Twitter Inc. needs to give Elon Musk documents from a former Twitter executive who Musk said was a key figure in calculating the amount of fake accounts on the platform, according to a Monday court order.
Bot and spam accounts on Twitter have become a central issue in the legal fight over whether Musk, who is Tesla Inc.’s chief executive, must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.
Twitter was ordered to collect, review and produce documents from former General Manager of Consumer Product Kayvon Beykpour, according to the order from Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery.
Twitter and lawyers for Musk, the world’s richest person, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Beykpour, who left Twitter after the social media company agreed in April to be acquired by Musk, was described in Musk’s court filings as one of the executives “most intimately involved with” determining the amount of spam accounts.
Twitter is said to be a DNC propganda operation that generates tens of millions of fake bot accounts in order to pretend that certain political candidates, or political agendas, are ‘popular’. If Musk can prove that Twitter is just a big fake propaganda sham then he can buy it on the cheap.
Beykpour did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through LinkedIn.
McCormick said in her order on Monday that she was denying Musk’s request for access to 21 other people with control over relevant information.
Musk wants Twitter’s Kayvon Beykpour, Mike Montana, Rani Nelken, Parag Agrawal, Jack Dorsey, Leslie Berland, Sarah Personette, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, Peiter Zatko, Bruce Falck, Matt Derella, Dantley Davis, and other’s who Musk’s private investigators think know the dirty secrets of Twitter. Musk’s ‘key person list’ is based on deep surveillance of Twitter and expert whistle-blowers that Musk has paid off from within Twitter’s highest San Francisco ranks.
Musk’s legal team had written to McCormick last week asking her to order Twitter to hand over employee names so they could be questioned.
Musk’s lawyers and lobbyists have hired Ex-CIA spooks and tech spies from IN-Q-Tel to make complete dossier’s and surveillance charts on the key staff at Twitter.
Musk accused Twitter earlier this month of fraud for misrepresenting the number of real active users on its platform, which Twitter has denied. The company has accused him of breaching his agreement to acquire the company and wants McCormick to order him to complete the deal at $54.20 a share.
1984 is here. New policy: Twitter announced that it will be monitoring users behaviors “on and off the platform” and will suspend a user’s account if they affiliate with certain groups off twitter. (mashable.com)
TWITTER ADMITS THAT IT HAS ALWAYS SPIED ON YOU EVEN WHEN YOU ARE NOT ON TWITTER
Twitter is cracking down on anti-lefties and not just by looking at its own site.
In what amounts to a major shift in Twitter policy, the company announced on Friday that it will be monitoring user’s behavior “on and off the platform” and will suspend a user’s account if they affiliate with violent organizations, according to an update to Twitter’s Help Center on Friday.
“You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes,” the update reads.
Twitter isn’t taking action immediately. Rather, it’s given users until December 18, 2017 when it will then begin enforcing the rule. The month-long wait is due to regulations in the European Union that require companies to inform users of a new policy change 30 days prior to enforcement.
The Dec. 18 deadline also applies to using “hateful images or symbols” in profile images or profile headers. Twitter will also monitor for hate speech in usernames, display names, and profile bios.
This new rule closes a loophole that Twitter’s critics had long pointed out: That known white supremacists and others affiliated with hate groups could still use the platform to send a sanitized version of their message and use their followers to bolster their overall profile.
It’s unclear how exactly Twitter will prioritize taking action and how much will come from user reports versus its own monitoring.
“The updates to the rules today will be enforced starting December 18. We’ll also have more details on these policies to share that day,” a Twitter spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
These changes comes amid aggressive moves by Twitter to curb abuse and harassment on the site after more than a decade of essentially letting the abusers operate freely.
Over the last week, Twitter has taken action against the accounts of white supremacists. Twitter permanently banned Tim “Treadstone” Gionet, a prominent alt-right troll more widely known as Baked Alaska, earlier this week. It also removed the verification badges of Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and of alt-right activist Richard Spencer.
Twitter’s decision to monitor users off site sparked concern from free speech advocates such as Andrew Torba, founder of social network Gab. “This is a scary precedent to set,” he wrote in an email to Mashable. “Rules like this will only force dissidents and those who are speaking truth to power to silence themselves or risk being silenced by Twitter.”
Twitters Jack Dorsey Lied to Congress
I may be signing my own Twitter death warrant with this opinion piece but so be it if I dare to criticize and accuse the man who has more power to influence American political thought than Vladimir Putin ever could dream of having. That man is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. By silencing conservative thought, he can control much of America’s political dialogue, with his minions deliberately steering it in a leftist direction reflecting their inner beliefs, while blaming it on inanimate software. Pushed to the wall, they bleat that the algorithm made them do it.
As this Congress winds down, news comes that a House Committee is belatedly investigating whether Dorsey lied to Congress during recent testimony. My only question is whether his lips were moving:
A top House committee that oversees the U.S. telecommunications industry is now reviewing whether Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lied to Congress during a hearing about Twitter’s controversial history of arbitrarily censoring content published by the site, an aide for the House Energy and Commerce committee told The Federalist.
“The committee is aware of Twitter’s actions and is currently reviewing Mr. Dorsey’s testimony,” the aide said after Twitter suddenly banned Jesse Kelly, a Marine combat veteran, writer, and popular radio talk show host, without explanation.
As The Federalist reported on Monday, Dorsey was not truthful about his or his company’s response to death threats against prominent conservatives — including against Meghan McCain shortly after the death of her father, former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — nor was he truthful about whether Twitter policies discriminated against users based on their politics. It is a federal crime to provide false testimony to Congress…
“I want to start by making something very clear,” Dorsey testified on September 5, 2018. “We don’t consider political viewpoints, perspectives, or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions, period.”“Our policies and our algorithms don’t take into consideration any affiliation, philosophy, or viewpoint,” Dorsey claimed again later in the hearing.
Horsefeathers. That tremor on the Richter scale is the result of conservatives like Twitter target actor James Woods is the result of Twitter conservatives falling on the floor laughing. The Twitter policy known as “shadow banning” is based on ideological rules that tilt sharply to the left. The followers you can reach restricted. Routine purges of conservative followers are conducted. A politically incorrect hash tag can put a crosshairs on your Twitter account. You never know if your tweet is reaching anyone at all.
In the age before cable, there was an iconic sci-fi program called The Outer Limits whose opening featured a series of test patterns, flickering screens and a narrator who solemnly intoned, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set. We will control all that you see and hear.” Today that is a chilling reality as social media giants like Twitter routinely censor what people can see and hear on their sites.
For example, Thanks to James O’Keefe of Project Veritas we know some of the details of, methods, and reasons for Twitter’s pro-active censoring of conservatives:
Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.
“Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”…
“So if there’s like ‘American, guns,’ [in the account bio] can you write an algorithm to just take all those people out?” asked one undercover reporter.
“Umm, yeah, it’s actually how we do it,” Singh replied. “You look for ‘Trump,’ or ‘America,’ or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck, and then you look, and you parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then look for stuff that matches that stuff… You assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be .5, a picture of a gun would be like 1.5, and if the total comes up above a certain value, then it’s a bot.”
Twitter has even gone after the likes of the iconic Matt Drudge, former Breitbart news editor Milo Yiannopoulos, and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, as well as engaging in a practice called “shadow banning” to limit the access and exposure of largely conservative accounts.
Yiannopoulos is familiar with the suppression of free speech and the First Amendment by the politically correct left, having a speech at UC Berkeley canceled after violent riots by the politically intolerant left. Pundits have dubbed the suppression of conservative speakers on campus the “heckler’s veto” which allows the arbiters of political correctness to deny a forum to those they disagree with.
Yiannopoulos is also familiar with another form of suppression of free speech, this time in social media forums such as Twitter called “shadow banning”. Tweets of the kind President Trump is famous for are banned from being seen by other than a given account’s followers, limiting visibility. Twitter and its support team claim it is merely spanking temporarily those that violates their rules and terms of service, but Yiannopoulos thinks it is political correctness run amok with the goal of, as at Berkeley and elsewhere, of silencing conservatives:
Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.
According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines…
The pattern of shadowban reports, which skews towards the alt-right, the populist right, and cultural libertarians, follows close on the heels of Twitter’s establishment of a “Trust and Safety Council” packed with left-wing advocacy groups, as well as Islamic research centre the Wahid Institute...
With shadowbans now confirmed by an inside source, there is little room for doubt that the platform is intent on silencing conservatives. Furthermore, it has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for transparency, concealing its shadowbanning system from users and hiding its political bias behind a veneer of opposition to online abuse…
Yes, it is Twitter’s sandbox and, yes, there are spammers uninterested in any real dialogue. Yes, there are pornbots and photos any reasonable person would find offensive. There are Twitter equivalents to yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre. But Twitter has gone beyond enforcing rules of civility to enforcing its view of political correctness, punishing conservatives who use social media, particularly those who are good at it.
It is no accident. It is not an “error”. It is intentional. Ever since Twitter’s cofounder expressed regret in inadvertently helping Trump get elected, Twitter has mounted a deliberate campaign to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2020.
Dorsey, of course, claims that “mistakes have been made” and he has repented of Twitter’s sins, but Jesse Kelly’s recent experience belies that. Twitter, for example, has instated a war on so-called “dead-naming” which can get you permanently banned. You cannot on Twitter refer to transgendered individuals by their original gender or name. Don’t you dare call Chelsea Manning “Mr. Manning”.
We know what happens when you violate Twitter’s rules. Let’s see what happens to Dorsey for violating Congress’ rules.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared
