Shadow Ban the Kraken!

More Twitter Files disclosures, executions in Iran

Kingdom of the Kraken, by KyuYong Eom

Monday, once again. After losing pretty much an entire week of my life to the manflu from hell — or was it actually influenza? I don’t know — I’m trying to get a grip on my life again here today. Powerwolf is helping. I saw them live in Hamburg before this whole flu ordeal started and I’m still thinking back to that fondly. That band is amazing fun. Unless you’re actually a devout Catholic, in that case it’s probably more than you could handle. Especially the songs about the phalluses and sex demons. 😆

But let’s get back to the news. First, we have to catch up with what happened with The Twitter Files since I wrote about the first two installments (Taibbi and Musk Clean House at Twitter, Twitter Lied about Shadow Banning People).

The Twitter Files 3: Too Cushy with the Security State

The two latest Twitter Files disclosures deal with how Donald Trump’s account was banned on Twitter. No matter what you personally think of Donald Trump — I myself think he’s an ass who failed upwards to almost unseen-before heights — the story here is not about Trump. It’s about banning the social media account of the elected head of government of the most powerful country in the world. Whatever your opinion on Trump or the events of 6 January 2021, the banning of his account was an important milestone in internet history. The background of which Matt Taibbi is uncovering with part 3 of The Twitter Files. He starts off by explaining that with this decision, Twitter themselves knew immediately that it was a hitherto unseen power grab for a social media company.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

Basically what happened with the Trump ban is that Twitter changed from putting up rules and then trying to follow them to trying to use these rules to justify gut decisions made by a small cabal of executives who had regular meetings with intelligence agencies like the FBI and the DHS. In effect, Twitter perverted its own system for content moderation where political issues were concerned. Even if you see the outcome (Trump banned) as good, think about what this does to the system. Imagine what would happen if Musk — who’s politically much more likely to side in an opposing direction to the previous Twitter executives — where to keep this system. Isn’t it clearly a good thing that he’s being transparent about what the company did in the last few years?

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @bariweiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 15. There was at least some tension between Safety Operations – a larger department whose staffers used a more rules-based process for addressing issues like porn, scams, and threats – and a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and Gadde.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.

What worries me most about this is how much scumbags like this Yoel Roth character enjoyed doing the bidding of intelligence services. He’s fucking over democracy, his users and a large part of free speech on the internet and he’s feeling great about it!

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI):

But there’s also other issues with Twitter’s moderation here. For one, these guys deciding all this shit are dumb as fuck. Not only do they want to ban obvious joke tweets because someone could take them serious, but they also, for no discernible reason, expand their decisions to arbitrary and subjective criteria that can’t even be decided in a sane and reproducible way. These decisions could never be codified in rules, or explained to the public in a transparent way. They basically turn their whole process into a subjective mess based on an idealistic, but very dumb, urge to do the right thing. Whatever that means.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 33. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in “confusion.” This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues:

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 34. In the docs, execs often expand criteria to subjective issues like intent (yes, a video is authentic, but why was it shown?), orientation (was a banned tweet shown to condemn, or support?), or reception (did a joke cause “confusion”?). This reflex will become key in J6.

So, basically, Twitter decided, for misguided idealistic reasons, that it needs to be the World Speech Police, because otherwise, democracy would die. Why? Trump! Nazis! Or something…

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 55. This is all necessary background to J6. Before the riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods This project was preposterous yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with groupthing, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was Twitter's responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 57. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes

The Twitter Files 4: Idiots at the Helm

In part 4 of The Twitter Files, environmental activist and author Michael Shellenberger expands on these insane moderation practices and explains what happened at Twitter right before Trump was banned. It seems like Twitter backed down from its earlier ideals on free speech due to pressure from the establishments in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Twitter Public Policy @Policy

Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows. Former First Lady @MichelleObama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.

Apparently there was only one dude in the whole company who dared to speak out where it mattered against selling free speech ideals down the river in the name of fighting the Bad Orange Man.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization. It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as “site-integrity-auto."

The most interesting revelation about all of this is how inept the people where who decided these things. When you picture a technocracy like that, you usually imagine very smart people deciding things for society at large for the betterment of humankind. But then it’s actually dumbasses like Roth who, as he says in one of these leaked chats, quit university because he thought business was a better vehicle to do good for humanity. I mean…

No wonder he totally gets into the weeds once he’s given some power and then promptly can’t find his way out ever again. Here’s these geniuses trying to blacklist a QAnon term, only to figure out that there’s also other things named after sea monsters from Greek mythology and that their little filter will disappear those things too — d’oh! The Kraken is a nice rum, BTW!

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

Roth immediately DMs a colleague to ask that they add "stopthesteal" & [QAnon conspiracy term] "kraken" to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified. Roth's colleague objects that blacklisting "stopthesteal" risks "deamplifying counterspeech" that validates the election.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

But it turns out that even blacklisting "kraken" is less straightforward than they thought. That's because kraken, in addition to being a QAnon conspiracy theory based on the mythical Norwegian sea monster, is also the name of a cryptocurrency exchange, and was thus "allowlisted"

This whole thread by Shellenberger basically demonstrates dumb middle and upper level management people inside Twitter being dumb middle and upper level management people. Anybody who’s ever worked for a larger company will immediately recognise what’s going on there. Management fucking things up and getting in the way of people doing their work. Except in this case, it’s also destroying free speech on the internet as some kind of massive collateral damage. The nice thing about these fancy, progressive working from home setups is that all the shit that’s usually just agreed on verbally in these situations now gets saved permanently for journalists to look at later. That might actually be worth all the lost productivity due to people working from home.

It’s not only Twitter who threw their initially high moral standards overboard in the Trump case, of course. Facebook actually got there first.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

"The underlying problem," writes @WillOremus , is that “the dominant platforms have always been loath to own up to their subjectivity, because it highlights the extraordinary, unfettered power they wield over the global public square...

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

"... and places the responsibility for that power on their own shoulders… So they hide behind an ever-changing rulebook, alternately pointing to it when it’s convenient and shoving it under the nearest rug when it isn’t.”

onezero.medium.comFacebook Chucked Its Own Rulebook to Ban TrumpThe move is a reminder of social platforms’ power over online speech — and the inconsistency with which they wield it

Part of this might also be an issue with Section 230 of Title 47, USC. This is a law in the US — often referred to as “safe harbour” — which protects internet service providers from being sued for things their users do on their platforms and networks. But it only protects them as long as these platforms don’t exercise editorial control over the content transmitted or displayed. With other words, online publications aren’t protected.

Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the good faith removal or moderation of third-party material they deem "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."

Note that this doesn’t mention political speech. Which is why Twitter is so obsessed with proving that Trump “incited violence”. If they just moderate for political reasons, as these disclosures prove — at least in my opinion — they should lose Section 230 protection, which would open them up to lawsuits by users who have legal objections about tweets by other users.

Side Note

Twitter did some of the filtering in these instances by using “bots” — which for some reason is their term for “algorithm”, apparently. It’s basically some kind of SkyNet Twitter Gestapo that automatically watches and actions tweets, ruling over what people can and can’t talk about on the platform.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 49. In Twitter docs execs frequently refer to “bots,” e.g. “let’s put a bot on that.” A bot is just any automated heuristic moderation rule. It can be anything: every time a person in Brazil uses “green” and “blob” in the same sentence, action might be taken.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 50. In this instance, it appears moderators added a bot for a Trump claim made on Breitbart. The bot ends up becoming an automated tool invisibly watching both Trump and, apparently, Breitbart (“will add media ID to bot”). Trump by J6 was quickly covered in bots.

I sincerely hope Musk will stay true to his word and release the tool he’s been promising which would enable every Twitter user to see for themselves what kind of detrimental rules their account has been hit with.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal

Mainstream Media Trying to Discredit the Disclosures

Almost more interesting than these latest revelations have been the reactions to them from my colleagues at mainstream outlets. Taibbi and his merry band of rogues have been vilified and their reporting denigrated throughout. One guy at a German hipster tech magazine even called all of them “right wing”.

¹

But why do these people think that Twitter being influenced by intelligence services to moderate people's political speech on the internet isn't a story? Not because it isn't actually a story for their readers. No. It's because they are mad that they've been scooped. And because they have been complicit in this shit by cheering on Twitter when it was doing it for years.

Matt Taibbi

addresses this in a post to his Substack subscribers:

What’s in "The Twitter Files, Part 3"

Glenn Greenwald said it reminded him of how the mainstream press initially treated the Snowden revelations.

Don't underestimate how much journalist rage and bitterness is from impotence. I first saw it in the Snowden story: they were furious independent journalists got that. You see it now with the success of Taibbi/Weiss/others on Substack/Rumble/YT.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

In his new article, @mtaibbi addresses corporate's media's insane conspiracy theories about what "conditions" he supposedly agreed to from Musk: beyond reporting it on Twitter, almost none. This explanation about why journalists are so enraged is key: taibbi.substack.com/p/note-to-read…

I think he’s right. There are several factors that prevent my colleagues who are cloistered in the groupthink mines of newsrooms and large editorial offices from seeing the actual story here:

1. Hating Elon is the Current Thing™, thus any story originating from him can only be bad

2. While it’s okay to mindlessly rewrite a story from a Trusted Source™ (like The New York Times, the Washington Post or Vox) it is a no-go to trust an independent journalist on Substack — even these hacks would actually have to do some research at this point and they don’t like that

3. Twitter might have done bad things, but they did it in the name of fighting the Bad Orange Man, which makes anything short of a tactical nuclear strike basically permissible

4. Taibbi, Weiss and Shellenberger aren’t woke enough to be trusted

And thus, instead of working for their readers, viewers and listeners and telling a good and important story, these people prefer to further perpetuate the same stupid political prejudices that made Twitter commit all the shit that’s in these leaks in the first place. Which is very likely why Musk didn’t go to them with this story. They would’ve buried it.

Second Protester Executed in Iran

The Iranian regime has executed a second protester. At least this stuff is finally being discussed in the mainstream media as well.

Iran has publicly hanged a man accused of killing two members of the security forces in its second use of capital punishment against anti-government protesters. Majidreza Rahnavard’s family were woken early on Monday morning to be informed that he had been executed and that his body had been buried in a lot in the local cemetery. His execution underscores the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations.

Iranian media has printed the names of 25 other people who faced the death sentence in relation to the protests, which were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested by the morality police for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress code for women. The protests, described by authorities as “riots”, represent the biggest challenge to the regime since the shah’s ouster in 1979.

On Thursday, Iran hanged Mohsen Shekari, who had been convicted of injuring a security guard with a knife and blocking a street in Tehran, the first such execution after thousands of arrests over the unrest, drawing western condemnation.

I don’t know if any of these two executions were of the protester sentenced to death in November, but it doesn’t sound like it. So I think it’s safe to say that there will be many more executions by the looks of it. At least there’s some outrage about this outside of Iran and communities that have close contacts to the country now. That’s a step forward, even if it comes very late.

EU Parliament Vice President Arrested

Meanwhile, a corruption scandal has erupted in the European Union parliament. One of the body’s 14 vice presidents, the Greek socialist Eva Kaili, has been arrested. She’s under suspicion of having accepted gifts from Qatari representatives trying to influence EU policy.

Belgian police seized cash worth about €600,000 ($632,000; £515,000) in 16 searches in Brussels on Friday. Computers and mobile phones were also taken, to examine their contents. Four people have been charged while two have been released, prosecutors said on Sunday.

Prosecutors said they suspected a Gulf state had been influencing economic and political decisions of the parliament for several months, especially by targeting aides. Local media has named the state as Qatar, though the Qatari government said any claims of misconduct were "gravely misinformed". Ms Kaili's responsibilities as vice-president include the Middle East. She has been a defender of Qatar in the past.

This is quite a story, as EU parliament members like Kaili are protected by parliamentary immunity and cannot be arrested unless they were caught directly committing a serious crime. There were reports that she was caught with “bags of cash” in hand, but I haven’t been able to verify this from a reliable news source. They must have had something definite on her, though. Apparently her boss, EU Parliament President Roberta Metsola, flew to Brussels for some searches of offices belonging to EU parliamentarians — as is required by the Belgian constitution.

The Wirecard Trial Begins

And while we are talking about cases of unbelievably brazen fraud, the lawsuit against the people responsible for the Wirecard scandal has begun in Munich. The defence for the former CEO of the company is asking for the charges against him to be dropped.

Markus Braun’s lawyer has filed a motion to suspend the criminal trial of the former chief executive of disgraced German payments group Wirecard just days after the case began. Alfred Dierlamm on Monday morning told a Munich court that prosecutors had failed to properly investigate the case, ignored key evidence and relied on flawed testimony of an unreliable witness who was telling a “pack of lies”.

“The whole criminal investigation has been suffering from serious shortcomings,” said Dierlamm, adding that “the current trial is doomed to fail”. The court heard opening statements from the lawyers of the two other defendants on Monday and will decide on the motion in the next weeks as the trial continues. If it is successful, Braun might be released from police custody.

Prosecutors last week charged Braun, Wirecard’s former head of accounting Stephan von Erffa and former senior Dubai-based manager Oliver Bellenhaus with fraud, embezzlement, accounting manipulation and market manipulation. Braun and Bellenhaus have been in police custody for two-and-a-half years.

As seems to be the usual procedure in these cases, the whole thing has been transformed into a huge blame game.

Dierlamm accused Bellenhaus and Wirecard’s fugitive former second-in-command Jan Marsalek of having channelled at least €750mn of those funds to shell companies. “Braun was not informed about this,” he said. “Oliver Bellenhaus was in control of those payment flows.”

Dierlamm argued that Braun believed Wirecard was viable until the end, pointing to the fact that in May 2020, the chief executive bought additional Wirecard shares for €2.5mn and did not sell a single share in the group. “As the single largest shareholder, he could not have any interest in channelling money out of Wirecard,” Dierlamm said, calling the allegations against his client “absurd” and “implausible”.

I don’t actually understand how “he didn’t know anything” can even be a relevant excuse for a CEO in a case like this. Don’t these people always say they earn their millions in salaries because they are responsible for what happens at the company? If he actually didn’t know, he should be jailed for being too dumb to be allowed to roam the streets. Anyway, I will keep on this story come what may. I’ve been reporting on since this podcast episode in June 2020, after all.

On My Desk Today

Well, with all the distractions that happened to me while writing this, the day will be almost over by the time I get this newsletter out to you. Therefore, I haven’t gotten much else done, except a lot of boring organisational work. I lost a whole week, after all. I’ve got to make up for it somehow during the next few days. Some of this work might prevent me from writing newsletters on Tuesday and Wednesday. But I am hoping to be back with another one on Thursday.

Until then, I hope this issue was useful to you. Consider dropping me a line if you have some feedback. Either the comment function here on Substack or just emailing the address you receive the newsletter from works fine. Thanks for reading!

1. Yes sure, Matt Taibbi could probably be called “conservative” in today’s climate. But unless trying to do good journalism and not buying lies about Trump dished up by the FBI and CIA is considered “right wing”, he most likely isn’t. And in that case, I’d be a right winger, too. Michael Shellenberger strikes me of a similar mindset. His biggest crime is probably criticising woke culture and having left his left-wing origins behind. Bari Weiss, who’s crime is to dare to leave The New York Times, has actually written a book on anti-semitism and her writing has appeared in Haaretz and The Forward. So I guess the problem here isn’t that these people are actually right wing. It’s that my colleague has a very loose grip on reality and thinks of everyone slightly right of Karl Marx as “right wing”.