Twitter Suspends User For Sharing Washington Post Story About Pentagon Docs Leaker

Content Moderation

from the impossibility-theory-all-over-again dept

You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as some questions about the story itself, Twitter made the (ultimately unwise and mistaken) decision to block links to that story, and (in some cases) to suspend accounts that were sharing it. A day later, the company admitted this was a mistake and changed its policy.

As we’ve explained at great length, the conspiracy stories that came out of this one incident are ridiculous and out of touch with reality. The company made one dumb move, which (despite what you might have heard) was not pushed on them by the government or the Biden campaign (which was not the government). They corrected it relatively quickly. This is the nature of content moderation. Mistakes will be made.

Yet, the conspiracy theories continue to spread, and even Elon Musk (the now owner of Twitter) has bought into many of them, and has even suggested that this was some of the reason he chose to purchase Twitter, as right after the announced purchase, he declared that it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate” for Twitter to have done that to “a major news organization.”

Leaving aside that Musk’s own Twitter also blocked the NY Post incorrectly just recently, it appears that it is also somewhat aggressively blocking links to certain other news stories as well.

You’ve likely heard about recent leaks of Pentagon documents that were first leaked via a Discord server. On Wednesday, the Washington Post’s Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford broke quite a story about where the documents came from, discussing the small, private Discord group, and the guy who operated it, who apparently went to great lengths to leak these classified documents.

The young member read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed hespent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on governmentcomputer networks or spooling out from printers. He annotated some of the hand-typed documents, the member said, translating arcane intel-speak for the uninitiated, such as explaining that“NOFORN” meant the information in the document was so sensitive it must not be shared with foreign nationals.

OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watchedmovies together, joked around and prayed.But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.

This is pretty good reporting, and on Thursday, the FBI arrested someone that they allege was the leaker described in the article.

Glenn Greenwald, who appears to have an incredibly warped view of what journalism is, freaked out that the Washington Post would report on what it had turned up about the leaker claiming it was doing “the job of the US Security State by hunting down its leakers.” But, uh, that makes zero sense. It’s one thing for a journalist to protect whistleblowers/leakers who come to those journalists to share documents. It’s another altogether to say journalists should not try to report the story of who was sharing classified documents in a gamer Discord server for clout, not as a whistleblower or anything like that.

But, of course, Elon agreed with Glenn, because that’s what he does these days.

Reporting on someone leaking information is kind of a thing that reporters do. Glenn wrote an entire book about Ed Snowden, after all. Yes, it’s different in that Snowden went to Glenn with his docs, but it’s still a reporter’s job to report on stuff like this.

Anyhow, all that is lead up to the fact that Twitter now appears to be permanently suspending at least some accounts that have shared the Washington Post story.

Professor Kathy Gill explained that she attempted to share that story on Twitter with a screenshot of the headline with an annotation noting that it was a teenager who told the story to the WaPo reporters. It didn’t work. She received a message saying “Tweet not sent” instead.

When it didn’t work a second time, she “appealed” to Twitter, noting that it was just a link to the story and a screenshot of the headline:

And, in response: her account was suspended permanently.

Very free speechy from the free speech king.

It’s unclear exactly why Kathy’s account was suspended. It’s difficult to see what rules were broken here, and when the dude in charge insists that blocking major media organizations is “obviously incredibly inappropriate” you kinda have to wonder.

I mean, the reality is that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and mistakes are made. This seems likely to be a mistake. But since the supporters of Elon seem to think that you can judge the entire management based on just one such mistake, even to the point of launching congressional inquiries… it seems worth noting this particular bit of content moderation.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, journalism, kathy gill, link sharing, news
Companies: twitter