Is everybody reading the Twitter files?
I’m most fascinated by the hubris of the former Twitter operatives who thought it was up to them to be the arbiters of Good and Bad.
I’m even more interested in their extraordinary pettiness and parochialism. The people they thought merited censorship weren’t warlords, dictators or terrorists. They were Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Chaya Raichik, Dan Bongino, and Charlie Kirk.
You’ve got this enormous power, and you use it to. . . hassle the Libs of Tik Tok account? Shadowban Charlie Kirk? I thought the only person who took Charlie Kirk very seriously was Charlie Kirk.
And Jay Bhattacharya? The nerdy Stanford prof? You are really scraping the barrel if you think he’s a baddie in need of suppression.
I won’t even talk about Dan Bongino because, honestly.
This is all so incredibly… small. These people were censored over very insignificant transgressions. You’ve got all this power and you unleash it against Charlie Kirk? How do you not feel completely pathetic after that? These Twitter operatives sound like they had the mental age of 11.
Clarissa's Blog 
“These Twitter operatives sound like they had the mental age of 11.”
11? More like five-year-old kindergatners fighting in a sandbox, if you ask me.
And the petty petty-mindedness shows how spoilt and self-entitled they have felt all their lives long. Privileged, spoilt, rotten nitwits with worthless minds and expensive degrees from so-called ‘elite’ schools. [I know what I’m talking about as I went to one myself: no sour grapes here].
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“Twitter operatives sound like they had the mental age of 11”
Stepping into a minefield and starting to tapdance…. what’s the male/female percentage of these operatives?
There’s something very Mean Girls* about twitter censorship….
*Mean Girls was a 2004 comedy film about social power and prestige competition among American high school girls, though IIRC those reach their peak around the middle school years (12-14-ish) though that could just be when it’s most obvious and by high school it’s more hidden from simpler male observers.
Similarly the “Fashion Club” on the animated series Daria covered a lot of the same ground, often better…
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Are they publishing more than what’s showing up on Twitter? So far I’m disappointed not to be seeing much in the way of original documents. It’s hard to read as a string of tweets with a few screenshots attached
Is there more that I don’t know about, or are they really slow-rolling it this much?
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I’m also waiting for a long-read article or even a book. This deserves some good, detailed investigative reporting like the kind Berenson did in Pandemia or Sam Quinones in Dreamland.
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Unsurprisingly, Twitter is a crap format for what needs to be said.
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Fun facts from 1946: while the rank-and-file may be protected to a limited degree by the fact that they were “just following orders” and weren’t able to push back without being cast out, the Nuremburg Tribunal established that any of the officers could be fair game.
Back in 1946, I believe that established that any of the Reich’s military who had the rank of Hauptmann or above had to answer for their role in the regime.
But what you are asking for is effectively similar to someone back in 1940 asking for a true and faithful accounting of the Reich’s crimes while the Reich continues to be ascendant.
So I’d like to skip forward to the tribunals of the “officer class” of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and so forth, because anything else is a Typical American Political Entertainment Activity, and the books on it should be written later.
Other fun facts from American history: the modern war crimes tribunal and the Second Bank of the United States, the one that Andrew Jackson undermined in order to guarantee European banking dominance over the US, have an overlap.
It’s almost like across the generations, the same groups of people seeking freedom and independence have to fight the same groups of people who want anything other than that.
And it’s actually more than what you’re seeing at Twitter, BTW.
When the Bitchy Hall Monitors of Twitter were sacked, suddenly Japanese Twitter looked considerably more … Japanese.
Gone from Twitter were the not-so-subtle pushes of Korean K-Pop and Korean culture into Japan.
Gone from Twitter were the shadow bans and search blocks of Japanese people promoting Japanese culture.
Less BTS, more Hatsune Miku.
Japanese entertainment culture is so overly sweetened that the best it usually does is sweeten itself with saccharine, and so the sudden “sugar shock” was highly noticeable.
While we’re at it, let me offend “weeb culture”, just because I can: Naruto and One Piece are not high art, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was not the best anime ever created, and Serial Experiments: Lain is an IQ test to see whether “weeb culture” people can actually understand something with cultural complexity.
Also, that last one dovetails a bit into cliff’s earlier comment about “mean girls” culture, especially on the Internet.
In 1980s and 1990s Japan, the cool girls joined forces and fought crime, because what else would you do if your gang leader’s secretly a cyborg from the intel community, your friends are all secretly cops or military people, even the one pretending to be a fitness instructor, and you’re a hot chick with a cool bike and an on-and-off non-relationship with a cop who wants in your pants? (Hey, Bubblegum Crisis, I’m looking at you.)
But it’s so good to see Japanese Twitter embracing its own “cringe” a lot more and importing someone else’s a lot less. 🙂
“Unsurprisingly, Twitter is a crap format.”
Fixed that with a full stop for you. 🙂
Twitter is a crap format because its length restrictions for years shaped it into a space for bumper sticker slogans and meme shitposting, all of which are more of the same American Political Discourse As An Entertaining Activity.
A considerable number of anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, agorists, and so forth have embraced Twitter not because it’s anything other than crap, but because they can turn the crap into a non-stop parade of subversive entertainment.
Example from today involves that infamous Joe Biden driving photo:
GET IN, WE’RE TRADING FOR THE MERCHANT OF DEATH
Drives off without Marine
Also from today:
Women with a time machine:
Left: I am your granddaughter
Right: Really?
Men with a time machine:
Left (Chad Wojak): The Japanese Empire will bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.
Right (FDR): I know.
The Canadian euthanasia memes are pretty brutal right now. 🙂
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