Inside Twitter, Fears Musk Will Return Platform to Its Early Troubles

Yep, there's a tremendous level of fear back at HQ. It's freaky. 

I mean, all this time our Twitter overlords were making the site a "safe space" for their cuckolds and non-binary gender non-conforming psychiatric outpatients (especially their confused, dsyphoric young women with social contagion). And now with Boss Elon recalibrating the shots, it's the end of the world as they know it.

Nah I say ... just wait till November, for the congressional midterm earthquake and concomitant tsunami that washes Pelosi and the Democrats out to sea. It'll be great --- all those 2016 crying-scream-memes were getting a bit old anyway.

At the New York Times, "Content moderators warn that Elon Musk doesn’t appear to understand the issues that he and the company will face if he drops its guardrails around speech":

Elon Musk had a plan to buy Twitter and undo its content moderation policies. On Tuesday, just a day after reaching his $44 billion deal to buy the company, Mr. Musk was already at work on his agenda. He tweeted that past moderation decisions by a top Twitter lawyer were “obviously incredibly inappropriate.” Later, he shared a meme mocking the lawyer, sparking a torrent of attacks from other Twitter users.

Mr. Musk’s personal critique was a rough reminder of what faces employees who create and enforce Twitter’s complex content moderation policies. His vision for the company would take it right back to where it started, employees said, and force Twitter to relive the last decade.

Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech that were similar to Mr. Musk’s. They believed Twitter’s policies should be limited, mimicking local laws. But more than a decade of grappling with violence, harassment and election tampering changed their minds. Now, many executives at Twitter and other social media companies view their content moderation policies as essential safeguards to protect speech.

The question is whether Mr. Musk, too, will change his mind when confronted with the darkest corners of Twitter.

“You have said that you want more ‘free speech’ and less moderation on Twitter. What will this mean in practice?” Twitter employees wrote in an internal list of questions they hoped to ask Mr. Musk, which was seen by The New York Times.

Another question asked: “Some people interpret your arguments in defense of free speech as a desire to open the door back up for harassment. Is that true? And if not, do you have ideas for how to both increase free speech and keep the door closed on harassment?”

Mr. Musk has been unmoved by warnings that his plans are misguided. “The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

He went on to criticize the work of Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker, two of Twitter’s top lawyers. Ms. Gadde has led Twitter’s policy teams for more than a decade, often handling complicated moderation decisions, including the decision to cut off Donald J. Trump near the end of his term as president. A former general counsel for the F.B.I., Mr. Baker joined Twitter in 2020.

Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, did not directly respond to the criticism, but in a tweet he wrote, “Proud of our people who continue to do the work with focus and urgency despite the noise.”

Employees of Twitter and other social media companies said that Mr. Musk seemed to understand little about Twitter’s approach to content moderation and the problems that had led to its rules — or that he just didn’t care. Some of the suggestions he has made, like labeling automated accounts, were in place before Mr. Musk launched his bid.

“He’s basically buying the position of being a rule-maker and a speech arbiter,” said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who worked with the United Nations on speech issues. “That has been really fraught for everybody who’s been in that position.”

In its early years as a small start-up, Twitter was governed by one philosophy: The tweets must flow. That meant Twitter did little to moderate the conversations on its platform.

Twitter’s founders took their cues from Blogger, the publishing platform, owned by Google, that several of them had helped build. They believed that any reprehensible content would be countered or drowned out by other users, said three employees who worked at Twitter during that time.

“There’s a certain amount of idealistic zeal that you have: ‘If people just embrace it as a platform of self-expression, amazing things will happen,’” said Jason Goldman, who was on Twitter’s founding team and served on its board of directors. “That mission is valuable, but it blinds you to think certain bad things that happen are bugs rather than equally weighted uses of the platform.”

The company typically removed content only if it contained spam, or violated American laws forbidding child exploitation and other criminal acts.

In 2008, Twitter hired Del Harvey, its 25th employee and the first person it assigned the challenge of moderating content full time. The Arab Spring protests started in 2010, and Twitter became a megaphone for activists, reinforcing many employees’ belief that good speech would win out online. But Twitter’s power as a tool for harassment became clear in 2014 when it became the epicenter of Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign that flooded women in the video game industry with death and rape threats.

“If there are no rules against abuse and harassment, some people are at risk of being bullied into silence, and then you don’t get the benefit of their voice, their perspective, their free expression,” said Colin Crowell, Twitter’s former head of global public policy, who left the company in 2019.

In response, Twitter began expanding its policies...

More at that top link, and, on "Gamergate," see the Other McCain, "GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives."

Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie

At Amazon, Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.

Social Justice Warriors have plagued mankind for more than 150 years, but only in the last 30 years has their ideology become dominant in the West. Having invaded one institution of the cultural high ground after another, from corporations and churches to video games and government, there is nowhere that remains entirely free of their intolerant thought and speech policing. Because the SJW agenda of diversity, tolerance, inclusiveness, and equality flies in the face of both science and observable reality, SJWs relentlessly work to prevent normal people from thinking or speaking in any manner that will violate their ever-mutating Narrative. They police science, philosophy, technology, and even history in order to maintain the pretense that their agenda remains inevitable in a modern world that contradicts it on a daily basis. The book is named after the First Law of SJW: SJWs always lie. SJWs ALWAYS LIE is a useful guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks from the perspective of a man who has not only survived, but thrived, after experiencing multiple attempts by Social Justice Warriors to disqualify, discredit, and disemploy him in the same manner they have successfully attacked Nobel Laureates, technology CEOs, broadcasters, sports commentators, school principals, and policemen. It analyzes well-known SJW attacks as well as the two most successful examples of resistance to the SJW Narrative, #GamerGate and Sad Puppies. Written by Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil and three-time Hugo nominee who is described as the most hated man in science fiction by Black Gate and the Wall Street Journal, SJWs ALWAYS LIE is a powerful weapon in the cultural war against the thought police.

Vox Day: 'Why I Support Donald Trump'

One of the better arguments for Trump I've read in recent weeks.

At Heat Street, "Vox Day of #Gamergate: Why I Support Donald Trump":

I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are not completely self-contradictory.

The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned with those of the American public rather than with the interests of the anti-nationalist elite who see America as nothing more than lines on a map and Americans as nothing more than 300 million economic units in the global economy.

The reason I trust Donald Trump, despite all his rhetorical meanderings, is that he is a traitor to his class. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, both ordinary people who sold their souls in order to be granted a seat at the table of the Great Game, Donald Trump was born a member of the elite and he has always been welcome in the inner circles of both political parties. When I met him in 1988, it was at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where he was the personal guest of George Bush in his private suite there. Like the Bushes, like the Clintons, Trump is truly neither Republican nor Democrat. He is a lifetime member of America’s bi-factional ruling party.

So Donald Trump was already a man of great wealth, influence, connections and power. He did not need to run for president in order to make a name for himself or to launch a public speaking career at $200,000 a pop. Nor does it make sense to claim that he is running for president in order to assuage his formidable ego. Quite to the contrary, he has been under furious attack and criticism from the media as well as from the wealthy elites his rivals are most desperate to please, and it is only his tremendous ego that permits him to survive it. He is enduring this relentless, bipartisan assault because the ruling party knows he has chosen the American people over them.

Ask yourself this: why did Donald Trump run for president in the first place? I believe that the real reason is that he, like you, is deeply concerned about the current state of the United States of America, and he, like you, fears for its future...

Still more.

'Before you decide to go to war on the Internet, first consider the fate of Max Read...'

Following-up up on "Nick Denton's Gawker Removes Gay-Shaming Post About Condé Nast CFO."

GamerGate's not my bailiwick, although it's interesting as hell.

So don't miss this excellent entry from the indubitable Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Congratulations, ‘Dishonest Fascists’ — #GamerGate Destroys Max Read":

“Never underestimate your enemy,” is a maxim of military strategy. Before you decide to go to war on the Internet, first consider the fate of Max Read, who was riding high as editor of Gawker until he decided that insulting #GamerGate was a smart move. He chose poorly.

Custer at Little Bighorn, the French at Dien Bien Phu — military history offers many parallels to Max Read’s fateful miscalculation, but perhaps the best would be Gen. John Sedgwick. On May 9, 1864, Sedgwick was directing the placement of Union artillery near Spotsylvania, Virginia. Annoyed that his men were ducking to avoid fire from Confederate sharpshooters a thousand yards away, he said: “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” A moment later, Sedgwick was killed by a bullet from one of the Confederates whose marksmanship he had disparaged. Hubris, meet nemesis.

The resignation Monday of Max Read as editor-in-chief of Gawker, along with his executive editor Tommy Craggs, will not likely be interpreted by major media as a vindication of #GamerGate, because most of the media share the same shallow prejudice that led Read to declare his disdain for #GamerGate as “a small, contemptible crusade . . . of dedicated anti-feminist internet trolls.” Well, he who laughs last, et cetera...

Keep reading.

Plus, a pretty good inside scoop at the New York Observer, "Is Gawker Destroying Itself From the Inside? Let’s Hope So."

And from Gabriel Sherman, at New York Magazine, "Nick Denton had been at odds with Executive Editor Tommy Craggs over company's long-term direction, with Denton telling Craggs that Gawker was 'too mean'." (Via Mediagazer.)

BONUS: From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "THE DAY GAWKER TORE ITSELF APART, from Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast, who also formerly worked for Condé Nast, whose CFO’s life was upended by Gawker last week..."

Executive Editor Tommy Craggs and Editor-in-Chief Max Read Resign from Gawker; Craggs Says Advertisers Threatened to Pull Out Over Gay Escort Story

At the Hollywood Reporter, "Gawker Editor-In-Chief Resigns After Controversial Post Gets Take Down." (Via Mediagazer.)

Also at the Wrap, "Gawker Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief Both Resign After Gay Porn Story Fiasco

."In memos sent to staff and management, Craggs and Read said an unprecedented breach of the firewall between Gawker’s business and editorial side had occurred, and they could no longer operate at the company.

“On Friday a post was deleted from Gawker over the strenuous objections of Tommy and myself, as well as the entire staff of executive editors,” Read wrote in a memo to Gawker’s partnership group. “That this post was deleted at all is an absolute surrender of Gawker’s claim to ‘radical transparency'; that non-editorial business executives were given a vote in the decision to remove it is an unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall, and turns Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company into, essentially, a joke.”

That's a huge aggregation at Mediagazer, for good reason.

And ICYMI, at the Other McCain, "Web Site Everybody Hates Reminds Everybody Why We Hate Them," and "The #GamerGate vs. Gawker War."

PREVIOUSLY: "Nick Denton's Gawker Removes Gay-Shaming Post About Condé Nast CFO."

How Our Touchy-Feely Feminized Society Creates Young Male Mass Killers

From Milo Yiannopoulos, at Big Government, "TO STOP MASS KILLERS, WE HAVE TO STOP DRUGGING OUR YOUNG BOYS" (via Blazing Cat Fur):

As America comes to terms with a monstrous shooting in Charleston that has left nine churchgoers dead, bewildered members of the public are seeking rationality in apparently wanton and inscrutable crimes.

We may never know quite what drives some people to kill. But it seems that in young Dylann Storm Roof, we have further evidence of a trend that should worry us all. I’m talking about his dependence on prescription drugs: suboxone, to be precise.

Roof is just the latest in a long line of young men who have committed appalling crimes after a lifetime on psychotropic drugs. If you don’t believe me, consider some of the most notorious young male shooters in American history.

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza? Lexapro and Celexa. Red-headed Aurora killer James Holmes? Clonazepam and sertraline. Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho? Prozac. Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper”? Dexedrine. Columbine executioners Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Zoloft and Luvox.

You get the idea. These young men were all on prescribed medication. Feminism helped to get them there. In particular, female teachers who either dislike men or are completely ignorant of healthy behaviour norms for boys are creating a generation of emotionally stunted, drugged up young men.

Millions of young American men are prescribed powerful drugs after being diagnosed with the phantom condition “ADHD,” better known as a mixture of natural boisterousness and poor parental discipline. The mere fact of being male has become pathologised.

When they get into their teens and early twenties, they graduate onto drugs like Zoloft and Prozac, drugs that can produce a powerfully dissociative effect in the mind, muddying the distinctions between reality and fantasy. All this, because boys are now treated as though they are defective girls.

I once clumsily wrote that video games helped to “shape the fantasies” of Isla Vista gunman Elliot Rodgers. I intended not to incriminate video games in his spiral into madness and murder but rather to point out that young men who lose grip on the real world often retreat into imaginary ones, which can then have a stylistic effect, if you like, on their crimes.

After a year of reading the research on what America is doing to its men, and interviewing hundreds of young men in preparation for my book on the GamerGate controversy, I have come to believe that in most cases it’s not games, or movies, or “misogyny,” or “racism” that drives young men to kill. It is the increasing sense of isolation and disorientation young boys feel in a world that now feels architected against them...

Well, I'm not sure that feminism and ADHD are causal factors here, but certainly there's something to this idea of the "isolation of disorientation young boys feel." It's a point I raised earlier today in my essay, "Crazy Emo-Prog Dylann Roof Doesn't Fit the Left's 'Right-Wing Racist White Supremacist' Narrative."

Update on Brianna Wu

Following-up from last October, "Brianna Wu Goes Into Hiding — #GamerGate."

See Milo Yiannopoulos, at Breitbart, "The Wacky World of Wu: The Tortured History of GamerGate's Self-Styled Feminist Martyr."

Well, this definitely clears a number of things up. Turns out, for example, Brianna Wu used to be John Flynt.

More:

In October, Brianna Wu failed to attend a scheduled recording of an internet radio show hosted by the present correspondent in which she was to answer charges that she was responsible for whipping up a media frenzy about GamerGate supporters, accusing them of crimes to which she cannot possibly have linked them to the satisfaction of any law enforcement agency.

Wu later claimed to be “on the run” and “in fear of her life” while continuing to conduct media interviews from her home. She has since positioned herself as what some call a “professional victim,” soliciting pity and crowdfunded donations on the back of ever-more outlandish and implausible claims of real-world persecution on social media. But there has not been a single arrest or prosecution on the basis of any complaint she has made, either to the police or to the FBI, about the harassment she says she has received.

So, John McAdams Hasn't Updated the Marquette Warrior Since Last Wednesday...

... Because the university is revoking his tenure and canning his ass --- for a blog post!

The Marquette Warrior is apparently in legal limbo.

See Conor Friedersdorf, at the Atlantic, "Stripping a Professor of Tenure Over a Blog Post."

Make sure you follow the links, especially to Cheryl Abbate, who left Marquette's philosophy graduate program after McAdams' alleged "misogynist" attacks. See the loooong post, "Gender Based Violence, Responsibility, and John McAdams." She really goes after iOTW Report, claiming that the blog should be shut down because the "rape culture" comments. Yeah, how's that working out for ya?

Look, I'm sympathetic to the women on the receiving end of all these so-called misogynist attacks --- the GameGate dust-up hasn't been one of my hottest topics, mainly because I can't see how folks like Anita Sarkeesian deserve the abuse. But then, there's a lot of inside baseball in the gamer culture, so I leave the coverage to those better up on the issues --- Milo Yiannopoulos, for example. Or see Robert Stacy McCain, "The #GamerGate Hate Hoax."

Meanwhile, the FIRE has come to Professor McAdams' defense, "The Travesty of Due Process at Marquette."

BONUS: From Megan McArdle, at Bloomberg, "Free Speech and Ivory Towers."

Wikipedia Bans Five Social Justice Editors in GamerGate Controversy

I suppose this is a logical development, although I don't follow the controversy that much. It's sorta inside baseball, IMHO.

At the Guardian UK, "Wikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles":

Online encyclopedia’s highest court rules on more than 10 editors deemed to be breaking the site’s rules amid Gamergate controversy.

Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, the highest user-run body on the site, has banned five editors from making corrections to articles about feminism, in an attempt to stop a long-running edit war over the entry on the “Gamergate controversy”.

The editors, who were all actively attempting to prevent the article from being rewritten with a pro-Gamergate slant, were sanctioned by “arbcom” in its preliminary decision. While that may change as it is finalised, the body, known as Wikipedia’s supreme court, rarely reverses its decisions.

The sanction bars the five editors from having anything to do with any articles covering Gamergate, but also from any other article about “gender or sexuality, broadly construed”.

Editors who had been pushing for the Wikipedia article to be fairer to Gamergate have also been sanctioned by the committee, but one observer warns that those sanctions have only hit “throwaway” accounts.

“No sanctions at all were proposed against any of Gamergate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned,” said Mark Bernstein, a writer and Wikipedia editor.

In contrast, he says, “by my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the Gamergaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia.”

The conflict on the site began almost alongside Gamergate, a grassroots campaign broadly targeting alleged corruption in games journalism and perceived feminist influence in the videogame industry. Even the title of the article was fought over: Gamergate itself is taken by an article about a type of ant, leaving the article about video games to move to “Gamergate Controversy”.

At one point, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, was drawn into the debate, telling a student who had emailed him over perceived bias in the article that “Gamergate has been permanently tarnished and hijacked by a handful of people who are not what you would hope.”

Wales’ advice for Gamergate supporters who wanted to change the Wikipedia article was to be constructive, and present a vision for the article which they wanted to read rather than engage in a war with feminist editors who were trying to maintain their vision...

Keep reading.

And ICYMI, an interview with Anita Sarkeesian, at ABC News, "What It Feels Like to Be a Gamergate Target."

Previous GamerGate blogging at the link.

Game Theory Explains #GamerGate

Game theory and Darwinian evolution.

Pretty amazing.

From Clark, at Popehat, "Gamer Gate: Three Stages to Obit."

'Somewhere out there online, Neal Rauhauser must be lurking in the shadows of #GamerGate...'

From Robert Stacy McCain, "A #GamerGate Oddity."

Brianna Wu Goes Into Hiding — #GamerGate

Remember from last month, "FEMINIST BULLIES TEARING THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY APART."

It's Milo Yiannopoulos, and I agree with his commentary, for the most part. And then I see stuff like this and don't know what to think.

Can't keep up with everything:

8chan/#gamergate just doxxed me, posting all kinds of personal information about me. Guys, THIS is the war on industry women. Wake up.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) October 11, 2014

And, here's the part of the night where I call the police. pic.twitter.com/uMByxBEtYz

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) October 11, 2014

The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women. pic.twitter.com/ZU6oEVxMGL

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) October 11, 2014

RELATED: FWIW, from Laurie Penney, "WHY WE’RE WINNING: SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS AND THE NEW CULTURE WAR."

And then back to Yiannopoulos, "HOW TO LOSE A PUBLIC RELATIONS BATTLE ON THE INTERNET."

Maybe Robert Stacy McCain can figure it out?!!

#GamerGate: Online Gaming Community Gets Violently Misogynistic

I'm not a gamer, so the gamer culture is completely foreign to me, but the threatening nature of the Internet underworld is not. These threats ultimately spin out of control and end up hurting people in real life.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Gamergate-related controversy reveals ugly side of gaming community":

A startling number of women I know are quitting games writing or considering quitting due to the ongoing torrent of misogyny and harassment.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 4, 2014

With every threat I wonder why the hell I keep doing this, but I do it because it’s so much bigger than just games. This is about justice.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 4, 2014

This is nothing short of psychological warfare. It is completely unacceptable.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 6, 2014

The emotional, mental & physical impacts of being targeted by hateful sociopaths everyday are immeasurable. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 6, 2014

This column is usually dedicated to discussing video games, but in the past week and a half, you’d be forgiven for not having the stomach to play one. I haven’t.

Infighting, finger-pointing and the airing of dirty laundry have dominated the late summer in video games. For those who have played an online multiplayer game, this may sound like any other day in video games. But it’s not. Now the attacks are so threatening in nature that even the FBI has taken notice.

A long-simmering schism among select, very vocal members of the gaming community and others in the industry has come to the fore over the last two weeks, resulting in unprecedented levels of death threats and harassment directed at game designers and writers — many of them women.

This is not, to be clear, some trash-talking in a “Call of Duty” match. The hateful social media posts, a number of them threatening rape and crippling injury, have been so violent that some intended targets have gone into hiding.

The fury started in mid-August. The exact incident, in which the spurned ex of a female independent game designer reportedly published embarrassing personal details of their relationship and accused her of infidelity, is now beside the point. That moment has become an excuse, an opportunity to rail against designers and writers who are attempting to intellectualize the medium — “social justice warriors,” as they’ve been labeled by their online assailants.

These “social justice warriors” are seen as capable of destroying the very essence of what some players love about video games: violence, fantasy and scantily clad women.

Far from making a point, the ugly reaction has instead exposed the rage and rampant misogyny that lies beneath the surface of an industry that’s still struggling to mature.

Much of the ire has been aimed at Anita Sarkeesian, a respected pop-culture critic whose series of videos under the Feminist Frequency banner analyzes sexism in mainstream video games. On Aug. 26, she posted to Twitter that “some very scary threats have just been made against me and my family. Contacting authorities now.”

Sarkeesian, whose biting, unflinching observations have long made her a punching bag for those who feel she’s attacking the games they love, has been candid on social media in exposing the recent barrage of harassment. “I hope you die” is one of the few tweets slung her way this week that’s actually printable.

Her most recent supposed offense is posting a video that analyzes how top-shelf video games often resort to using women as background decorations, such as a cringe-inducing strip-club setting of the gunfight in “Mafia II: Joe’s Adventures,” in which bullets soar over the body of a dead, barely clothed exotic dancer.

Attempts to reach Sarkeesian this week have thus far been unsuccessful, as have attempts to reach a number of the other women affected. But anonymous message board postings calling for a game designer who’s been outspoken on social issues to receive a “good solid injury to the knees” is not uncommon.

More.

Ed Morrissey has more, at Hot Air, "A few more thoughts on GamerGate."

ADDED: As the necessary caveat, I've gotta add these tweets from Christina Hoff Sommers, via Ed Morrissey's post:

College deans,news editors,politicians--ran for cover when gender hardliners made strident demands.Gamers--male & female--fighting back.

— Christina H. Sommers (@CHSommers) September 5, 2014

The gender warriors made a huge tactical error when they went after the gamers. Wrong group to irritate.

— Christina H. Sommers (@CHSommers) September 5, 2014