Depending on the circumstances, it can be illegal for the government to pressure companies to censor speech, especially if there is an implied threat like "that's a nice business you have there, it would be a shame if it gets investigated by the FTC". Sometimes affected users can sue in such situations. A failed lawsuit of this type is described here:
Yeah this is the key point. It's a bit odd to portray this as Twitter behaving badly, really in the first instance it's the government behaving badly. But ideally Twitter should have said no to orders that violated the First Amendment.
Elvis Chan's deposition in the Missouri A.G.'s lawsuit has him saying that he observed social media company staff feeling pressured to act. Apologies for the line breaks. This quoted section starts on page 115 of the deposition.
If they felt pressured to do something they didn’t wish to do certainly there would have been some internal discussions about the consequences of resisting government wishes.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen lots of evidence pushing back on government requests.
I was never privy to high level discussions, but I do remember people expressing that we better be on the government's good side or else they might try to break up the company.
Zuck ended up repeatedly asking for legislation. He said this was because one company shouldn't be making the rules, but I think the big benefit would be that the rules could be made legible. The status quo is that Congress can admonish you and try to punish you and "I'm following the rules you set" isn't a possible response.
We also gamed out that being broken up would be tremendous job security for us infra engineers. Disentangling different parts of the company would be a massive years-long effort.
You seem to be focused a lot on what Twitter was doing, and whether they did anything wrong. I understand the focus because that is who these files are about, but I feel like it misses the big takeaway: that the government was pressuring private companies to moderate their discussion in certain ways.
There is a huge and obvious power imbalance issue here. A relationship between a boss and subordinate is always assumed to be non-consensual, because bosses have almost all the power in the relationship. Governments can only "express a preference" to naive companies, to anyone with a hint of political acumen ... they know its basically an order/demand.
Congress spent multiple years dragging tech executives in front of committees to make this point clear. The tech companies clearly haven't forgotten this point, neither should we.
Let's say an employee and boss are dating each other. It's possible that this is fully voluntary and above board. But there are some things that should make you suspicious:
1. All the other bosses in the company are also dating an employee. The government had these same moderation requests for every big tech company, and they all complied.
2. The details of the relationship are hidden and undisclosed. If it wasn't for Musk buying Twitter we still wouldn't know to what extent this stuff was happening, or if we were just being paranoid.
3. The boss flew into a rage the one time an employee wasn't dating them. Again, multiple years of Congressional hearings, dragging tech company CEOs to Washington to testify, threatening new regulations, threatening monopoly investigations, etc.
After all of that it is still possible Twitter might have been doing this of its own volition. But it seems pretty clear that the government setup the incentive gradient in a particular way.
I’m not seeing the “incentive gradient”. As I mentioned in another reply here. Surely if Twitter was worried about consequences from not moderating in a certain way there would have been some internal discussion of this fact.
Not if the decision to hire these people in the first place was part of the compliance. If you are managing Twitter and you want to avoid getting stomped by the government and you need stricter moderation to avoid that stomping you don't hire a bunch of free speech fans.
I don't really think Twitter was the social media company most willing to buck the US government anyways. I think that honor probably goes to Meta. Which is why Zuckerberg was the one getting dragged before Congress and smeared a bunch in the media.
This is again the whole problem with all of this stuff.
To reiterate my earlier question, how do you know that a relationship between a boss and a subordinate is fully consensual?
Does an absence of evidence of non-consent imply consent? Can consent ever be known when the subordinate can be threatened for even showing signs of non-consent?
_______
Last thing I will say on this issue:
In general there is a power imbalance between the government and the companies in an economy. This is an expected and normal power imbalance (does anyone want Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, or Twitter to be more powerful than the federal government?). I do not think it is helpful to pretend that this power imbalance does not exist.
If you do not think that this power imbalance exists then we are at an impasse. I can't really conceive of your position, so I have no idea how to talk you out of it.
Nitpicking, but Kulldorf said “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should”. The statement “everyone must be vaccinated” is Obvious Nonsense, no? You’re arguing that “everyone should be vaccinated” is a reasonable statement but that’s not what he said. I mostly point this out because this is the same argument as plays out with regard to vaccine mandates (where opposition to mandates is conflated with opposition to vaccination)
Also:
> I find it quite hard to get worked up about the labeling and restrictions, as opposed to the strikes that accumulated and led to his suspension, which is where we should focus
In the context of Twitter (and most social media), preventing engagement and surfacing of a tweet is like 95% of the way to deletion of a tweet in terms of practical effects on visibility and being able to influence public opinion. Almost everyone interacts with the site through their algorithmic feed, and if you prevent or suppress something from showing up in people’s feeds you’ve effectively silenced it. If you're upset with message deletion (or people being suspended, and maybe I shouldn't be conflating deletion of tweets / suspension of users), then shouldn't you be 95% as upset about message labeling / suppression?
If Twitter wasn't influential, I wouldn't care much about them moderating in whatever fashion they want. On Something Awful you could get banned for anything and it was often hilarious. But Something Awful only influenced Internet humor.
Twitter influences a lot. Culture, corporate policy, government policy can be downstream of what gets spread on Twitter. When Twitter puts a thumb on the scale, it matters a great deal.
I also wonder if the journalist just haven't gotten to the good stuff yet, given how much Covid inanity I observed at The Other Big Social Media Company. It was internal Covid censorship that was the final push for me to leave. The company announced we would have a booster mandate. I argued against a mandate, and cited the latest IMHE report that had modeled the impact of boosters and said that the pandemic was moving too quickly for policy to have an appreciable impact.
My comment was removed for citing a non-authoritative source. I plead my case to the moderators and discovered that they were working with a definition of "authoritative source" that included only government public health agencies and peer reviewed papers. I tried to demonstrate how absurd this definition was, that the CDC uses the outputs of IMHE models, Fauci cites them, etc. I was unsuccessful. I was also told that I couldn't share the authoritative source definition.
I'd also said in a separate comment that as a company we were at less risk than the general public because we're much younger than the population as a whole. I was told I didn't have a source for the claim about age distribution at the company.
So as a general reply to everyone saying similar things and offering similar evidence, I think it is right to say that we should worry in general about government pressure on SM companies to censor and that they might do this via implicit threats of regulation.
None of the evidence that is concerning, however, was in the Twitter file in question, quite the opposite in fact - we failed to see that much evidence of impact on this issue.
I guess it would find the lack of evidence more convincing if this was a big info dump. Instead it was one guy reporting what he thought was important. This is approximately 1000 words of text.
And there isn't no evidence, this was directly in a tweet:
"The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19."
and
"Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp
showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes."
Do we believe David Zweig, or not? If he lied here then sure there is no evidence. but then why bother discussing this stuff?
>Also, his statement is pretty false and definitely misleading. The idea that ‘everyone’ should be vaccinated (air quotes because everyone presumably in context means ...
I'm sorry, but the Kulldorff tweet did not say "should", but said "must". This is a crucial difference. We can argue semantics all day, but it's pretty straightforward to steelman his tweet into something true.
>Who then, if this thread is any guide, showed remarkable restraint in dealing with the situation. Compared to almost all other times and places, we should be grateful.
Sure, but with enough context, any action can be justified. Think of e.g. a child abuser being abused as a child/having mental issues etc - the child abuse is still bad. Similarly, Twitter having "society-issues" doesn't make their censorship better just because it could have been worse, given the context.
All* very fine. And very reasonable. What made my jaws drop, though, was how ChatGPT finishes. Awed.
* except: i read that "fire-in-theater" link, It showed where the quote comes from and says some say its kinda irrelevant (not really saying why - except that the quote if from a judge's opinion in a 1919 case). It did not say anything about it being legal when there IS a fire. (Well, sure, if it IS legal to shout even if there is no fire ... . )
One, as others have pointed out, is that there are government officials poring over a vast quantity tweets and trying to make decisions on them.
Two, it's great that so many of the Twitter censors were so thoughtful and careful and restrained. That is good luck. Should they have been doing all that censoring at all?
It's like, if you're stuck in a bureaucratic labyrinth and one worker is particularly efficient and zealous on your behalf, helps you cut through the red tape and solve your issue. Does that make it right that you were caught in the bureaucratic maze to start with? Should it depend on the existence of that one worker?
I would prefer they do their best to do as little censorship as possible. However, the option to do actual zero censorship of any kind isn't really a thing, given the legal landscape.
In respect to James Baker...the Twitter legal who asked about Trump’s optimism” quote: Baker was a strident anti-Trump actor while at the DOJ and was a key player in promulgating the Russia hoax. That’s why he’s been singled out here, his bias is well known now. Baker left the DOJ under suspicion.
Depending on the circumstances, it can be illegal for the government to pressure companies to censor speech, especially if there is an implied threat like "that's a nice business you have there, it would be a shame if it gets investigated by the FTC". Sometimes affected users can sue in such situations. A failed lawsuit of this type is described here:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/19/no-government-action-and-thus-no-first-amendment-violation-in-suspension-of-plaintiffs-youtube-accounts/
Yeah this is the key point. It's a bit odd to portray this as Twitter behaving badly, really in the first instance it's the government behaving badly. But ideally Twitter should have said no to orders that violated the First Amendment.
This necessarily implies that Twitter took some actions that they didn’t really want to take. I’ve yet to see any evidence that this is true.
Elvis Chan's deposition in the Missouri A.G.'s lawsuit has him saying that he observed social media company staff feeling pressured to act. Apologies for the line breaks. This quoted section starts on page 115 of the deposition.
https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/doc-144-2---exhibit-a-chan.pdf?sfvrsn=2fc3c6f6_2
---
Q. BY MR. SAUER: Let me ask you this: Why
did things change, in your view? I take it in 2018
and 2020 there were many more account takedowns,
right?
A. So there are two parts to your question.
Why do I think they did it? I can provide you with
my personal opinion.
Q. Okay.
A. My -- I believe pressure from Congress,
specifically HPSCI and SSCI, may have had a part of
it.
And then also because I believe that they
felt that this may have damaged their brands, but
that is my personal opinion.
Q. Okay. Well, let me ask you this: When
you say "pressure from Congress" and you mentioned
HPSCI and SSCI, what are HPSCI and SSCI? Are
those -- are those committees?
A. I'm sorry. HPSCI is the -- the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And
SSCI is the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.
Q. Starting with the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, what kind of pressure
did they put on the social media platforms to, you
know, engage more aggressively in account
takedowns?
A. They compelled -- I don't know if they
compelled. They requested the CEOs for the
companies that I mentioned, the -- to testify in
front of their committee.
Q. And so they kind of brought in Mark
Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai and
had them testify in front of Congress?
A. That is correct.
Q. And that happened -- that happened once or
it happened multiple times?
A. To my knowledge, that happened more than
once.
Q. And you believe that that -- that that
kind of scrutiny and public pressure from Congress,
in your view, motivated them to be more aggressive
in the account takedowns?
MR. SUR: Objection; lacks foundation,
calls for speculation.
THE WITNESS: That is just my personal
opinion.
Q. BY MR. SAUER: Yeah. What is the basis
for your opinion? Has anyone at a social media
platform ever made a comment to you that would
reflect that -- that view?
A. I would say yes. And the types of
comments that I have received are that staffers
from both of those committees have visited with
those companies. And while they would not reveal
the types of discussions that they had with these
House and Senate staffers, they would indicate that
they had to prepare very thoroughly for these types
of meetings and that it was -- they indicated that
it felt like a lot of pressure.
Q. "They" is representatives of social media
platforms?
A. Yeah. The social media companies that
were visited.
Q. What -- what social media companies were
visited by these HPSCI and SSCI staffers?
A. To my knowledge, it was the three
companies that I've mentioned, which include
Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Q. And Facebook, Google and -- Facebook,
Google and Twitter employees all told you that they
experienced these visits from congressional
staffers as exercising a lot of pressure on them?
A. That was how I interpreted their comments.
Q. And then you infer from that that their
changes in takedown policies resulted from that
kind of pressure from Congress?
A. That is my personal opinion.
If I can add, I think some of -- some of
what was discussed -- I'm interpreting what -- some
of what was discussed. But what the -- the
staffers would come and talk to us either before or
after they met with those three companies. And so
brandon@b-rock:~$ cat /tmp/depo | sed -E 's/[0-9]+ //'
Q. BY MR. SAUER: Let me ask you this: Why
did things change, in your view? I take it in 2018
and 2020 there were many more account takedowns,
right?
A. So there are two parts to your question.
Why do I think they did it? I can provide you with
my personal opinion.
Q. Okay.
A. My -- I believe pressure from Congress,
specifically HPSCI and SSCI, may have had a part of
it.
And then also because I believe that they
felt that this may have damaged their brands, but
that is my personal opinion.
Q. Okay. Well, let me ask you this: When
you say "pressure from Congress" and you mentioned
HPSCI and SSCI, what are HPSCI and SSCI? Are
those -- are those committees?
A. I'm sorry. HPSCI is the -- the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And
SSCI is the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.
Q. Starting with the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, what kind of pressure
did they put on the social media platforms to, you
know, engage more aggressively in account
takedowns?
A. They compelled -- I don't know if they
compelled. They requested the CEOs for the
companies that I mentioned, the -- to testify in
front of their committee.
Q. And so they kind of brought in Mark
Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai and
had them testify in front of Congress?
A. That is correct.
Q. And that happened -- that happened once or
it happened multiple times?
A. To my knowledge, that happened more than
once.
Q. And you believe that that -- that that
kind of scrutiny and public pressure from Congress,
in your view, motivated them to be more aggressive
in the account takedowns?
MR. SUR: Objection; lacks foundation,
calls for speculation.
THE WITNESS: That is just my personal
opinion.
Q. BY MR. SAUER: Yeah. What is the basis
for your opinion? Has anyone at a social media
platform ever made a comment to you that would
reflect that -- that view?
A. I would say yes. And the types of
comments that I have received are that staffers
from both of those committees have visited with
those companies. And while they would not reveal
the types of discussions that they had with these
House and Senate staffers, they would indicate that
they had to prepare very thoroughly for these types
of meetings and that it was -- they indicated that
it felt like a lot of pressure.
Q. "They" is representatives of social media
platforms?
A. Yeah. The social media companies that
were visited.
Q. What -- what social media companies were
visited by these HPSCI and SSCI staffers?
A. To my knowledge, it was the three
companies that I've mentioned, which include
Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Q. And Facebook, Google and -- Facebook,
Google and Twitter employees all told you that they
experienced these visits from congressional
staffers as exercising a lot of pressure on them?
A. That was how I interpreted their comments.
Q. And then you infer from that that their
changes in takedown policies resulted from that
kind of pressure from Congress?
A. That is my personal opinion.
If they felt pressured to do something they didn’t wish to do certainly there would have been some internal discussions about the consequences of resisting government wishes.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen lots of evidence pushing back on government requests.
I was never privy to high level discussions, but I do remember people expressing that we better be on the government's good side or else they might try to break up the company.
Zuck ended up repeatedly asking for legislation. He said this was because one company shouldn't be making the rules, but I think the big benefit would be that the rules could be made legible. The status quo is that Congress can admonish you and try to punish you and "I'm following the rules you set" isn't a possible response.
We also gamed out that being broken up would be tremendous job security for us infra engineers. Disentangling different parts of the company would be a massive years-long effort.
It might be true, but it’s still very speculative. Employees believe all kinds of things that aren’t actually true.
I can also create a story that calls for legislation are anti-competitive and little else.
Yeah fair point.
You seem to be focused a lot on what Twitter was doing, and whether they did anything wrong. I understand the focus because that is who these files are about, but I feel like it misses the big takeaway: that the government was pressuring private companies to moderate their discussion in certain ways.
There is a huge and obvious power imbalance issue here. A relationship between a boss and subordinate is always assumed to be non-consensual, because bosses have almost all the power in the relationship. Governments can only "express a preference" to naive companies, to anyone with a hint of political acumen ... they know its basically an order/demand.
Congress spent multiple years dragging tech executives in front of committees to make this point clear. The tech companies clearly haven't forgotten this point, neither should we.
Why do you think Twitter was moderating content in a way other than they wanted to?
Let's say an employee and boss are dating each other. It's possible that this is fully voluntary and above board. But there are some things that should make you suspicious:
1. All the other bosses in the company are also dating an employee. The government had these same moderation requests for every big tech company, and they all complied.
2. The details of the relationship are hidden and undisclosed. If it wasn't for Musk buying Twitter we still wouldn't know to what extent this stuff was happening, or if we were just being paranoid.
3. The boss flew into a rage the one time an employee wasn't dating them. Again, multiple years of Congressional hearings, dragging tech company CEOs to Washington to testify, threatening new regulations, threatening monopoly investigations, etc.
After all of that it is still possible Twitter might have been doing this of its own volition. But it seems pretty clear that the government setup the incentive gradient in a particular way.
I’m not seeing the “incentive gradient”. As I mentioned in another reply here. Surely if Twitter was worried about consequences from not moderating in a certain way there would have been some internal discussion of this fact.
Not if the decision to hire these people in the first place was part of the compliance. If you are managing Twitter and you want to avoid getting stomped by the government and you need stricter moderation to avoid that stomping you don't hire a bunch of free speech fans.
I don't really think Twitter was the social media company most willing to buck the US government anyways. I think that honor probably goes to Meta. Which is why Zuckerberg was the one getting dragged before Congress and smeared a bunch in the media.
That’s highly speculative and asserting motivation without any evidence.
>asserting motivation without any evidence
This is again the whole problem with all of this stuff.
To reiterate my earlier question, how do you know that a relationship between a boss and a subordinate is fully consensual?
Does an absence of evidence of non-consent imply consent? Can consent ever be known when the subordinate can be threatened for even showing signs of non-consent?
_______
Last thing I will say on this issue:
In general there is a power imbalance between the government and the companies in an economy. This is an expected and normal power imbalance (does anyone want Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, or Twitter to be more powerful than the federal government?). I do not think it is helpful to pretend that this power imbalance does not exist.
If you do not think that this power imbalance exists then we are at an impasse. I can't really conceive of your position, so I have no idea how to talk you out of it.
Nitpicking, but Kulldorf said “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should”. The statement “everyone must be vaccinated” is Obvious Nonsense, no? You’re arguing that “everyone should be vaccinated” is a reasonable statement but that’s not what he said. I mostly point this out because this is the same argument as plays out with regard to vaccine mandates (where opposition to mandates is conflated with opposition to vaccination)
Also:
> I find it quite hard to get worked up about the labeling and restrictions, as opposed to the strikes that accumulated and led to his suspension, which is where we should focus
In the context of Twitter (and most social media), preventing engagement and surfacing of a tweet is like 95% of the way to deletion of a tweet in terms of practical effects on visibility and being able to influence public opinion. Almost everyone interacts with the site through their algorithmic feed, and if you prevent or suppress something from showing up in people’s feeds you’ve effectively silenced it. If you're upset with message deletion (or people being suspended, and maybe I shouldn't be conflating deletion of tweets / suspension of users), then shouldn't you be 95% as upset about message labeling / suppression?
If Twitter wasn't influential, I wouldn't care much about them moderating in whatever fashion they want. On Something Awful you could get banned for anything and it was often hilarious. But Something Awful only influenced Internet humor.
Twitter influences a lot. Culture, corporate policy, government policy can be downstream of what gets spread on Twitter. When Twitter puts a thumb on the scale, it matters a great deal.
I also wonder if the journalist just haven't gotten to the good stuff yet, given how much Covid inanity I observed at The Other Big Social Media Company. It was internal Covid censorship that was the final push for me to leave. The company announced we would have a booster mandate. I argued against a mandate, and cited the latest IMHE report that had modeled the impact of boosters and said that the pandemic was moving too quickly for policy to have an appreciable impact.
My comment was removed for citing a non-authoritative source. I plead my case to the moderators and discovered that they were working with a definition of "authoritative source" that included only government public health agencies and peer reviewed papers. I tried to demonstrate how absurd this definition was, that the CDC uses the outputs of IMHE models, Fauci cites them, etc. I was unsuccessful. I was also told that I couldn't share the authoritative source definition.
I'd also said in a separate comment that as a company we were at less risk than the general public because we're much younger than the population as a whole. I was told I didn't have a source for the claim about age distribution at the company.
So as a general reply to everyone saying similar things and offering similar evidence, I think it is right to say that we should worry in general about government pressure on SM companies to censor and that they might do this via implicit threats of regulation.
None of the evidence that is concerning, however, was in the Twitter file in question, quite the opposite in fact - we failed to see that much evidence of impact on this issue.
That doesn't mean other stuff was fine, etc.
I guess it would find the lack of evidence more convincing if this was a big info dump. Instead it was one guy reporting what he thought was important. This is approximately 1000 words of text.
And there isn't no evidence, this was directly in a tweet:
"The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19."
and
"Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp
showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes."
Do we believe David Zweig, or not? If he lied here then sure there is no evidence. but then why bother discussing this stuff?
>Also, his statement is pretty false and definitely misleading. The idea that ‘everyone’ should be vaccinated (air quotes because everyone presumably in context means ...
I'm sorry, but the Kulldorff tweet did not say "should", but said "must". This is a crucial difference. We can argue semantics all day, but it's pretty straightforward to steelman his tweet into something true.
>Who then, if this thread is any guide, showed remarkable restraint in dealing with the situation. Compared to almost all other times and places, we should be grateful.
Sure, but with enough context, any action can be justified. Think of e.g. a child abuser being abused as a child/having mental issues etc - the child abuse is still bad. Similarly, Twitter having "society-issues" doesn't make their censorship better just because it could have been worse, given the context.
I just want to say I appreciate the Firefly theme reference.
Yes, me too.
All* very fine. And very reasonable. What made my jaws drop, though, was how ChatGPT finishes. Awed.
* except: i read that "fire-in-theater" link, It showed where the quote comes from and says some say its kinda irrelevant (not really saying why - except that the quote if from a judge's opinion in a 1919 case). It did not say anything about it being legal when there IS a fire. (Well, sure, if it IS legal to shout even if there is no fire ... . )
Thank you for this balanced review.
However, there are two issues.
One, as others have pointed out, is that there are government officials poring over a vast quantity tweets and trying to make decisions on them.
Two, it's great that so many of the Twitter censors were so thoughtful and careful and restrained. That is good luck. Should they have been doing all that censoring at all?
It's like, if you're stuck in a bureaucratic labyrinth and one worker is particularly efficient and zealous on your behalf, helps you cut through the red tape and solve your issue. Does that make it right that you were caught in the bureaucratic maze to start with? Should it depend on the existence of that one worker?
I would prefer they do their best to do as little censorship as possible. However, the option to do actual zero censorship of any kind isn't really a thing, given the legal landscape.
In respect to James Baker...the Twitter legal who asked about Trump’s optimism” quote: Baker was a strident anti-Trump actor while at the DOJ and was a key player in promulgating the Russia hoax. That’s why he’s been singled out here, his bias is well known now. Baker left the DOJ under suspicion.