American censorship machine in social networks on the example of Twitter

Hello.

The election race in America is gaining momentum, Elon Musk is on the side of the Republicans and,

by accessing internal Twitter documents,throws out on the public that is capable of destroying both political careers and the company itself. The stakes in this game are as high as ever, it can be argued that Musk is going for broke. Musk has little time to create the image of a fighter against the injustice of politicians who are in power and automatically receive a safe conduct from persecution. The strategy is profitable, since here you can turn a lot to your advantage, even those issues that have nothing to do with politics.

Elon Musk involved in the investigation of censorship inA Twitter journalist named Matt Taibbi, a chain of tweets from him reveals some of what was going on inside Twitter. It is on this chain that we will stop to talk about what is happening, as we have a full-blown picture of censorship that is no different from other American social networks. Moreover, what is happening is possible not only in the United States, in other countries censorship mechanisms are activated faster and easier. Therefore, keep in mind that the events described are easily applicable to any part of the globe.

The story is called “Twitter files”, itbased on thousands of social network internal documents. Requests to correct this or that information were constantly received by Twitter, by 2020 they have become commonplace and everyday tasks. For example, there were constant requests from the White House to withhold information that could negatively affect the position of the president. Let me remind you that the son of President Joe Biden lost his laptop, which turned out to be a lot of interesting data about his life - prostitutes, drug use, financial information that reveals hard-hitting actions. And they tried to remove this information from the public field, and they did it at the request of the White House administration. In particular, one of the top managers of Twitter shares with another information about what needs to be withdrawn.

Musk and his lawyers worked out the issue well, theydo not publish external requests from the administration, only internal correspondence within the company, which sheds light on what is happening anyway. This avoids lawsuits for disclosure of information provided by government officials and reduces the ability to influence subsequent publications.

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Attention could attract both stars andunknown users - no one has guaranteed censorship protection on the platform. Both Democrats and Republicans, both President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had access to the system. But, according to the investigation, there was no balance, since the company's employees for the most part supported the Democrats and were against Trump. As evidence, donations to each party from Twitter employees are given.

Therefore, the support of the Democrats was onfundamentally different level, as well as working with the current administration of the White House. On October 14, 2020, an article appeared in the New York Times about Hunter Biden's letters found in his lost laptop. Twitter took extraordinary steps to keep the information from spreading — removing links to these materials, marking links as “unsafe”, the social network even went so far as not to allow forwarding links in private messages, they were deleted. Usually such draconian measures are taken for child pornography.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was banned from Twitter for mentioning an article in the New York Times, Trump campaign staffer Mike Khan wrote an angry letter on Twitter.

Inside Twitter, this request caused discussions, sohow different departments did not have transparent communication about this. The response was that these materials violated Twitter's rules regarding material obtained by hackers.

At the same time, warnings from officialswere general in nature, the decision to withdraw materials was made on the side of Twitter, it is alleged that Jack Dorsey, the owner of the company, did not know anything about this. Inside Twitter, employees didn't understand what rules applied to content and why they worked in an arbitrary way.

At some point, high-ranking officialsTwitter tried on the togas of judges, began to discuss how and what they should do, what prerequisites to proceed from (Hunter Biden's laptop was stolen and hacked or simply forgotten somewhere). In fact, the social network became a party to the conflict and began to serve the White House in full.

Politicians tried to discuss with managementTwitter freedom of speech, the fact that in the NYT journalists did their job and are protected by law from prosecution, as they provided important information to the public. But inside Twitter, this did not bother anyone, since they were fulfilling a completely obvious order and came up with different ways to block information critical for the Democrats, to put out the fire. It is possible that their motives were good, but the social network tried on functions that are unusual for it, began to manage the information agenda, distort it to suit its own interests. The motives of the leadership of Twitter are unknown to us, but I think they lie on the surface.

Scandal will continue as aheadpublication of many documents, information will be given out in doses, this is part of the election race. And for the Democrats, this is a ticking time bomb, as many details are revealed that are guaranteed to infuriate ordinary people who are far from this topic. The time, place and what to publish are perfectly chosen.

Idealists who believe in the existence of an Americandemocracies should remember that Twitter and other social networks blocked Donald Trump, then the current president of the United States, without any court order or external reasons. They just wanted to do it, and they did it. Trump is currently suing Twitter over this point, and this is one of the reasons why he does not want to return to the platform, he has a desire to win the blocking lawsuits.

Much is said about these files in the aspect of America,but almost nothing is said about other countries. Let's turn on the head, the only jurisdiction in which the same Twitter operates is the United States, the company wanted to spit on the laws of other countries and observe them carelessly. Moreover, given the scale of censorship in America, we can safely say that outside the country it looks even bigger, there are no restrictions and rules. I would like to say that the history of Twitter is unique, but it is not - exactly the same approach we see in all social networks. And I don’t think that Russian social networks are somehow fundamentally different, perhaps they just moderate content not so zealously and save on it, but the principles of work are exactly the same. Recall how Yandex employees admitted that Yandex.News has built-in censorship and distorts the agenda. There are no differences from the approach of the same Twitter here, it's about the same. And it's not different at all, the approach is the same. And here the question arises that a clear, transparent regulation of the work of both social networks and instant messengers is needed so that they cannot restrict the transmission of the same messages. For example, the law "On Communications" prohibits operators from distorting transmitted messages or deleting them. At the same time, instant messengers do such tricks all the time, and no one pays attention to it, they think that it should be so. But this is not so at all. It shouldn't be like this, everything should work differently, and a person should have the right to convey what he wants. Another thing is that if it is something forbidden, then you can conduct an investigation, signal and so on. But in any case, it is necessary to transmit information, there is simply no other way for this and cannot be. Call me an idealist, but we need to develop transparent rules of the game for everyone. Perhaps Twitter and internal company documents will allow us to take a different look at the situation.

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