Today’s miscellaneous political stuff - Part 10

He really does try and sound like some mafia boss doesn’t he.

Only the best…

Isn’t this interesting.

From The Washington Post…

“What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report”

Frim the article..

“The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.

Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

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“That focus on Trump meant the report missed an opportunity to hold social media companies accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, even though the platforms had been the subject of intense scrutiny since Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, the people familiar with the matter said.

Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack, the people said — a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, two of the people said.”

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Deference to Trump 

“A large part of Twitter’s failure to act, multiple former Twitter employees, including Johnson and Collier Navaroli, told the committee, was deference to Trump.

Trump’s account was the only one of Twitter’s hundreds of millions that rank-and-file officials could not review in one of their main internal tools, Profile Viewer, which allowed moderators to establish a history and share notes about an account’s past tweets and behaviors, the employees testified.

The block prevented moderators from reviewing how others had assessed Trump’s tweets, even as his following grew to 88 million and his tweets drove conversations around the world. Trump “was a unique user who sat above and beyond the rules of Twitter,” Collier Navaroli testified.

“There was this underlying understanding we’re not reaching out to the President,” she told the committee. “We’re not reaching out to Donald Trump. There is no point in doing education here because this is how this individual is. So the resolution was to do nothing.”

Collier Navaroli and a few others inside the company had worked to push executives to action long before Jan. 6, she said, citing internal memos and messages. In the week after the November 2020 election, she said, they began warning that tweets calling for civil unrest were multiplying. By Dec. 19, she said, Twitter staff had begun warning that discussions of civil unrest had centralized on Jan. 6 — the day that Trump had called his supporters to mass in Washington, saying it “will be wild!”

By Dec. 29, she and members of other Twitter teams had begun warning that Twitter lacked a coordinated response plan, and on Jan. 5, she said, she warned a supervisor directly that the company would need a much more robust response the following day.

When asked by a committee staffer whether Twitter had adopted a “war footing,” having seen the warnings, Collier Navaroli said her U.S. team had fewer than six people, and that “everybody was acting as if it was a regular day and nothing was going on.”

Like the response.  Why does one group of people feel they have the right to dictate how another group should live?  Seriously what is it to them if someone is gay or a transgender?  

And the lies continue.