OK, so here's the key bit:
"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
...
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted.
...
There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?
"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
...
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?