Moderating social media Platforms are difficult. Just ask ex-Twitter employees what they thought of the 2020 ban New York Post The story of Joe Biden’s son Hunter was decided yesterday in tweets from substack author Matt Taibbi.
Or ask Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter and the self-proclaimed Chief Twit, who mocked Taibbi’s tweets, which contained images purporting to show internal company messages. Despite their payments as evidence of the company’s history of political bias, the documents show people who were caught in the trap that now traps Musk, who must make difficult decisions about what to allow on Twitter.
The tweet thread, which Taibbi called “The Twitter Files,” shows company executives scrambling to make a barrage of phone calls without success. As the presidential election is coming up, a New York Post He also said that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained evidence that he tried to illegally sell a meeting between a business client and his father when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
The e-mails and messages on the photos taken by Taibbi show what one official called a “whirlwind,” as some of Twitter’s policies and trust and security staff questioned the initial decision to ban sharing the story for violating the platform’s policy on distributing harmful content. (The origins of the laptop, and whether all the files on it belong to Hunter Biden, are unknown.)
The photos showed a staff warning, “We will face tough questions if we don’t have clear ideas.” A lawyer for the company said it was “reasonable [Twitter] thinking” the things that the newspaper found were stolen. Other footage showed Twitter executives offering advice from a Democratic member of congress and a tech industry lobbyist.
What did the world learn about Twitter’s handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not really. After all, Twitter changed its mind two days later, and CEO Jack Dorsey said the decision was “wrong.” Instead, the thread provided new fodder for conspiracy theories surrounding the laptop issue, including claims — unsupported by evidence — that federal officials intervened to shut it down. Send it story.
Yet the most important lesson from Taibbi’s thread may apply to Musk himself, who has made major decisions on Twitter almost unilaterally.
In the last two weeks, Musk restored the account of former US President Donald Trump based on the results of a Twitter investigation and opened a number of users who were previously banned from the site for violating content rules. Musk as well struggle The return of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose account was banned in October who wrote an anti-Semitic tweet. (Banked accounts still appear on the platform, but users cannot post or chat with them.)
However Musk this week announced that You will be stopped again after drawing a picture of the swastika inside the Star of David. His imagination, indeed students and journalists said anonymously, that the post was in violation of Twitter’s policy against inciting violence.
