[ryanbrunner]

If we take the most innocent sounding version of this, where the White House points out that a tweet is in violation of Twitter's stated policies and asks for those policies to be applied, I think it's pretty clearly not.

Of course those requests can and will be made in a biased manner, and it's naive to assume that the nature of the request isn't going to influence how Twitter responds to it, but it's definitely a murky grey area at that point.

[mc32]

Couple of things:

government used to be weary of any appearance of impropriety, lest people believe they are acting improperly -being slimy. That seems to have gone by the wayside.

two, if the requests were to suppress sensitive government information --secrets, ok, I might lend a sympathetic ear, if they could prove it was so (not because they said "take our word". But this is "don't make us look bad" --sorry, but no, it stays.

And now we are hearing the gov wants to amp up domestic surveillance. The ACLU and EFF, etc should get off their butts and perform their claimed duty. We're not China in that sense yet, but if we let them, we'll get there.

[ajross]

> government used to be weary of any appearance of impropriety, lest people believe they are acting improperly -being slimy. That seems to have gone by the wayside.

Voters used to punish politicians that seemed improper. They don't anymore. The Trump administration was the capstone on this, obviously, but the trend has been developing for decades.

[dd36]

It was clearly the common media informing the voters of improper behavior. Now voters can pick their own media and avoid unflattering stories. This then has led to terrible politicians getting away with far more than they ever could before.

[mc32]

Eh, the media has been corrupt and shaping and staging. They probably sunk Gary Hart's ambitions by insinuating he had an affair with Donna, so the Dems ended up with some damned Goofball against the desiccated GHW. Of course for the coup de grace they bum rushed Ross the next round.

[dd36]

The issue isn’t there was a time of pure media. It’s there was a time of common media.

[hackernewds]

Good to observe that 1) the white House resided then president Donald Trump 2) the tweets submitted for removal were H Biden's genitalia, which are in clear violation of Twitters PoS.

[Dem_Boys]

This is a good point!

The wording probably matters too. The Biden team asked Twitter to "review" certain tweets instead of "remove" certain tweets. So technically they're not suppressing speech explicitly but implicitly we (and twitter employees) all know what they mean by "review".

[evrydayhustling]

You do realize this was the Trump Whitehouse? and that both Trump's campaign team and White House staff made requests that were honored? And that when Biden's team asked for the reviews it was not the executive branch?

[Dem_Boys]

Yep! Dont really care who's in the White House in this instance.

I referenced the Biden team's verbiage because that's the only verbiage that was posted with the implied intent on getting tweets removed (besides the DNC). I'd love to see the email's from the White House asking for tweets to be removed.

[romellem]

I wonder why these Twitter Files didn’t include any partial emails from Trump’s staff, only the DNC where they expedited a ToS violation review.

Oh wait, it’s because clearly this information from a “Twitter source” (aka Elon) is disseminated with a viewpoint and is hardly impartial.

All of this should be viewed with extreme skepticism, and so far none of this seems damning in any way. I haven’t seen anything that says Elon is remotely operating in good faith.

[agrippanux]

Also that the tweets the Biden team asked to be reviewed violated Twitter TOS for revenge porn.

[evrydayhustling]

I suspect some of these slimy outcomes (parties and offices having special access to request review) are pretty hard to avoid in practice. Like, if you know for a fact that there will be illegal actors targeting both campaigns, do you not listen to direct requests from the targets? And if you offer it to one side, would you offer it to all? I bet there are more principled ways to do it but I also think this is what it would like if a reasonably well intentioned but also selfish / risk averse staff tried to react in realtime to a really new situation.

[Karunamon]

Transparency would go a long way. The fact that all of this is happening behind closed doors means that the process is just begging for abuse.

[dmix]

The power structures in society having arbitrary influence is what matters. A c-tier candidate would never have the same pull as not-yet elected Biden. Nor would a controversial candidate even from a popular party.

The only solution is to not provide the power in the first place instead of trying to fix it with layers of easily bypassed rules. You can’t have easy censorship if there isn’t an established censorship system already in place.

A system that is limited by law and very fundamental policies is much less prone to abuse (ie, a constitutional republic with transparent but limited policy making power vs monarchical systems with backroom dealing by elites). The minute it became about broadly policing speech via backroom dealing was the minute it became wide open to abuse.

[ModernMech]

> You can’t have easy censorship if there isn’t an established censorship system already in place.

This creates a new kind of abuse. If Twitter has no way of removing illegal content from its platform, then your opponent can use that fact to post illegal content about you (i.e. hacked pictures of your naked body), and you have no recourse.