da truth wars

wen memes become reality

The Twitter Files Thing

We got a truth war on our hands.

Something really weird is happening with the truth on Twitter.

It seems that some of the nastiest “rumors” are, in fact, reality. And some of the things that are treated as “reality” are turning out to be nasty rumors.

Twitter Is a Social Media Giant No More

Let’s start with this: the fact that Elon Musk is the CEO of Twitter is super weird and unprecedented in our young internet age. We are used to Social Media Giants being run as bureaucracies. Dorsey, Zuckerberg, and their peers at Reddit and Snapchat have had to work around an excessive amount of red tape tacked on by their board of directors and stakeholders and such to make any changes to social media platforms. While technically in charge, things like censorship, deplatforming, and moderation have sort of spun out of control at these Social Media Giants just based on the fact that they are multi-billion dollar behemoths with thousands of workers. One man cannot make a ripple in the spider web of huge tech companies.

Elon, as owner of Twitter, the private social media platform, has no such red tape. He can genuinely move fast and break things. And breaking things is certainly what he is doing. In essence, Twitter has gone from a Social Media Giant to a Social Media Startup overnight.

You can tell by how fast Twitter is iterating on product design. Since Elon came on board, they’ve tried out multiple versions of a new subscription model, along with various ways for users to earn that beautiful blue check mark. For power users, Twitter has also shipped new products for Spaces, Lists, and stuff like that. For a platform that has been pretty stagnant since 2012 compared to other Social Media Giants, I have personally found all the experimenting to be a breathe of fresh, though somewhat frustrating as the UX hasn’t been seamless.

One of the first things Musk is breaking is the norm of content moderation being a ~super shadowy~ topic.

Breaking Down The Twitter Files

In a series of Twitter Threads broken by a select group of journalists, Musk has exposed the underbelly of Twitter’s operations. He has given these journalists access to primary sources at Twitter (including internal chats and records), which have led to the answer to a few MAJOR questions. So far, they have broken three different major stories, each of which answers a really, really important question regarding content moderation.

• Q: “why was the Hunter Biden story not allowed to be published on Twitter”

• A: They sort of made it up.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

• “who made the decision to ban Trump”

• Like 6 people, without guidelines.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.

• Q: “are people who disagree with vaccine mandates being shadowbanned”?

• A: Yes. Even though they lied about it.

  Bari Weiss @bariweiss

  3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

  

Bari Weiss @bariweiss

6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

To summarize, journalists have taken a deep, long look at the internal communications at Twitter and come to the conclusion that many “theories” espoused by right-leaning Americans are, in fact, reality.

• Yes, Hunter Biden’s laptop story was true. No, Twitter didn’t really have a reason for banning the story from the platform.

• Yes, Trump was kicked off of Twitter for inciting violence. No, Twitter did not have a policy for that type of moderation before Trump. And, no, Twitter has no enforced that policy against many other sitting officials.

• Yes, members of Twitter were being shadow banned for speaking out against mandatory vaccinations. No, Twitter did not admit to doing so.

This is wild and scary and, well, not surprising?

So What

In my opinion, what Musk has uncovered at Twitter is something I am going to call the “Truth War.”

We now have PROOF that a social media platform took the law into its hand and GENUINELY and KNOWINGLY censored information.

I don’t mean to write this as a stinging criticism of Twitter nor the Democratic party (which was actually very hands off in most of these situations, with politicians like Rho Khanna calling for the Hunter Biden story to be republished).

My purpose for writing this little recap is to emphasize just how hard it is to find correct information in the age of Social Media Giants.

These billion dollar companies are rife with slow decisions and committees and weird power structures. They are also, like, completely left leaning (for example, 99% of Twitter employee donations were blue in 2021). Because of this, Social Media Giants are obviously going to make mistakes and they are going to be biased (shoutout to being human). This is just a fact. We must live with it.

So, as a person living in 2022, we have to fight everyday in the “Truth War” — meaning we have to surround ourselves with as much good information as possible and be able to look skeptically at what Social Media Giants are feeding us.

I’m infatuated with the “Truth War” because I am affected by it every day due to the digital nature of my job. The “Truth War” is all about putting you in an algorithmic bubble and force-feeding you clickbait that you agree with. For example, I get a bunch of “crypto is great” tweets at the top of my Twitter feed, while my dad gets a bunch of “click this to find out why this river was important in the Civil War” links.

I’m aware of this (sort of), so have to fight the “Truth War” every day by seeking out “why crypto sucks” articles and videos, just to keep my information diet balanced.

There is more to the “Truth War” to algorithmic feedback loops though. There is also a ton of politicking and misinformation built into how these huge companies act. For example, Facebook probably let Russia game the 2018 election but they are never going to admit that they let that happen. Another example is that TikTok is probably being used by China to influence American kids into being dipshits, yet they would never admit that. Being able to tell when a Social Media Giant is lying (like Twitter and its shadow banning tool) is a crucial skill — and will only become more important as software continues to eat the living hell out of the rest of the world.

What Can You Do About The Truth Wars

I’m really not sure, but here are four things I challenge myself on in fighting the Truth Wars.

1. Reading or watching only one side of a story is no longer enough. If I only watch Fox, I’m fucked. And if I only watch CNN, I’m equally fucked. It’s time to admit that both sides are fucked and to try to eat the kernels of truth that either side is feeding me. Furthermore, if I can find a primary source, that’s what I consume. Like, for instance, instead of reading the framing from the journalists in the Twitter Files, go read the internal Twitter discussions that are shown in the images — that’s where I try to form my opinion on things… not on what the journalist says.

2. I turned my Twitter feed and Instagram feed to show me posts based on the “time” a post was, um, posted, rather than using their base algorithm, which shows content that I’m likely to click on. This is obviously not a perfect system (as the people I follow are obviously going to post things I agree with and I’m still getting biased information), but it is better than only getting to see tweets that Social Media Giants choose for me.

3. I find “news” to be a waste of time. I spend most of my hours reading blog posts analyzing news (Pirate Wires is my favorite right now) or reading longform books talking about Big Topics (like Carlo Rovelli talking about time as a social construct). I find zooming out from the day-to-day fuckery of news cycles is super helpful. It’s far more important, in my opinion, to read about the history of student loans than to get super mad at what Biden is trying to do about student loans (for example).

4. Finding smart people who disagree with me is important. I try to consume information I disagree with at least once a day. For example, Molly White thinks crypto is an absolute fraud and I do not. I read her blog two or three times a week, because I respect her intellect and want to make sure I get out of my normal feedback loops. I try to do the same thing with political views and stuff like that (though this can get time consuming. (if you ever catch me watching Stephen Colbert, now you know why.)

Conclusion

Anyways.

That’s the war I’m focused on right now — my personal war for truth while surfing the internet everyday.

- kram