There’s a big difference between having to comply with the laws versus the censorship that existed under Twitter 1.0, suppressing the political positions that liberals didn’t like. Yglesias can keep spinning and getting ratioed, but he can’t argue away what happened before and what Musk has done for free speech.

According to data from the MRC’s Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database, there have been 293 cases of documented censorship since Musk took over from Nov. 4, 2022, through Mar. 4, 2023. This is 67 more cases than the 226 instances reported by CensorTrack.org from pre-Musk Twitter during the same time last year.

Tech entrepreneur David Sacks, who co-hosted the Twitter event alongside Musk, had a different theory, saying:

I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. //

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1
·
New York Times calls the DeSantis announcement a "fiasco."

NBC News calls it a 'melt down.'

The Washington Post calls it "awkward."

Politico calls it "horrendous."

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
I call it “massive attention”

Top story on Earth today
10:03 PM · May 24, 2023

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Replying to @krassenstein
You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.
10:14 PM · May 15, 2023 //

Elon Musk may not be a conservative. He has his issues, like all of us. But he’s a considered thinker, who seems to be learning fast about the dangers of the left. He’s spoken about the threat to civilization in the past posed by the “woke mind virus.”

Musk showed again that he does have some understanding of the left during an interview he gave to CNBC on Tuesday. //

Musk was asked about why he made his comment about Soros during the interview and he laughed at the interviewer, David Faber. “I think that’s true, that’s my opinion,” Musk responded. //

But why share it if people might not agree with you? Faber asked. What if advertisers on Twitter or Tesla buyers might not agree?

Boy, isn’t that a liberal in a nutshell? Why not share it if it’s his opinion? Is he supposed to go easy on what he thinks about Soros because it will upset the left? Maybe it’s more important to point out that Soros is doing harm to society. The look on Musk’s face in response was priceless — like, are you nuts?

He paraphrases Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride”: “Offer me power, offer me money, I don’t care.” To drive the point home, Musk declared: “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”

Sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play, and the problem isn’t that someone is donning a tinfoil hat but that he’s buried his head in the sand. //

Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans. //

The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research. //

But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants....

Jonathan Turley
·
Feb 8 @JonathanTurley
·
Roth says that it would not surprise him if "visibility filters" were placed on the accounts of elected officials without their knowledge.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Since he placed many of them there himself, he would indeed not be “surprised” lmao
11:59 PM · Feb 8, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
“A Fractal Rube Goldberg Machine.”

That’s what @elonmusk called Twitter. As they fix the code more problems arise. A delicate balance he likened to a Jenga tower. One wrong move the whole thing collapses. They’re working nonstop, and both times I met him were after midnight.

12:57 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
What’s also really crazy now having seen under the hood is that Jack Dorsey repeatedly said they don’t shadowban. The entire machine behind Twitter is designed to shadowban. It’s almost as if that was the primary goal rather than the product itself.
2:02 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
Will share more in bit but have to catch a flight.

On a personal note Elon is funny as hell, laughs a ton and it’s just really obvious he cares about Twitter because he cares about free speech and the bigger problems facing the world. He doesn’t need this headache, he chose it.
1:23 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Dave Rubin @RubinReport
·
Replying to @RubinReport
Oh, one either thing for now…

Elon really lit up when we talked about the shifting political landscape and how anyone non-woke is now “far right.”

That notion is deeply connected to how screwy thing got at Twitter and he’s working to fix it despite the huge challenges ahead.
1:36 PM · Jan 26, 2023

Mr. Tweet @elonmusk
·
Replying to @RubinReport

Accurate thread
3:22 PM · Jan 26, 2023

The Dirty Truth (Josh)
@AKA_RealDirty
·
Follow
.@DavidSacks explains how the FBI was using a tool called “ teleport” to communicate with Twitter. They were able to send instructions that deleted after 10 days and they weren’t able to take a screenshot of the communication.

5:20 PM · Jan 15, 2023

But they could tell that some messages were sent via the teleport tool when they were looking at the emails and the FBI would tell Twitter Safety head Yoel Roth to look at the messages they just sent him on teleport. “It was a very weird detail,” Sacks said, “And it shows the way our government prefers to operate, which is in secrecy.” “What basis is there for the FBI first of all even to be engaged in censorship on social media to the extent they were,” Sacks said, noting they had an 80-agent team flagging posts for the FBI and other parts of the government. //

“What was the crime that they were investigating here,” Sacks declared. This was all coming under the heading of searching for “foreign interference” in elections, a truly nebulous justification. Add to that the instructions were secret, disappearing, Sacks said, “Why isn’t that a matter of public record?” He said first of all, it was a violation of the First Amendment if they were pushing censorship, but on top of that, they weren’t even being transparent about it. “We have a right as citizens of this country to know what our government is doing, and for them to be engaging in this sort of um, you know, magic trick, where the instructions they are giving are disappearing, it’s almost like the cover-up part of this crime.” //

What that means is that it’s harder to find the evidence of secret instructions that they were giving to Twitter if you were trying to figure out what they were doing. It also raises questions about why they’re erasing the evidence unless they knew that what they were doing was problematic. Yet, we still haven’t gotten any real answers from the FBI on this, just a response that claimed that this was “traditional” contacts they’d had with private companies (that alone is chilling if this is “traditional”) and they called the Twitter files “conspiracy theorists. //

Quiverfull
10 minutes ago
Relevant to the discussion, and hopefully a jury instruction read during the trial of numerous federal employees who participated in this mass violation of Americans' civil rights, here is the Federal Court Jury Instruction:

1.20 SPOLIATION/DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
[Party] contends that [Other Party] at one time possessed [describe evidence allegedly destroyed]. However, [Other Party] contends that [evidence never existed, evidence was not in its possession, evidence was not destroyed, loss of evidence was accidental, etc.].
You may assume that such evidence would have been unfavorable to [Other Party] only if you find by a preponderance of the evidence that:
(1) [Other Party] intentionally [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed]; and
(2) [Other Party] [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed] in bad faith. //

anon-8f8k
17 minutes ago
Isn't destruction of official government communications a crime in and of itself?

Just as Durham never delivered genuine justice for the biggest political scandal in modern American history, we should be skeptical that Musk will deliver digital free speech. Musk’s “free speech” marketing campaign has enticed marginalized and desperate right-wingers to get sucked back into Twitter. But it’s false advertising until Musk stops the arbitrary and personal targeting, shuts down the shadowbanning, and embraces freedom of speech and reach.

Until he does that, Musk is no better than the Twitter leaders he replaced. And for conservatives who were hopeful he would deliver a victory, he’s no better than Durham.

Twitter’s global guidelines lean toward Silicon Valley-style free speech absolutism, in which everybody has the right to speak and be heard (and never shadow-banned). Vulnerable users increasingly felt the effects of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, that if we include in a more tolerant discussion those who are less tolerant, they will prevent the discussion from being fully open. (Thus, in Popper's view, some level of "intolerance towards intolerance" must be exercised even by the tolerant.) In a 2021 report, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) bluntly stated that, "Surveying the current landscape of leading social media platforms, the entire sector is effectively unsafe for LGBTQ users." //

If you want to run an instance to bring local friends onto the Fediverse, the first question is which platform to base it on. Lemmer-Webber recommends that those who want a single- or few-user instance try Misskey. Pleorama, with a less discovery-focused project governance group, has its own how-to for installing it onto various flavors of Linux. Mastodon, as the incumbent, has some pre-built packages that offer a relatively turnkey setup, or follow the full step-by-step procedure. //

Kazemi is optimistic about coming full circle and using ActivityPub as the next RSS. "I hope it's even better. I hope it's even more widely adopted than RSS was back in its heyday," he said. While we chatted, he set up @ars_technica@rss.friend.camp, an ActivityPub actor republishing everything on Ars' main RSS feed; search for it from your Mastodon, Pleorama, or Misseky instance, follow it, and you can retire that RSS reader you keep only to check for Ars articles.

Twitter’s top ranks were riddled with ex-FBI agents and executives, stitching the company even closer to the federal agency now under fire for leaning on Twitter to meddle in the 2020 elections.

More than a dozen former feds flocked to the company in the months and years prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the social network in October.

The Post found FBI influence was considerably more significant than just James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel who later worked in the same role for Twitter. He was recently fired by Musk for interfering in the billionaire’s efforts to come clean about past transgressions at the company.

In some cases, the former G-men and -women held positions that would have put them close to company leadership directly involved in censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden coverage in October 2020.

Mastodon, which proudly proclaims it is “not for sale” and has around 4.5 million user accounts, is pretty similar to Twitter, once users get past the complicated sign-up process. The main difference is that it’s not one cohesive platform, but actually a collection of different, independently-run and self-funded servers. Users on different servers can still communicate with each other, but anybody can set up their own server, and set their own rules for discussion. Mastodon is a crowdfunded nonprofit, which funds the full-time work of Rochko—its sole employee—and several popular servers.

The platform doesn’t have the power to force server owners to do anything—even comply with basic content moderation standards. That sounds like a recipe for an online haven for far-right trolls. But in practice, many of Mastodon’s servers have stricter rules than Twitter, Rochko says. When hate-speech servers do appear, other servers can band together to block them, essentially ostracizing them from the majority of the platform. “I guess you could call it the democratic process,” Rochko says.

“Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitter’s process [for measuring spam accounts] was. Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users) and applied unidentified standards to somehow conclude every quarter for nearly three years that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were false or spam.” //

On April 28, just three days after signing the Agreement, Twitter restated three years of its mDAU numbers, despite never disclosing the issue to Defendants pre-signing. Post-signing, Defendants promptly sought to understand Twitter’s process for identifying false or spam accounts. In a May 6 meeting with Twitter executives, Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitter’s process was. Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users) and applied unidentified standards to somehow conclude every quarter for nearly three years that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were false or spam. That’s it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning.