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by moistofreason 1318 days ago
All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not disclose private company communications… this is way different than censoring a user who is under no such agreement.
4 comments

The difference is that Twitter does not enforce those agreements as quickly for any company that's not Twitter.

Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.

And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.

The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.

But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce them at the same speed for other companies. If processing speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of course Twitter will be able to verify their own agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily double standards.

It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.

That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee for all.
But they never claimed to be an equitable platform with regards to that issue, did they? Musk might idealistic, but not that idealistic.
To be fair, some of his early comments indicated that all legal speech was to be allowed.

That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.

To be fair, Musk also pledged that Twitter would not become a "free for all" in terms of speech.
> Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform)

Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.

Was illustrating conceptual. I don't think they have an actual like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Though maybe they should?
Uhh, not from Twitter the product's vantage it's not.

So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?

Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.

But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those agreements? No. How could they?

Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.

But Elon Musk didn’t own the company when they signed those NDAs. He’s a “free speech absolutist”. Why would he allow such abominations to be enforced?