[incomingpain]

On april 17th I made the prediction that the US government was in control of twitter for probably this reason. I got flagged for this.

A day later a bunch of former intelligence people basically said this is a good idea. That's funny to me.

[eganist]

Found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31057193

Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.

[incomingpain]

>Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.

Institutions like Blackrock or Vanguard don't get to vote, they may at most provide a proxy vote at cost.

The typical 'conspiracy' around those 2 is that their management can threaten entities like twitter with delisting. Twitter is then removed from their holdings at tremendous cost. So they have kind of a little threat and they get some say to do stuff like climate change and diversity stuff. Ultimately the orgs still take this upon themselves. It's an easy thing to bluff against.

Yes maybe some of these institutions have some players involved but I dont see it.

Twitter looks tremendously undefended.

[spamizbad]

Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand. They’re also all over the spectrum depending on what audience they’re chasing. Not that much difference than any other media influencer or substack author.

It's ultimately a free speech issue. You can't demand people to self-censor because their previous employment places unjustified credibility their nonsensical views. The way to combat this is through better civic and media literacy.

[pessimizer]

> Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand.

Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes because they're paid to, and after those goofy takes have been blasted by every corporate media outlet 24 hours a day for a month or two, they transform from goofy takes into orthodoxies that you could be fired for denying.

[incomingpain]

>Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand. They’re also all over the spectrum depending on what audience they’re chasing.

You're right but is this one a goofy take? Or is there a real something here?

[spamizbad]

I don't think so, but to indulge my own cranky theories: Perhaps Elon Musk's takeover attempt was done at the behest of the US government to take control of the platform under the cover of "censorship". Musk himself indicated he wanted to make the platform more miserable for the "extremes" on both the left and right (both perceived as being anti-government) - leaving you with the establishment consensus unharmed in the middle.

[incomingpain]

That's a cool idea. Largely speaking you can see Elon's point of view.

He was on Babylon Bee's show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGnw1sHh9M 2.4 million views in last 3 months. In this video they in detail discuss the problem with political banning.

2 months later, Babylon Bee got banned off twitter for a joke. Clear political banning and violation of section 230.

[everforward]

> Clear political banning and violation of section 230.

This has been posted a bunch of times, and it's wrong. Section 230 doesn't prohibit political bannings. It doesn't actually prohibit any banning at all.

This is the relevant section (from https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230).

> (2) Civil liability > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or > availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, > lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise > objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;

Even banning for constitutionally protected speech is explicitly allowed.

Whether that's a good thing or not is a separate conversation, but nothing presently in section 230 would prevent Twitter/Facebook/etc from banning an entire political party.

[spamizbad]

Babylon Bee doesn't threaten the national security establishment. The "Far left" and "Far right" - yes.

The idea is you won't get banned for making jokes about trans stuff, but you'll instead get banned for saying something bad about US global hegemony. It's not a culture war issue so nobody is going to care that you got censored.

[weeblewobble]

For the record Babylon Bee is not banned, they can unlock their account any time by deleting a Tweet that jokingly gives a "man of the year award" to a real individual transwoman by name.

[jaywalk]

"They're not banned! They are free to continue tweeting as soon as they abandon their principles and bow down to Twitter's arbitrary rules!"

[AnimalMuppet]

So they aren't banned, just the one tweet is. Sounds good, but the reality is that unless and until they recant that one tweet, then they are banned.

[thorRay8383]

What’s real is Greenwald poetically desires a world organized by his principles but has neither the skills or imagination to offer more than paranoid Big Brother scenario.

Technology based mesh networks are not going anywhere. Unless the public itself revolts against the state it will always stick its fingers in them.

One planet, one reality on the ground. If people don’t want big government they need to replace it.

[yonaguska]

Former Intel people are a necessary tool of the current Intel community. I forget which project veritas recording caught this- but a journalist was caught stating that they get their information from former Intel people that talk to current Intel officials to get around rules preventing current Intel officials from leaking information to journalists, we have a problem. And we've had a serious problem as this behavior is not just the activity of rogue officials that only leak true information. I would argue that it's also likely that Intel officials are doing this with the blessing of their organizations in order to shape public opinion. And they aren't always leaking the truth. Remember when 50 Intel officials signed a weasely letter stating that the laptop from hell was simply Russian Disinformation? Or in the case of the Durham investigation, we are seeing an increasingly obvious pattern that Intel agencies were involved in creating fake controversy over Russia and Trump in order to remove him from power?

You call it brand building, I call it destroying democracy.

[andrewclunn]

We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

[incomingpain]

>We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.

You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.

[bryanrasmussen]

>You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government. Meaning that the conversion happens in the underlying JIT engine where government hacks twitter to do what it wants.

So the idea is that you could make a first amendment complaint against the government for hacking twitter if it infringed your free speech with that hack, but you could not say twitter cannot just turn off my account because while twitter == government it does not === government.

[andrewclunn]

> it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government.

Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).

[bryanrasmussen]

Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!

[incomingpain]

I get the complication of the position. Occams razor puts me back to the plain option that twitter is simply controlled by us gov.

[nemothekid]

I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

[incomingpain]

>I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I don't use twitter. Because of Elon I wanted to test and do have an account right now. I connected to my canadian political folks and chess people. I liked lots of things, but I never commented or retweeted. I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored. Absolutely no way should have my account been treated this way.

>I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.

[notacoward]

Occam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious. Literally it means "do not multiply entities beyond necessity"; in practice it's also called the principle of parsimony, meaning that one should not assume a more complicated explanation when a simpler one will do. Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

[incomingpain]

>ccam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious.

My mistake. Maybe I can't think of the one I'm trying to think of. I don't need a name or rule really.

Philosophically speaking, if you have a few competing ideas and no way to come to a conclusion. The simplest explanation is the best one to go with.

> Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

I did provide evidence in my original post. Perhaps you dont accept my evidences for some reason?

I believe I should consider a rebuttal to my evidences. Are the other S&P500 companies so tremendously undefended from takeover?

WBD recently joined S&P and they are pretty undefended, not as bad as twitter.

CPT is worse than WBD.

MOH is worse than CPT.

NDSN is about WBD.

CEG is worse than all of them.

Woah. I kind of disproved myself? I haven't considered this. Tesla is like the only defended stock I can find? I haven't checked them all.

https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

Haven't checked on this in awhile. It's high but is trending down post covid recession.

The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?

Just checked TSX60 for Canada. AEM, AQN, ATD, BCE, BMO, BNS, ABX, and they are all good. BHC is the first one that looks maybe questionable but nowhere near problematic.

Just checked a random selection of FTSE 100. BP, BATS, BLND. All healthy.

I feel like disproving myself wasn't a good thing though. I need to go spend some time on questrade.

[JKCalhoun]

Controlled how?

I ask because I'm pretty sure real (non-US government) people post to Twitter and get real retweets. How is the US government controlling it?

I imagine this would have blown wide open a long time ago if true. (Also Occam's Razor?)

[dgb23]

Social control and power is never complete and absolute. Even very direct coercion can often be ignored, worked around or endured except for very extreme cases.

[adventured]

> What moral high ground do we hold now?

Vast amounts of ground, fortunately. How about the fact that we can have these conversations fully uncensored? That little thing known as freedom of speech, which is still overwhelmingly alive and well. I enjoy its use, aggressively, on a daily basis without persecution and have for decades uninterrupted.

[dangus]

The article is about the benefits that the US intelligence agencies get from the censorship power of a centralized monopoly of tech companies.

For example, if your main form of communication online is through companies owned by Meta, it’s very easy to effectively censor a point of view or group of people through deplatforming, but if there are dozens of platforms that becomes more difficult.

While more authoritarian countries rely on direct censorship, the US instead promotes the viewpoints they want people to subscribe to: positive reinforcement. You can see this with the government’s involvement with the entertainment industry, or with the military paying sports leagues to promote patriotic displays.

Tech companies being private entities means that they can censor or at least stop the viral effects of social media on ideas that don’t fit the mold.

There’s a lot you can do to shape public opinion without violating the first amendment.

It’s kind of similar to the way local news stations will run “stories” that amount to advertisements for various products or local businesses. Or you might see a funny meme on Reddit where the joke mostly has to do with a company.

Not to say that there aren’t valid reasons to do stuff like this…there’s plenty of harmful speech out there that makes the world a worse place. Hateful, violent, or misleading speech is a legitimate problem. For example, there’s a report that claims most anti-vaccination online content comes from just 12 sources. [1]

It seems a little bit alarming that such a small group can amplify speech in a way that has cost perhaps thousands of lives.

[1] [PDF] https://f4d9b9d3-3d32-4f3a-afa6-49f8bf05279a.usrfiles.com/ug...

[zozbot234]

Except that freedom of speech does not protect us from intolerance, as Karl Popper observed. For example, private entities are not required to uphold freedom of speech.

[refurb]

It's funny when Popper is brought up in this way because his conclusion was that the only reasonable censorship of intolerance was that which poses a threat of immediate physical harm. So basically how the US treats freedom of speech today.

He certainly wouldn't be supportive of censoring racist commentary that didn't incite immediate physical violence.

[mschuster91]

Funny enough, in Germany - which is definitely more restricted, and for good reason, on the US understanding of "free speech" - Facebook and Twitter are routinely seen as public discourse forums and have to unban users as long as what they post isn't against the law [1].

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-urteil-faceboo...

[politician]

Good news- We aren’t required to tolerate institutions that don’t uphold freedom of speech.

[formerkrogemp]

We can have this conversation now, but vigilance is good.

[adventured]

Certainly. Nothing in my comment suggests otherwise in the least.

[formerkrogemp]

So much on this site and online more generally comes across as criticism. It wasn't meant as such. I just thought it should be minded.

[stjohnswarts]

I don't think people think it's impossible but you need a source. The article in the headline does not prove this. Of course US security/war hawks want control over twitter but that doesn't make it true.

[tomrod]

From your comment, you went unnecessarily political regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In my view, this is why people downvoted your comment. The common narrative is that it was insurrection. It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.

[bavell]

LOL no sane person thought the country was going to be taken over by some grandmas and goofy morons...

[tomrod]

Correct. But interfering with election proceedings, never mind being encouraged to kill the people charged with finalizing those proceedings, could lend to chaos and give incumbents (who are stocking the chaos) opportunities to seize control -- an effective coup.

Don't confuse tools with crafters.

[bavell]

I hear you, but as soon as anyone "siezed control" they would be summarily thrown out in the mud and made a laughing stock by the entirety of the nation.

Don't let the tiny vocal minority of fools chanting election fraud trick you into thinking regular folks would go along with some half-baked coup attempt - they'd be met with laughter and scorn. I've discussed this at length with friends and family, some of whom have pretty strong political views.

[tomrod]

Ah yes, "it could never happen here."

But if they're in nominal control of the military, and have 40% of the country expressing a modicum of sympathy, then you let loose a pretty dangerous situation.

[vvvzxd]

>The common narrative is that it was insurrection.

how many people from Jan 6 have been charged with insurrection?

[tomrod]

The event was an insurrection. Several have been charged with seditious conspiracy, as your earlier commenters have pointed out. Others have other charges.

Here is a quick Google result for your perusal: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.insider.com/all-the-us-capi...

[incomingpain]

>From your comment, you went unnecessarily political regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In my view, this is why people downvoted your comment. The common narrative is that it was insurrection

That hasn't been true for months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_att...

Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that. I understand the criticism that perhaps it's because it's political, but that's the because the whole subject is political.

>It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.

Dangerous seems an over reach.

Contemporary comparison you have mostly peaceful riots and actual insurrections like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

It's really important to see what's happening here. It's ultra important to be able to talk about these things.

Republicans need to address the police brutality and objectively proven racism.

Democrats need to address some things as well.

These conversations have to happen and they are going to hurt.

[notacoward]

> Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that.

They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained. But ask a layperson to describe the difference and you'll get nothing. Even the US house and senate voted on impeachment for "incitement of insurrection" despite the legal distinction. Saying that it's "not insurrection[legal]" might be true, but HN is not a court and saying "not insurrection[common]" here is false.

[tomrod]

> But ask a layperson to describe the difference and you'll get nothing. Even the US house and senate voted on impeachment for "incitement of insurrection" despite the legal distinction.

\o layperson here. My observation of January 6 was the people being punished were part of a hapless, mindless mob who believed the lies of kakistocrats playing on their economic insecurities and political loyalties.

[incomingpain]

I withdraw my position about US government and twitter.

>They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained.

I think I saw this on twitter. I'm not going to argue over this one. Even the wikipage extensively uses the word insurrection still.

This is a super non-issue. In fact, the differing reactions and hard line take on these contemporary political protests is all that matters.

I could also point out, but it won't help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

Elon isn't too late. Seemingly he's ahead of me on this one. I didn't realize how bad it is.

I just hope Canada and Mexico stay out of this.

[superturkey650]

Besides that, the subtitle of the article on Wikipedia is literally “ Violent insurrection after the 2020 presidential election”.

[phkahler]

Yeah, one group of "protestors" can take over a small section of a city, push the authorities out, loot and riot. But another "protest" gets a little out of hand and it's an attempt to overthrow the government.

Trump lost, can nobody see that continuing to talk about him is counterproductive? On both sides!

[tomrod]

> Yeah, one group of "protestors" can take over a small section of a city, push the authorities out, loot and riot.

If you read my prior comment, you'll note a distinct lack of discussion regarding this unrelated topic.

> But another "protest" gets a little out of hand and it's an attempt to overthrow the government.

Correct. The mob that actually performed the violent protest may not have come to the Capitol that day to overthrow the government, but the people spurring them on had other designs. Calling for the murder of the government official performing their duty is a key tell for that; to my understanding there is further evidence beyond incendiary and violent rhetoric.

But please, let's stay on topic instead of deflecting to the ills of Antifa and her counter-agitators. That conversation just reinforces the backfire effect since the trivial triggering conversation challenges deeply held worldviews.[0]

[0] https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe_clean