The Twitter Files

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

This thread is about Twitter, and how executives there knew through reverse engineering the names of real people, real Americans, who the public was told were Russian bots. They were not. And how those Twitter executives felt they did not have a choice regarding whether or not they banned those people due to governmental pressure.

As PP said, one can’t believe anything coming out of intelligence, DOJ, Congress, etc, regarding Russia, Trump, etc. It’s clear that even leftists at Twitter knew and were intimidated into complying. I used to believe that Yoel Roth was one of the hugest issues with Twitter and didn’t believe Musk when he said that Roth was actually trying to fight this. The release of these emails shows me that indeed, Roth WAS pushing back hard, but when you have the DOJ and intelligence breathing down your neck, it’s a dire situation to be in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

This thread is about Twitter, and how executives there knew through reverse engineering the names of real people, real Americans, who the public was told were Russian bots. They were not. And how those Twitter executives felt they did not have a choice regarding whether or not they banned those people due to governmental pressure.

As PP said, one can’t believe anything coming out of intelligence, DOJ, Congress, etc, regarding Russia, Trump, etc. It’s clear that even leftists at Twitter knew and were intimidated into complying. I used to believe that Yoel Roth was one of the hugest issues with Twitter and didn’t believe Musk when he said that Roth was actually trying to fight this. The release of these emails shows me that indeed, Roth WAS pushing back hard, but when you have the DOJ and intelligence breathing down your neck, it’s a dire situation to be in.

+ a million

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

This thread is about Twitter, and how executives there knew through reverse engineering the names of real people, real Americans, who the public was told were Russian bots. They were not. And how those Twitter executives felt they did not have a choice regarding whether or not they banned those people due to governmental pressure.

As PP said, one can’t believe anything coming out of intelligence, DOJ, Congress, etc, regarding Russia, Trump, etc. It’s clear that even leftists at Twitter knew and were intimidated into complying. I used to believe that Yoel Roth was one of the hugest issues with Twitter and didn’t believe Musk when he said that Roth was actually trying to fight this. The release of these emails shows me that indeed, Roth WAS pushing back hard, but when you have the DOJ and intelligence breathing down your neck, it’s a dire situation to be in.

I haven't yet seen enough information to know whether their supposed "reverse engineering" was actually accurate or reliable. Roth pushed back but he doesn't have any actual technical background, so he went by whatever he was told by the folks who supposedly "reverse engineered" it. I've seen exactly ZERO detailed technical analysis to back anything up so far.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

This thread is about Twitter, and how executives there knew through reverse engineering the names of real people, real Americans, who the public was told were Russian bots. They were not. And how those Twitter executives felt they did not have a choice regarding whether or not they banned those people due to governmental pressure.

As PP said, one can’t believe anything coming out of intelligence, DOJ, Congress, etc, regarding Russia, Trump, etc. It’s clear that even leftists at Twitter knew and were intimidated into complying. I used to believe that Yoel Roth was one of the hugest issues with Twitter and didn’t believe Musk when he said that Roth was actually trying to fight this. The release of these emails shows me that indeed, Roth WAS pushing back hard, but when you have the DOJ and intelligence breathing down your neck, it’s a dire situation to be in.

And AGAIN, you're ignoring how Twitter WAS in fact manipulated by a whole range of influence operations, not just the server farms running bots and entire office complexes full of human employees in Russia, but all of the other purveyors of fake news, propaganda, et cetera operating worldwide. And, continues to be.

[Anonymous]

It's astounding that this keeps being portrayed as some grand evil deep state scheme solely orchestrated to ban conservatives, when the pesky fact of millions of actual troll and bot accounts still sits there glaring in everyone's faces, only to be completely ignored by Taibbi and some of the people in this thread. It's absolutely astounding.

[Anonymous]

And of any conservatives who did get banned, in the overwhelming majority of cases it wasn't over "differing opinions on policy" it was things like outright antisemitism, racism, violent threats, et cetera. Just look at Nick Fuentes - barely back 24 hours before he got re-banned for claiming Israel was behind the 9/11 attack, for praising Hitler, and for giving validation to the Unabomber's attacks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And of any conservatives who did get banned, in the overwhelming majority of cases it wasn't over "differing opinions on policy" it was things like outright antisemitism, racism, violent threats, et cetera. Just look at Nick Fuentes - barely back 24 hours before he got re-banned for claiming Israel was behind the 9/11 attack, for praising Hitler, and for giving validation to the Unabomber's attacks.

Actually, one of the people on the list said it best.......“Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's astounding that this keeps being portrayed as some grand evil deep state scheme solely orchestrated to ban conservatives, when the pesky fact of millions of actual troll and bot accounts still sits there glaring in everyone's faces, only to be completely ignored by Taibbi and some of the people in this thread. It's absolutely astounding.

So let them deal with actual trolls instead of calling people they don't agree with trolls.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone here dispute Taibbi’s argument about Hamilton 68 and its dashboard? Let the neocons answer, and answer proudly.

You out there neocons? Thoughts?

What is it you want to know?

How anyone can argue with a straight face that he’s wrong. Can’t be done.

How can anyone BELIEVE Taibbi with a straight face? He wants to play investigative journalist, he has full access to Twitter's internal files, records, emails and reports, yet hasn't posted a damn thing about the *actual* Russian troll farms, Internet Research Agency, the server farms running bots, how Twitter is *still* failing to counter them, and how about all of the sketchy things that have happened SINCE Musk took over - bullying and unjustified firings (lawsuits abound), rents and bills not paid, disgusting bathrooms for lack of janitorial staff, essential Twitter services like MFA broken, and worse yet Twitter banning watchdogs keeping tabs on far right extremism like Chad Loder, at Elon Musk's personal behest. If you can't coherently speak to any of those things then there's your answer how we can indeed, with a straight face, question the legitimacy of what Taibbi is peddling.

You're like every other ideologue - hey journalist, don't write about this, write about that! The story is what I say the story is!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So where we're at now...

Taibbi repeatedly keeps pushing this narrative that Twitter was run by a bunch of woke liberal ideologues hellbent on muzzling conservatives. And that they worked hand in hand with the FBI and other groups to make that happen.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate FBI counterterrorism concerns from Taibbi.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate concerns about actual, genuien foreign election meddling and foreign influence operations, like the Internet Research Agency.

Yet we see from messages from Yael Roth and others that they were more like amoral corporate characters than some kind of ideological crusader hell bent against the right.

Taibbi's releases are extremely misleading and deceptive for not including any of that. It cannot be denied that Taibbi and Musk are selling a very deceptive and dishonest narrative.

One can only speculate why. At best, Musk is using this nonsense to deflect away from the complete dumpster fire that twitter has become since he's taken over. And he's definitely trying to play himself as some kind of hero for free speech and transparency (while failing miserably at it.)
But meanwhile, he is playing right into the hands of people who use his platform to manipulate twitter's audience. Complete 💩 show.

You're partisan. You refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the Twitter files, at a minimum, showed a great deal of fabrication, distortion, and censorship, both by government agencies and by progressive media. Some of it is certainly borderline unconstitutional and even outright illegal on the part of the government agencies. The Hamilton files were especially revealing because twitter themselves said the Hamilton people were basically making up all the bots allegations. That's twitter's own progressive leadership! Yet the media continued to treat Hamilton as factual truth. T

The collapse of the integrity of the legacy media is one of the great crises of our lifetime. Sentiments like yours remind me of the child with the finger in his ear changing la la la because they can't countenance the truth - that they were lied to extensively, for years, by the sources they believed to be seeking the truth.

Wrong. On many levels. I totally acknowledge that Twitter had a whole host of problems prior to Elon Musk's takeover. That central premise of yours is thus completely wrong. But I disagree with your characterizations and representations relative to "government agencies" and "progressive media" - it is a platform, which has been utilized by a whole range of parties, all for their own self-serving purposes, to include conservative politicians and media as well. Not all of which has been done with integrity. Twitter was and continues to be used to smear, slander, spread hate, conspiracy theories, propaganda, hoaxes and disinformation by a wide range of parties from all across the spectrum and from all across the globe. That is a fact.

What you are missing is that nothing these Twitter files are doing actually addresses, let alone restores integrity for Twitter, because in its extremely narrow and selective releases of these "twitter files" it is painting an extremely skewed and staged narrative, while deliberately omitting a lot of critical salient information and context. And that is fundamentally dishonest. These Twitter Files releases are not at all about integrity, and that is what YOU refuse to acknowledge, like your proverbial child with his fingers in his ears.

You're saying that there is some sort of "critical salient information and context" that makes it OK to call Joe freakin' Lauria a Russian bot?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And of any conservatives who did get banned, in the overwhelming majority of cases it wasn't over "differing opinions on policy" it was things like outright antisemitism, racism, violent threats, et cetera. Just look at Nick Fuentes - barely back 24 hours before he got re-banned for claiming Israel was behind the 9/11 attack, for praising Hitler, and for giving validation to the Unabomber's attacks.

Actually, one of the people on the list said it best.......“Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’”

So which one of these accounts were banned?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not a neocon but my understanding is that Hamilton 68 represented a bunch of liberal “intel” leaders who outright lied about Russian trolls to support their liberal agendas.

I will never believe another intelligence official who also happens to be a Dem.

What about Republican intelligence officials? Maybe you already forgot about the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, who investigated the matter, yielding a 5-volume report on Russian interference, collusion and influence operations. Volume 5 alone was 1000 pages. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report/

Odd that so far, absolutely nothing in Taibbi's reporting reflects ANY of those documented findings.

This thread is about Twitter, and how executives there knew through reverse engineering the names of real people, real Americans, who the public was told were Russian bots. They were not. And how those Twitter executives felt they did not have a choice regarding whether or not they banned those people due to governmental pressure.

As PP said, one can’t believe anything coming out of intelligence, DOJ, Congress, etc, regarding Russia, Trump, etc. It’s clear that even leftists at Twitter knew and were intimidated into complying. I used to believe that Yoel Roth was one of the hugest issues with Twitter and didn’t believe Musk when he said that Roth was actually trying to fight this. The release of these emails shows me that indeed, Roth WAS pushing back hard, but when you have the DOJ and intelligence breathing down your neck, it’s a dire situation to be in.

And AGAIN, you're ignoring how Twitter WAS in fact manipulated by a whole range of influence operations, not just the server farms running bots and entire office complexes full of human employees in Russia, but all of the other purveyors of fake news, propaganda, et cetera operating worldwide. And, continues to be.

Didn’t work all that well for Coronavirus, did it Ms. Wen

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So where we're at now...

Taibbi repeatedly keeps pushing this narrative that Twitter was run by a bunch of woke liberal ideologues hellbent on muzzling conservatives. And that they worked hand in hand with the FBI and other groups to make that happen.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate FBI counterterrorism concerns from Taibbi.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate concerns about actual, genuien foreign election meddling and foreign influence operations, like the Internet Research Agency.

Yet we see from messages from Yael Roth and others that they were more like amoral corporate characters than some kind of ideological crusader hell bent against the right.

Taibbi's releases are extremely misleading and deceptive for not including any of that. It cannot be denied that Taibbi and Musk are selling a very deceptive and dishonest narrative.

One can only speculate why. At best, Musk is using this nonsense to deflect away from the complete dumpster fire that twitter has become since he's taken over. And he's definitely trying to play himself as some kind of hero for free speech and transparency (while failing miserably at it.)
But meanwhile, he is playing right into the hands of people who use his platform to manipulate twitter's audience. Complete 💩 show.

You're partisan. You refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the Twitter files, at a minimum, showed a great deal of fabrication, distortion, and censorship, both by government agencies and by progressive media. Some of it is certainly borderline unconstitutional and even outright illegal on the part of the government agencies. The Hamilton files were especially revealing because twitter themselves said the Hamilton people were basically making up all the bots allegations. That's twitter's own progressive leadership! Yet the media continued to treat Hamilton as factual truth. T

The collapse of the integrity of the legacy media is one of the great crises of our lifetime. Sentiments like yours remind me of the child with the finger in his ear changing la la la because they can't countenance the truth - that they were lied to extensively, for years, by the sources they believed to be seeking the truth.

Wrong. On many levels. I totally acknowledge that Twitter had a whole host of problems prior to Elon Musk's takeover. That central premise of yours is thus completely wrong. But I disagree with your characterizations and representations relative to "government agencies" and "progressive media" - it is a platform, which has been utilized by a whole range of parties, all for their own self-serving purposes, to include conservative politicians and media as well. Not all of which has been done with integrity. Twitter was and continues to be used to smear, slander, spread hate, conspiracy theories, propaganda, hoaxes and disinformation by a wide range of parties from all across the spectrum and from all across the globe. That is a fact.

What you are missing is that nothing these Twitter files are doing actually addresses, let alone restores integrity for Twitter, because in its extremely narrow and selective releases of these "twitter files" it is painting an extremely skewed and staged narrative, while deliberately omitting a lot of critical salient information and context. And that is fundamentally dishonest. These Twitter Files releases are not at all about integrity, and that is what YOU refuse to acknowledge, like your proverbial child with his fingers in his ears.

You're saying that there is some sort of "critical salient information and context" that makes it OK to call Joe freakin' Lauria a Russian bot?

I didn't even know who Joe Lauria is, but now that I look at his account, he sure seems to post a lot of unhinged conspiracy-theory crap.
But when was he banned? He appears to have been continually online and posting the whole time, right up into the transition into Elon Musk's ownership. And what's the story here? Was he actually flagged by Hamilton68, or was he flagged by whatever supposedly "reverse engineered" version of Hamilton68 that was half-ass hacked together? Completely unclear, given Taibbi's rambling threads, which exclude a lot of those important details.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So where we're at now...

Taibbi repeatedly keeps pushing this narrative that Twitter was run by a bunch of woke liberal ideologues hellbent on muzzling conservatives. And that they worked hand in hand with the FBI and other groups to make that happen.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate FBI counterterrorism concerns from Taibbi.

Yet we saw zero of the emails (and I am sure there are many) detailing legitimate concerns about actual, genuien foreign election meddling and foreign influence operations, like the Internet Research Agency.

Yet we see from messages from Yael Roth and others that they were more like amoral corporate characters than some kind of ideological crusader hell bent against the right.

Taibbi's releases are extremely misleading and deceptive for not including any of that. It cannot be denied that Taibbi and Musk are selling a very deceptive and dishonest narrative.

One can only speculate why. At best, Musk is using this nonsense to deflect away from the complete dumpster fire that twitter has become since he's taken over. And he's definitely trying to play himself as some kind of hero for free speech and transparency (while failing miserably at it.)
But meanwhile, he is playing right into the hands of people who use his platform to manipulate twitter's audience. Complete 💩 show.

You're partisan. You refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the Twitter files, at a minimum, showed a great deal of fabrication, distortion, and censorship, both by government agencies and by progressive media. Some of it is certainly borderline unconstitutional and even outright illegal on the part of the government agencies. The Hamilton files were especially revealing because twitter themselves said the Hamilton people were basically making up all the bots allegations. That's twitter's own progressive leadership! Yet the media continued to treat Hamilton as factual truth. T

The collapse of the integrity of the legacy media is one of the great crises of our lifetime. Sentiments like yours remind me of the child with the finger in his ear changing la la la because they can't countenance the truth - that they were lied to extensively, for years, by the sources they believed to be seeking the truth.

Wrong. On many levels. I totally acknowledge that Twitter had a whole host of problems prior to Elon Musk's takeover. That central premise of yours is thus completely wrong. But I disagree with your characterizations and representations relative to "government agencies" and "progressive media" - it is a platform, which has been utilized by a whole range of parties, all for their own self-serving purposes, to include conservative politicians and media as well. Not all of which has been done with integrity. Twitter was and continues to be used to smear, slander, spread hate, conspiracy theories, propaganda, hoaxes and disinformation by a wide range of parties from all across the spectrum and from all across the globe. That is a fact.

What you are missing is that nothing these Twitter files are doing actually addresses, let alone restores integrity for Twitter, because in its extremely narrow and selective releases of these "twitter files" it is painting an extremely skewed and staged narrative, while deliberately omitting a lot of critical salient information and context. And that is fundamentally dishonest. These Twitter Files releases are not at all about integrity, and that is what YOU refuse to acknowledge, like your proverbial child with his fingers in his ears.

You're saying that there is some sort of "critical salient information and context" that makes it OK to call Joe freakin' Lauria a Russian bot?

I didn't even know who Joe Lauria is, but now that I look at his account, he sure seems to post a lot of unhinged conspiracy-theory crap.
But when was he banned? He appears to have been continually online and posting the whole time, right up into the transition into Elon Musk's ownership. And what's the story here? Was he actually flagged by Hamilton68, or was he flagged by whatever supposedly "reverse engineered" version of Hamilton68 that was half-ass hacked together? Completely unclear, given Taibbi's rambling threads, which exclude a lot of those important details.

We don't know who was flagged by Hamilton68 because they have never made it public. It's not about banning. It's about identifying people with dissenting opinions and branding them "Russian bots" - and then mainstream media and policy circles thoughtlessly accepting and repeating this charge without a shred of evidence connecting them to Russia. This is censorship and criminalization of dissent.