MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Hide Replies’

Scandal-Ridden OPCW Now Using Twitter’s “Hide Replies” Function – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on February 20, 2020

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/02/19/scandal-ridden-opcw-now-using-twitters-hide-replies-function/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

When Twitter first implemented its “hide replies” function last year I published an article warning that it could be used by establishment narrative managers to marginalize dissident voices and diminish the relatively egalitarian nature of the platform. When I wrote it I was imagining the function being used by overt manipulators like cable TV pundits and Washington Post columnists, and think tank operatives like Neera Tanden who vocally supported the implementation of the function.

What I absolutely was not expecting, as paranoid and conspiracy-minded as I am, was a highly regarded UN-associated international chemical watchdog group using the function for that purpose.

As of this writing, if you go to the Twitter account for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), you’ll see this tweet at the second from the top:

If you log on to Twitter and go to that tweet and click this little button, it will take you to a section of “hidden replies” which aren’t visible on the main tweet.

You will not be surprised to learn that the tweet which the OPCW’s Twitter account has chosen to hide is critical of the organization:

That “#wikileaksdoumareport” hashtag in the hidden tweet refers to the leaks which have been pouring out from the OPCW adding to the mountain of evidence that the US, UK and France bombed the Syrian government in 2018 as a retaliation for a chemical weapons attack in the town Douma which did not occur. Whoever is in charge of the OPCW’s Twitter account does not like the lowly commoners talking about this on their page.

Here’s an OPCW tweet from a week ago which has the same issue:

Click the same little button to view hidden replies and you’ll see three of them on this one, again all discussing the scandal-ridden Douma investigation:

It doesn’t seem to happen if you’re not logged on to your account, and seems to express differently on different browsers, but if you log in and scroll through the OPCW Twitter page you’ll find many tweets with hidden replies, almost all of which directly pertain to the Douma scandal.

The OPCW tweet which appears to have the largest number of replies is the smear job they released earlier this month attacking the whistleblowers whose leaks poked giant holes in the official Douma narrative. This smear job has been ripped to shreds in an article by Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté, who in his trademark style systematically debunks the organisation’s attempts to spin the whistleblowers as incompetent outsiders who tried to manipulate the Douma investigation for no clear reason.

If you go to that OPCW tweet and scroll down you’ll see dozens of spaces where replies ought to be, with the message “This reply was hidden by the original Tweet author,” meaning hidden by the author of the initial top tweet by the OPCW. I’ve archived screenshots of the entire thread here as it looks from my account as of this writing, but here’s a small sample of what the top of the replies section looks like on that tweet:

I myself posted the reply that got the most likes and retweets back when the OPCW first shared its smear job, but in a strange twist on Twitter’s “hide replies” function it doesn’t show up in the main thread or in its “hidden replies” section. Other users also say they can’t see it in either section. So as things are right now it looks like some posts in threads with a large number of hidden replies are just disappeared entirely, which is all the more incentive for narrative managers to use it.

There are already many users in the comments objecting to the OPCW yet again making use of opacity to silence dissident voices, and understandably so. Ever since the first Douma leak in May 2018 this organisation has been stonewalling journalists, refusing to answer crucial questions, smearing its own investigators and denying them a platform to speak, all after hiding from the public the fact that there had been large amounts of internal dissent regarding its Douma investigation. This dissent included unanimous agreement between four toxicologists that no chlorine attack occurred in Douma, and reports that some 20 OPCW inspectors had voiced objections to the way the Douma investigation was taking place.

The OPCW had no business hiding all this information from the public about an event which led to an act of war against a sovereign nation, and it has no business hiding the public’s attempts to demand more information be brought into the light.

These deliberate acts of obfuscation make no sense if you look at the OPCW as an independent international investigative body whose sole interest is truth and the elimination of chemical weapons, but they make perfect sense if you see it as a narrative management apparatus of the US-centralized empire. The US government already has an established history of manipulating the OPCW into facilitating the advancement of pre-existing regime change agendas in the Middle East, and not one but two whistleblowers have separately attested that US government officials were brought in by OPCW leadership (in violation of the organisation’s supposed independence) to persuade them that the Syrian government had committed a chemical weapons attack.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is acting like a narrative management operation because that is what it has become: a tool to help the US-centralized empire spin narratives favorable to pre-existing regime change agendas like the one it has long had for the Syrian government. That’s how it behaves, so we should ignore all narrative spin and assume that that’s what it is until its behavior changes. As long as it continues walking like a duck and quacking like a duck, we should continue to assume that it’s a duck.

The OPCW has been hiding replies on Twitter, yes. But at least it has stopped hiding what it is.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Twitter’s ‘Hide Replies’ Function Serves To Appease The Elitists Of The Political/Media Class – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on September 24, 2019

It used to be that the unwashed masses were kept quarantined from the narrative makers of the plutocratic media; they’d stay safely insulated among their own kind and they’d tell the rabble what to think from behind a wall of inaccessibility.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/23/twitters-hide-replies-function-serves-to-appease-the-elitists-of-the-politicalmedia-class/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

 

“I honestly think the annoyingness of a certain candidate’s supporters on Twitter prevents other reporters/analysts from pointing out that said candidate’s campaign obviously isn’t going that well,” griped the popular statistician/establishment narrative manager Nate Silver on Twitter today, following angry backlash from American progressives for a controversial racially charged tweet a few hours earlier in which he referred to Bernie Sanders’ diverse base as “residue”.

We’ve been seeing many such complaints from elitists of the political/media class about the way Twitter’s somewhat egalitarian structure allows ordinary citizens to effectively criticize their posts, and it’s been growing louder and louder in recent years. Slate‘s Ashley Feinberg published an article earlier this month documenting New York Times columns over the last two years that have been dedicated to NYT columnists using their massive platforms to whinge about the comments they receive on Twitter. Feinberg’s article was inspired by the hilarious melodramatic hissy fit thrown by neocon Bret Stephens over some random guy calling him a “bedbug” on the social media site, but it’s amazing how many other columns the editors of the New York Times thought worthy of publication on this matter.

This ongoing meltdown by elitist narrative managers over the fact that mere commoners now dare address them in public without reverence and respect is the result of the novel nature of this dynamic. It used to be that the unwashed masses were kept quarantined from the narrative makers of the plutocratic media; they’d stay safely insulated among their own kind and they’d tell the rabble what to think from behind a wall of inaccessibility. Now if you’re in politics or media you’re expected to maintain a social media profile so that potential future employers can see what a good establishment lackey you are, but this new dynamic is clashing with the surging western populist movements who have an ever diminishing respect for that same establishment.

This freakout arguably began being shoved into mainstream consciousness with the completely bogus “Bernie bro” narrative  in 2015, when pundits and political influencers began seeing their comments sections light up with angry replies every time they moved to sabotage the 2016 Sanders campaign. Their discomfort at this new dynamic was falsely spun as the result of being targeted by sexism and racism because they could never get away with calling it what it really was: the experience of cognitive dissonance caused by the common riff raff criticizing them in a way to which they were not accustomed.

The mass media narrative managers are able to use their plutocrat-sponsored influence to create the illusion of an epidemic where one does not exist, as we’ve seen them do in the UK with the entirely fabricated “Labour antisemitism crisis”. It should come as no surprise, then, that Twitter has now taken steps to appease this elitist class by rolling out a new “hide replies” function in the US and Japan.

The function is typical of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s “I just want everyone to get along and keep giving me billions of dollars” mentality, allowing people to choose which replies to their posts are visible but including an option to “view hidden replies” for those who know where to look. You can tell the function is designed to appease the elitists of the political/media class by those who are happy about it, like the president of the Center for American Progress think tank Neera Tanden, who spends much of her time on Twitter smearing everyone to the left of Elizabeth Warren and tweeted “This is great” in response to the news about the “hide replies” function. Meanwhile those of a more anti-establishment political inclination have been voicing nothing but objections to the change.

Establishment loyalism (often mislabeled “centrism” despite its violent, extremist nature) is always necessarily elitist, since the sole function of that ideology is the preservation of elite power structures. We can learn a bit more about why their ilk loves this new “hide replies” function so much from a recent thread by a mainstream media denizen named Heidi N Moore, who has over 100,000 followers, and describes herself as follows: “Frequent guest on TV and radio, including MSNBC, CNBC and NPR, and my specialty is explaining difficult topics concisely and accurately. Bylines in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, USA Today, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Slate, Mashable and Fortune.com.”

Moore, who often complains bitterly about Sanders supporters and despises Jeremy Corbyn, says the new function is great because before she had to rely on using Twitter’s quality filter or only reading the replies of verified (blue-checkmarked) accounts, which was insufficient for silencing objections and problematic because, while having a large account comes with the advantage of “algorithmic authority“, “people desperate for attention love to free-ride on large accounts for clout.”

“Those trolls are depending on a siphoning effect: If a tweeter is important enough for the algorithm, then their reply might be too,” Moore’s elitism-swollen head proclaims. “They might pick up a few followers by replying snottily. It’s a grift.”

“Anyone who’s ever tweeted knows that your snottiest or spiciest sentiments will get shared more widely than positive ones,” Moore argues. “So there’s a technological incentive to create and boost sentiments around disrespect, dunking, misogyny, hatefulness etc etc etc.”

Note the deliberate conflation of “disrespect” and “dunking” with “misogyny” and “hatefulness”. Citing no evidence, Moore strongly implies that “Twitter swarms” (large numbers of disagreeable comments) are primarily directed at women with large or verified accounts, thus making the new function an ideal weapon against sexist silencing tactics.

“In addition, Hide Replies isn’t censorship — it puts the jerks into a little leper island, which anyone is free to visit,” Moore says. “But — here’s the genius — we all know that endless scrolling is the way we engage. How many people will stop and read all the replies AND hidden replies?”

Indeed, how many people will do so? Probably not many. Which is precisely why these once-completely unaccountable political/media class elites are so thrilled about this new function they’ve been whining and whining and whining for since 2015. They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they don’t like having their narratives disrupted by the plebs.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permissionto republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

 

 

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