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edit: snipe
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Edited by solidar ()
This is some amazingly comedic footage: today, over 100 police officers raided the Tokyo headquarters of an ultra-leftist group.
— Spoon & Tamago (@Johnny_suputama) October 16, 2020
pic.twitter.com/YK4tuu27mw
solidar posted:that dudes background was harvard, then doing policy advising for obama and clinton for years, then twitter.
also lol at the new york post being "a major mainstream news organization" - i wonder how many times that twitter has proactively blocked something from the national inquirer
is there even a shred of doubt about the story though
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David Brooks, of the New York Times, is closing in on being the dumbest of them all. He doesn’t have a clue.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 6, 2016
8 yıldır kedilerle yaşayan karga miyavlamaya başladı. pic.twitter.com/vdO37ja3Xq
— Kritik Haber (@kritikhabertr) October 21, 2020
aerdil posted:its a little funny that despite the sex & crack smoking pics & not-all-that-damning emails about influence peddling being undeniable, giuliani was too incompetent/stupid to concoct a halfway decent cover story for however they stole the icloud/harddrive that would withstand a second's scrutiny so it's a non-story for the most part except for the dems immediately spinning it as 'joe loves his failson' (which has actually been effective unlike the gop version). overall a failure of an october surprise, they should have put a better gop operative on this one.
idgi, is the idea here that Twitter, etc. were telling the truth about why they aggressively crushed the story on their platforms? since when is a news story not a news story because the information on a public figure was "stolen"? like... if they just imagined up a reason to try and suppress a story on one candidate, I kind of doubt that the other candidate's team could have debate-clubbed their way into preventing that. The reason that the platforms offered was entirely arbitrary.
Imagine being a judge and reading this in a lawsuit pic.twitter.com/1EIu0XkNq2
— An Intersectional Gipper (@WokeReagan) October 23, 2020
solidar posted:that dudes background was harvard, then doing policy advising for obama and clinton for years, then twitter.
also lol at the new york post being "a major mainstream news organization" - i wonder how many times that twitter has proactively blocked something from the national inquirer
That's not the point. The point is the pretty big step from a stupid fact-check blurb to Twitter telling people "sorry friend, you are not allowed to think this and don't try to PM it to anyone either, because the link is blocked in private messages too so your DM acquaintances are also not allowed to think this."
Like I doubt anyone who tried to be blasé about it now would have predicted it happening this year.
kornfan posted:to be fair, Bernie guys weren’t allowed to be mad about the DNC email leaks because it was a freakin nefarious Russian hacker from the twisted fucked up natjon of Russia, aka Hitler 2.
Twitter didn’t block people from linking to that story.
SCOOBY-DON !! pic.twitter.com/DESl7LDplH
— james austin "johnson" (@shrimpJAJ) August 21, 2020
cars posted:A bunch of platforms including Twitter and Instagram are currently silencing anything that trips a filter related to the word “Bolivia”, presumably because the U.S.-backed Nazi coup government just lost an election and is trying to obtain hundreds of visas to flee the country.
unless the coup government figures the imf debt they took on in the last year is enough to hobble the new government I'm not convinced we've seen the last of them
Chairman of Samsung is probably dead but we are all pretending he is alive because if he dies, the country will probably go into an economic death-spiral.
— John Yoo (@oniontaker) January 7, 2020
A thread. pic.twitter.com/KCZKczOQ3t
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solidar posted:i'd give ya'll that it is a step that twitter is openly saying that it is blocking some news story. but feels wild to make such a big deal out of this one act when the conversation then immediately switches to just a casual acceptance that these sites are blocking something about bolivia for political reasons.
No it doesn't. They've been doing stuff like that about foreign politics for a long time by taking down accounts.
The significant shift is that they are flat-out blocking links in the company's own home country to a domestic politics story in that country. Not just in posts, either. Private messages containing links to the story are blocked.
This is a big move for them, a brazen step into direct politicking for their chosen politician in a domestic election.
solidar posted:i'd give ya'll that it is a step that twitter is openly saying that it is blocking some news story. but feels wild to make such a big deal out of this one act when the conversation then immediately switches to just a casual acceptance that these sites are blocking something about bolivia for political reasons. in the evolution of western social media sites i've heard for 5? maybe 10 years now? people complaining about their posts, certain pictures, or links to various other stories that don't line up with the imperialist/capitalist lines resulting in the post getting removed, not posting at all, or them getting shadow banned for repeatedly posting about certain subjects. moving from doing this behind the scenes and maybe incompletely, to openly blocking some content seems to me to be a fairly predictable, and not particularly unique, move in the ever-more-heavily controlled and manipulated social media world.
The root DNS service (the one with all the com, net, org domains in it) operates on a government contract. What happens when the right comes back with “okay, twitter.com is no longer a valid URL because it tried to tamper with an election.”
What happens when they’re on the fence about it but Facebook and Snapchat pay them to do it.
What happens when a foreign news service that reports on those Australian soldiers murdering Afghani farmers in front of a camera loses its entire internet presence because it is “anti US propaganda and we don’t owe them use of our internet services”
What happens when the FBI and CIA want a list of everyone who tried to think a prohibited thought by posting a prohibited link.
If you think what happened here was
solidar posted:predictable
...then please link to where you predicted it.
This is one form of social control Twitter and similar platforms practice: they push people to believe & repeat the line that "everything" (really, a select subset of it) is predictable and was predicted, nothing was ever unexpected & you'd better not admit otherwise in public. Certainly, the line's used to promote the idea that nothing that these platforms do is any surprise to anyone and it's pointless to call it out or discuss it, or to treat them as real actors within history. At the same time, they've become the leading means for the U.S. government to disseminate propaganda. This not a coincidence.
We've discussed before in this thread how pernicious that ideology is and why it's harmful to adopt it, especially for Marxists.
If you want to think historically, you absolutely need to distinguish between the two activities here, and what's more, you have to be honest about what you predicted and what you didn't and try to think hard about why. It's not that it's "worse" that they're enacting brute-force measures that are a significant departure from their previous ones in multiple ways.
It's that it's different, and that novel activity will set a precedent. And if you pretend nothing ever happens like what just happened, then, because these platforms act as storytellers for much of the world around you, everything they do may come to look to you like it's an eternal truth of the universe.
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cars posted:idgi, is the idea here that Twitter, etc. were telling the truth about why they aggressively crushed the story on their platforms? since when is a news story not a news story because the information on a public figure was "stolen"? like... if they just imagined up a reason to try and suppress a story on one candidate, I kind of doubt that the other candidate's team could have debate-clubbed their way into preventing that. The reason that the platforms offered was entirely arbitrary.
while the reason given by twitter for crushing the story - "not publishing hacked materials" - is a new move and one that should rightly raise eyebrows (what about relevant public disclosures about corporate or government malfeasance if it was 'stolen'?), i think no other mainstream news outlets are reporting on the stuff directly because the trumpists/bannon's chinese-government-in-exile aren't releasing anything that can actually be verified. not that i'd be surprised if it still got suppressed but, in this case, it's understandable.
that said, i've noticed far more of a crackdown on unpopular speech this year by the big social medias like twitter and instagram and it should definitely be a red flag for anyone outside the center-right neoliberal continuum of opinion. i shared a meme the other day in a DM on instagram and later got a notification about it being "misleading news" as judged by their fact checkers and a threat that accounts that keep sharing stuff like that will be ghostbanned.
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that behavior appears consistent on google across browsers; bing and duckduckgo both have no such problem
solidar posted:if i'm reading ya'll correctly a big part of what you see as troubling here is the shift from this type of activity being in the background, not acknowledged and inconsistent to it being open, universal, broad. in writing and thinking about this i've moderated my position and will concede that "it's different, and that novel activity will set a precedent." but i'm still left wondering what really changed? maybe that thinking is still the thing you were critiquing me of, and it would be more helpful to shift the conversation to be forward looking: with this new precedent what should we expect moving forward, what should we do about it, what trends/movements does this decision sit within?
Correct, because we can predict where that stuff ends historically as well.
I don’t know if you use these social media platforms a lot or no, but if you haven’t been using them much since 2016 I can tell you the old early 2000s line about the patient, reasonable libs mocking and satirizing the evil right wingers is out the window, The typical Biden volunteer would be very happy to have a war with Russia over... tweets? Stuff Rachel Maddow made up for Hillary Clinton? I say volunteer specifically.
They’re every bit as insane as the typical right wing death cultist who thinks giving his guided tours to Israel help pay for the Rapture.
The average Biden voter may not be that unhinged (yet), but the one who refreshes centrist lib media all day long surely is. And when all of social media is managed through handlers at Lockheed and Raytheon, everyone can get their 30 minutes of approved thoughts every day from their phone, just like they used to get their approved thoughts from 30 minutes of approved news on the three approved TV networks back in the 70s and 80s.
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shriekingviolet posted:i love my dead cia son
ilmdcs
The Walter Benjamin's Last 24 Hours in Portbou Escape Room pic.twitter.com/U049YDwm5v
— Gerard-Jan Claes (@gerardfranz) November 13, 2020