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miles.mcstylez's avatar

Munk debate is available online now https://vimeo.com/munkdebates/review/775853977/85003a644c

I'm mentally steeling myself for the sheer volume of cringe I expect to see emanating from Gladwell and Goldberg.

Apparently, Taibbi struggled to keep a straight face when Gladwell brought up the Hunter Biden laptop. For those who missed Taibbi's twitter thread, here are the highlights:

- Twitter was engaging in Calvinball censorship. First they censor, then they work backwards to try to find a rule violation they can use to justify an action they've already taken. In this case, they were hoping a policy about hacked materials would do the trick, even though several voices inside Twitter pointed out that excuse wouldn't hold up to scrutiny

- Even before Biden won the election, his campaign team was coordinating with Twitter to have accounts censored. A Trump admin official asked Twitter execs to "at least pretend to care" about political neutrality

- Twitter pre-Musk was rife with factionalism; the content moderation team would make decisions that the PR team highly disapproved of, and often Jack Dorsey was the last guy to find out about controversial decisions being made

- American jurisprudence explicitly prohibits jawboning, where a government engages in indirect/proxy censorship by pressuring a private company to act as a middleman/front. There seems to now be hard evidence that the American federal government engaged in jawboned censorship of citizens, in violation of the First Amendment

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Mike Hind's avatar

A disturbing facet of this is their indifference to not being trusted. As if they feel untouchable or invincible. That's the power of hegemony.

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