Twitter, Reddit support challenge of visa applicant social media requirement

The word choice "very good reason" in the parent comment isn't in regards to anyone's view of the ethics of a particular case. A different way of phrasing the parent comment would be prosecutors only pursue cases that they think are winnable, given the evidence available.

It is not 99.7 percent. It is in fact 99.97 percent.

12 denials from 33942 requests. 1 out of roughly 2828 requests instead of 282 requests.

Having worked with people who bring cases to FISA, they spend a ton of time ensuring they are ironclad before they bother bringing them to FISA.

Previously I had assumed it was a lot of rubber-stamping, however the folks I worked with frequently bemoaned about how incredibly difficult and time consuming it was to get a FISA warrant.

>Are 99.7% of cases ~really~ ironclad?

>> I agree that this is too low and is a sign of rubber stamp-iness, but what would be the right rejection rate to make you feel more comfortable about the FISA process?

Did you also delete the copy stored in NSA’s Utah Data Center?

There is no such thing as "deleting" data on somebody's else system.

there are multiple services that cache deleted twitter and reddit content. it'd be silly to assume the government wasn't capable of accessing that.

I'd argue they can't... and that's why it's being stored that long... if you end up on a shitlist I'd guess your retention period goes up.

No. The First Amendment applies to everyone. It applies to American law on American soil, on foreign soil, to citizens, and to non-citizens. There are some exceptions, particularly for illegal immigrants, but in general foreign nationals have the same Constitutional rights as American citizens.

It's not even hard to find legal scholar opinions stating such:

https://victormalcalaw.com/do-non-citizens-have-constitution...

https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/t-he-constitutional-rights...

Guantanamo Bay being a violation of due process and habeus corpus is one of the big problems with it. The problem is that it's excruciatingly difficult to have standing and jurisdiction in these cases, which is one of the ways the government skirts accountability.

Edit: I replied before your edit; I will leave this comment as-is, however.

There's plenty of things that are illegal, but that we don't collect the maximum amount of evidence at the border to detect.

For example rape is illegal, and collecting DNA samples at the border might deter or detect rapists. Some drugs are illegal, and hair sample drug tests might deter or detect drug users. Money laundering is illegal, and requiring online banking credentials be handed over might deter or detect money launderers.

As it's at the border, there would be no constitutional concerns.

And yet we don't do these things - why do you think that is?

>As a visa holder you should generally respect the laws of your host country.

... and terms of your visa.

>To the extent that the laws of your host allow you to participate in political action you should feel entirely free to.

You are taking a risk that a citizen of that country does not. If a citizen gets arrested as part of riot/protest control, they'll get released in a short amount of time. You, as a visa-holder, may get your visa revoked, lose your job and get deported. You may have issues with visa renewal or reentry (because typically visa terms allow for arbitrary revocation and lots of discretion is given to border agents and issuing officer). But it's your life. Take any risk you want.

While this is a good thought, and in theory you should be correct, it is just not really how it works (I can only speak for my experiences with the US, and with TN work status). The majority of US citizens do not understand the visa/status/immigration process. Many people seem to think that there is a list of checkboxes, and if you hit them, you can get your visa/status. In practice it does not always work that way.

The individual officer (wither USCIS or CBP) has, for the most part, full discretion each time you want to enter the US. It does not matter if you have a visa, and it does not matter if you have been admitted with the same documentation 5 times in the past. As well, the reason for your denial does not really have to be provided in a clear fashion, and there is not much of an appeal mechanism. If you were to post an opinion critical of a given administration, or a given action, and your adjudicating officer sees it and disagrees with you, there is really nothing stopping them from denying you entry based on your personal opinion.

So yes:

- it is perfectly within my rights to make a twitter post that I disagree with something.

- I should feel comfortable doing that without fear that it will be used it against me

- I do not.

> you should not misrepresent yourself as a citizen of the host country, but that's just part of the general "lying is bad" moral prohibition

There is actually a specific question of this nature on the application for US citizenship. So, it's more than just moral prohibition, it could result in a rejection of citizenship.

They also asked me about this during my in-person citizenship interview.

Reddit has bugging me relentlessly to add an email address to my account for the past year. Sometimes, the banner can't even be dismissed. I'm not sure if it's related to this case or just general tracking and list building, or maybe even actual account security as they suggest.

It feels a bit weird to engage in politics in a country you are not a citizen of, though. It's good that it's allowed and it shouln't be impeded but it feels a bit like when you go to a friend's house and tell them how they should educate their children differently.

I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.

I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone. What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs.

These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care.

It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.

> That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance.

This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic.

It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined.

I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.

Lots of subreddits will ban you if you post on a subreddit they don’t like..

Past totally apolitical random subs like /ski it is just silly. Reading stuff right now going on about US protests I can easily see how anyone with 2 brain cells can write a bot that will creat posts driving certain agenda. If you have few hundred minimum wage posters on staff and some tools it should be really trivial to creat a lot of shit

>That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.

So the solution to reddit's partisan and out of touch politics is to consume more of it, but make sure that you have a good cross section of dumb viewpoints?

I have a better suggestion: find political insight literally anywhere other than reddit. It's a naive place with all the perspective and context of a 15 year old first discovering the world and trying to express opinions about it.

It's a monolith in terms of ideology and content, they face no challenges in terms of managing tensions within its community of users.

To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views.

This post pretty much sums up T_D:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thno...

> any moderation makes them liable as a publisher

Quite a lot of moderation is required either by law or other forms of liability. And then you have the international jurisdiction question: if a social media platform removes posts to comply with French or German anti-Nazi law, or UK defamation law, does that make them liable under s230?

> with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity.

Who's saying that? That's very much not what section 230 says. And as a change to the law to do this would eliminate all social networks (along with newspaper comment sections and similar) it is highly unlikely to ever go anywhere.

Section 230 is essentially about the ability to quote someone else without fact checking or taking responsibility for what was said. It has nothing to do with neutrality and never had anything to do with neutrality until recent efforts to manufacture outrage started conflating Section 230 and the entirely unrelated concept of free speech.

None of what you said is actually true; Section 230 does not in any way require neutrality in order to gain its protections. The law is very clear about this, and the courts have been very clear about this.

Heck, we’ve been over this before on HN multiple times this past week; 230 does not require neutrality.

Chances are they wouldn't (if you were reasonably cautious with, e.g., your phone). But if they find out you don't later they can throw you in jail and deport you. Lying to federal officers while getting a visa over something as innocuous as a social media account really doesn't seem to be worth it under basically any circumstances.

I have no idea what they actually do, but I'm guessing they could simply search for the accounts, or ask other people you know.

I'm not sure that's true. Membership in a terrorist group is specifically mentioned on their list of ineligibilities.

The problem is that it's not enough anymore to try to moderate away illegal content on a best-effort basis and you're required to be perfect. In the earlier situation, if the moderation misses some violating content and leaves it there, it's still the sole liability of the poster. With the recent changes, if you don't want to be liable for less-than-perfect moderation, the prudent choice seems to be to avoid any moderation at all; you'll leave all the illegal content alone but at least that won't be your liability.

Illegal is nebulous, there are two aspects to it, criminal and civil. Civil liability is the one that's most in play here, since criminal content like CP or threats of violence are more easily recognizable. Defamation and libel lawsuits can be problematic, and you can be sued by celebrities and politicians for defamation. Even if you win it, the lawyer fees, and the inconvenience of dealing with the courts etc. isn't worth it at all.

> doing so makes it seem reddit cares first and foremost about its own freedom, and less about freedom of speech in general

It’s a company. Of course that’s its motive. I’d argue this is true for most people, too.

Which is fine. It is incumbent upon those users whose free speech Reddit impinges upon to rectify the situation, but bringing other users to support their cause or setting up a competitor.

Either way, this is all orthogonal to the First Amendment concern of this case.

Reddit is global so its censorship makes it a poor choice for any group that doesn't support the narrative.

> article makes it look like they are in support of the former (free speech)

Fighting for the First Amendment does promote feee speech. Without the First Amendment, free speech is dead. With it, it has a chance (but is not guaranteed).

The same principle that allows individuals to say what they want also allows companies like Reddit to disallow certain speech on their platform. It's not as though they're fighting for it to virtue signal. Besides that, you want to keep the flow of speech open, even if you bottleneck it yourself, because it gives you more range on what to allow and what to block.

Does "common carrier" describe any social media website? All social media sites, besides choosing what content to allow, make many decisions about what to promote. (These decisions are usually made algorithmically, but not exclusively, and the choice of what algorithms to use and how to tune them is still very opinionated.) The common carrier rules seem intended for companies like phone providers and ISPs that don't make any decisions about what people should use on the platform. In comparison, social media sites seem like more open versions of newspapers and TV stations.

If this is what you believe, why do you participate in the heavily-moderated HN instead of barely-moderated alternatives like 4chan or 8chan? If it's because you think there's a better standard of conversation here, then I'd argue that's not unrelated to the moderation that happens.

I know. What’s also not in the constitution: Power to restrict the movement and work of foreigners.

Wouldn't visas be interstate commerce?

Do you posit that Constitution never states the rights of the federal government to control entry to the territory of the US?

My understanding of the Constitution is that it sets limits on government power, e.g. it can't pass a law that restricts free speech. It does not enumerate all the things the federal government may do.

> So would a site like Reddit selectively choosing what speech to report to the government create a chilling effect on the First Amendment, given that they may report speech that isn't illegal but still results in an investigation and maybe even court fight

That's not how the system we were discussing works. You are supposed to self-report your social media accounts, and then the government looks into those social media accounts. The platform is never asked to report anything at all.

Or are you describing an entirely different scenario, in which a site like Reddit voluntarily reports on its users (selectively or not)? In which case I don't see how that creates a chilling effect of speech more than anyone else. Any motivated individual can check your social media accounts and report anything they see to the police if it's illegal or suspicious. And they can choose to do this as selectively as they want.

> Do you think the US government should not look at what people publicly say as part of their entrance criteria to the US? If so, what about those people who publicly say they want to harm an individual or group of people? Should what they say not be considered for entrance? The US government has a responsibility to protect it's individuals as part of the entrance selection criteria to the US.

It's the endless debate of security v.s. privacy and potential abuse of policy. Governments across the globe are trying to use the technology boom as an opportunity to redefine the borders on this topic that I believe were perfectly fine before. And it's all smoke and mirrors to distract from the fact that it's just literally 'because technology'.

Example 1: the postal service opening your mail is a big no-no without a warrant, but suddenly 'because technology' it's okay to do to internet traffic?

Example 2: Two people having a private conversation has been possible since the dawn of time, but suddenly 'because technology' the government has the inalienable right to eavesdrop and backdoor every conversation at any time?

Example 3: The right to not self-incriminate is incredibly important, but suddenly 'because technology' you can be forced to give up encryption keys and open laptops using information that only exists in your head, or risk being detained indefinitely?

I believe that if your argument boils down to 'it's X but with technology' then the government shouldn't have any extra rights or deny any of yours.

I personally think the real issue with the social media border inspection is the self-incrimination and possibly warrentless searches.

I don't have an issue with a border agent looking you up on Facebook, finding your public profile and seeing you posted messages inciting violence against gays, and denying you entry. I do have issues with the government forcing Facebook to give up private messages without a warrant.

I also have a problem with you being forced to divulge all your social media accounts or risk being denied entry based on the fact that you lied. This is just plain self-incrimination.

I agree with what you wrote, except that it's the 1st amendment that's relevant.

> There is nothing special about a social media company that should give them the ability to infringe on our rights.

I personally believe that social media platforms are public spaces (although I don't think it's clear how to precisely define this into law without or minimal loopholes).

But I don't think it's inconsistent or hypocritical for a company to not want to lose control over the discourse on its site while simultaneously advocating against government requests for self-reporting of social media accounts due to previously discussed chilling effects.