Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

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Vēritās
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Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by Vēritās »

For God knows how many months Conservatives have been whining about conspiracies between Twitter execs and the "Democrats" to censor Conservatives, especially Trump. For months they've been saying the Biden administration has been directing them to kill stories and censor information that offends the White House.

So what happens when they're interrogated by Congress?

We learn that Donald Trump tried to get Twitter to censor Chrissy Teagan because she responded to his attacks:
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter executive who was a whistle-blower during the Jan. 6 investigation, recalled an incident from 2019 when a White House official tried to persuade the company to delete a tweet by the model Chrissy Teigen. She had insulted Mr. Trump in vulgar terms after he referred to her as “filthy-mouthed.”
Free speech huh? What a friggin snowflake that Trump guy is. He attacks a female of color and then whines about it when she responds in kind. Can't take what he dishes out and he tried to use his authority as President to have her censored. Gee, kinda like everything the Republicans have been asserting about the Biden White House.

The NYT listed that as one of five things we learned from the hearings. The second is this:
Twitter changed internal rules to avoid limiting Mr. Trump’s tweets. Ms. Navaroli also testified that Twitter changed its rules to avoid adding labels to some of Mr. Trump’s tweets that would have identified them as violating the company’s rules. Among them were posts that denigrated a group of liberal congresswomen of color known as “the Squad.”
Gee, doesn't sound much like a Liberal attempt to censor Trump at all.

#3. Apparently this Twitter Exec felt that Twitter was enabling the January 6th insurrection and didn't do enough to prevent it.
Ms. Navaroli testified that she was at her “wit’s end” when Twitter executives refused to intervene as Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was escalating before Jan. 6.

Her team created a “Coded Incitement to Violence” policy to censor accounts, but Twitter executives declined to approve it, she said.

“On Jan. 5, with the policy still not approved, I led a meeting where one of my colleagues asked management whether someone was going to have to get shot before we would be allowed to take down tweets,” she testified. “Another colleague looked up live tweets and read them to management to try to convince them of the seriousness of the issue. Still no action was taken.”

After Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and injured more than 150 police officers, Ms. Navaroli asked management “whether they wanted more blood on their hands.”
#4 Execs flat out deny what Republicans have been accusing them of.
The former chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has already conceded to Congress that the company was wrong when it banned the Post article, and the former executives testifying on Wednesday once again stated that the company should not have done so.

But the former executives testified that while the decision was in part a reaction to F.B.I. warnings about possible Russian misinformation, the government had not directly pressured the social media platform to block the article, a central accusation leveled by Republicans.

“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” testified James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy general counsel.
#5 Twitter execs have been receiving death threats
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified that he had to sell his home and move after becoming the target of online harassment.
So at the end of the day, the only administration to pressure Twitter to suppress information was the Trump administration?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/p ... aring.html

See also:

Twitter Kept Entire ‘Database’ of Republican Requests to Censor Posts
WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.

That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter. Some Republicans even believe the release of the “Twitter Files” is the “tip of the spear” of their crusade against the alleged liberal bias of Big Tech.

But former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the White House’s Teigen tweet demand was hardly an isolated incident: The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.

“It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”

In interviews with former Twitter personnel, onetime Trump administration officials, and other people familiar with the matter, each source recalled what could be described as a “hotline,” “tipline,” or large Twitter “database” of moderation and removal requests that was frequently pinged by the offices of powerful Democrats and Republicans alike.

The voluminous requests often came from high-ranking political appointees working in different departments, offices, and agencies in the Trump administration. But during both the Trump and Biden presidencies, these types of moderation requests or demands were routinely sent to Twitter by the staff of influential GOP lawmakers — ones with names like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik.

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Vēritās
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

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"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Mitchell 1919
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by Mitchell 1919 »

I'm starting to get the feeling Veritas is a liberal Democrat groupie that finds all his self worth in trying to prop up the progressive agenda. What a sad life that must be.
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by Chap »

Mitchell 1919 wrote:
Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:56 am
I'm starting to get the feeling Veritas is a liberal Democrat groupie that finds all his self worth in trying to prop up the progressive agenda. What a sad life that must be.
Frankly, your vague feeling based judgements about the self worth of other posters are not very interesting.

Maybe you could get back to the thread topic, perhaps by addressing the recent very substantive post by the person to whom you refer?
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by Some Schmo »

I have absolutely no doubt that GOP pols talk to each other about their base being gullible rubes and strategize with that assumption. They must. The way they act on a regular basis proves they think their voters are damned morons.

To be fair, they do a lot of evidence.
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by Vēritās »

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also exposed the fact that Twitter promptly changed their rules to accommodate Trump's attacks. For example, one of Twitter's banned phrases was "go back to your own country." Trump said it and was reprimanded, but then shortly after that no longer was a violation of the rules.

"Twitter is biased against Conservatives? Yeah, right!" She said. :lol:

This is turning into a complete nightmare for the Republicans. Mark this down as yet another investigation that suffered a swift death.
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Re: Twitter Hearings Backfire on GOP

Post by canpakes »

Chap wrote:
Thu Feb 09, 2023 4:59 pm
Mitchell 1919 wrote:
Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:56 am
I'm starting to get the feeling Veritas is a liberal Democrat groupie that finds all his self worth in trying to prop up the progressive agenda. What a sad life that must be.
Frankly, your vague feeling based judgements about the self worth of other posters are not very interesting.

Maybe you could get back to the thread topic, perhaps by addressing the recent very substantive post by the person to whom you refer?
But, his feelings.
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