[degobah]

What did the Biden campaign do that the Trump White House did not?

"In 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored."

The difference is that the Trump White House was the executive office of the federal govt making requests, while Biden was a private citizen.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752

[M4v3R]

The difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.

[cycomanic]

> The difference is also that, per the data that was linked in the thread, the Democrats had orders of magnitude more requests sent and honored than Republicans, because the former had more contacts at Twitter that were willing to take those requests.

Hold on the second does not follow from the first. They might have send more request because they had a more savy social media team, they might have send more request because much more ToS violating content was posted about Biden.

If there is a massive difference in percentages of honored requests that could _maybe_ indicate bias (but that's still a bi maybe).

[cozos]

You're right, all of those things could be true. 98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems, nothing to see here, move along.

https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/159882999626439065...

[shagie]

It is important to read that table correctly.

It does not say "98.47% of Twitter donated to Dems".

Rather it says: "Of the $968,749 contributions made by employees of Twitter, 98.47% of those contributions went to Dems."

It says nothing about the number of people making those donations and thus nothing about the percent of the employees that made those contributions.

(edit)

It is also fun to extend that table to 2016 and before:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/totals?id=D00006711...

    Contributions by Party of Recipient
    Cycle   Total       Democrats    % to Dems  Republicans % to Repubs
    2022    $185,267    $165,969     99.73%     $451            0.27%
    2020    $968,749    $909,431     98.47%     $14,137         1.53%
    2018    $309,394    $295,722     96.38%     $11,100         3.62%
    2016    $858,596    $589,301     69.07%     $263,945        30.93%
    2014    $41,300     $23,300      88.59%     $3,000          11.41%
    2012    $35,529     $34,279      99.28%     $250            0.72%
    2008    $3,000      $3,000       100.00%    $0              0.00%

[cozos]

Uh-uh. 98.47% of $$ went to Dems in 2020. But _obviously_ magnitude of dollars has nothing to do with number of people, influence, or power. Or rather, you're saying, there's no way to know, so we should just move along right?

[shagie]

Hypothetically, if Acme had 100 people and one person donated $100 to a Democrat while another person donated $1 to a Republican would it be correct to say that 99% of Acme donated to Democratic causes?

If not, would you please restate "98.47% of Twitter contributions to Dems" to be more representative of what the numbers say.

[etchalon]

There's no data in the thread which points to any internal metrics at Twitter which shows outsized influence by Democrats.

There's an implication based on the political donations of Twitter employees that that was likely the case.

[candybar]

This is a huge tell,. Matt Taibbi (or Elon Musk via him) is trying to paint a picture that this was heavily tilted in favor of Democrats. But he has access to the actual data - why not just publish that if he feels it's damning? Whatever mechanism he used to find these emails and also to conclude that both campaigns had access, could also have been used to determine the bias statistically. And the raw data could even have been shared for public consumption.

Instead, he talks about campaign contributions, which isn't even circumstantial evidence of bias. You don't have to contribute to a political campaign to process moderation requests from them. There's no plausible mechanism by which the volume of requests that can be processed is related the amount of money donated by Twitter employees. You just need one contact and again, no evidence exists - and not even clear accusations have been made - that Twitter employees involved were reluctant to process requests made by the Trump team.

If anything the fact that Matt Taibbi is dishonestly trying to make this connection is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that they couldn't find anything even remotely damning. Because if they could find something actually damning, they would've used that instead. Resorting to, ugh, Twitter employees are liberal, so I'm sure they weren't entirely being fair in processing requests from the Trump team and ugh, more contributions to the Democrats so like, must be able to process more requests, which is a complete non-sequitur, is highly damaging to whatever narrative that he's trying to push.

[etchalon]

It sounds like what he has is a dump of emails, not necessarily a database of moderation actions.

Even if he had a database like that, it's unlikely it's easily classified in a way you could actually correlate individual actions to specific sources. I highly doubt there's a database column for "as commanded by the dark Democratic conspiracy."

[candybar]

Sure but you can turn a dump of emails into statistics easily. Or alternatively, you can release the dump of emails.

> This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.

Yet the fact that there's absolutely no attempt to even analyze the data for signs of bias, but have to resort to a complete non-sequitur, is quite telling. It likely means that the raw data doesn't support their narrative. You can also share a sample of tweets that were requested to reviewed by both parties and which ones got removed and which ones did not. If the Trump administration's requests were not honored despite the tweets clearly being in violation or the Biden campaign's requests being honored despite the tweets clearly not being in violation, well that would be something if there was a clear pattern, or internal discussions that explicitly suggest that they are making decisions like that specifically to favor one candidate. It still has nothing to do with the 1st amendment, but it would at least corroborate the claim that Twitter was biased.

Again, the standards need to be high because they are the party with all the information. This type of insinuation can be persuasive if you're the outside party that suspects bias and the other party controls the information. But claiming that there might be some bias, look at all this external information as to why it might have happened, tells the exact opposite story, when they are the ones that control the information. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi literally have all this information at their disposal and clearly want to spread this narrative that Twitter was biased in the Democrats' favor. But they can't prove it - it seems ridiculous for them not to have looked into this, but they thought it was best not to release that information. Why not? Almost certainly because it detracts from the narrative.

[mcrad]

Yes, you can turn a dump of emails into biased statistics, easily.

[oxff]

This is quite obviously about substantial influence on election news cycle; and of course pointing the finger at the other side is already contained in the friend-enemy distinction.

[degobah]

You are more scandalized about the campaign of a private citizen emailing Twitter to ask that dick pics of his son remove, than about the White House emailing Twitter to have tweets removed?