(2022-12-31) ZviM The Twitter Files Covid Edition

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Twitter Files: Covid-19 Edition. I’ll walk through the thread... A common dunk on The Twitter Files has been ‘oh look at these records that show a reasonable company acting completely reasonably.’ That is not a dunk

There’s no way to deal with the volumes involved without bots, and the bots are going to make mistakes, more mistakes than even a not very skilled human would make.

Thing is, that’s… fine? I don’t get, or at least don’t agree with, the purity reactions of ‘this is punishment so it can’t be making mistakes.’ Punishments with major consequences, years in jail, ruined reputations and livelihoods and other things like that, require public trust and reliability. When it is small time stuff like ‘this Tweet needs to be deleted and you need to spend 24 hours not posting to this hell website’ I am less sympathetic. So what?

Back to the broader pattern. Was it true that things aligned with power and the narrative would stand, while things not aligned would sometimes get these labels? Yes. That definitely happened, and altered somewhat the flow of debate. It still seems rather restrained if these are the best examples David could find.

Would have been an excellent final result, except that it took months to get the review done. That’s a long time. I’d say the above Tweet is technically fine. I’d also say it is, shall we say, FUD central and not in the best of faith. It is a false positive, but an understandable false positive if the error is corrected when reviewed.

It was the Serious People and Public Health Authorities and Responsible Adults acting as one, and then that pressure being applied to Twitter, both directly and through influencing the views of employees. Who then, if this thread is any guide, showed remarkable restraint in dealing with the situation. Compared to almost all other times and places, we should be grateful.

These problems are hard. Here’s an example from this week. What do you do about the quoted tweet here, from an account with 30k+ followers?

It is clearly a clip designed to create a false impression. It is also quoting words that were said by a person, and also providing a clip that gives the context. The intent to deceive here is clear. I wouldn’t intervene. Do I understand someone thinking intervention is called for? Yes, I do.

Thumbs were still clearly on the scale. If you wanted to explain that people were being freaked out over risks to children that were quite small, you could get action taken against you. If you highlighted potential vaccine risks, you could get action taken against you. There were cases that aren’t listed here that seem worse to me than the ones chosen, including when people pointed out things like the effectiveness masks (including, early on, that they worked, and then later that they often didn’t), or the safety of being outdoors

So mostly I think this offers additional confirmational evidence that the moderation was asymmetric in favor of things preferred by power, and mistakes got made and disapproved speech especially against the vaccines was somewhat chilled or downweighted, while also confirming that it did not go terribly far and the individual decisions that mattered were mostly pretty reasonable – these were supposed to be Bad Examples and were not so bad.

Conclusion

what happened seems mostly clear

Individual posts were sometimes flagged as ‘misinformation.’ Mostly this was because they contained false statements, or statements power believed could be safely called false, in the direction power didn’t like.

If action got taken five times, your account got suspended, which was the real threat. Five chances is enough that you have a good idea that power doesn’t like what you are doing, and you decided to keep doing it anyway, and it really is only a Twitter account. Some people, I think, didn’t too much mind getting suspended. Others did.

The asymmetries are annoying – if you said something false, or widely believed false, that power did like, and it wasn’t too egregious, they did not take action

Twitter tried to balance having rules that it followed and not shutting down speech with what it sees as its job to help shape discussion of vaccines and other issues both related and unrelated to Covid, but especially vaccines, to avoid giving people what everyone at Twitter thought were the wrong ideas that would do harm.

Compared to the worlds I feared we were in, or the worlds many suspected, this edition of The Twitter Files reveals that our real situation regarding Covid was not so bad, and closer to the Jack world than we realized.

I hope we can do better in the future. I’d still be happy if we avoid doing worse.