After Elon Musk’s buyout and the ongoing release of the the “Twitter files”, the cat is out of the bag, as it were, when it comes to Twitter’s extreme leftist political agenda and their collusion with the federal government and the DNC. And, it appears that some of the people deeply involved in the platform’s censorship model are willing to discuss their tactics and motives. One might expect them to take a more apologetic position in light of their exposed lies and trespasses against their customers and site users, but this is definitely not the case.
Former Twitter employees, most especially former moderators and Trust and Safety employees, are unrepentant for their censorship efforts tainted with political bias and seem to loath Elon Musk for opening the door to fair debate on the social media site.
One Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, was recently in the headlines for admitting that Twitter’s aggressive censorship of the Hunter Biden Laptop story was a “mistake.” Roth is the former Global Head of Trust And Safety and played a direct role (along with other executives) in the suppression of the news, leading to the banning of the New York Post account merely for relaying accurate reporting.
Presenting the event as a “mistake” rooted in the company’s concerns about “misinformation”, however, seems disingenuous. As we now know, Twitter and the DNC were in regular contact with each other and requests were made by DNC officials to block any mention of such damaging stories. There was round-table debate at Twitter, but it was not about whether it was morally right to censor the information. Rather, Twitter execs debated whether or not they could get away with it.
The trust and safety elites within Big Tech companies have no doubts about the validity and righteousness of their cause, and that’s the biggest problem. The monstrous nature of the ideology of scientifically precise censorship is on full display in the following interview with Roth at the Knight Foundation. Roth has no qualms about the notion of crushing free speech.
Roth equates banned information to “malicious campaigns,” painting a picture of some nebulous organization of “trolls” with ill intent working from the shadows to spread mean words and falsehoods. This is projection. The only organized and shadowy efforts were performed by Twitter’s leadership and were designed to silence dissent, in some cases in an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election for their friends in the Democratic Party.
This is even hinted at by Roth, who explains the widespread decision within Big Tech companies after the 2016 election to focus heavily on campaign and election influence. Roth cites the long debunked theory that Russia manipulated the 2016 election as the reason for this agenda to control election information.
A clear case of collusion can be presented between the Democrats and Twitter to do the exact thing Roth warns about, which is the subversion of election outcomes. But the psychology of people like Yoel Roth is disturbing beyond the issue of potential political manipulation. For example, Roth goes on to claim that the satire inherent in organizations like Libs of Tikok and the Babylon Bee is “dangerous” and specifically suggests they threaten the lives of people within the trans community.
Keep in mind that satire and humor are usually the first targets of any authoritarian regime clamoring for power because the greatest comedy strikes at the heart of lies and speaks truths that many people are otherwise afraid to discuss. If a joke is based on falsehoods it’s usually not very funny. As far as Libs of TikTok is concerned, all they do is re-post videos of leftists’ own arguments and confessions, and for that they are labeled “dangerous.”
The former trust and safety exec goes on to admonish the removal of covid censorship, calling it “bad and damaging” without explaining how. One can only suggest that the leftists at Twitter were also in collusion with government officials to silence any and all facts and evidence that ran contrary to the mainstream pandemic narrative. Much of this information, like the Biden Laptop, was labeled “conspiracy theory” and banned, only to later be revealed as absolutely true.
The deeper poison of Trust and Safety cultism is two-fold: First, it is being done scientifically and with increasing precision. It is not only based simply on community flagging; these people are exploiting algorithms and computer modeling in the hopes that they can develop predictive suppression. They think they can “measure hate events” as if they are hurricanes and batten down the hatches before the waves hit. The thing is, much of the “hate” they fear is all in their minds. The “malicious campaigns” they see are often merely people disagreeing with them on the basis of facts and principles.
You cannot accurately measure “hate”, for one, and when that hate is perceived through a lens of delusion built on bias and zealotry, we run into a threat much bigger than hate – The threat of despotism wrapped in technocracy. They aren’t blocking hate, they are blocking free debate.
The real discussion should be on whether or not Trust and Safety metrics should even exist. Why do we need them? Roth never questions the validity of his former job and the motivations behind it. The bottom line is this: Big Tech censorship is founded on the argument that people cannot be trusted to make up their own minds on the information they see. Social media leaders think that THEY should be the arbiters of information in order to protect people from themselves.
What qualifies them to hold this kind of power? Nothing. No one is qualified enough, intelligent enough or objective enough to mediate the speech of millions of people, and since Big Tech holds a veritable monopoly on modern communications, their policies become a kind of law that affects the whole of society. Twitter by itself is only a small part of the overall picture, but the cold and calculating censorship promoted by Roth is something that is being executed by the majority of Big Tech companies right now. We have to ask ourselves as Americans (and western culture in general needs to ask) if this kind of ideological monopoly can be allowed to persist, because it means the eventual destruction of free speech as we know it.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/04/2022 – 22:05
