ken klippenstein – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Big Tech’s Promise Never To Block Access To Politically Embarrassing Content Apparently Only Applies To Democrats

from the hypocrites?-in-big-tech?-how-could-it-be? dept

It probably will not shock you to find out that big tech’s promises to never again suppress embarrassing leaked content about a political figure came with a catch. Apparently, it only applies when that political figure is a Democrat. If it’s a Republican, then of course the content will be suppressed, and the GOP officials who demanded that big tech never ever again suppress such content will look the other way.

A week and a half ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing about the threat of foreign intelligence efforts to interfere with US elections. Senator Tom Cotton, who believes in using the US military to suppress American protests, used the opportunity to berate Meta and Google for supposedly (but not really) “suppressing” the Hunter Biden laptop story:

In that session — which I feel the need to remind you was just held on September 18th — both Nick Clegg from Meta and Kent Walker from Google were made to promise that they would never, ever engage in anything like the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story (Walker noted that Google had taken no effort to do so when that happened in the first place).

Clegg explicitly said that a similar demotion “would not take place today.”

Take a wild guess where this is going?

Exactly one week and one day after that hearing, Ken Klippenstein released the Trump campaign’s internal vetting dossier on JD Vance. It’s pretty widely accepted that the document was obtained via hacking by Iranian agents and had been shopped around to US news sites for months. Klippenstein, who will do pretty much anything for attention, finally bit.

In response, Elon immediately banned Ken’s ExTwitter account and blocked any and all links to not just the document, but to Ken’s Substack. He went way further than anyone ever did regarding the original Hunter Biden laptop story and the content revealed from that laptop. We noted the irony of how the scenario is nearly identical to the Hunter Biden laptop story, but everyone wants to flip sides in their opinion of it.

Elon being a complete fucking hypocrite is hardly new. It’s almost to be expected. That combined with his public endorsement (and massive funding) of the Trump/Vance campaign means it’s noteworthy, but not surprising, that he’d do much more to seek to suppress the Vance dossier than old Twitter ever did about the Hunter laptop story.

So, what about Meta and Google? After all, literally a week earlier, top execs from each company said in a Senate hearing under oath that they would never seek to suppress similar content this year.

And yet…

That’s the link to the dossier on Threads with a message saying “This link can’t be opened from Threads. It might contain harmful content or be designed to steal personal information.”

Ah. And remember, while Twitter did restrict links to the NY Post article for about 24 hours, Meta never restricted the links. It only set it so that the Facebook algorithm wouldn’t promote the story until they checked and made sure it was legit. But here, they’re blocking all links to the Vance dossier on all their properties. When asked, a Meta spokesperson told the Verge:

“Our policies do not allow content from hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence US elections. We will be blocking such materials from being shared on our apps under our Community Standards.”

Yeah, but again, literally a week ago, Nick Clegg said under oath that they wouldn’t do this. The “hacked sources” policy was the excuse Twitter had used to block the NY Post story.

Does anyone realize how ridiculous all of this looks?

And remember how Zuckerberg was just saying he regrets “censoring” political content? Just last week, there was a big NY Times piece arguing, ridiculously, that Zuck was done with politics. Apparently it’s only Democrat-politics that he’s done with.

As for Google, well, Walker told Senator Cotton that the Biden laptop story didn’t meet their standards to have it blocked or removed. But apparently the Vance dossier does. NY Times reporter Aric Toler found that you can’t store the document in your Google Drive, saying it violates their policies against “personal and confidential information”:

As we’ve said over and over again, neither of these things should have been blocked. The NY Post story shouldn’t have been blocked, and the Vance dossier shouldn’t have been blocked. Yes, there are reasons to be concerned about foreign interference in elections, but if something is newsworthy, it’s newsworthy. It’s not for these companies to determine what’s newsworthy at all.

While it was understandable why in the fog of the release about the Hunter Biden story both Twitter and Meta said “let’s pump the brakes and see…” given how much attention has been paid to all that, including literally one week before this, it certainly raises a ton of questions to then immediately move to blocking the Vance dossier.

Of course, the hypocrisy will stand, because the GOP, which has spent years pointing to the Hunter Biden laptop story as their shining proof of “big tech bias” (even though it was nothing of the sort), will immediately, and without any hint of shame or acknowledgment, insist that of course the Vance dossier must be blocked and it’s ludicrous to think otherwise.

And thus, we see the real takeaway from all that working of the refs over the years: embarrassing stuff about Republicans must be suppressed, because it’s doxxing or hacking or foreign interference. However, embarrassing stuff about Democrats must be shared, because any attempt to block it is election interference.

Got it?

Filed Under: content moderation, hunter biden laptop, hypocrisy, jd vance, jd vance dossier, ken klippenstein, nick clegg, tom cotton
Companies: google, meta, twitter, x

Quick Let’s Watch Everyone Flip Sides On Twitter’s Handling Of The Hunter Biden Laptop vs. The JD Vance Dossier

from the watch-the-rationalizations-fly dept

It’s been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example.

Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: “Outrageous censorship!” and possibly a “First Amendment violation!”

ExTwitter, under Elon: Blocks links to leaked JD Vance dossier. Also Elon: “Most egregious doxxing ever!” Hmm…

As we’ve discussed for years now, very few people fully understand what happened four months ago with Twitter and the NY Post’s story about the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Two years ago, we pieced together what actually happened based on information from lawsuits, but also from what Elon released after taking over Twitter (though he did so misleadingly).

In short, Twitter had a very, very broad policy (too broad!) regarding “hacked materials.” We had criticized how that policy had been used to hide news reports before the whole Hunter Biden laptop story came out, warning that the policy was too broad and resulted in blocking legitimate news based on leaks.

At the same time, there were widespread (legitimate) concerns that foreign entities might engage in “hack and dump” efforts to leak critical information, as had happened in 2016. The folks who had access to the details of the laptop had shopped the contents around to multiple news sources who all refused to publish it, including Fox News. Eventually, the NY Post bit on the story, though even the main author of it was so unsure of the story he asked for his name to be taken off the byline. The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory.

Given the general concerns about amplifying a “hack and dump” campaign perhaps by a foreign adversary, and with no direct communication by the government, Twitter had a quick internal discussion. Then, they decided to limit access to the NY Post’s story under the “hacked materials” policy (as they had done before) until they knew more about the provenance of the laptop content. At that point, users were unable to share the link to just that story.

The internal leaks from the company showed that the decision makers inside the company struggled with how to deal with this, but politics did not come into play. Instead, they noted that given it “is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear” and the risks, they decided to err on the side of caution and limit the distribution.

This did not actually limit interest in the article (hello Streisand Effect), which got way more traffic once Twitter made that decision.

Just one day later, Twitter admitted it had made a mistake, changed the policy, and again began allowing users to share that story.

Following that, there have been years of nonsense. This includes a firm (false) belief that Twitter actively tried to stifle the story for political reasons, that it blocked the story for months, that it knew the story was real, that the FBI and/or the non-existent Biden administration (remember Trump was the President at the time) had ordered Twitter to suppress the story.

An election interference lawsuit was filed… and rejected. There were Congressional investigations from Jim Jordan, which turned up nothing (but which he still spun as exposing conspiratorial actions).

But to many, including Elon Musk and many of his most vocal fans, it is taken as fact that old evil Twitter deliberately censored that story for political reasons, possibly changing the course of the 2020 election (even though literally none of that is accurate).

When his own company released the fact that the Biden campaign (not administration) asked Twitter if it might remove five tweets that showed Hunter Biden dick pics that were revealed as a part of the leak, Elon claimed that this story was a quintessential “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” even as the tweets clearly violated Twitter’s policy against the sharing of non-consensual nude images.

Indeed, many people cite that false narrative as a reason they’re happy that “free speech absolutist” Elon took over to make sure such a thing would never happen again.

Fast forward to yesterday…

Hold onto your hats, folks. This year, there are widespread (legitimate) concerns about foreign interference in the election including “hack and dump” efforts. Over the last month, there have been tons of stories regarding how Iran had hacked Trump officials, obtained a bunch of things, and shopped them around to a variety of media sources, who all refused to publish it.

Eventually, one dipshit decided to publish at least some of it: the Trump internal dossier on JD Vance. In this case, the dipshit was Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter, known for his terrible reporting as well as his willingness to beg for attention on social media.

The actual content revealed in the story was… not really particularly interesting or revelatory. It’s a dossier of all the reasons why Vance might be a bad VP choice. There’s little that’s surprising in there.

So, the scenario has an awful lot of similarities to the Hunter Biden laptop story, right? Almost eerily so. But this time, Elon Musk is in charge, right? And so, obviously, he left this up, right? And he let people share it, right? Free speech absolutism, right? Right? Elon?

Hahaha, of course not.

And if you try to share the link to Ken’s article? According to multiple people who have tried, it does not work. Here’s one screenshot of a few that I saw showing what happens if you try:

You also can’t share the link via DMs.

Another user on Twitter notes that their own account was temporarily suspended not even for tweeting out a link to the Vance dossier story, but for tweeting a link to Ken’s post about getting suspended!

ExTwitter Safety claims Ken’s is a “temporary” suspension (just like Twitter’s temporary limit on the NY Post — though in that case they didn’t suspend the account as they did here). And the reason given is that the dossier supposedly revealed Vance’s physical addresses and “the majority of his Social Security number.”

As opposed to, say, Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

That said, the link posted to ExTwitter did not, in fact, reveal the addresses or partial SSN. It linked to an article that Ken wrote about the dossier, which then did include a link to the file, but it’s still two clicks away from ExTwitter.

Ken points out that this particular info (Vance’s addresses and partial SSN) is widely available online or via data brokers. That still seems a bit iffy, and it feels like he could have easily redacted that info, but chose not to. There are plenty of cases that many people consider to be “doxxing” that are little more than getting info from a data broker.

Elon, though, is insisting that this was “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” Which is laughably untrue.

And, of course, unlike the old Twitter regime, which made no public displays of support for presidential candidates, Elon has publicly endorsed Donald Trump, become one of the largest donors to his campaign, and turned ExTwitter into a non-stop pro-Trump promotional media site. So, unlike the old Twitter regime, Elon has made it clear that he absolutely wants to use the site to elect his preferred candidate and would have political reasons for trying to suppress this marginally embarrassing dossier.

So… is Jim Jordan going to launch an investigation and hold hearings, like he did about Twitter and the NY Post over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Is he going to haul Elon before Congress and demand he explain what happened? Will Elon release the “X-Files” revealing the internal discussions he and his employees had over banning Ken and blocking the sharing of the link?

Or nah?

Already we’re seeing Musk’s biggest fans trying to come up with justifications for how these stories are totally different. But they’re literally not. On basically all important details they’re effectively identical.

Again, I said at the time (and even before the Biden laptop story came out) that I thought Twitter’s policy was bad and they were wrong to temporarily block the sharing of the link. I also think that Elon is wrong to suspend Ken and block the sharing of the links as well.

But watch the rank hypocrisy fly. The old Twitter regime at least struggled with this decision internally (later revealed by Elon) and recognized that they were making a quick call based on imperfect information that they quickly reversed course on and apologized.

Somehow, I doubt Elon’s going to do any of that.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, hunter biden, hunter biden laptop, jd vance, ken klippenstein
Companies: twitter, x