Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Explains Why He Banned Trump

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Explains Why He Banned Trump


In a long tweet thread, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained why the social media giant decided to ban Trump for life.

In the first of a series of tweets Dorsey wrote,” I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban
@realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?

“I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.”

“That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us,” Dorsey stated.

The Blaze reports:

Twitter hit Trump with a 12-hour suspension on Jan. 6 over three messages he sent continuing to insist the election was stolen from him the same day a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a siege that left at least five people dead. The suspension came with a warning that future violations of the company’s “Civic Integrity or Violent threats policies” by the president would result in a permanent suspension of his account.

Two days later, Twitter followed through the with threat, banning Trump from the platform for good citing “risk of further incitement of violence.”

The next day, Twitter’s stock took a 6% hit, yet the company continued to purge tens of thousands of accounts allegedly for spreading the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Facebook also joined Twitter in banning Trump along with many other companies.

Apple, Google, and Amazon took down Twitter’s direct competitor Parler which had recently seen a massive influx of users due to Twitter and Facebook’s clamping down of conservative viewpoints.

Dorsey said he does not believe the takedown was a coordinated effort.

 

BREAKING: Shocking Video From Data Scientists Exposes Major Election Night "Errors"


A video outlining major election night “errors” is going viral on social media.

In the video, data scientists show nine different drastic vote swings in a matter of 20 minutes in the state of Pennsylvania.

In one instance, between 9:15 p.m. ET and 9:18 p.m. ET, 300,000 votes were magically added for Biden.

John Basham tweeted about the video, “BREAKING: VIDEO- Data Scientists Identify Huge Vote Shift Across Multiple States On Election Night. Vote Counts Went Backward For @realDonaldTrump & Votes Were Shifted From Trump To Biden Across Multiple States, Counties, & Precincts!”

Watch as votes for President Trump seem to disappear, and ask yourself: Did your vote count? How many times or at all? How many errors are too many? When do votes ever go negative? Who is responsible for all of these mistakes? Don’t we have a right to know?

Can You Hack an Election in 7 Minutes?


Can an election be hacked in seven minutes?

Andrew Appel, a professor at Princeton University set out to do just that, hack into a voting machine. In order to do this he could have tried traditional ways of hacking or writing malware to sneak on to a machine at a polling place that are left unguarded for days, but he decided it was much easier to just buy one online.

For the cost of a whole $82, Appel became the proud owner of a behemoth machine called Sequoia AVC Advantage. This machine is one of the oldest and most vulnerable in the US and is unfortunately used in places like Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

 

Politico Reports:

No sooner did a team of bewildered deliverymen roll the 250-pound device into a conference room near Appel’s cramped, third-floor office than the professor set to work. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds.

Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.

To mark the achievement, his student snapped a photo of Appel—oblong features, messy black locks and a salt-and-pepper beard—grinning for the camera, fists still on the circuit board, as if to look directly into the eyes of the American taxpayer: Don’t look at me—you’re the one who paid for this thing.

 

Appel’s mischief might be called an occupational asset: He is part of a diligent corps of so-called cyber-academics—professors who have spent the past decade serving their country by relentlessly hacking it.

Electronic voting machines—particularly a design called Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE’s—took off in 2002, in the wake of Bush v. Gore. For the ensuing 15 years, Appel and his colleagues have deployed every manner of stunt to convince the public that the system is pervasively unsecure and vulnerable.

Beginning in the late ’90s, Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marsha led their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director).

There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac-Man; infecting popular models with self-duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on eBay.

Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph.D. students grew into a singular conviction: It was only a matter of time, they feared, before a national election—an irresistible target—would invite an attempt at a coordinated cyberattack.

There is no singular national body that regulates the security or even execution of what happens on Election Day, and there never has been. It’s a process regulated state by state.

The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course).

They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don’t.

Cleary hacking into voting machines is an easy task, which is a major concern for our democracy. If powerful people with money and resources want to stay in control, we now know they can make that happen very easily.

Full story at Politico.

 


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