[fzeroracer]

Not just that, but revenge porn is literally illegal in the state of California, where Twitter is HQ'd.

I'm getting increasingly annoyed by people pointing to those removed tweets as a smoking gun while being completely unaware that we know the contents of said tweet and said tweets can easily be interpreted as violating Twitter's ToS at minimum and actively violating California law at worst.

[chrisco255]

The case in point was the removal and censorship of the NY Post's story on the laptop, which was incredibly relevant to the Presidential election. It revealed Hunter as a degenerate crackhead, and an unqualified man-child who benefited directly from his father's position as Vice President to get a powerful, paid position on the Burisma Board of Directors, a favor for which he committed "10% to the big guy" (among other positions, Burisma was not the only one). It underscored the corruption of the current U.S. president, who used his power and influence over foreign relations with Ukraine to enrich his own family and himself.

The pornographic images, to what extent they were shown in the NY Post, were redacted. The main function they played is in showing that the laptop contents couldn't have been fake.

[ytpete]

There's an important distinction here. It seems there were some tweets the Biden campaign raised with contacts at Twitter - they contained porn, and were rightly taken down.

Then there was a NY Post story blocked by Twitter - that move is much harder to defend, but crucially it seems Twitter took it upon themselves to remove that story, with no evidence presented that the Biden campaign had anything to do with it.

A lot of the debate here seems to be conflating those two things.

[mfost]

I question the integrity of the journalist reporting those tweets (Matt Taibbi) at that point I must admit.

So many people seem to conflate the requests for review of ToS violating messages with some kind of power the Democrats had to get Twitter to block the story.

If the Democrats had that kind of power and it was visible in the info available, no doubt this would be shown upfront. Instead we get pretty loaded (lying?) mentions of "requests from connected actors to delete tweets" when the message clearly mentions tweets to review.

In fact the answer "handled" doesn't even imply anything was deleted. Also this so called journalist didn't even try to see what had been deleted in the end to see if it wasn't just blattant ToS violations and worse, material that had really nothing much to do with the campaign in the first place. I fail to see how the right of some tweets of revenge porn to survive a few hours longer because they had to go through the regular queue of moderation was of any import.

It's easy to paint a team as having excessive influence on Twitter. Just have your own team post a lot of ToS abusing materials then later on show the stats of deleted tweets to show the "bias"

[pstuart]

All that has been shown is that Hunter was a POS trying to profit from his relationship with his father, who has been investigated and exonerated by the GOP: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/senate-homeland-secur...

Just because they want to offer up 10% to the big guy doesn't mean he took it.

If he was guilty he should have been prosecuted (and would have been). Would you be willing to say the same about Trump?

[killdozer]

They're clearly not acting in good faith and you should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[antiterra]

I think there’s a lot more at play than lack of good faith. It’s incredibly tantalizing and comforting to buy into a narrative that the other side is engaged in an unforgivable scandal that will eventually result in your side regaining power or moral superiority. We’re all trapped in an out of control rumor machine just in time for the arrival of AI generated misinformation.