We’ve noted how most modern media executives see “AI” (language learning models) not as a way to improve productivity, boost product quality, or satisfy readership — but as a way to lazily cut corners and attack labor (organized or otherwise). As a result, they’re implementing these potentially useful technologies in the most half-assed, nontransparent, and problematic way possible.
Both Gannett and Sports Illustrated’s parent company, The Arena Group, responded to the scandals in the exact same way: by playing dumb and blaming everything on a the same third-party vendor: AdVon Commerce. But in SI’s case there does at least appear to be something vaguely resembling accountability, given several of the Arena Group executives involved in the fracas have been fired.
The company that first claimed it the articles weren’t generated by AI (they were), and had no idea how this all happened is now claiming the firings have nothing to do with the recent scandal:
“Speaking to Futurism, [majority owner Manoj] Bhargava’s rep claimed the dismissals were unrelated to recent revelations about Arena Group’s use of AI or the resulting damage to the reputation of Sports Illustrated and Arena Group writ large — and that the cuts were made as part of Bhargava’s overall reorganization plan.”
This will be far from the last of these sort of scandals. The fail-upward, trust fund brunchlords in charge of most major media companies are dead set on replacing human-focused and generated journalism with an (badly) automated, ad-engagement ouroboros that effectively shits money — without any pesky annoyances like having to pay writers and editors a living wage.
But while early LLMs may be undercooked and prone to fabulism and plagiarism, the problem here generally isn’t the tech itself. The problem is human beings who don’t really understand the industry they’re in charge of (and don’t care to), don’t understand the tech they’re adopting, and don’t respect their existing writers and editors enough to include them in the decision-making process.
This is all set to a backdrop of a record-number of journalist layoffs in 2023, as hard reporting and journalism increasingly get replaced by a badly automated quest for clicks by some of the least competent and ethical people imaginable.
Over the years we’ve written about plenty of “cyberespionge” companies. Some engage in spyware or surveillance ware. Others actively hack devices. Almost all of these eventually get exposed through dogged investigative reporting.
Reuters has temporarily removed the article “How an Indian startup hacked the world” to comply with a preliminary court order issued on Dec. 4, 2023, in a district court in New Delhi, India.
Reuters stands by its reporting and plans to appeal the decision.
The article, published Nov. 16, 2023, was based on interviews with hundreds of people, thousands of documents, and research from several cybersecurity firms.
The order was issued amid a pending lawsuit brought against Reuters in November 2022. As set forth in its court filings, Reuters disputes those claims.
I had missed the original article, now that the court has forced Reuters to take it down, it seems likely to get much more attention. You can find archives of it in multiple places. Though who knows if those will remain up. You can also find articles building on Reuters’ investigative reporting.
The basic summary of the Reuters report is that an Indian firm, Appin Software Security, has been offering what is effectively “hack for hire” services for over a decade.
Notably, Reuters reporters handed over the data they found to SentinelOne who did their own analysis of what was found, and it’s pretty damning. Notably, the SentinelOne report appears to still be online.
Appin is considered the original hack-for-hire company in India, offering an offensive security training program alongside covert hacking operations since at least 2009. Their past employees have since spread to form newer competitors and partners, evolving the Appin brand to include new names, while some have spread into cybersecurity defense industry vendors. Appin was so prolific that a surprising amount of current Indian APT activity still links back to the original Appin group of companies in one form or another. Campaigns conducted by Appin have revealed a noteworthy customer base of government organizations, and private businesses spread globally.
Our analysis and observations corroborate the June 2022 reporting from Reuters noting some of Appin’s customers tied to major litigation battles. The group has conducted hacking operations against high value individuals, governmental organizations, and other businesses involved in specific legal disputes. Appin’s hacking operations and overall organization appear at many times informal, clumsy, and technically crude; however, their operations proved highly successful for their customers, impacting world affairs with significant success.
Of course, I might never have heard about this at all if a court in New Delhi hadn’t ordered Reuters to delete the story. And it’s possible that you wouldn’t have heard about it either.
I will note that in the original Reuters article, they note that the company’s US legal representatives is the law firm Clare Locke, which we’ve spoken about before. They’re the lawyers who often appear to brag about how their aggressive tactics are known to get stories killed in the media. Their website literally lists all the major media outlets they’ve gone after in the past.
So I guess it’s little surprise that the firm would seek to suppress the story about them.
But the data and the report seen by SentinelOne are pretty damning.
The cybersecurity firm’s exhaustive analysis of data that Reuters journalists collected showed near-conclusive links between Appin and numerous data theft incidents. These included theft of email and other data by Appin from Pakistani and Chinese government officials. SentinelOne also found evidence of Appin carrying out defacement attacks on sites associated with the Sikh religious minority community in India and of at least one request to hack into a Gmail account belonging to a Sikh individual suspected of being a terrorist.
“The current state of the organization significantly differs from its status a decade ago,” says Tom Hegel, principal threat researcher at SentinelLabs. “The initial entity, ‘Appin,’ featured in our research, no longer exists but can be regarded as the progenitor from which several present-day hack-for-hire enterprises have emerged,” he says.
Factors such as rebranding, employee transitions, and the widespread dissemination of skills contribute to Appin being recognized as the pioneering hack-for-hire group in India, he says. Many of the company’s former employees have gone on to create similar services that are currently operational.
Reuters’ report and SentinelOne’s review have cast fresh light on the shadowy world of hack-for-hire services — a market niche that others have highlighted with some concern as well.
And the demand that the Reuters piece get removed only should draw that much attention towards Appin’s behavior.
While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a comically sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness.
If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The result: articles rife with accuracy problems and plagiarism. Of the 77 articles published, more than halfhad significant errors. It ultimately cost them more to have humans editors come in and fix the mistakes than the money they’d actually saved. After backlash, Red Ventures paused the effort.
Gannett, the giant media company that owns USA Today (and very likely whatever’s left of your local newspaper), was also forced to pause its use of AI earlier this year because the resulting product was laughably bad and full of obvious errors. Even when used for the kind of basic writing LLMs are supposed to excel at, like basic box score journalism.
Fast forward to this week, and Gannett is once again under fire for allegedly making up writer bylines as cover for a different low-quality AI experiment. This time the problems bubbled up at Reviewed, a USA Today-owned product review website, where staffers noticed that badly written product reviews of products staffers had never seen were popping up under the bylines of people who didn’t exist:
“Not only were Reviewed staffers unfamiliar with the bylines on the stories — names like “Breanna Miller” and “Avery Williamson” — they were unable to find evidence of writers by those names on LinkedIn or any professional websites.”
All of the articles in question are sterile and not particularly engaging, and all shared notable similarities. Here, for example, is one of their reviews for scuba masks, contrasted to their reviews for water bottles:
While “AI” can definitely improve journalism efficiency on everything from transcription to editing, the kind of fail-upward types at the top of the media industry food chain generally see the technology as a way to cut corners and assault already woefully mistreated and underpaid human labor, especially of the unionizing variety.
Unionized writers at Reviewed say that Gannett was trying to obfuscate its efforts to undermine unionized human staff after its embarrassing face plant earlier this year:
Carrillo, a shop steward for the union, said the mysterious reviews — which appeared just weeks after staff staged a one-day walkout to demand management negotiate on a new contract — harm the reputations of actual employees.
“It’s gobbledygook compared to the stuff that we put out on a daily basis,” he said. “None of these robots tested any of these products.”
Amusingly, when approached for comment by the Washington Post, a Gannett spokesperson first tries to deny that the articles were AI generated, then implies that if they were AI-generated, it was all the fault of a third-party marketing firm:
“In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson said the articles — many of which have now been deleted — were created through a deal with a marketing firm to generate paid search-engine traffic. While Gannett concedes the original articles “did not meet our affiliate standards,” officials deny they were written by AI.
“We expect all our vendors to comply with our ethical standards and have been assured by the marketing agency the content was NOT AI generated,” the spokesperson said in an email.”
The marketing firm in question redirected questions back to Gannett. WAPO reporters couldn’t find evidence any of the writers exist. The site’s human writers say it’s obvious that AI was used, noting the marketing firm in question clearly advertises that it engages in “polishing AI generative text.”
Again, the problem here generally isn’t the technology itself. AI will ultimately improve and become increasingly useful in a myriad of ways. The problem is the kind of humans implementing it. And the way they’re implementing it without involving or even telling existing staffers.
The affluent hedge fund brunchlord types that dominate key positions across U.S. media “leadership” clearly see AI not as a path toward better product or more efficient workforce, but as a shortcut to building an automated ad engagement machine that effectively shits money. And, as an added bonus, a way to undermine staffers peskily demanding health insurance and a living wage.
Large U.S. media companies are filled to the brim with managers who are terrible at their jobs to begin with, making their failures on AI unsurprising. When it comes to the folks shaping the contours of modern journalism, ethics, product quality, accurately informing the public, staff happiness, or genuine human interest very often never even enter the frame.
Earlier this year a new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to do things differently, with Finkelstein claiming he wanted to build “an alternative to a national news media” that “has come under the sway of partisan influences.” Finkelstein insisted there was a clear and simple path to having over 100 million readers monthly, which would have made it one of the biggest news sites online.
Right out of the gate there were signs of trouble. SEO bumbling resulted in a website that barely registered with search engines. And this new, supposedly “different” media operation immediately doubled down on the kind of aggregated clickbait journalism even though it was supposed to be above such engagement bait. All while its projected growth and revenue figures were derided as fantasy.
After months of grumbling by reporters and other employees, news has now emerged that the company is warning of impending financial collapse. At the same time, employees eye unionization as the outlet begins exploring using the kind of half-baked “AI” that’s been a clumsy disaster for outlets like CNET:
Meanwhile, with reporters already grousing about the reliance on “clickbait” journalism and aggregation to generate gobs of content, the newsroom was taken aback this month by the announcement that the site was partnering with Seekr, an AI company.
The Messenger currently ranks somewhere around #195 among U.S. news sites, roughly on par with some local Texas broadcast news stations.
The idea that the rich and out of touch gentleman behind The Hill — itself a longstanding purveyor of clickbait and timid journalism — was going to single-handedly change modern reporting was laughable. Especially given that this is a guy who seemingly didn’t learn much from the last decade of Trumpism.
Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein’s incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, whether it’s the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” or “view from nowhere” reporting, or the underlying flaws with the ad-engagement models that now prop up — and violently derail — efforts to educate and inform the public.
The lesson of The Messenger, to me, is not the portentous signs surrounding its start, but the infuriating ways in which money congeals at the top of the media pyramid. That $50 million invested in The Messenger before it even launched could have been used to pay up front for over a decade of work from a modestly budgeted but still innovative and effective newsroom. Why do we instead have a media environment where a 74-year-old can take all that money for a blatantly unprofitable click farm dressed up in network-era drag? Who bought into this scheme, and how can we ensure that they never have any power to affect real people’s livelihoods again?
That $50 million could have gone a long, long way at any number of upstart outlets doing disruptive journalism on a shoestring budget (like say Techdirt, or perhaps 404 Media, an outlet built by journalists fleeing the Vice bankruptcy idiocy). U.S. journalism desperately needs aggressive, creative, young minds with new ideas for coverage and funding. Folks who understand that with a parade of authoritarian propagandists exploiting lazy journalism daily, that the hour for meaningful reform is getting late.
Instead, it’s an industry dominated by the kind of trust fund brunchlord fail upward types that tend to congeal at the top of the food chain courtesy of inherited wealth, not competency. The kind of folks who prefer “news simulacrum” as to avoid offending advertisers, sources, or event sponsors. The kind of folks that see AI not as an efficiency tool, but as a way to cut corners and attack already underpaid labor.
In other words, the very last people that should be spearheading any kind of meaningful journalistic revolution.
Elon Musk keeps insisting that stopping spam bots is a huge priority. After all, he said he’d either stop them or die trying.
And, apparently one way to try to stop spam is to stop allowing people to report spam. I’m guessing this is just a mistake on a site that has massive errors pretty much every day, but it’s still crazy. Apparently, exTwitter no longer lets you actually report spam. If you try, it automatically misclassifies it as something else, and then you get a notice that because it’s not that something else, it remains online.
Spam problems solved!
I first spotted this over on Bluesky from user Q.H. Stone, who noted that if you now try to report spam on ExTwitter, rather than saying “we received your report for spam,” it instead says (incorrectly) “we received your report for sensitive media.”
Then, one of the three remaining trust & safety hamsters on the wheel looks at the spam, looks at the report, and says “this isn’t sensitive media,” so nothing to do here:
While I hid the user account in this case, I will note that (of course) it is paying for Twitter Blue, Twitter Verified, Verified, X Premium, so perhaps that’s why it’s not getting removed for spam. But, rest assured, all that account is doing is spamming people with crypto spam. But, apparently, it’s okay, because it’s not “sensitive media.”
It’s “protect the children” season in Congress with the return of KOSA and EARN IT, two terrible bills that attack the internet, and rely on people’s ignorance of how things actually work to pretend they’re making the internet safer, when they’re not. Added to this is Senator Dick Durbin’s STOP CSAM Act, which he’s been touting since February, but only now has officially put out a press release announcing the bill (though, he hasn’t released the actual language of the bill, because that would actually be helpful to people analyzing it).
CSAM is “child sexual abuse material,” though because every bill needs a dumb acronym, in this case it’s the Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment Act of 2023.
There is a section by section breakdown of the bill, though, along with a one pager summary. And, given how bad so many other internet “protect the children” bills there are, this one is… not nearly as bad. It actually has a few good ideas, but also a few really questionable bits. Also, the framing of the whole thing is a bit weird:
From March 2009 to February 2022, the number of victims identified in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) rose almost ten-fold, from 2,172 victims to over 21,413 victims. From 2012 to 2022, the volume of reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline concerning child sexual exploitation increased by a factor of 77 (415,650 reports to over 32 million reports).
Clearly, any child sexual abuse material is too much, but it’s not at all clear to me that the numbers represented here show an actual increase in victims of child sexual abuse material, or merely a much bigger infrastructure and setup for reporting CSAM material. I mean, from March of 2009 to February of 2022 is basically the period in which social media went mainstream, and with it, much better tracking and reporting of such material.
I mean, back in March of 2009, the tools to track, find and report CSAM were in their infancy. Facebook didn’t start using PhotoDNA (which was only developed in 2009) until the middle of 2011. It’s unclear when Google started using it as well, but this announcement suggests it was around 2013 — noting that “recently” the company started using “encrypted “fingerprints” of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database” (which describes PhotoDNA).
This is what’s frustrating in all of this. For years, there were complaints that these companies didn’t report enough CSAM, so they built better tools that found more… and now the media and politicians are assuming that the increase in reporting means an increase in actual victimization. Yet, it’s unclear if that’s actually the case. It’s just as (if not more) likely that since the companies are getting better at finding and reporting, that this is just presenting a more accurate number of what’s out there, and not any indication of whether or not the problem has grown.
Notice what’s not talked about? It’s not mentioned how much law enforcement has done to actually track down, arrest, and prosecute the perpetrators. That’s the stat that matters. But it’s missing.
Anyway, again, stopping CSAM remains important, and there are some good things in Durbin’s outline (though, again, specific language matters). It will make reporting mandatory for youth athletic programs, which is a response to a few recent scandals (though, might also lead to an increase in false reports). It increases protections for child victims and witnesses. Another good thing it does is make it easier for states to set up Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces, which specialize in fighting child abuse, and which can be helpful for local law enforcement who are often less experienced in how to deal with such crimes.
The law also expands the reporting requirements for online providers, who are already required to report any CSAM they come across, but this expands that coverage by a bit, and increases the amount of information the sites need to provide. It makes at least some move towards making those reports more useful to law enforcement by authorizing NCMEC to share a copy of an image with local law enforcement from its database.
Considering that, as we keep reporting, the biggest issue with CSAM these days is that law enforcement does so little with the information reported to NCMEC’s CyberTipline, hopefully these moves actually help on the one key important area: having law enforcement bring the actual perpetrators to justice and stop them from victimizing children.
But… there remain some pretty serious concerns with the bill. It appears to crack open Section 230, allowing “victims” to sue social media companies:
The legislation expands 18 U.S.C. § 2255, which currently provides a civil cause of action for victims who suffered sexual abuse or sexual exploitation as children, to enable such victims of to file suit against online platforms and app stores that intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently promote or facilitate online child sexual exploitation. Victims are able to recover actual damages or liquidated damages in the amount of $150,000, as well as punitive damages and equitable relief. This provision does not apply to actions taken by online platforms to comply with valid legal process or statutory requirements. The legislation specifies that such causes of action are not barred by section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230).
Now, some will argue this shouldn’t have a huge impact on big companies that do the right thing because it’s only for those that “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently promote or facilitate” but that’s actually a much, much bigger loophole than it might sound at first glance.
First, we’ve already seen companies that take reporting seriously, such as Reddit and Twitter, get hit with lawsuits making these kinds of allegations. So, plaintiffs’ lawyers are going to pile on lawsuits even against the companies that are trying to do their best on this stuff.
Second, even if the sites were doing everything right, now they have to go through the long and arduous process of proving that in every one of these lawsuits. The benefit of Section 230 is to get cases like this kicked out early. Without 230, you have to go through a long and involved process just to prove that you didn’t “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently” do any of those things.
Third, while “intentionally” and “knowingly” are perhaps more defensible, adding in “recklessly” and (even worse) “negligently” again just makes every lawsuit a massive crapshoot, because every lawyer is going to argue that any site that doesn’t catch and stop every bit of CSAM will be acting “negligently.” And the lawsuits over negligently are going to be massive and going to be ridiculous and going to be expensive.
So, if you’re a social media site — say a mid-sized Mastodon instance — and it’s discovered that someone posted CSAM to your site, the victimized individual can sue, and insist that you were negligent in not catching it, even if you were actually good about reporting and removing CSAM.
Basically, this opens up a flood of litigation.
There may also be some concerns about some of the new reporting requirements, in that I fear that (like this very bill misuses the “reported” stats as proof that the problem is growing) the new reports will be used down the line to justify more draconian interventions just because “the numbers” are going up, when that might just be a result of the reporting itself. I also worry that some of the reporting requirements will lead to further (sketchy) justifications for future attacks on encryption.
Again, this bill has elements that seems good, and would be useful contributions. But the Section 230 carveout is extremely problematic, and it’s not at all clear that it would actually help anyone other than plaintiffs lawyers filing a ton of vexatious lawsuits.
On top of all that Durbin’s floor speech on introducing the bill was, well, problematic full of moral panic nonsense mostly disconnected from reality and he goes hard against Section 230, though it’s not clear he understands it at all. Even worse he talks about how EARN It and STOP CSAM together would lead to a bunch of frivolous lawsuits, which he seems to think is a good thing.
How can this be, you ask? Here is
how. The Communications Decency
Act of 1996—remember that year—contains a section, section 230, that offers
near-total immunity to Big Tech. As a
result, victims like Charlotte have no
way to force tech companies to remove
content posted on their sites—not even
these child sexual abuse horrible images.
My bill, the Stop CSAM Act, is going
to change that. It would protect victims and promote accountability within the tech industry. Companies that
fail to remove CSAM and related imagery after being notified about them
would face significant fines. They
would also be required to produce annual reports detailing their efforts to
keep children safe from online sex
predators, and any company that promotes or facilitates online child exploitation could face new criminal and
civil penalties.
When section 230 was created in 1996,
Mark Zuckerberg was in the sixth
grade. Facebook and social media sites
didn’t even exist. It is time that we rewrite the law to reflect the reality of
today’s world.
A bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Graham and Blumenthal would
also help to do that. It is called the
EARN IT Act, and it would let CSAM
victims—these child sexual abuse victims—have their day in court by
amending section 230 to eliminate Big
Tech’s near-total immunity from liability and responsibility.
There are serious ways to fight CSAM. But creating massive liability risks and frivolous lawsuits that misunderstand the problem, and don’t even deal with the fact that sites already report all this content only to see it disappear into a blackhole without law enforcement doing anything… does not help solve the problem at all.
The nonsense never ends. As you’ll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn’t fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive. What has since come out is that there was thorough debate within Twitter about whether or not this was a good idea, but the decision was made in an abundance of caution, as the provenance of the information was still unclear, and there were some questionable aspects to the information being released.
The policy used was Twitter’s “Hacked Materials” policy, which had been in place in March of 2019 and which we had highlighted as problematic a month before the NY Post kerfuffle, noting how it had already been used against journalistic activity by DDoSecrets after it published leaked police chat information and had its account banned.
In the wake of the NY Post story, Twitter admitted that the policy was a problem and changed the policy to no longer target journalists.
Except that was Twitter 1.0.
Now that we have Twitter 2.0, led by Elon Musk and trust & safety boss Ella Irwin, who have told us that they believe the NY Post banning was a mortal sin that should never be repeated… except that Musk/Irwin did also ban the NY Post’s account for a period of time just recently. And while they corrected that mistake, it’s still difficult to see how that was any different than Twitter 1.0.
But now we have the “Hacked Materials” policy showing up again, this time under Musk/Irwin’s control… and this time used in a manner I would argue is way, way, way more sketchy and problematic than earlier uses.
Specifically, Wired reporter Dell Cameron has had his account permanently suspended from Twitter as he revealed on Mastodon.
So why did Cameron’s account get suspended? Twitter claims he violated its “hacked materials” policy. You know, the same one that was used to block links to the NY Post story… and which Twitter had adjusted so as (in theory) not to target actual journalism.
But really, I can’t wait for all the people who had shit fits and ordered Congressional hearings over the whole NY Post / laptop story to twist themselves in pretzels to defend this banning of Cameron, who was reporting on a hack, but whose reporting did not reveal anything particularly sensitive or embarrassing. Oh yeah, who could forget this:
Of course, this should also remind journalists in particular that it is not safe to rely on Twitter for spreading your reporting. Musk and Irwin have made it clear that their only principle in handling trust & safety is to silence speech they find makes them look bad.
It wasn’t particularly surprising if you’ve watched the outlet’s coverage over the last decade become increasingly inundated with affiliate blogspam and often toothless, corporate friendly stenography of company press releases. And who could forget that time former CNET owner CBS blocked the company from doling out a CES award to Dish Network as part of a petty legal dispute over cable box ad skipping.
A major reason for CNET’s more recent problems are thanks to its owner, private equity firm Red Ventures, which acquired CNET from CBS in 2020. Recently leaked internal communications and employee accounts from inside CNET indicate that Red Ventures was so excited by AI’s ability to generate content at scale cheaply, it didn’t really care if the resulting content was rife with inaccuracies:
“They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated,” a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called “hallucinations.”) “One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn’t work out so well.”
Amusingly, the whole point of doing this, lower costs, never materialized because editing the resulting AI content was more time consuming that editing human work:
The AI system was always faster than human writers at generating stories, the company found, but editing its work took much longer than editing a real staffer’s copy. The tool also had a tendency to write sentences that sounded plausible but were incorrect, and it was known to plagiarize language from the sources it was trained on.
But AI aside, insiders say the environment created by Red Ventures is one in which affiliate blogspam style coverage takes precedent, and the company is all too happy to obliterate editorial firewalls and soften coverage if it makes advertisers happy:
Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures’ business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures’ affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.
Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales.One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures’ business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.
U.S. journalism is, if you hadn’t noticed, already in crisis. There’s a decided lack of creative new financing ideas. There are also endless layoffs, and homogenized, feckless content that’s increasingly afraid of challenging sources, advertisers, or event sponsors. Twice a year the entire United States tech press turns their front pages into glorified blogspam affiliates for Amazon, and nobody, in any position of editorial authority, ever seems to think that’s in any way gross, unethical, or problematic.
AI will likely help human beings in multitude of ways we can’t even begin to understand. But it’s also going to supercharge existing problems (like propaganda) in similarly complicated and unforeseen ways, whether that’s making it easier for corporations to run sleazy astroturf lobbying campaigns, or inexpensively slather the Internet with feckless clickbait and blogspam at unprecedented scale.
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.
While it seems difficult for some to balance these things, it remains entirely possible to think that Julian Assange is, generally speaking, a horrible human being, who was likely easily played like a fiddle by foreign nation states looking to play influence games in other nations… and that the US’s charges against him remain absolute bullshit and a threat to freedom of the press. That’s basically the position we’ve held since day one.
Recently a bunch of giant news organizations appeared to feel similarly and sent a letter to the US government saying that the DOJ should drop its case against Assange. From the letter:
This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticise his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database. But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.
The Obama-Biden administration, in office during the WikiLeaks publication in 2010, refrained from indicting Assange, explaining that they would have had to indict journalists from major news outlets too. Their position placed a premium on press freedom, despite its uncomfortable consequences. Under Donald Trump however, the position changed. The DoJ relied on an old law, the Espionage Act of 1917 (designed to prosecute potential spies during world war one), which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster.
This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s first amendment and the freedom of the press.
Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.
The letter was signed by the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais.
That’s the crux of the concern there. Most of the actions described in the indictment would apply equally to many investigative reporters and their employers. And they are core journalism techniques that deserve protection. Criminalizing basic investigative journalism, including the publishing of leaked documents in the public interest would have tremendously dangerous consequences at a time when we need more investigative reporting than ever before.
