| This is hilariously naive. 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: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives... https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 etc 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. |
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.