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.”

Join: The Twitter Files

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.”

Join: The Twitter Files

41. Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at Twitter, we hope this latest installment of #TheTwitterFiles gave you insight into that unprecedented decision.

Join: The Twitter Files

42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.

Join: The Twitter Files

43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.

Join: The Twitter Files

44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

Join: The Twitter Files

45. This was reported by Shellen Berger MD, Isaac Grafstein, Snoozy Weiss, Olivia Reingold, Peter Savodnik, Nellie Bowles.

Follow all of our work: The Twitter Files

The question is who should make those decisions and how.

/END

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/twitter-broke-its-own-rules-to-ban

Join: The Twitter Files

Every website has to make some decisions about content moderation if only to enforce laws, including the one upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003), against issuing threats of violence against “a particular individual or group of individuals.”

Join: The Twitter Files

Governments would quickly find themselves facing the same problem as Twitter in deciding who should be allowed to speak and who shouldn’t.

In retrospect, Dorsey’s vision of a single digital town square was hopelessly naive.

Join: The Twitter Files

COMING at 4 est:

TWITTER: THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

Join: The Twitter Files

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

Join: The Twitter Files

2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.

Join: The Twitter Files

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

Join: The Twitter Files

4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

Join: The Twitter Files

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

Join: The Twitter Files

6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

Join: The Twitter Files

7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.

Join: The Twitter Files

8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

Join: The Twitter Files

9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

Join: The Twitter Files

10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

Join: The Twitter Files