>DOUGH
>https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1605271521768906772
https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/12/20/the-year-of-the-underdogs
The year of the underdogs
From Volodymyr Zelensky to the Moroccan football team, they shone in 2022
Rocky has always been a good fighter. He hits like hell and his nose has never been busted. The trouble is, he never got a break. He lives in a hovel and rarely takes off his fingerless gloves. But lightning strikes, and Apollo Creed, the world heavyweight champion, gives him a shot at the title. “This time”, says the loan shark who employs Rocky as muscle, “Lady Luck may be in your corner.”
“We are the Rocky of this World Cup,” said Walid Regragui, Morocco’s football coach, invoking the latter-day saint of underdogs at the close of what has been the underdog’s year. His team were not the only outsiders to stun the tournament. Saudi Arabia beat Argentina; Japan beat Germany. But the dauntless Moroccans were the underdog kings, seeing off the Belgians, Spanish and Portuguese, three of the favourites, to become the first Arab and African side to reach a semi-final. (In the stands, some Iranian fans, underdogs in a benighted nation, booed their country’s anthem and cried.)
>DOUGH
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605292454261182464
TWITTER FILES PART 8
>TWITTER FILES PART 8
On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and issued a stark warning about a certain technology perfected by the intelligence community, which could be used by the US government against its own citizens to create “total tyranny”
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/
Twitter Aided the Pentagon in its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
Internal documents show Twitter whitelisted CENTCOM accounts that were then used to run its online influence campaign abroad.
Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire starting giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
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The Stanford report did not identify all of the accounts in the network but one they did name was the exact same Twitter account CENTCOM asked for whitelist privileges in its 2017 email. I verified via Twitter’s internal tools. The account used an AI-created deep fake image.
who tf is lex