Reports indicate now that top Twitter management willfully blocked security, undermined safety from violence.
Vice President for Trust & Safety Del Harvey is called out here.
Both committee staff and former employees who gave depositions singled out former Twitter Vice President for Trust & Safety Del Harvey as an obstacle to tougher enforcement against election-related extremism in the run-up to the insurrection. Harvey, the 120-page summary concludes, “personally obstructed” the creation of a coded incitement to violence policy drafted by Twitter Safety employees in the months before the insurrection.
You may recall that Del Harvey was something of an intentional imposter.
Harvey has an unusual background for someone with so much power over public speech. She isn’t a lawyer and won’t say if she graduated from college. Del Harvey is not her legal name. She is secretive about her past but allows that she grew up in the South, where she spent a summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution working with troubled youth.
Nothing says people can trust your ability to protect them from abuse like you can’t even protect yourself from abuse. She was proudly saying she hid herself in a privileged and selfish way, not in a sustainable or healthy one. Imagine a police chief saying they couldn’t use their real identity. Absurd.
And grew up in “the South”? South of what? That’s a reference that sticks out like a sore thumb. Was she lifeguarding a whites-only pool in “the South” of Africa?
Is that meant to be a metaphor for her background in public safety being framed by America’s notoriously racist systems? Did she work at all to reverse the caste system she clearly benefited from (no school, no name, just “streets” experience… becomes VP so you know she has to be white)?
It wouldn’t be so bad that she refused to offer up anything resembling qualifications, if her work wasn’t also described both inside and outside the company as an abysmal failure for over a decade.
Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo declared in a recent leaked message to employees that the company has “sucked” at dealing with abuse and trolls.
She apparently wowed people with such insights as warning that the phrase “locked and loaded” could somehow have a self-defense context and therefore should never be moderated to prevent violence.
There is scant evidence the phrase could ever be used in an actual self-defense context, as you should realize from reading the above examples.
For readers new to this blog, I’ll refer you here:
Trump repeatedly used language with the intention it would encourage others to commit a terrorist act.
There is even less evidence that Harvey understood this. Allowing imminent real attack violence was clearly worse than stopping it, especially when there is zero evidence moderating that phrase could have any adverse effects.
We know with certainty, for example, that “locked and loaded” was being used in specific encoded calls to gin up support for attack violence.
One simple explanation for the disconnect between attack and defense context is that the phrase “locked and loaded” isn’t based on anything even approaching rational self-defense behavior.
It’s a fantastical emotional tough-guy film reference at best (a fluffy 1949 John Wayne film about invasion, Sands of Iwo Jima), which does NOT rise to realistic defense speech at all or ever.
William Manchester, historian and WWII Marine Corps veteran, put it best in 1987:
It was peacetime again when John Wayne appeared on the silver screen as Sergeant Stryker in ”Sands of Iwo Jima,” but that film underscores the point; I went to see it with another ex-Marine, and we were asked to leave the theater because we couldn’t stop laughing.
After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Wayne humiliated in person at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases, were sent there. The hospital was packed, the halls lined with beds. Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Marine Corps was being bled white.
Each evening, Navy corpsmen would carry litters down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a movie. One night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted and out stepped John Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit – 10-gallon hat, bandanna, checkered shirt, two pistols, chaps, boots and spurs. He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and said, ”Hi ya, guys!” He was greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody booed. Suddenly everyone was booing.
This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren’t going to listen to him. He tried and tried to make himself heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left. If you liked ”Sands of Iwo Jima,” I suggest you be careful. Don’t tell it to the Marines.”
Even more to the point, as explored in Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing, people who regularly confuse vapid John Wayne phrases with real life may be signaling intent to commit mass atrocities.
Compare it to the defense strategy phrase “keep your powder dry”, if you will.
When you understand that “locked and loaded” is primarily a “symbol of the fake machismo” used in force projection of white nationalism and thus emotive violence, then you don’t worry it might somehow end up in self-defense vernacular.
Half-cocked. Fully in need of moderation.
Donald Trump Hopes to John Wayne His Way Into the White House: Why the American Hero trope is so dangerous
Experts all pointing big blame fingers at Harvey make a very interesting point.
Even if she manifestly was unqualified to be in a safety VP role, and even if she had failed at safety for a decade already, at what point does she become responsible for violence enabled by personally blocking moderation?
Speaking of “loaded”, to me it reads like she was operating like a bar bouncer who intervenes to make sure that clearly intoxicated customers are still served… because she wonders what if they might be scientists studying the effects of alcohol on driving. And then people are dead.
