In my view, this is the gold standard of Christmas carols. Nobody know for certain who write the soaring melody. It might have been Handel.

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I apologize for the various WordPress glitches of late. They are fooling around with the software again. Now, on every draft post, I have to put up with idiotic suggestions from the platform on what to write about. Just now, it was, “Are you more of a night or morning person?” Get off my screen, you meddling fools! I don’t need your pedestrian input to find inspirations for an ethics blog’s content.

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The Twitter censorship story reminded me again of how biased, cowardly and dead wrong the left-ish commenters and silent readers here were over the past few years to flee Ethics Alarms because it accurately, fairly and objectively figured out how unjustified and sinister their favorite party’s treatment of  President Trump, how contrived and rigged the Russian collusion investigation was, how destructive the two partisan impeachments were, how dangerous the mainstream media’s transformation into a propaganda weapon had become, and how ethically rotten their favorite party was. Ethics Alarms was right, they were wrong, and if even one of the self-exiled who pulled themselves up to their full height, stuck their defiant chins in the air, and accused me of “drinking the Kool-Aid” had an atom of courage or integrity, they would apologize and ask to have their commenting privileges restored. Instead, they remain enablers of the attacks on individual rights and democratic institutions by their apathy, acquiescence, and denial. People are always accusing me of being “upset” about the ethics issues we cover here. I almost never am. This, however, pisses me off.

1. Hopeless, but admirable.…Since Google has traveled from “Don’t Be Evil” to Big Tech ethics villainy, a new search engine has been launched, Freespoke, as a non-totalitarianism-enabling alternative.  The problem with all of these competitors, like DuckDuckGo, is that they just aren’t as reliable. Still, I’ll give this one a chance. Here’s a good sign: a search for”ethics blog” turned up Ethics Alarms on the first page, 7th in line. On Google, the same search placed Ethics Alarms on the sixth page, after many sites that receive far less traffic and several that are functionally dead, like the Legal Ethics Forum, which once was one of my favorite resources. Its last post was last January, yet its two pages ahead of  EA. Gee, I wonder why that would be? Looks like I can’t blame all of the reduced traffic here on pusillanimous wokesters… Continue reading →

This is going to be only one post when it ought to be about five. I’m restraining myself; here is another example of a story that has me in a self-flagellating mood because I have so mismanaged my life, time, opportunities and talents that I am reduced to fulminating futilely on an obscure blog that does nothing to effect any substantive change, at a period in our culture’s journey when ignorance and malevolence threaten the nation’s essence.  Meanwhile, the likes of Alyssa Milano, Milo Yiannopoulos, and social media “influencers ” have millions of followers who heed their “wisdom.” Continue reading →

So far, not surprisingly, the mainstream media isn’t covering the story encompassed by Musk’s internal records about how Twitter helped bury the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. It is continuing to concentrate on Kanye West’s Nazi affection and his banning by Musk as its Twitter story of the day. This reflects poorly on Trump, you see. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

Today Musk sent the relevant Twitter records to ex-Rolling Stone substack journalist Matt Taibbi, who tweeted lengthy Twitter-burst about what they show. I hate reading those 10 part Tweet-streams, so here is what they say put together:

“Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.'”

As in this attachment, from Musk’s documentation:

Taibbi continued,

“Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However… This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives…there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen” that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop …the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde [That’s her above] playing a key role. …Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.” This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams: Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy. 

They just freelanced it,’ is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘Hacking’ was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

Continue reading →