Let That Sink In – small dead animals

The Twitter Files, Part 5: “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.

25. But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

Less than 24 hours later they were eager to expand their new powers to Covid.

16 Replies to “Let That Sink In”

I’ve decided that I’m not going to hold my breath that anything will be done or anyone punished. Forever hopeful but always a skeptic.

HiHo says:

December 12, 2022 at 8:09 pm

Seems to me that the only times the guilty are held to account is after a war, and even then, there is no guarantee.

What the Bidenites did, and continue to do, reminds me of the crime of ant-Soviet agitation.

So far, it’s difficult to say that Twitter did anything criminal. Yes, they were wildly biased and unethical. A terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome enforced and amplified by group-think allowed them to believe that Trump was Hitler and that they were saving the world. Insane, yes. Criminal, don’t know yet.

Where this is all heading is the demonstrably criminal behaviour of the Biden family, whether there is a “smoking gun” implicating Joe personally and the role the FBI and CIA had in the cover-up. Twitter is just an opening act.

Kenji says:

December 12, 2022 at 3:42 pm

If all these Twitter execs stood outside a polling place and shouted that President Trump is so evil, that he needs to be silenced … they’d be taken away by the police. They’d be harassing and intimidating voters. What they actually did was far worse than that … they shouted to the internet that Trump is so evil, that they SILENCED him. How do you think voters would react to that? They used their powerful social media tool to interfere with an election.
1. Political Junkie says:
  
  December 12, 2022 at 4:24 pm
  
  JD, you are correct in saying that the deck is stacked. You can’t fight city hall applies in spades here.
  
  Kari Lake has launched an interesting lawsuit in Arizona. At first glance, the evidence is pretty compelling, including some interesting whistleblowers.
  
  The Congressional inquiries might be a hoot after the Republicans sanitize Pelosi’s gavel.
  1. JD says:
    
    December 12, 2022 at 5:05 pm
    
    Hence filing a civil suit under the other 2 statutes in a more friendly jurisdiction, and civil suits aren’t “beyond a reasonable doubt”
JD says:

December 12, 2022 at 3:56 pm

If the FBI directed that certain people be silenced or banned from twitter, then one might be able to make a case under:
18 USC 241 – Conspiracy Against Rights
18 USC 242 – Deprivation of Rights under color of law

Unfortunately those would have to be prosecuted by the Biden DoJ, with a trial in DC, and overcome claims of Qualified Immunity or Sovereign Immunity.

There is also a separate claim to be put forth under 42 USC 1983 as a civil action for deprivation of rights, and 42 USC 1985 (3). for the underlying conspiracy.
1. Daniel Ream says:
  
  December 12, 2022 at 5:56 pm
  
  Were Twitter acting alone, they’d be clearly under their First Amendment rights, just as newspapers have always been ridiculously biased since their inception.
  
  Had the federal government tried to strongarm Twitter and Twitter resisted, there’d be a clear takings violation under the Fifth, and a host of other civil rights laws.
  
  It’s a lot less clear what remedies are available to the users of a business – note, not customers, because the vast majority of Twitter’s users never pay them any money – if the federal government says “We want you to do this” and the business says “Sure! Sounds awesome!”. It’s not clear to me that there are any remedies.
  
  Recall that in the 1940s the government “asked” Hollywood to insert pro-war propaganda into their films and Hollywood by and large went along with it. If what Twitter is doing is wrong (ethically and/or legally) then that was also wrong.

I think we can wait two years for indictments.

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” – CS Lewis

38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”

40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”

“excited to see us handling more categories of misinformation”. Content moderation, for Twitter employees, was like a drug. The more they took, the more they wanted to take. Drunk on power.