Jan 6 committee subpoenas Meta, Google, Reddit etc. after 'inadequate responses'
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
It's not clear to me what the House committee is asking for. From what I read in their letters it's basically, "We think you have more than you've given us, so give it to us".
That's not how this works. If you want to subpoena information, you need to be specific and targeted. If you don't get what you think you want, call people in to testify.
Here's the actual Committee release [1]. Two quotes from the Alphabet letter:
"For example, Alphabet has not produced any documents that fully explain non-public moderation discussions and policies" "Additionally, Alphabet has not produced documents relating to YouTube’s policy decisions"
But, IIRC, YouTube (and Twitter) were pretty publicly vocal and specific about their policies for months preceding Jan 6th. I just don't see what warrants this round of grandstanding.
[1] https://january6th.house.gov/news/press-releases/select-comm...
There is no way the full scope, procedures, code, algos, and more are public for all moderation methods and channels.
I suspect people are hoping trade secret law will protect, but I think the House wants to see regardless!
To be frank, no matter what side of the political spectrum, we're in very, very deep trouble here.
Our very democracies are at risk, and the manipulation by media, and enemies of our democracies will only get worse and worse.
Hell, even manipulation by members of our democracies, from special interest groups, political parties, to even just nutbars, what we've seen so far, has shown us that people will buy into anything, if it's all they hear.
Our civilization, our world, will live or die by how we all get a handle on misinformation.
And while I embrace democracy, and capitalism, I couldn't care one bit of the required fix tanks Google, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Quite literally, everything is at stake here.
They are asking for TV time
I'm sure there is some actual substance to these hearings and there most likely is info that they want to learn. But at this point I will say the whole thing around Jan 6 is 10% substance and 90% media theater.
On one hand, a congressional subpoena for "non-public moderation discussions and policies" is broad. On the other hand, there is certainly some version of that request that is within reasonable scope for a subpoena. In the hypothetical world where passing legislation in the US were still possible and Congress was capable of regulating Big Tech (e.g. changing Section 230 or so on), this is exactly the sort of thing a Congressional Subpoena would make sense for, since there would be a germane policy making interest in obtaining this information.
> I just don't see what warrants this round of grandstanding.
The paradox of Big Tech: everyone hates Big Tech because they think their political adversaries control Big Tech.
The Left views Big Tech as monopolies controlled by techno-libertarian ultra-billionaires. The Right views Big Tech as Democrat companies controlled by radical leftist censors.
(As an aside: in a sense, both views have a kernel of truth. Big Tech employees skew left, especially on social issues, although not nearly as homogeneously as the right seems to think and individual FAANG employees have far less power than people seem to imagine. On the other hand, the leadership of these companies are definitely not natural allies of progressives, but are also not -- AFAICT -- nearly as villainous as the left seems to think.)
But the real thing that both have in common is conspiratorial brain candy with Big Tech as the modern stand-in for Illuminati or whatever.
Leftists are anti-corporate power in the public sphere.
None of this is paradoxical.
So called "pinkwashing" is well known among leftist circles so to suggest that entire political spectrum has been hoodwinked by American corporations seems wrong?
The real answer is just that the Left isn't particularly powerful in the US, even during the WTO protests.
There's always the mistake of assuming the person means the US Left as opposed to another country's Left movement, but the Left as understood within the US is quite powerful. It seems really as if both movements divide the country in two.
> The Left views Big Tech as monopolies controlled by techno-libertarian ultra-billionaires. The Right views Big Tech as Democrat companies controlled by radical leftist censors.
I guess it's only a paradox if you are partisan and think there are only two types of people. I don't consider myself left or right and big tech is definitely an adversary to me and my beliefs.
The observation is that Big Tech plays the role of Powerful Boogeyman for both the left and the right in polarizing narrative construction.
Ofc non-partisans can also dislike big tech, and partisans can dislike big tech for rational reasons. Neither of those is inconsistent with the above observation.
Did you see what happened when they asked specific and targeted questions to the FBI?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQRetozhSY
If the FBI won't even answer basic questions why should companies have to give have random arbitrary data that probably won't help with the investigation? This January 6th committee is a complete joke and nothing but theater.
If a crime was committed by the US Executive branch (e.g., President, e.g., Nixon), should the Executive branch investigate itself?
Congress investigating things goes back a few centuries:
> On November 4, 1791, some 900 U.S. army troops under the command of Gen. Arthur St. Clair, a Revolutionary War veteran, were killed or wounded in a surprise attack by Native American warriors on the Ohio frontier. The following year, in what was the new nation’s first congressional investigation, a House committee was formed to look into the debacle, which became known as St. Clair’s Defeat. As part of the investigation, the committee asked President George Washington for paperwork pertaining to his administration’s management of the failed expedition.
* https://www.history.com/news/6-famous-congressional-investig...
That seems to be the current state of the internetz everywhere. I have to print that on a sticker or something.
Do you earnestly believe this?
That's not looking for a scapegoat; it's looking for a set of root causes
It's a scapegoat. If you want people to stop looking up content about distrusting the government, the solution is a more transparent government, not to stop them from watching the content.
This rabbit hole encourages extremism in some people, and that can be harmful to society. Why the defeatist attitude, that huge companies have to encourage extremism or people will stop using their products? That's non-sensical
The other thing is that we really don't have shared definition or word-feel for "extremism". The people who are the most vocal about curbing extremist content also happen to be wildly partisan. I don't think that is a coincidence. I sense the false-positive rate is extremely high in this regard.
It is also unclear to me that the recommendations ought to be moderated by some embedded state entity to make sure the results align with what is in political vogue.
I wouldn't say they are looking for a scapegoat, it's just political theater and tactical expediency. Furthermore, I'd also say "root causes" is not quite right either. At the end of the day, this is a very partisan committee and I believe they understand the power in getting these big social media companies to crack down on conservative content under the guise of preventing "extreme/radical content".
What I mean by the parenthetical statement is that while the legislative branch does have an established right to ask the disclosure of information, their power to actually compel is limited. Without cooperation from the other branches of government, what they directly control is a handful of operatives who maintain no facilities for detaining people for the long term.
It's worth pointing out though, that Congress does in fact have a power of inherent contempt that enables them to enforce their own subpoenas. This is a separation of powers concern: what if Congress needs to subpoena someone in the Executive branch or DoJ in particular?
Increasing trust in the outcome would go a long way. How about trying to make the election more verifiable. Put it some real biometric features into mail out ballots. Instead we get, no id required to vote. Doesn't really build trust.
I'm not American, so I'm not swayed by part allegiance. What I did see is 3 am mail in ballot reversals in multiple cities at ridiculous high skewed percentages.
A wildly popular president, the most popular in history, 81 million votes, that somehow is barely polling in the 30%s. Winning the fewest precincts in history yet breaking record for the most votes. More black people voting in record numbers much higher than for Obama in downtown Detroit for him.
It smells like a Putin election. Except Putin is actually popular in his country unlike Biden.
Maybe since you're not American, you're missing a little nuance about the situation. First of all, mail-in-ballots are counted last in many places. Sometimes, it's by law (like in PA, where mail-in-ballot counting cannot start until after election day). This is why you saw a lot of 3am mail-in-vote counting.
The reason why it took so long to count those votes as opposed to other years is due to the ongoing global pandemic. Because of the pandemic, voters were encouraged to vote by mail. However, the President had spent months before the election claiming that mail-in-voting was rigged, and encouraged his supporters to vote exclusively in person. This is why the mail-in-vote percentages were so skewed toward Democrats.
Therefore the dynamic on election night was that all the in-person votes were counted first, and they gave the impression that Trump had won. When the mail-in-ballots were counted, they were in some cases able to overtake the in-person vote tally, which caused Biden to win in those cases.
> A wildly popular president
Trump was not wildly popular. Again, this may be a perception you had from abroad. In reality, Trump did not win the popular vote the first time he was elected. He lost the House during his first two years in office, and lost the House again and the Senate in 2020, as well as his own election. While it's true he got 74 million votes, his opponent was more popular, and more importantly won the electoral vote, and that's why he's president today. Also in America, our population is highly concentrated in cities. The 500 counties won by Biden account for 70% of the US population. The 2500 counties won by Trump only account for 30% of the population.
All of the other points you raise are just the result of this being an election with record turnout across the country. I just don't understand what you could possibly infer by more black voters voting for Biden than Obama. What exactly is that supposed to prove? There's really nothing about the demographics or statistics of the 2020 election that point to fraud.
There's no good reason other than narrative that the mail-in ballot ratios would not closely trend the in person voting. It's sampling the same population. Please provide some evidence that Republicans don't vote by mail.
Imagine if Putin lost the in person vote by a large margin, but won mail-in ballot vote by a huge percentage. And those votes came from inner city Moscow, inner city St. Petersburg, his party strongholds. The winning margin from votes from the poorest citizens, a demographic that rarely votes, but this time voted in record numbers like never before. And their will is apparently in opposition to rest of the country. That alone would be good enough reason to be suspicious.
At minimum if you're going to have an election with mail-in ballots in the US and you want the citizens to trust the results. There needs to be some way to tie the paper ballot to the person for audit purposes. Otherwise, the losing side, will assume it's printers doing the voting. Hence the J6 protest that turned riot.
At least with an in person ballot you have some upper bound of how many people came out to vote, to verify the results against.
With mail-in voting. You could literally delay announcing the results of election and print out as many votes as needed to overcome any margin. It makes cheating on a mass scale much easier.
Most of my statements are from first-party sources like government reports and court filings. My statements about the election results stem from monitoring I did of the results as they arrived on election day. I'm a data nerd and there's a lot of fun data to play with around election time. The results of course were of significant national interest as well. I stayed up for multiple days going over the results, and am proud to say I called Pennsylvania on Tuesday by looking at the Northampton County returns. They turned out to be a good bellwether for how the rest of the state was going to go.
> Please provide some evidence that Republicans don't vote by mail.
Don't take my word for it. Here are some exit polls:
In person (total) By mail or absentee
Trump voters 68% 32%
Biden Voters 42% 58%
If you are hearing the things I'm saying in state/corporate media, I would say that's because they are truthfully reporting on what happened.
> That alone would be good enough reason to be suspicious.
You tried to make this seem nefarious, but let me restate what you wrote. People in Democratic-friendly areas voted heavily for Democrats. That's not suspicious. What would be suspicious is if Trump won places which are known to vote Democratic. That Democrats won in cities is one of the least surprising outcomes of the election.
Do you want to know how Trump really lost the election? It wasn't because of poor people voting extra in cities. It wasn't even because he lost Georgia, because it wasn't critical in his path to victory.
What really sunk Trump were people who voted a straight Republican ticket except for Trump. Think about that. They either left it blank, or wrote in someone else. They didn't even vote for Biden really, although some did. But House and Senate Republicans actually got more votes than Trump did. All of this consternation about Democrats being responsible for Trump's loss is misplaced. If he would have stayed off of Twitter, I bet he would have won easily.
> With mail-in voting. You could literally delay announcing the results of election and print out as many votes as needed to overcome any margin.
This would be caught easily, because it would result in a bunch of envelopes with no paper trail. The attack you describe was alleged quite often during the 2020 election, but the mail-in voting process does not really work as you may expect, so the attack is not feasible.
The first protection is that you need to have requested a ballot for one to be printed. If ballots are printed indiscriminately, there would need to be a corresponding record of requests for those ballots. Even if ballots are sent without a request, as is done in California, there would still need to be a record of the envelope's provenance. Where did it come from, who handled it, etc.
Secondly, there is a signature match process. You have to put your ballot in a security envelope with a signature to be matched against others. If the signature does not match then the ballot will be cast provisionally, and the voter will be contacted to correct it.
Actually this requires more verification than voting in-person. Mail-in voting is one of those things were people think it is less secure, so it's scrutinized more, making it actually the most secure way to vote.
But anyway, I can only describe my local election process, I'm not aware of how every place works. Either way, I don't see why in-person voting is not just as vulnerable to the attack you describe.
I think that if the current administration continues on it's trajectory, people will simply care less and less about j6. Because their everyday lives are being impacted more and more by hostile policies.
Keeping prisoners held in inhumane conditions while awaiting trial is also not helping. Even Democrats are calling this issue out. It was sickening when we did it to foreigners in gitmo, and it's sickening now.
I wish we saw some honest attempts and transparency at figuring out what happened, but... without that- the schism is only widening.
You (and your friends if they are real) are propaganda victims.
That's what Garland said per your article. The only ones who mentioned terrorism was the NSBA and they didn't accuse anyone of it, they suggested some of the threats they'd received could be equivalent to terrorism. So, no Polifact is exactly correct here and the NY Post agrees.
The NBSA sent a letter to the DOJ asking them to look into school board meetings around the country, saying that the parent protests were "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism."
The NBSA has since apologized and removed the letter from their website.
Politifact responds by saying the word "terrorist" does not appear in the memo, thus the "domestic terrorist" claim is false. They created a straw man and then defeated it. Yeesh.
Here you will see that the FBI counter terrorism team was spurred by that Oct 4 letter to start tracking potential threats that concerned parents posed. So no, he didn't technically call them terrorists, he just had the counter-terrorism team activated to look for terrorists.
Absolutely. These tech companies know they face the threat of regulation, whether on anti trust grounds or labor issues or whatever. When Twitter banned Trump, they wrote a blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) that offered no good reason and pointed at things like his refusal to attend Biden’s inauguration. AOC also demanded that tech companies censor Parler (https://imgur.com/jJo0lEx), and Apple/Google/Amazon all complied. The timing of this sudden and willing compliance from all these companies who historically would resist, was not coincidental. It happened because there was a coming change of administrations, and this compliance bought them favor.
Glenn Greenwald has written many great articles on this topic, but here’s a particularly relevant one: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...
I can understand why some people might think the next step would be to improve the quality of the information from the sources that are providing this skewed, stilted and possibly even false coverage, but I have trouble seeing this working well enough to improve things in any meaningful way. On the contrary, it seems like this kind of news will be even more sought after as it becomes harder to find.
That said I don't have a good solution. Maybe somehow promoting better sources of news or making it easier for these more reliable news sources to generate income.
I think the basic idea is that the government shouldn't be involved in institutionalizing or promoting preferred media narratives of any form.
I disagree that the "larger issue" is that people are misinformed. In fact, I would suggest that there have been several thousand years where people were horribly misinformed on a number of topics.
I can easily imagine that the next time the GOP controls congress they'll ask similar questions of outlets like CNN and MSNBC vis-a-vis the George Floyd riots.
People should be more considerate of the opposition when they're in power. Payback is almost assured, and sometimes even with escalation.
After reddit shut down /r/TheDonald, the "pedes" migrated to thedonald dot win (which I think has since been shuttered and moved elsewhere). With all the claims being made about a stolen election, I was watching that site with morbid fascination in December and early January, including the planning for the 6th specifically (I assume it's still in the Wayback Machine). The talk ranged from vague protest, to a quasi-Occupy strategy of refusing to leave until results are overturned, to explicit calls to violence and far-right fantasies ("1776 solutions to 1984 problems", "day of the rope", etc).
And the whole time, I assumed: obviously this is on the radar of the FBI and the "IC". These idiots are out of their depth: they don't even know how to use encryption to coordinate their attempted coup, and they're gonna walk right into a regiment of Feds on the capitol steps.
Luckily Trump is fundamentally a coward, and Pence has some shred of integrity (or just sense), and the participants failed to galvanize a response from the more mainstream Trumpers. But if you want to talk about an "inadequate response": the gross incompetence of our bloated national security apparatus failing to do the only thing that justifies their existence really takes the cake; and I can't help but think all the Congressional hearings and hand-wringing and crocodile tears is a theatrical distraction from that institutional failure.
In theory, I ran a platform that protected everything the First Amendment did, and protected nothing that the Amendment did not protect, I should be legally in the clear.
But I'm not going to attempt such a thing - because it's clear Congress would do the ultimate shakedown.
As other have said, this is a bit different then that since it's an investigation but I'm sure you can find some examples from the past years of politicians and government officials trying to influence moderation policies for better or worse.
Let me break this down for you: you host a weekly poker night. My buddies and I come and during these nights plan a crime. We than carry out a crime and get arrested. The investigators come to you and ask “what did those guys talk about at your poker nights?” You say “poker stuff”. They subpoena you to get a better answer. Where in all of this did the first amendment come into play?
Sure except the subpoena in question was not actually about records of conversations that the rioters had, it was about efforts FB did/didn't take to discount election misinformation.
Election misinformation is covered by free speech.
In the same way as yelling “fire” in a theater.
Not at all? There's a clear moral (and certainly legal) dividing line between the two.