(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Democrats have exposed the basis of the House hearing on Twitter as Republican disinformation [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-08 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought up the 2019 tweet in which Trump said that she and Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” She asked Anika Collier Navaroli, who was at the time the most senior member of Twitter’s content moderation team, how her team had assessed the tweet. The answer was that they found it in violation of Twitter policy—that, in fact, the moderation guidelines specifically prohibited saying that immigrants should “go back where they came from” and similar language. But Navaroli’s judgment was overruled by her supervisor, and not only that, the moderation guidelines were changed to allow that kind of attack against immigrants. x "So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter" -- AOC guides Navaroli through explanation how Trump violated Twitter's policies and then Twitter changed its policies to accommodate him pic.twitter.com/51nqFSQEXG — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023 Trump benefited from Twitter bending over backward to let him say whatever he wanted. But that wasn’t his approach to other people’s tweets about him. When model and social media influencer Chrissy Teigen insulted Trump on Twitter, the White House asked Twitter to have that taken down, Navaroli testified in response to questions from Reps. Gerry Connolly and Maxwell Frost. Republicans are saying it’s illegitimate that the Biden campaign, which was not a government organization, asked to have nonconsensual nude photos of the candidate’s son removed from Twitter, when the Trump White House made it a practice of asking to censor celebrities for calling Trump a “pussy ass bitch.” Rolling Stone reports that this wasn’t uncommon. “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” according to an unnamed “former top aide to a senior Trump administration official.” And, Rolling Stone reports, those requests often came from Trump political appointees, but not always. Sometimes they came from Republican members of Congress. (And Democrats, but Democrats didn’t call this hearing to complain about the practice of taking complaints from public figures and assessing whether they met the standards for action by moderators.) Ocasio-Cortez also highlighted that the Trump administration itself openly worked with Twitter and other social media companies on preventing foreign interference in elections and the spread of disinformation. She quoted Trump official Chad Wolf as saying, shortly before the 2020 elections, “We now have direct lines of communication with tech and social media companies and election officials so that both parties can seamlessly take action against false information spreading online.” All of this goes to show that there was nothing unusual or nefarious about the Biden campaign reaching out to Twitter to flag troubling tweets. Twitter had a whole process for handling things like that and regularly did so in response to Democrats and Republicans alike. A request didn’t mean automatic action from Twitter. Sometimes Twitter changed the rules to let a Trump tweet stay up. Sometimes a Trump request to remove an insult from Chrissy Teigen didn’t succeed. But nude photos are pretty obviously a violation of Twitter policy, so those were going to get swift action. It would have been the same if someone had started spreading nude photos of Don Jr. (shudder), as it should be. So that’s part of what Democrats did with their time at this hearing. Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was showing that she still doesn’t know what’s in federal law or the First Amendment and combining that ignorance with some COVID-19 disinformation: x Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks (wrongly) that Twitter broke the law by suspending her account for violating the terms of service pic.twitter.com/xKugHRHZ1F — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023 But that’s what Greene was there to do. It’s what every Republican was there to do. It doesn’t matter to them how easy it is to fact-check any of this. It just doesn’t matter, because these glaring falsehoods will play well with her supporters, and that’s all she cares about. That’s a big difference in the demands placed on the two parties. Democrats are meticulously making a fact-based case and Republicans are spewing disinformation—and the latter are getting more of what they want out of this hearing. RELATED STORIES: No one has ever worked harder to waste their 15 minutes of fame than Sarah Huckabee Sanders House Republicans melt down over factual tweet noting their embrace of racist conspiracy theory We're chatting with one of our favorite fellow election analysts on this week's episode of The Downballot, Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball. Kyle helped call races last year for CBS and gives us a rare window inside a TV network's election night decision desk, which literally has a big button to call control of the House—that no one got to press. Kyle also dives into his new race ratings for the 2024 Senate map, including why he thinks Joe Manchin's unlikely tight-rope act might finally come to an end. In their Weekly Hits, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap big developments in two Senate contests: Rep. Adam Schiff's entry into the race to succeed Dianne Feinstein, and the GOP's unexpected show of unity in the open-seat election in Indiana. They also dissect the first poll of this year's hotly contested race for governor in Kentucky and highlight another 2023 battle that shouldn't get overlooked: the race for a vacant seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/8/2151868/-House-Twitter-hearing-is-a-case-study-in-why-it-s-so-hard-to-combat-Republican-disinformation Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/