved sentience. That puts the engineer into an ethical dilemma.

Image: abcnews.go.com

Links from months ago

Charlie Munger, a billionaire investor who is also associated with Warren Buffett, is 97 years old and throwing money into a social experiment in student housing. His idea: students don't need windows to the outside in their dorm rooms. The results aren't good, but he's on his second project in this dream. The first was a dorm for 600 grad students at U Michigan. The second is for 4500 students at UC Santa Barbara. 

A NYT article about how the Biden administration can fight misinformation.. 

The president of Belarus is weaponizing migrants--flying them into Belarus, then dumping them across the borders at the neighbors he doesn't like. 

Ethnic studies will be required for graduation in California high schools. Sounds like a good idea! Not so different from having mandatory health education.

The fast, unorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan happened in part because the Taliban weren't going to extend the ceasefire into September. 

A different kind of misinformation. An anti-BLM claim that Irish slaves were treated worse than African slaves. The story is tracked down, debunked, and shown as the propaganda it is. 

Image: youtube/kobeissi

The future of the GOP

(I've been neglectful of my blog. Catching up with some posts I wrote. This one is from early November 2021.)

I asked what Qanon is going to do. I have to ask the same about the GOP. Not that most of the GOP is as crazy as Qanon folks, but they are in a bind. Trump said the election was stolen from him, but the evidence is so paltry that the claims are frankly embarrassing. So what will the GOP do? In Virginia, the winning governor candidate went along with the charade during the primary, and has now pivoted away from it. 

There's also the problem of the Jan. 6 riots/attempted coup/insurrection/tourist visit to the Capitol. Will Congress be able to set up a commission to investigate and report on it? Uh, it's certainly past time when the commission should have been formed. However, Republicans want to block it without being caught blocking it. Lots of them are in this bind, but probably none more than Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House. He was on the phone with Trump on Jan. 6, so his testimony is extremely important, and perhaps extremely embarrassing. Yes, what a bind. 

Politico: Headaches of Trump running again. The Politico article is over 6 months old, but so much of it still applies. Trump did squander a lot of political capital, and other senior GOP leaders don't know what to do about him. They are flailing in their response because Trump is frankly more popular than the established leadership. There is no old dean or statesman who has the stature to talk sense to the party base. So the situation is frozen until primaries show which view is stronger. 

Image: businessinsider.com