Matt Taibbi brought up a case of a guy who put up montages of Trump saying the 2020 election was rigged cut up with clips of liberal media figures saying the Russians stole 2016.
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.
Not even close. Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop. The reality was that Trump was in office at the time and the Biden team, as private citizens, requested TOS enforcement on Hunter's naked pics and received it.
Yes, some of the TOS enforcement hit conservative outlets merely on account of association with the material despite the fact that they made an effort to censor the private pics, but from the emails it was crystal clear that this was because twitter lacked a mechanism to grant special trust to these outlets and not an intentional effort to kill a story (and a sorry nothingburger of a story at that). Revenge porn doesn't typically have a legitimate public interest involved; their infrastructure to deal with this edge case was not well developed.
Ro Khanna (D) was the only Dem in office to wander into the fray and he did it on the side of Free Speech. Interesting how that tends to get omitted from the story.
Thanks, Republicans. You defeated the terrible censorship. Now I know what THEY didn't want me to: Hunter Biden has a huge cock.
The Twitter files encompasses more than just the Hunter Biden laptop story (where the FBI did indeed say the story was likely disinformation , despite knowing it was true. Whether this was bureaucratic dysfunction or deliberate remains unclear).
It also encompassed purported COVID misinformation (much of which turned out to be true). Government agencies and government sponsored NGOs did indeed direct social media to ban specific individuals advocating against blanket lockdowns.
The notion that Taibbi et al. aimed to show that Biden is some illuminati-like shadow figure ruling the world secretly is a straw man. It did indeed show what it sought out to prove: the government directly and indirectly directed the censorship carried out by large social media companies and often labeled true facts as misinformation.
I limited my investigation to the Hunter Biden Laptop story in the first Twitter Files release; the dishonesty I saw from Musk and Taibbi on that subject was enough to pass judgement.
The Republican MO is to pivot to a different claim in the firehose-of-falsehood the moment you get called out. I'm not impressed.
> Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop
This is not at all what was claimed. The focus on the Hunter laptop censorship was on the FBI confirming (or at least strongly suggesting) that the story was disinformation despite the fact that the FBI knew of its veracity. Not due to any string pulling by Biden.
Yes, there were meetings between twitter and the feds monitoring Prigozhin's bot farms. Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't.
Not only did the feds not lean on Twitter to suppress Hunter's dick picks, but the coordination that I saw is actually coordination I want to see. Yeah, the spooks should talk with the social networks, so long as the social networks can check and balance the requests. If you disagree I would like you to explain to me what is so important about allowing Dimitri Prigozhin's bot farms to go unchallenged? Do you want another TEN_GOP incident, where a prominent republican account turns out to literally be run out of Dimitri Prigozhin's IRA just outside Moscow? I'd think you would want to avoid another embarrassment like that.
> Taibbi implied -- over and over again, as you are now -- that these meetings saw the feds lean on Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They didn't
Incorrect. What Taibbi wrote was that Twitter approached the FBI, asking whether the laptop story was misinformation. The FBI had in fact known that this was a genuine hard drive long before it reached the press (nearly a year before) but nonetheless said that the story was probably a misinformation campaign.
The government leaning on social media was not related to the laptop story. That came later, in 2021, where the government worked through NGO proxies to lean on social media to ban people arguing against lockdowns and even supplying lists of users to ban or suppress.
The 5th Circuit had ample time to review the evidence and found it compelling enough to uphold the injunction. Do you think these judges are just being duped by misinformation?
>Taibbi made it sound like Biden, who wasn't in office, pulled strings to have the government lean on Twitter to suppress important scandalous revelations from Hunter Biden's Laptop.
The Twitter files were very specific about the plethora of 3-letter agencies set up to do nothing but make censorship requests. Your claim is a strawman.
Ignoring the fact that there were concerted efforts by people in various government branches to attack and get rid of Trump while he was president makes your argument silly.
Just because Trump was in office doesn't mean his political enemies in the government were unable to use their governmental powers to censor speech that would help Trump get reelected.
Didn't he read an acronym wrong and it was a nongovernmental agency in one of the most prominent examples he used? And Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was for the stuff they requested get removed?
> Taibbi has admitted mistaking CIS for CISA in a single tweet in one of his many threads, but his testimony to Congress was entirely different. Hasan deceptively conflated this quickly corrected tweet with Taibbi’s testimony.
> But the evidence shows that Taibbi’s congressional remarks were correct. CIS and CISA collaborated with EIP on moderation requests, with both organizations directly appealing to Twitter for censorship, making Taibbi’s overall point and particular argument completely accurate.
He swapped them in one particular tweet, quickly corrected, but it was nowhere near "one of the most prominent examples".
Twitter were revealed to have an active relationship with the US government to quash "misinformation" that they didn't like (which turned out to include things that are true but might be helpful to Trump's electoral prospects) while promoting misinformation that the FBI thinks is helpful to them [0].
This is authoritarianism and government corruption of the public discourse. It is hard to tell if it is new (the FBI seems to have had similar relationships with the corporate media since forever ago) but it is profoundly anti-liberty and a real betrayal of the freedom and openness that the tech companies stood up for in the early 2000s.
> And Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was for the stuff they requested get removed?
While I do think it is less controversial than some people pretend - many politicians appear to have a lot more money than they should - it is naive in the extreme to say that being in office is the major factor when paying off politicians. Joe Bidan has held political offices since 1970s and is a significant force in the Democratic party, the returns on slipping him money would have been quite high whether he is in office or not.
The idea isn't to get a specific couple of lines slipped into a bill, the idea is to guide the long term narrative. Think the difference between quashing a single Jeff Epstein investigation vs covering up the entire scandal over multiple years.
Several "non-governmental" agencies (like the Election Integrity Partnership or the Stanford Internet Observatory[0]) were involved in making recommendations to censor. I say "non-governmental" in quotes because entities like SIO receive a lot of federal funding, and key players shuttle back and forth between private and government functions.
> Biden wasn't in office for the laptop stuff but Trump was
I'm not sure what "laptop stuff" you're referring to, but whether Biden, Trump, or whoever else was in office has no bearing on the illegality of the executive actions in question.
Zuckerberg said that the FBI pressured Facebook over Hunter Biden, you can look it up if you want another datapoint.
Anyone who votes on Hunter Biden's personal habits is a dummy but there was definitely a coordinated campaign to call it "disinformation" despite the dude's actual dick being in the pictures.
Are you talking about on Joe Rogan? He didn't say that at all. He said they later assumed they were talking about the laptop from something they said earlier that was much more general about upcoming Russian misinfo.
Uh, I guess one could phrase it that way but it's rather dishonest.
It'd be akin to saying a police officer testifying that they saw X person shoot Y person as attempting to deplatform X person.
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Honestly the only thing questionable in the twitter files was the USG telling twiter which accounts were their cy-ops accounts so they wouldn't get banned.
Twitter having a policy of you can't do Y on the platform and the USG asking Twitter if X person is violating Y is not illegal censorship.
You understand that USG in reference to the twitter files means Donald Trump as he happened to be in charge of the executive branch during that period?
All governmental prosecution should be before a court with the protection of rights. Even in your contrived example, the defendant has the right to face his accuser, cross-examine, attorneys, judges, juries, and the many things we throw in the government's way of harming people, justified or not.
When the USG tells anyone to do something, chances are they will comply, legal or not, just because it isn't worth the pain and suffering of fighting, especially for someone you don't even know. We have relearning what it is like to have your personal life ruled by people you have never met in places you have never been. The USG has stepped too far and the overreaction to public/private partnerships is coming.
Are you serious? A US District Court as well as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that those files were not in fact a joke, and that the federal executive did strong-arm private entities like Twitter to censor.
It's almost certainly fair use. The Copyright Act explicitly allows the use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and the like. Courts have historically been sensitive to First Amendment concerns when copyrighted materials are used for transformative purposes. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court emphasized the transformative nature of parody as a form of commentary, giving it a wide berth under fair use.
Now, onto the crux of your argument about implicit commentary. Even if a work does not contain explicit commentary, the juxtaposition of clips alone can function as a form of critique or commentary. This is especially relevant when highlighting inconsistencies or ironies in public discourse. While there isn't direct commentary, the act of selectively piecing together these clips communicates a larger point or message. Courts often look at the 'purpose and character' of the use, and if it is transformative—adding new meaning or context—it's generally favored under fair use.
Thank you for explaining this. It is obvious if you think about it, but some commenters seem to think copyright can be used as some kind of loophole to shield public figures from exposure of their public behaviour.
You can do that if you want to risk a legal battle, but Youtube doesn't care about your legal battle until its over. The fact of the matter is that footage can be copyrighted and videographers have the right to protect their copyright. If I go film Trump giving a speech with the sole purpose of selling that material to news agencies and you decide to release that footage on your own platform, then you're at risk of infringing on that copyright. The only way to completely decide if you're infringing on their copyright is through a court case. Currently, outside of unique cases like "response videos," it's common for Youtube to side with the copyright owner. So I'm betting Youtube demonetized it for infringing on copyright.
I agree that YouTube will often side with the copyright holder - I’m a Rick Beato fan, and there’s a practical risk of demonetization or removal on that platform. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between what YouTube decides to do and what the actual law permits under fair use. YouTube’s policies don’t necessarily reflect a balanced interpretation of copyright law.
When it comes to copyright law itself, montage videos of politicians that serve a transformative purpose, such as critique or commentary, fit squarely within the realm of fair use, as established by various court precedents. So, while you may face a challenge on platforms like YouTube, the underlying legality of such videos is more accommodating than those platforms might suggest.
No. As someone who works in documentaries, you absolutely have to license footage of public figures, including news footage. There’s a reason most news media shoot their own footage.
If you are commentating on it and making significant changes, then it can be fair use.
The public figure can't copyright their appearance, but whoever recorded the clip absolutely has a copyright on it.
The funniest thing about copyright issues is that whenever they come up, people are so confidently wrong about the actual law. Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
> Lots of stuff on YouTube is only permitted because the rightsholders allow it to stay up - every cover of every modern song, for example.
And many of those rights-holders only allow it because YouTube built a mechanism that helps them detect these uses and then automatically siphon off ad revenue it generates.
I'm honestly confused what people get upset about using a private platform. If you want better accountability argue for an open platform uncontrolled by capital. What is the point of complaining while suggesting nothing? This conversation is even more useless than the old "marketplace of ideas" bullshit.
At some point the private platform becomes so influential over the information environment and politics that it can no longer be considered merely a private platform. It is now also a public square. It’s not unreasonable at that point to require it to adhere higher standards of evidence, law, and reason.
In this case, I’m no fan of Brand, but I’m even less a fan of YouTube’s apparent policy of “guilty till proven innocent” here. How about waiting till he and his accuser/s have had their day in a court, and jury of peers weighs the evidence and decides his guilt?
I am also very much a free speech absolutist. But demonetization is different. Anyone who wants to see the video still can, so Russel Brand has not had his freedom of speech restricted in any way.
This is not a policy of guilty until proven innocent. It's a policy of "advertisers don't want to be associated with rapists." And while there is a good argument for allowing access to YouTube as a public square, there is no such argument for allowing access to YouTube as an advertising platform.
Is that even true? Are there no convicted rapists with monetized youtube channels? Youtube does background checks? Or they merely take action when someone's crime(s) make it into the news? That seems rather arbitrary and short-sighted. Some journalist or cabal of journalists can write a viral article about someone, about something that happened a decade or more ago, and a corporation will unilaterally decide to end the economic aspect of their relationship with the person?
Sorry, what does this have to do with the legal system? Twitter and youtube are free to exclude service in any way they please, sans for protected classes (which is nearly impossible to demonstrate in practice).
I'd also like to point out that a court determing legal guilt has precisely zero standing in terms of actual guilt. Courts are fallible systems that fail every day and are a terrible metric for determining what actually happened.
Fair enough point. Fwiw I don’t consider myself a free speech absolutist, and have no problem with restricting speech that incites harming other people, among other things.
Then break up Google from YT and their ad network. Have more competition in the market. You are going to get exactly the opposite of what you want by having one huge monopoly that's controlled by the government on what they can and cannot say.
>It’s not unreasonable at that point to require it to adhere higher standards of evidence, law, and reason.
Civil law is based on contract. Nearly every civil contract regarding media has disparagement clauses.
> At some point the private platform becomes so influential over the information environment and politics that it can no longer be considered merely a private platform.
Good luck taking that up with the department of justice.
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to get at—just because you want a space to be public doesn't change the legal reality.
Problem is that we are at a point at which these 'private platforms' are in a position to do serious damage to public speech primarily due to network effects. They dont become important venues of speech until they are a dominant portion (if not outright monopoly) of communication medium. This is structural & will not be resolved on its own unless some other non-profit seeking entity (Govt) enforces it. As it is we are losing the 'money is speech' battle because of 'Citizen's United' (google it), This left unchecked will just make it hopeless.
Pure trolling, kind of funny, 100% clips of public figures with no commentary. Demonetized.