> 97%+ Twitter employee donations were to Democrats?
So what’s the principle here? What’s the plan. Which companies should have to disclose the political contributions of their employees and what should they do if it’s unbalanced at more than say 60-40, randomly fire employees until it’s back in line?
The "driven by connections" and the culture that implies is the interesting part. It highlights how they're a center of power that needs similar anti-corruption traditions as any other center of power; there's at least the possibility of something generally useful coming out of this being known.
Looking at the donation ratio as proof of the very obvious bias that everyone who cared to look already know about, is good for... what, playing "I told you so"?
I lived and worked in DC for 10+ years.
I watched this sort of thing happen live just sitting in coffee shops and restaurants near K street or the capitol, or just walking the halls in the office buildings.
This is not driven by political donations at the 500-1000 level that employees are doing.
No one gives a crap about those. Sorry. they just don't.
Maybe you get invited to a dinner with 10000 other people and sit 1000 feet away from a candidate.
The people who have "connections" to a place like twitter exist on both sides, aren't getting them from small donations to candidates, and believing otherwise is pretty far out there.
If you want to use the donation number to paint this as "twitter has a liberal censorship bent because it's employees are democrats", the problem is that despite matt's anecdote, actual research doesn't back this up:
I'm also incredibly curious what you think should happen that would actually be better?
Everything that involves humans is biased in some way by humans.
You ban them from donating - well, if your problem is really they are democrats, this will fix nothing, of course.
You force them to hire equal numbers of people from various political ideologies - There's a lot of them!
You hold them criminally liable for something or other - good luck defining what "wrong" means. Or getting something other than robots to be good at it.
Unless you are going to sequester people in a room, without access to anything outside, and somehow suppress all their lived experiences, you are going to end up with biased people moderating content.
But here's the thing: If you want the platform to be useful in any meaningful way, you need to moderate content anyway, and live with the fact that it's always going to be biased. Free speech absolutism is not actually a highly useful thing for society in the end, despite the dangers of everything else. That's humans for you.
All of our systems and all of the things we build are biased by the people who create and run them. That's true of justice systems, governments, your friend groups, everything.
Trying to remove all the bias from decision making in something as large as twitter is like trying to kill all the ants in your backyard.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. You seem to have gone off on some wild tangent and started it with calling me "naive".
Let me break it down:
- Influence over Twitter policy is mostly through connections with politicians
- At least using donations as a metric, 97%+ of Twitter employees support the Democrats
- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy
- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform.
Which is kind of the key point of the story?
I mean the banning of Trump while President kind of makes sense. There was nobody (or maybe 3% of employees) who who leaned Republican who could actually argue their point.
Here:
"- Hence, the Democrats overwhelmingly have more influence on Twitter policy"
No, this does not follow, even a little.
The donations are to politicians, not from politicians.
So you seem to be trying to argue "because some of the employees donate to democrats, all employees therefore accept influence from democrats overwhelmingly". But this is not logical in any way, shape or form.
First, as pointed out numerous times, you don't know who the donations are from, and what population at twitter they represent.
For all you know, the entire policy team is republican or whatever and didn't donate at all!
Using the small percent who did donate somewhere as a proxy smear of the entire population of twitter employees is beyond silly.
Second, you have established zero connection between donation and influence of the donatee, because none can exist.
If i donate to say the ACLU, it doesn't mean the ACLU has influence over me.
It may (or may not!) mean we share some views, but that's not the same as them being able to influence me at all.
I donated a bunch to toys to toys for tots and the salvation army this season. By your argument, apparently they have a massive amount of influence on me through some unknown, unproven connection!
Yes, I think it is naive to believe otherwise, and that most of your argument is incredibly biased and naive, so i did call you naive for believing so.
Third, using donations of employees as a proxy metric for who has influence on employees is not backed up by any research, which i explicitly gave you, shows exactly the opposite of what you are claiming, and you just ignored.
"- Thus, when the Biden team expressed concern over a new article, the Twitter team was fast to censor the store on their platform."
Except the evidence shows when anyone expressed concern, they were fast to censor it.
It even says that!
So your whole point here, where it's about some twitter = democrat conspiracy, is nonsense.
Given that you seem to be incorrect on the second part, the rest of your statement falls apart. You seem to have a severe misunderstanding of math, 97% of donations went to Democrats. Not 97% of employees donated to Democrats. If you can do basic napkin math, this means if you had one leader, manager or whatever be a particularly prolific donator they could crowd out the entire company in terms of donations. This has zero actual bearing on how much influence the company as a whole has, unless you want to argue that it's illegal for private individuals to ever donate to a political party under fear of biasing their company.
Though given that you've made this mistaken point multiple times now I don't think you actually care and are just pushing a narrative here.