Look, I get that Rep. Jim Jordan is going to just keep on Jim Jordaning up the joint, and making statements that are blatantly untrue in an effort to chill speech he doesn’t like. But, for fuck’s sake, the media doesn’t need to repeat it. Of course, in this case, “the media” is the NY Post, which has been prone to doing the same sorta shit, but the latest is preposterously stupid.
Given the title of the NY Post article, I assumed that they’d publish these emails that proved that DHS created a group that censored speech before the 2020 election. Except… that’s not what any of it shows? The “emails” published by the NY Post literally debunk the claims in the headline and the article.
There are three emails published. The first is from Graham Brookie from the DFRLab at the Atlantic Council, in which he notes (very informally) that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was set up “at the request of DHS/CISA.” This… isn’t new? And it doesn’t seem to mean what they think it means. The whole setup of the EIP was the same kind of setup that CISA has organized in the past for cybersecurity issues, where there’s a central party to handle passing along information for companies to be aware of. Historically, it had been about cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and with the EIP it was about attacks on election integrity.
But… we knew that already?
And, worse, the next two emails further undermine the whole argument that this had anything to do with censorship. The next email is from Brian Scully who was at CISA, and who noted that via the EIP, accounts had been flagged to Twitter regarding “Impersonating Colorado Government.” Again, this was known. It was covered in the past. Indeed, we wrote about this exact thing a year ago in another debunking. What happened was that some Colorado (not DHS) officials found some joke Twitter accounts that were pretending to be Colorado election officials.
Given that there had been reports of attempts to interfere with voting by providing people false information about voting (something that is illegal and which a key online troll is now going to jail over), Colorado (not DHS) officials used the EIP portal to report these accounts to Twitter. Twitter was alerted. As we noted last year, it wasn’t even clear that Twitter did anything about these accounts, and this newly revealed email… says that they simply asked the accounts to “revise to meet parody account requirements, which most did.”
In other words, it appears the only actual new information in this emails is that, contrary to the implied earlier reporting, Twitter did not take down these stupid parody accounts.
So… what happened here was that Colorado officials overreacted to some stupid parody accounts, but in an abundance of caution used the EIP’s portal to alert Twitter to these accounts that claimed to be Colorado officials. Rather than take the accounts down or “censor” anything, Twitter just asked them to comply with the parody rules. For what it’s worth, that seems a lot less speech suppressive than Elon Musk, who has banned plenty of parody accounts for not being clear that they were parody accounts.
So, uh, the old Twitter received a notice that someone was violating their parody rules, and asked the accounts to comply with the rules and more clearly label their parody accounts. This is compared to Elon Musk who promises to “permanently suspend” any such accounts.
The next email is even worse. Read this email and tell me how anyone, whether it’s Jim Jordan or NY Post reporter Josh Christenson, could take this as evidence that the program was set up to censor speech:
It’s literally paragraphs of text from DHS saying (1) we’re not the originator of this information, merely the conduit through which it is passed along, (2) we’re not asking to remove it, and (3) no website will be punished if it does nothing with this info.
It’s literally saying “hey, we’re passing along this info, do with it what you want, it’s not our info, and feel free to ignore it.”
But, according to the NY Post this long disclaimer which debunks the entire premise of the article and the headline… actually shows “that CISA recognized it was on shaky legal grounds by participating in the effort.”
Um. No. That’s not what it shows at all. What it shows is that DHS/CISA knew the limits of its authority and were making it explicit to everyone else that it was not and could not demand any kind of censorship. And the companies knew that as well. The entire portal was set up for information sharing on potential election threats. And that’s what it was used for.
Yet we get release after release and article after article that is completely disconnected from this reality, pretending that this program did the opposite of what it was clearly intended to do, and then reads these emails to say the exact opposite of what they clearly say.
It’s absolutely fucking crazy that there are still people who believe it or that the NY Post thinks this story is accurate. The very emails in the article debunk the entire article.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the NY Post tweets a link to one of its own news stories, and Twitter decides that it violates the company’s rules (perhaps very questionably so), and in response, locks the NY Post’s Twitter account. Also, as part of the same “crackdown” on sharing certain media, Twitter also suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account.
Can’t wait for the House subcommittee investigation into this one. Oh, and the Twitter Files on this are going to be lit.
The details here are… kind of a mess, and I almost hate to get into them for fear it will derail the conversation. Basically there were a bunch of tweets about a protest to highlight the importance of the rights of transgender people. The name of the protest was a “trans day of vengeance.” As with so many culture war topics, this one was then weaponized by anti-trans people who were tweeting about it as well (and misrepresenting it, but that’s a separate issue).
And, because content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and because Twitter trust & safety seems to be managed by people who haven’t completed their speed run of the learning curve yet, they decided to delete all tweets from everyone on all sides that were showing a poster promoting the event. Around the same time, the company also suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account over her own tweet regarding the event.
Twitter’s, um, explanation of this was confused and didn’t make much sense:
Twitter’s trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, also explained the reason for taking down all those tweets was that “vengeance does not imply peaceful protest,” though I’d argue the context of the event (1) suggests otherwise and (2) suggests that, contrary to Elon’s claims, this is yet more moderation that goes way beyond the 1st Amendment. And, of course, this is all allowed (and perhaps even understandable under the true content moderation guiding light of “please, for the love of anything, just stop being jerks on our platform”).
Anyway, the NY Post wrote about the account suspensions, and apparently, the tweet about that article then resulted in the NY Post account being suspended and the account locked:
Hours later, however, Twitter reversed course and reinstated the NY Post’s account.
Again, all this is perfectly within Twitter’s rights, but I have difficulty seeing how it’s even one iota different from what happened in October of 2020. At that time, Twitter also applied a policy badly in the heat of the moment as things were moving quickly, suspended the NY Post’s account, and then admitted they were wrong and reinstated the account.
Mistakes sometimes happen. But people are still talking about the October 2020 version. Even this guy had something to say about it, as part of his justification for his attempt (at the time) to purchase Twitter:
That’s Elon Musk directly saying: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate”
Note that there’s no caveat there. There are no conditions. No suggestion that maybe it was a mistake that was corrected a few hours later (as happened in both cases). Just a flat out that “suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate” even though the identical thing happened under Musk’s watch as well.
But, in this case, people seem willing to let it slide by and Musk seems to think that he should be judged on a totally different standard. I mean, it’s almost as if he and his fans use different standards to judge Musk’s actions vs. the actions of the old leadership.
An intellectually honest response might lead to a recognition that perhaps the October 2020 actions were a similar type of mistake and correction, and should be forgiven just as this latest mistake and correction are being forgiven. But that would require some intellectual honesty and not rooting for one team to win and another to lose. And, apparently, that’s too much to ask for.
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop, there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.
Now, to be clear, I’ve explained many times before, in other posts, why people who freaked out about how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story are getting confused, but it’s usually been a bit buried. I had already started a version of this post last week, since people keep bringing up Twitter and the laptop, but then on Friday, Elon (sorta) helped me out by giving a bunch of documents to reporter Matt Taibbi.
So, let’s review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It’s no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election — not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.
Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a “hacked materials” policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were — clearly! — some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).
The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani’s hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata).
The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.
Based on that, both Twitter and Facebook reacted somewhat quickly. Twitter implemented its hacked materials policy in exactly the manner that we had warned might happen a month earlier: blocking the sharing of the NY Post link. Facebook implemented other protocols, “reducing its distribution” until it had gone through a fact check. Facebook didn’t ban the sharing of the link (like Twitter did), but rather limited the ability for it to “trend” and get recommended by the algorithm until fact checkers had reviewed it.
To be clear, the decision by Twitter to do this was, in our estimation, pretty stupid. It was exactly what we had warned about just a month earlier regarding this exact policy. But this is the nature of trust & safety. People need to make very rapid decisions with very incomplete information. That’s why I’ve argued ever since then that while the policy was stupid, it was no giant scandal that it happened, and given everything, it was not a stretch to understand how it played out.
Also, importantly, the very next day Twitter realized it fucked up, admitted so publicly, and changed the hacked materials policy saying that it would no longer block links to news sources based on this policy (though it might add a label to such stories). The next month, Jack Dorsey, in testifying before Congress, was pretty transparent about how all of this went down.
All of this seemed pretty typical for any kind of trust & safety operation. As I’ve explained for years, mistakes in content moderation (especially at scale) are inevitable. And, often, the biggest reason for those mistakes is the lack of context. That was certainly true here.
Yet, for some reason, the story has persisted for years now that Twitter did something nefarious, engaging in election interference that was possibly at the behest of “the deep state” or the Biden campaign. For years, as I’ve reported on this, I’ve noted that there was literally zero evidence to back any of that up. So, my ears certainly perked up last Friday when Elon Musk said that he was about to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression.”
Certainly, if there was evidence of something nefarious behind closed doors, that would be important and worth covering. If it was true that through discussions I’ve had with dozens of Twitter employees over the past few years every single one of them lied about what happened, well, that would also be useful for me to know.
And then Taibbi revealed… basically nothing of interest. He revealed a few internal communications that… simply confirmed everything that was already public in statements made by Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s Congressional testimony, and in declarations made as part of a Federal Elections Commission investigation into Twitter’s actions. There were general concerns about foreign state influence campaigns, including “hack and leak” in the lead up to the election, and there were questions about the provenance of this particular data, so Twitter made a quick (cautious) judgment call and implemented a (bad) policy. Then it admitted it fucked up and changed things a day later. That’s… basically it.
And, yet, the story has persisted over and over and over again. Incredibly, even after the details of Taibbi’s Twitter thread revealed nothing new, many people started pretending that it had revealed something major, with even Elon Musk insisting that this was proof of some massive 1st Amendment violation:
Now, apparently more files are going to be published, so something may change, but so far it’s been a whole lot of utter nonsense. But when I say that both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I keep seeing a few very, very wrong arguments being made. So, let’s get to the debunking:
1. If you said Twitter’s decision to block links to the NY Post was election interference…
You’re wrong. Very much so. First off, there was, in fact, a complaint to the FEC about this very point, and the FEC investigated and found no election interference at all. It didn’t even find evidence of it being an “in-kind” contribution. It found no evidence that Twitter engaged in politically motivated decision making, but rather handled this in a non-partisan manner consistent with its business objectives:
Twitter acknowledges that, following the October 2020 publication of the New York Post
articles at issue, Twitter blocked users from sharing links to the articles. But Twitter states that
this was because its Site Integrity Team assessed that the New York Post articles likely contained
hacked and personal information, the sharing of which violated both Twitter’s Distribution of
Hacked Materials and Private Information Policies. Twitter points out that although sharing
links to the articles was blocked, users were still permitted to otherwise discuss the content of the
New York Post articles because doing so did not directly involve spreading any hacked or
personal information. Based on the information available to Twitter at the time, these actions
appear to reflect Twitter’s stated commercial purpose of removing misinformation and other
abusive content from its platform, not a purpose of influencing an election
All of this is actually confirmed by the Twitter Files from Taibbi/Musk, even as both seem to pretend otherwise. Taibbi revealed some internal emails in which various employees (going increasingly up the chain) discussed how to handle the story. Not once does anyone in what Taibbi revealed suggest anything even remotely politically motivated. There was legitimate concern internally about whether or not it was correct to block the NY Post story, which makes sense, because they were (correctly) concerned about making a decision that went too far. I mean, honestly, the discussion is not only without political motive, but shows that the trust & safety apparatus at Twitter was concerned with getting this correct, including employees questioning whether or not these were legitimately “hacked materials” and questioning whether other news stories on the hard drive should get the same treatment.
There are more discussions of this nature, with people questioning whether or not the material was really “hacked” and initially deciding on taking the more cautious approach until they knew more. Twitter’s Yoel Roth notes that “this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.”
Again, exactly as has been noted, given the lack of clarity Twitter reasonably decided to pump the brakes until more was known. There was some useful back-and-forth among employees — the kind that happens in any company regarding major trust & safety decisions, in which Twitter’s then VP of comms questioned whether or not this was the right decision. This shows a productive discussion — not anything along the lines of pushing for any sort of politically motivated outcome.
And then deputy General Counsel Jim Baker (more on him later, trust me…) chimes in to again highlight exactly what everyone has been saying: that this is a rapidly evolving situation, and it makes sense to be cautious until more is known. Baker’s message is important:
I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted. There are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.
Again, all of this is… exactly what everyone has said ever since the day after it happened. This was an emerging story. The provenance was unclear. There were some sketchy things about it, and so Twitter enacted the policy because they just weren’t sure and didn’t have enough info yet. It turned out to be a bad call, but in content moderation, you’re going to make some bad calls.
What is missing entirely is any evidence that politics entered this discussion at all. Not even once.
2. But Twitter’s decision to “suppress” the story was a big deal and may have swung the election to Biden!
I’m sorry, but there remains no evidence to support that silly claim either. First off, Twitter’s decision actually seemed to get the story a hell of a lot more attention. Again, as noted above, Twitter did nothing to stop discussion of the story. It only blocked links to one story in the NY Post, and only for that one day. And the very fact that Twitter did this (and Facebook took other action) caused a bit of a Streisand Effect (hey!) which got the underlying story a lot more attention because of the decisions by those two companies.
The reality, though, is that the story just wasn’t that big of a deal for voters. Hunter Biden wasn’t the candidate. His father was. Everyone already pretty much knew that Hunter is a bit of a fuckup and clearly personally profiting off of the situation, but there was no actual big story in the revelations (I mean, yeah, there are still some people who insist there are, but they’re the same people who misunderstood the things we’re debunking here today). And, if we’re going to talk about kids of Presidents profiting off of their last name, well, there’s a pretty long list to go down….
But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the evidence. As reporter Philip Bump recently noted, there’s actual evidence in Google search trends that Twitter and Facebook’s decision really did generate a lot more interest in the story. It was well after both companies took action that searches on Google for Hunter Biden shot upward:
Also, soon after, Twitter reversed its policy, and there was widespread discussion of the laptop in the next three weeks leading up to the election. The brief blip in time in which Twitter and Facebook limited the story seemed to have only fueled much more interest in it, rather than “suppressing” it.
Indeed, another document in the “Twitter Files” highlights how a Democratic member of the House, Ro Khanna, actually reached out to Twitter to point this out and to question Twitter’s decision (if this was really a big Democratic conspiracy, you’d think he’d be supportive of the move, rather than critical of it, but the reverse was true.) Rep. Khanna’s email to Twitter noted:
I say this as a total Biden partisan and convinced he didn’t do anything wrong. But the story has now become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been.
So again, the evidence actually suggests that the story wasn’t suppressed at all. It got more attention. It didn’t swing the election, because most people didn’t find the story particularly revealing.
3. The government pressured Twitter/Facebook to block this story, and that’s a huge 1st Amendment violation / treason / crime of the century / etc.
Yeah, so, that’s just not true. I’ve spent years calling out government pressure on speech, from Democrats (and more Democrats) to Republicans (and more Republicans). So I’m pretty focused on watching when the government goes over the line — and quick to call it out. And there remains no evidence at all of that happening here. At all. Taibbi admits this flat out:
Incredibly, I keep seeing people on Twitter claim that Taibbi said the exact opposite. And you have people like Glenn Greenwald who insist that Taibbi only meant “foreign” governments here, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If he had found evidence that there was US government pressure here… why didn’t he post it? The answer: because it almost certainly does not exist.
Some people point to Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance over the summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast as “proof” that the FBI directed both companies to suppress the story, but that’s not at all what Zuckerberg said if you listened to his actual comments. Zuckerberg admits that they make mistakes, and that it feels terrible when they do. He goes into a pretty detailed explanation of some of how trust & safety works in determining whether or not a user is authentic. Then Rogan asks about the laptop story, and Zuckerberg says:
So, basically, the background here, is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and were like “just so you know, you should be on high alert, we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice, basically, that there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.”
This does not say that the FBI came to Facebook and said “suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.” It was just a general warning that the FBI had intelligence that there might be some foreign influence operations, and to “be vigilant.”
This is nearly identical to what Twitter’s then head of “site integrity,” Yoel Roth, noted in his declaration in the FEC case discussed above:
“[F]ederal
law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur
in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election . . . . I also learned in these meetings that there were
rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Basically the FBI is saying, in general, they have some intelligence that this kind of attack may happen, so be careful. It did not say to censor the info. It didn’t involve any threats. It wasn’t specifically about the laptop story.
And, in fact, as of earlier this week, we now have the FBI’s version of these events as well! That’s because of the somewhat silly lawsuit that Missouri and Louisiana filed against the Biden administration over Twitter’s decision to block the NY Post story. Just this week, Missouri released the deposition of FBI agent, Elvis Chan, who is often found at the center of conspiracy theories regarding “government censorship.”
And Chan tells basically the same story with a few slight differences, mostly in terms of framing. Specifically, Chan says that he never told the companies to “expect” a hack and leak attack, but rather to be aware of the possibility, slightly contradicting Roth’s declaration:
Yeah, I don’t know what Mr. Roth meant or meant, but what I’m letting you know is that from my recollection — I don’t believe we would have worded it so strongly to say that we expected there to be hacks. I would have worded it to say that there was the potential for hacks, and I believe that is how anyone from our side would have framed the comment.
And the reason I believe that is because I and the FBI, for that matter the U.S. intelligence community, was not aware of any successful hacks against political organizations or political campaigns.
You don’t think that intelligence officials described it in the way that Mr. Roth does here in this sentence in the affidavit?
Yeah, I would not have — I do not believe that the intelligence community would have expected it. I said that they would have been concerned about the potential for it.
In the deposition, Chan repeats (many, many times) that he wouldn’t have used the language saying such an effort would be “expected” but that it was something to look out for.
He also doesn’t recall Hunter Biden’s name even coming up, though he does say they warned them to be on the lookout for discussions on “hot button” issues, and notes that the companies themselves would often ask about certain scenarios:
So from my recollection, the social media companies, who include Twitter, would regularly ask us, “Hey, what kind of content do you think the nation state actors, the Russians would post,” and then they would provide examples. Like, “Would it be X” or “Would it be Y” or “Would it be Z.” And then we — I and then the other FBI officials would say, “We believe that the Russians will take advantage of any hot-button issue.” And we — I do not remember us specifically saying “Hunter Biden” in any meeting with Twitter.
Later on he says:
Yeah, in my estimation, we never discussed Hunter Biden specifically with Twitter. And so the way I read that is that there are hack-and-leak operations, and then at the time — at the time I believe he flagged one of the
potential current events that were happening ahead of the elections.
You believe that he, Yoel Roth, flagged Hunter Biden in one of these meetings?
No. I believe — I don’t believe he flagged it during one of the meetings. I just think that — so I don’t know. I cannot read his mind, but my assessment is because I don’t remember discussing Hunter Biden at any of the meetings with Twitter, that we didn’t discuss it.
So this would have been something that he would have just thought of as a hot-button issue on his own that happened in October.
He goes into great detail about meeting with tons of companies, but notes that mostly he’d talk to them about cybersecurity threats, not disinformation. He talks a bit about Russian disinformation campaigns, highlighting the well known Internet Research Agency, which specialized in pushing divisive messaging on US social media platforms. However, he basically confirms that he never discussed the laptop with anyone at any of these companies, and the deposition makes it pretty clear that if anyone at the FBI would have done so, it either would have been Chan himself or done with Chan’s knowledge.
As for the NY Post story, and the laptop itself, he notes he found out about it through the media, just like everyone else. And then he says that he didn’t talk with anyone at Twitter or Facebook about it, despite being their main contact on these kinds of issues.
Q. It’s your testimony that those news articles are the first time that you became aware that — you became aware of Hunter Biden’s laptop in any connection?
Yes. I don’t remember if it was a New York Post article or if it was another media outlet, but it was on multiple media outlets, and I can’t remember which article I read.
And before that day, October 14th, 2020, were you aware — were you aware of Hunter Biden — had anyone ever mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop to you?
No.
[….]
Do you know if anyone at Twitter reached out to anyone at the FBI to check or verify anything about the Hunter Biden story?
I am not aware of any communications between Yoel Roth and the FBI about this topic.
Are you aware of any communications between anyone at Twitter and anyone in the federal government about the decision to suppress content relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story once the story had broken?
I am not aware of Mr. Roth’s discussions with any other federal agency. As I mentioned, I am not aware of any discussions with any FBI employees about this topic as well. But I only know who I know. So I don’t — he may have had these conversations, but I was not aware of it.
You mentioned Mr. Roth. How about anyone else at Twitter, did anyone else at Twitter reach out, to your knowledge, to anyone else in the federal government?
So I can only answer for the FBI. To my knowledge, I am not aware of any Twitter employee reaching out to any FBI employee regarding this topic.
/
How about Facebook, other than that meeting you referred to where an analyst asked the FBI to comment on the Hunter Biden investigation, are you aware of any communications between anyone at Facebook and anyone at the FBI related to the Hunter Biden laptop story?
No.
How about any other social media platform?
No.
How about Apple or Microsoft?
No.
Basically, the exact same story emerges no matter how you look at it. The FBI, along with CISA, would have various meetings with internet companies mainly to warn them about cybersecurity (i.e., hacking) threats, but also generally mentioned the possibility of hack and leak attempts with a general warning to be on the lookout for such things, and that they may touch on “hot button” social and news topics. Nowhere is there any indication of pressure or attempts to tell the companies what to do, or how they should handle it. Just straight up information sharing.
When you look at all three statements — Zuckerberg’s, Roth’s, and Chan’s — basically the same not-very-interesting story emerges. The US government had some general meetings that happen with lots of big companies to warn them about various potential cybersecurity threats, and the issue of hack-and-leak campaigns as a general possibility came up with no real specifics and no warnings.
And no one communicated with the companies directly about the NY Post story.
Given all that, I honestly don’t see how there’s any reasonable concern here. There’s certainly no clear 1st Amendment concern. There appears to be zero in the way of government involvement or pressure. There’s no coercion or even implied threats. There’s literally nothing at all (no matter how Missouri’s Attorney General completely misrepresents it).
Indeed, the only thing revealed so far that might be concerning regarding the 1st Amendment is that Taibbi claimed that the Trump administration allegedly made demands of Twitter.
If the Trump administration actually had sent requests to “remove” tweets (as Taibbi claims in an earlier tweet) that would most likely be a 1st Amendment issue. However, Taibbi reveals no such requests, which is really quite remarkable. It is also possible that Taibbi is overselling these claims, because this is a part of a discussion that we’ll get to in the next section, regarding Twitter’s flagging tools, which anyone (including you or me) can use to flag content for Twitter to review to see if it violates the company’s terms of service. While there are certainly some concerns about the government’s use of such tools, unless there’s some sort of threat or coercion, and as long as Twitter is free to judge the content for itself and determine how to handle it under its own terms, there’s probably no 1st Amendment issue.
Indeed, some people have highlighted the fact that the government gets “special treatment” in having its flags reviewed. But, from people I’ve spoken to, that actually goes against the “1st Amendment violation!” argument, because many social media companies set up special systems for government agents not to enable “moar censorship!” but because they know they have to be extra vigilant in reviewing those requests so as not to take down content mistakenly based on a government request.
So, sorry, so far there appears to be no government intrusion, and certainly no 1st Amendment violation.
4. The Biden campaign / Democrats demanded Twitter censor the NY Post! And that’s a 1st Amendment violation / treason / the crime of the century / etc.
So, again, the only way that there’s a 1st Amendment violation is if the government issued the demand. And in October of 2020, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee… were not the government. The 1st Amendment does not restrict their ability, as private citizens (even while campaigning for public office) to flag content for Twitter to review against its policies. Hilariously, Elon Musk seems kinda confused about how time works. That tweet that we screenshotted about about the “1st Amendment” violation is in response to an internal email that Taibbi revealed about what Taibbi (misleadingly) says are “requests from connected actors to delete tweets” followed by a screenshot of Twitter employees listing out some tweets saying “more to review from the Biden team” and someone responding “handled these.”
There was then the next tweet which was a similar set of two tweets sent over from the Democratic National Committee (as compared to the Biden campaign in the first one). This includes a tweet from the actor James Woods, which the Twitter team calls special attention to for being “high profile.”
Except, as a few enterprising folks discovered when looking up those tweets listed, they were… basically Hunter Biden nude images that were found on the laptop hard drive, which clearly violated Twitter’s terms of service (and likely violated multiple state laws regarding the sharing of nonconsensual nude images). This includes the James Woods tweet, which included a fake Biden campaign ad that showed a naked picture of Hunter Biden lying on a bed with his (only slightly blurred) penis quite visible. I’m not going to share a link to the image.
A good investigative reporter might have looked up what was in those tweets before posting a conspiratorial post implying that these were attempts by the campaign to remove the NY Post story or some other important information. But Taibbi did not. Nor has he commented on it since.
On top of that, while Taibbi claims that these were “requests to delete,” as the Twitter email quite clearly says, these are for Twitter to “review.” In other words, these were flagged for Twitter to review if they violate Twitter’s policies as the naked images clearly do.
So, there’s clearly no 1st Amendment concern here because, despite Musk’s understanding of the space-time continuum, the Biden administration was not in the White House in October of 2020. Second, even if we’re concerned about political campaigns asking for content to be deleted, flagging content for companies to review to see if they violate policies is not (in any way) the same as demanding it be deleted. Anyone can flag content. And then the company reviews it and makes a determination.
Even more importantly, nothing revealed so far suggests that the campaign had anything to say to Twitter regarding the NY Post story or any story regarding the laptop. Literally the only concerns raised were about the naked pictures.
Finally, as noted above, the only other Democrat mentioned so far in the Twitter files is Rep. Ro Khanna who told Twitter it was wrong to stop the links to the NY Post article, and urged them to rescind the decision in the name of free speech. That does not sounds like the Democrats secretly pressuring the company to block the story. It kinda sounds like the exact opposite.
So despite what everyone keeps yelling on Twitter (including Elon Musk) this still doesn’t appear to be evidence of “censorship” or even “suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.” It’s just focused on the nonconsensual sharing of Hunter’s naked images.
As a side note, Woods has now said he’s going to sue over this, though for the life of me I have no idea what sort of claim he thinks he has, or how it’s going to go over in court when he claims his rights were violated when he was unable to share Hunter’s dick pic.
5. But Jim Baker! He worked for the FBI! And he was in charge of the Twitter files! Clearly he’s covering up stuff!
Here we are ripping from the stupidity headlines. This one came out just last night as Taibbi added a “supplement” to the Twitter files, again seemingly confused about how basically anything works. According to Taibbi in a very unclear and awkwardly worded thread, he and Bari Weiss (another opinion columnist who Musk has decided to share the files with) were having some sort of “complication” in accessing the files. Taibbi claims that Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, Jim Baker, was reviewing the files, and somehow this was as problem (he does not explain why or how, though there’s a lot of conjecture).
Baker is, in fact, the former General Counsel at the FBI. It made news when he was hired.
Baker was subject to a bunch of conspiracy theory stuff a few years ago regarding the FBI and some of the sillier theories regarding the Trump campaign, including the Steele Dossier and the even sillier “Alfa Bank” story (which had always been silly and lots of people, including us, had mocked when it came out).
But despite all that, there’s really little evidence that Baker has done anything particularly noteworthy here. The stuff about his actions while at the FBI is totally overblown partisan hackery. People talk about the so-called “criminal investigation” he faced for his work looking into Russian interference in the 2020 election, but that appears to be something mostly cooked up by extreme Trumpists in the House and appears to have gone nowhere. And, yes, he was a witness at the Michael Sussman trial, which was sorta connected to the Alfa Bank stuff, but his testimony supported John Durham, not Michael Sussman, in that he claimed that Sussman made a false statement to him, which the entire case hinged on (and, for what it’s worth, the trial ended in acquittal).
In other words, almost all of the FBI-related accusations against Baker are entirely “guilt by association” type claims, with nothing at all legitimate to back them up.
As for Twitter, we already highlighted Baker’s email that Taibbi revealed, which shows a normal, thoughtful, cautious discussion of a normal trust & safety debate, with nothing even remotely political.
The latest claims from Taibbi and Weiss also don’t make much sense. Elon Musk has told his company to hand over a bunch of internal documents to reporters. Any corporate lawyer would naturally do a fairly standard document review before doing so to make sure that they’re not handing over any private information or something else that might create legal issues for Musk. And since a large chunk of the legal team has left the company, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the task ended up on Baker’s desk.
Now, you can argue (as Taibbi and others now imply) that there’s some massive conflict of interest here, but, uh… that’s not at all clear, and not really how conflict of interest works. And, again, there’s little indication that Baker had a major role here at all, beyond being one of many who weighed in on this matter (and did so in a perfectly reasonable manner).
Honestly, Baker not reviewing the documents first would have potentially put him in legal jeopardy for not doing the very basic function of his job in making sure the company he worked for didn’t put itself in serious legal jeopardy by revealing things that might create huge liabilities for Musk and the company.
Either way, late Tuesday, Musk announced that Baker had “exited” from the company, and when asked by a random Twitter user if he had been “asked to explain himself first” Musk claimed that Baker’s “explanation was… unconvincing.”
And perhaps there’s something more here that will be revealed by Weiss now that the shackles have been removed. But, based on what’s been stated so far, a perfectly plausible explanation is that Musk confronted Baker wanting to know why he was holding back the files and what his role was in “suppressing” the NY Post story. And Baker told him, truthfully, that his role was exactly as was revealed in the email (giving his general thoughts on the proper approach to handling the story) and that he was reviewing documents because that’s his job, and Musk got mad and fired him.
Somewhat incredibly, Musk also seemed to imply he only learned of Baker’s involvement on Sunday.
Some people are claiming that Musk is saying he only discovered that Baker worked for him on Sunday, which is possible but seems unlikely. Conspiracy theorists had pointed out Baker’s role at the company to Musk as far back as April. A more charitable explanation is that Musk only discovered that Baker was handling the document review on Sunday. And I guess that’s plausible but, again, really only reflects extremely poorly on Musk.
If he’s going to reveal internal documents to reporters, especially ones that Musk himself keeps claiming implicate him in potential criminal liability (yes, it happened before his time, but Musk purchased the liabilities of the company as well), it’s not just perfectly normal, but kinda necessary to have lawyers do some document review. Again, as a more charitable explanation, perhaps Musk just wanted a different lawyer to do the review, and my only answer there is maybe he shouldn’t have gotten rid of so many lawyers from the legal team. Might have helped.
So, look, there could be a possible issue here, but given how much has been totally misrepresented throughout this whole process, without any actual evidence to support the “Jim Baker mastermind” theory, it’s difficult to take it even remotely seriously when there’s a perfectly normal, non-nefarious explanation to how all of this went down.
The absence of evidence is not evidence that there’s a coverup. It might just be evidence that you’re prone to believing in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, though.
6. Still, all this proved that Twitter is “illegally” biased towards Democrats!
Taibbi made a big deal out of the fact that Twitter employees overwhelmingly donated to Democrats in their political contributions, which is not exactly new or surprising. Musk commented on this as well, suggesting sarcastically it was proof of bias at Twitter, but left out that among the companies in the chart he was commenting on… was also Tesla, where over 90% of employee donations went to Democrats.
But, more importantly, it’s not surprising in the least. Employees of many companies lean left. Executives (who donate way more money) tend to lean right. I mean, you can look at a similar chart of executive donations that shows they overwhelmingly go to Republicans. Neither is illegal, or even a problem. It’s just reality.
And companies making editorial decisions are… in fact… allowed to have bias in their political viewpoints. I would bet that if you looked at donations by employees at the NY Post or Fox News, they would generally favor Republicans. Indeed, imagine what would happen if someone took over Fox News and suddenly started revealing (1) communications between Fox News execs and Republican politicians and campaigns and (2) internal editorial meeting notes regarding what to promote. Don’t you think it would be way more biased than what the Twitter files revealed?
Here’s the important point on that: Fox News’ clear bias is not illegal either. And, indeed, if Democrats in Congress held hearings on “Fox News’ bias” and demanded that its top executives appear and explain their editorial decision making in promoting GOP talking points, people should be outraged over the clear intimidation factor, which would obviously be problematic from a 1st Amendment angle. Yet I don’t expect people to get all that worked up about the same thing happening to Twitter, even though it’s actually the same issue.
Companies are allowed to be biased. But the amazing thing revealed in the Twitter files is just how little evidence there is that any bias was a part of the debate on how to handle this stuff. Everything appeared to be about perfectly reasonable business decisions.
And… that’s it. I fear that this story is going to live on for years and years and years. And the narrative full of nonsense is already taking shape. However, I like to work off of actual facts and evidence, rather than fever dreams and misinterpretations. And I hope that you’ll read this and start doing the same.
In Netflix’s recent release, “Death to 2020,” Lisa Kudrow does an absolutely pitch perfect parody of whiny “conservative” upset about non-existent “cancel culture” over “conservative views.” Kudrow, playing the role of a Trump campaign spokesperson/conservative commentator, talks about how she has to keep saying that “Conservative Voices Are Being Silenced,” including on a variety of popular media interviews and, of course, a NYT best-selling book by the same title:
Of course, it’s becoming harder and harder to create satire and parody these days when you have terrible people like Senator Josh Hawley making such parody obsolete within days. We’ve already talked about how Hawley, a lying demagogue, who apparently has been plotting how to run for President since he was a child, threw an absolute shit fit when Simon & Schuster told him it no longer wanted to publish his book. Hawley, who was (briefly) a constitutional law professor, has a law degree from Yale, and clerked at the Supreme Court for Chief Justice Roberts, ridiculously claimed that a private enterprise deciding it didn’t want to do business with him was an attack on his 1st Amendment rights. It was not. And, of course, within a few days, he had a new publisher.
But, Josh Hawley is going to Josh Hawley, which means never letting a chance to play the whiny, disingenuous victim go to waste. He’s now been given column space in one of the most well known newspapers in the country, the NY Post, to whine about how he’s being “muzzled.” And, of course, as soon as that was published, he immediately ran to his Twitter account, which has over half a million followers, to post a link to this op-ed in a major American newspaper, to whine about how he’s been muzzled.
I wish I were so muzzled.
Nearly everything about the article is bullshit. Josh Hawley, who is trying to restore his reputation after he was, correctly, seen as a key instigator of the insurrectionist mob at the Capitol, clearly has no compunction about just making shit up in an attempt to change the narrative. He wants to blame everyone, but refuses to take any responsibility. He’s the antithesis of every stupid “conservative talking point” he spent decades spewing. He’s refusing to take responsibility for his own actions. He’s demanding government action to stop the free market. He’s attacking actual free speech when it criticizes him.
I’m not going to quote any of it, because that’s sinking to the level he wants. If you want to read it, you can see it above, but Prof. David Karpf’s hilarious thread critiquing it as if it were a draft handed in by a student is basically all you need to see:
Okay… so, um, a few notes. This is not a good first draft.
1. The United States doesn't have a social credit score system. (Neither, really, does China.) People don't want to associate you because you promoted a violent insurrection. Do you see how those are *different*?
Oh yeah. Also, it seems worth noting that Josh Hawley, for all this bullshit about how he’s being censored, silenced, muted and whatnot, actually… refused to grant an interview to the newspaper in Missouri that did a front page story on him this weekend. I almost called it his “hometown” newspaper, since he is “the junior Senator from Missouri,” but that would be misleading, since he doesn’t actually live in Missouri, and (while complaining about voter fraud) may have violated voter registration laws by claiming his sister’s home as his Missouri residence for the last election.
Beware Josh Hawley’s attempt to rehabilitate his reputation with this nonsense. He’s a lying demagogue who appears unwilling to ever accept any personal responsibility for his role in inspiring a literal insurrection and mob that ended with five people dead.
Yesterday was certainly an interesting day in the content moderation realm. Early in the morning the NY Post released a story that I won’t link to, mainly because it’s hot garbage. If you want a concise, non-hyperbolic, and thorough (and non-partisan) analysis of why the story is problematic, I suggest reading Thomas Rid’s analysis, which highlights the many questions the story raises, and why it should not be reported on until certain details are confirmed.
CAUTION ADVISED with this morning's Burisma-Biden E-mail story. For several reasons. pic.twitter.com/61GEAhZZop
The story began to spread on social media, though. There were many people (like Thomas) raising questions, or in some cases debunking various aspects of the story (or just putting it into perspective). However, among supporters of President Trump, the story was (misleadingly) being used to claim there was a “smoking gun” of malfeasance on the part of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The actual details of the story don’t seem to support the claims being made. At the very least, without further confirmation, the story had all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.
As the story spread, both Facebook and Twitter decided to take steps to limit the spread, in both cases making use of relatively recently introduced policies. For Facebook, it simply limited the spread while fact checkers could check the story:
This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review. https://t.co/vf3CBvLmjj
The company put that policy in place a year ago after facing widespread complaints that by the time Facebook did a thorough fact check on certain information, that information would have already spread widely. So Facebook put in place a sort of two-step process. If something is going viral, and there are concerns that it is disinformation, the company will first slow the ability to spread the information, allowing the full fact-check to take place, and then making a further decision based on the results of the fact check. This is basically a “let’s slow this down while we check it out and then decide what to do” policy.
Twitter’s move was a bit stronger and more controversial. It blocked people from sharing the link altogether, though not for the reasons most people thought. Twitter says it blocked the sharing of the link because the article was pointing to “hacked” materials. We’ve discussed Twitter’s policy against hacked material in the past, including over the (controversial) decision to shut down the @DDoSecrets account, which posts newsworthy leaked documents, including the “BlueLeaks” documents of law enforcement leaks.
As seen in shutting down @DDoSecrets, Twitter takes a pretty strict definition of “hacked material” and under that definition, the Post’s reporting on emails that were taken from a laptop would qualify. That is, even if you disagree with the specific policy that Twitter has in place, it’s silly to claim that the takedown was for political purposes.
That said, this policy remains a silly one, and a dangerous one. As we have noted in the past in discussing it, journalists regularly report on leaked or “hacked” materials. And in many cases they are newsworthy. In this case, if the information is correct, then it is newsworthy.
But, even more to the point, it was not difficult to guess where this decision was going to end up — which is that the usual crew of Trump sycophants immediately insisted that this was “censorship” on the part of Twitter and Facebook, and an attempt to stifle a story that, if accurate, could be seen by some to paint Joe Biden in a bad light. Indeed, Senator Josh Hawley — who seems to have found his niche in creating absolutely bullshit panics about this kind of stuff — quickly got out his pen to send stupid letters. First he sent a nonsense letter to Facebook, claiming that Facebook following the policy it put in place last year was “selective” and “suggests partiality on the part of Facebook.”
Seems odd that if that’s his concern he hasn’t sent such letters to the NY Post or Fox News or Breitbart — all of whom have made editorial choices that show “partiality” to one candidate. And, of course, the letter fails to acknowledge that this has been Facebook’s policy for a year now, or that there may be legitimate reasons to try to slow the spread of possible disinformation. Instead, he tries to cook up a conspiracy.
His letter to Twitter is more of the same. Here, we have a US Senator demanding information regarding a private company’s editorial policies. That’s a HUGE 1st Amendment problem.
This statement raises questions about the
applicability of your policy, especially because such a pre-emptive removal of a news
story on such grounds?and the additional scrutiny you have applied?appears to be an
unusual intervention that is not universally applied to all content.
I ask that you immediately answer these questions and provide the requisite justifications
so that your users can feel confident that you are not seeking to influence the outcome of
the presidential election with your content removal decisions.
Politicians should not be able to demand any private company explain their editorial decision making process, especially under the threat of legislation. It’s an obvious intimidation tactic, and raises significant 1st Amendment questions.
Finally, Hawley sent an even more ridiculous letter to the Federal Election Commission, claiming that these moderation decisions violate campaign finance law. This is wrong on many, many, many levels. But first I’ll note, in passing, that Republicans like Senator Hawley have made sure that the FEC doesn’t even have enough members to meet, because the Republican Senate has refused to confirm them.
As for Hawley’s claims about campaign finance, they are also hot garbage:
This conduct does not merely censor the core political speech of ordinary Americans, though it certainly does
that. Twitter?s and Facebook?s conduct also appears to constitute a clear violation of federal campaign-finance law.
Federal law prohibits any corporation from making a contribution to a federal candidate for office. 52 U.S.C. § 30118(a).
Twitter and Facebook are both corporations. A ?contribution? includes ?anything of value . . . for the purpose of
influencing any election for Federal office.? 52 U.S.C. § 30101(8)(A)(i). Twitter?s and Facebook?s active suppression of
public speech about the New York Post article appears to constitute contributions under federal law. There can be no
serious doubt that the Biden campaign derives extraordinary value from depriving voters access to information that, if
true, would link the former Vice President to corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. And this censorship manifestly will influence
the presidential election.
This is ridiculous. Again, if true, then Fox News, Breitbart, and the NY Post all “violate federal campaign finance law.” Hell, under this interpretation, the NY Post “violated campaign finance law” by running this article. So would any newspaper that ran an endorsement. Or any newspaper that (quite reasonably) refused to run this sketchy garbage story from Rudy Giuliani in the first place. This is not how any of this works. And Hawley doesn’t want it to work that way either because it would destroy the media companies that prop up his own nonsense.
All that said, I still think that Twitter’s decision to block the sharing of the link was hamfisted. Coming just after I praised the company for focusing on friction, rather than suppression, this move seemed more about suppression. And, of course, it was not effective. Lots of people started coming up with ways to get around the block, and at least one account tweeted out every sentence of the article as individual tweets. The Senate Republicans’ Twitter account tweeted out a video of the article. And “Streisand Effect” trended on Twitter as Trump supporters noted that the block would likely only serve to draw more attention to the original story.
But it also did something worse. It played right into the bullshit narrative that Twitter is engaging in “anti-conservative bias” in its moderation practices. And it becomes a perfect (if inaccurate) talking point for Republicans like Josh Hawley and Donald Trump whose entire schtick is playing the victim. It also takes away attention from just how sketchy the original story was, and changes the focus to questions about social media companies and their moderation practices. That’s not the story here and it shouldn’t be. But these decisions made it so.
This is a lie. There’s no way around it. I’m sure the NYPD will come up with some excuse for this, but it will probably take a lawsuit to obtain the underlying documents, if not the NYPD’s internal justifications.
The subpoena to turn over documents, provided to The Post by Twitter, directs the social media company to produce all device and contact information associated with the user handle @Tinamoorereport, as well as all the handle’s connection history between Oct. 9 and Oct. 14.
During that time, Moore obtained and tweeted a gory crime scene photos from a dice-game shooting in Brooklyn that left four dead and three injured. Those photos appear to be at the center of the NYPD subpoena.
New York’s Shield Law codifies the privilege, arising under the First Amendment, that protects professional journalists from compulsory disclosure of confidential sources contacted or materials obtained in the course of gathering information for public dissemination.
Under New York law a professional journalist is defined as one who is engaged in “….gathering, preparing, collecting, writing, editing, filming, taping or photographing of news intended for a newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association or wire service or other professional medium or agency which has as one of its regular functions the processing and researching of news intended for dissemination to the public…”
Maybe the NYPD thought it wasn’t breaking the law because it sent the subpoena to Twitter, rather than to the journalist. Maybe the NYPD just didn’t care. Either way, the state’s law shields Moore from these demands for information. If the NYPD has a leak problem, it needs to handle it without threatening First Amendment-protected activities.
But it somehow gets worse. The NYPD cited two authorities in its subpoena [PDF]. The first is somewhat redundant: Section 14-137 of the New York City administrative code simply gives the NYPD the power to issue subpoenas. The second citation, however, makes no sense. And it’s this citation that makes it a lie.
See also USA Patriot Act, P.L. 107-56, Section 211 codified at 47 USCS Section 551(c)(2)(D).
This isn’t a terrorism case. This is a standard shooting case not tied to any suspected terrorist activity. But it appears the NYPD thought throwing that on the form would maybe allow it to gather all of the following with minimal protest from Twitter:
any/all detailed subscriber, profile, contact, billing and payment information; any/all associated email account(s)/ screen name(s)/ user name(s)/ domain name(s); any/all associated ISP/ESP provided or externally based storage account(s); any/all SERVER, CM, CPE, DHCP, GUID, FTP, IIS, Twitterpic address history and connection logs; any/all MAC or IP address history, length of service and connection logs related to this request for the account(s), subject(s), and any associated electronic device(s) using the following Twitter user name: @TinaMoorereport
It’s a fishing expedition designed to give the NYPD additional entities to throw subpoenas at, presumably with the same nonsensical reference to the Patriot Act attached. It’s unclear whether Twitter handed over this info. Whatever the case, it has actually made the pro-NYPD New York Post a bit less supportive of New York’s Finest. An op-ed from the paper’s editorial board says the NYPD should know better than to go after a journalist’s sources… and it definitely shouldn’t do this while pretending a normal shooting was somehow related to national security.
Unfortunately, the NY Post can’t bring itself all the way around on the issue, which results in the incongruity of a city paper seeing actual abuse of a law it loves but still refusing to criticize the abused law.
We’ve been firm supporters of the Patriot Act from the start, even as its critics have warned that law enforcement would seek to abuse such extraordinary powers by applying it to cases that have nothing to do with national security.
Now the NYPD — or its lawyers — has just given those critics some powerful fodder, undermining a law that helps keep this terror-target city safe.
Yes, people who abuse easily-abusable laws are bad. But bad laws that lend themselves to abuse are bad too, whether or not anyone gets around to abusing them. That’s the hard truth the Post will have to face at some point. But I guess the wholly-unjustified targeting of one of its reporters isn’t the “road to Damascus” moment it’s looking for.
While there was a lot of rhetoric concerning the Instagram terms of service mess recently, most observers of these kinds of things noted that for all the claims from people that they were “quitting” the service, few people ever actually follow through on such threats. So, it surprised some this morning when the NY Post reported that Instagram users actually did flee in large droves, citing data from a company called AppData. They argued that there was a potential 25% decline in users, which is huge. The news apparently contributed to Facebook’s stock dropping by nearly 3%… despite the claim being almost entirely bogus.
Even a quick look at the data that AppData presented should have raised some eyebrows:
As lots of folks pointed out, starting with Zachary Seward at Quartz (linked above), the drop shown does not occur until December 24th… a good week after the whole controversy went down. Furthermore, AppData does not measure all Instagram usage at all, but the small subset of people who have connected their Instagram accounts to their Facebook accounts. But most people just use Instagram as a mobile app, and AppData doesn’t measure that.
Meanwhile, Robin Wauters over at TheNextWeb does a brilliant job of showing plenty of other services that AppsData’s “data” also shows “plunged” during the same time period, including Yahoo! Social bar, which shot up… and then back down:
Or Pinterest, which dropped a bunch during that same time period:
Wauters lists a bunch of other examples as well, all suggesting that maybe the original claim by AppData, repeated by the NY Post (and then others) had little basis in reality.