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I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication, and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data.

That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.

Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.

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> It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack).

It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

> should allow all legal speech.

It is usually illegal or in breach of contract to share internal company communications. This isn't the "gotcha" you're looking for.

The speech is legal, it just might break a contract between two parities in the US. It's a far cry from a discussion around what kind of speech is acceptable in a public square.

Twitter is using a privileged position to protect it's own IP. It's fine for a company to do, but just doesn't really sit with "we're just running a public square for the good of the world"

But by this logic we'd have to argue that Wikileaks is a public square. Real public squares have police, and those police have a mandate by the people to enforce contract law and private property law.

This is why hate speech I think is a much more controversial topic than copyright.

Continuing that, i think that normally the ball would get rolling with some kind of civil suit. The police aren't judge and jury on contract law just doing blanket enforcement of that on their own. The police might have to enforce a court order sometime later.

This is, to me, more like your neighbor ripping down your derogatory sign about them because he doesn't like what it says, and the neighbor happens to also be your boss and landlord.

Why do you think police enforce "contact law" I.e. civil law?

> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

The employees probably sign NDAs. It's only a civil suit, but I think that would still fall outside the realm of what he's been preaching. Note, I'm not taking his side or anyone else's.

> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more interested in discussing if the move is right. If it violated internal company policy, or revealed internal identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the right move?

I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.

Which rule do you think it violated?

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

I think it violates private information policy. The last thing I want is my work name in a screenshot from an internal conversation posted on Twitter, reported by the news like I am a dissenter after getting terminated. I would want to be left completely alone.

Extreme cases i.e. leaked passwords are under hacked materials policy.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info... https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...

Also possible the user(s) deleted some themselves in order to not violate terms and thus retain their severance ---which typically hinge on such things.

I don't think the message that the tweet in question violates Twitter's rules would appear in this case.

That's a conflation of two different things. Twitter Inc. the Company and Twitter the App.

But they did take down content from Twitter the App...?

Would NYT publish scathing remarks about itself, or publish leaked internal data on itself? If not, I don't think such a thing should be expected of twitter either.

The NYTimes has investigated itself from time to time and publishes remarks that reflect poorly on themselves. Last example I can remember is the Caliphate podcast scandal

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

Yea doesn't the NYTimes have a section pretty much devoted to retractions? I'll see them in their morning news letter and I think it's pretty common at most news organizations with integrity to understand that sometimes they'll get things wrong like we all do, and just be candid about it and post retractions where necessary.

The BBC certainly broadcasts criticism of the BBC from time to time. Here’s one of the more trivial examples (easier to bring to mind because it’s amusing): https://youtu.be/MBWfCV4PjyU

Crude, and hilarious to watch those two keep straight faces. Have I Got New For You has very regular criticism of the BBC too, slightly higher brow but entertaining.

Do you mean Twitter in it’s entirety is like a respectable newspaper that should edit all their content for correctness and propriety?

But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?

IANAL but restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a “real” thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract.

If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?

This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.

I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like there is a large gray area when it comes to theft of trade secrets.

For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for copying a confidential spreadsheet containing Waymo status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to - the rest were dropped).

Calling layoffs "trade secrets" is some real double-speak and overreach.

Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.

Nobody is calling the layoffs trade secrets. The thread is about pictures of an internal slack channel, and other private information.

Is your point that it doesn't matter if those "pictures of an internal slack channel" actually contain trade secrets of if they show some people posting blue hearts to cheer up their coworkers? IANAL but I think it does matter what those pictures contain.

I was responding to the parent's statement that "restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a 'real' thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract."

This is not the case - you can be convicted of a felony and go to jail for taking a private company's confidential information. Nowhere did I call layoffs a trade secret.

Until it is publicly released, it is exactly that. You may be surprised to learn that competitors track this information.

All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not disclose private company communications… this is way different than censoring a user who is under no such agreement.

The difference is that Twitter does not enforce those agreements as quickly for any company that's not Twitter.

Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.

And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.

The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.

But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce them at the same speed for other companies. If processing speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of course Twitter will be able to verify their own agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily double standards.

It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.

That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee for all.

But they never claimed to be an equitable platform with regards to that issue, did they? Musk might idealistic, but not that idealistic.

To be fair, some of his early comments indicated that all legal speech was to be allowed.

That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.

To be fair, Musk also pledged that Twitter would not become a "free for all" in terms of speech.

> Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform)

Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.

Was illustrating conceptual. I don't think they have an actual like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Though maybe they should?

Uhh, not from Twitter the product's vantage it's not.

So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?

Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.

But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those agreements? No. How could they?

Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.

But Elon Musk didn’t own the company when they signed those NDAs. He’s a “free speech absolutist”. Why would he allow such abominations to be enforced?

It's not about censorship per se. There will always been censorship. Removing spam is censorship, removing copyrighted material is censorship.

There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.

Yes, it's legal. Twitter can always sue the person that tweeted it to have them remove it, let a judge decide.

This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).

So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content. And the judge would reject the suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its own website then it should just remove it.

I don't believe that's true. For copyrighted work, you can issue a takedown notice to the website - but copyright is federal law. NDAs are just private contracts. If you could sue someone for hosting/posting NDA content, then any leaks or whistleblower content could be hidden from the public just by suing the all the news websites.

Generally I think you can only sue the person who violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who posted the material. The same is even true for classified info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.

> If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website

> So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content.

is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied? if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the request would be immediately approved. At that point, there's no "difference" in the procedures for internal/external moderation requests.

> This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).

That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the law no news agency could ever report anything with anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the situation", because under your definition they are now violating an agreement about which they know nothing.

You could sue the website, but it wouldn't go very far, because website operators are not liable for user uploaded content because of Section 230 of the CDA.

> But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?

I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private contract.

You are conflating "illegal" with "criminal". Civil law is still law.

Assuming this all goes back to Elon's tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376, which reads:

"""

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

"""

I don't think it's reasonable to interpret this as referring to any speech which constitutes a civil wrong. There is simply no way for a third party to have the slightest clue based on the content of a tweet whether that tweet causes someone to suffer a loss, or constitutes a breach of contract,

Is a bunch of heart emojis confidential information? If so, lol.

Internal slack communication is confidential.

Did the screenshot actually expose any confidential information though? Musk seemed fine with leaking confidential information when Mudge was doing it, but now he is suddenly concerned about it?

It's a potential antitrust violation to serve themselves better than other users of the platform. This is what Google and Apple get in trouble for all the time.

> someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication, and it got removed

Yeah, except Musk himself already did that:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824

I mean it’s his company he can do as he likes, but that was one of the first things he did after the buyout.

So did Elon look up every private message in company chat that had the word Elon in it? Then he's sharing some of the juicy ones on twitter?

You know he's deep into all his Ex's twitter DMS. If I were withing a few hops of elon and I used twitter DMs I'd be nervous.

Now I'm genuinely curious if that constitutes a violation of GDPR (if Twitter was European) or CA's regulations (but Twitter is in CA, so maybe?)

Corporate communication is corporate property and fully accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate wrong-doing. You can be certain Twitter's new legal team is looking at everything. The issue is whether the persons in question were communicating in the capacity of working for Twitter. It's very clear that they were, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the clown show at Twitter did all manner of unethical things in conflicting with Musk.

> Corporate communication is corporate property and fully accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate wrong-doing.

I guess it depends on your definition of corporate wrong-doing. If Elon just looked for all posts that include his name and he's firing everyone who was critical of him, that might stretch the definition for most people. That could even cross over into creepy big-brother like oversight and might dissuade people from working at Elon led companies (or maybe attracts people who want him searching their private messages for references to him).

Elon bought the company. That includes internal DMs between managers who violated their training and admitted breaking the law.

Everyone who works for Elon, and half the people who don't, how heanages his companies.

Agree re: the less sinister explanation. I think only this particular tweet has been removed and the other tweets referred in the article are still up.

This one's still up: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824

Is that Elon publicly accusing one of his own execs, who still works at Twiqtter, of fraud?

I can only imagine how much collateral the banks demanded to fund Musk's boondoggle.

Hanlon's razor except s/stupidity/corporate policy/g.

I think the question is - did the twitter employee delete their own tweet, regardless of their reasoning, or was the tweet deleted in the backend by a different twitter employee?

Is Twitter going to remove all screenshots/leaks of any company's internal comms? If not, this is not a good look.

Any company can request that Twitter take down screenshots of their own internal communications. Both before and after Elon, I imagine Twitter would comply if the request went through the legal channels (i.e. lawyers sending letters).

I can't remember the details now, but I remember a couple years back the New York Times published a big exposé on a screwup in the Middle East perpetuated by... The New York Times. My understanding is that this type of thing isn't even so uncommon.

Oh, please. This "internal communication" was a bunch of blue hearts if the source is to be believed. What vital business information did that leak?

It's much easier to have a rule that says "no public posting of internal communications" than "make a judgement call about whether an internal communication is vital or not". And with an upheaval going on at Twitter at the moment, nobody has the time to do the latter.

It seems far more likely removing this tweet was a response to the publicity it was getting, and was an effort to keep such dissent from being aired publicly (and thus a contradiction with Musk's stated principles and goals for this takeover), than that it was an ordinary moderation process that just happened to produce this outcome. The disruption you cite makes it far less likely that this is by the book, not more.

What makes that explanation more likely than the other? Imagine there was no optics problem here, and it was just a highly publicized tweet of some internal comms with no PR consequences, it would still obviously need to be removed, right?

That's not obvious to me, no. What I'd imagine is something like this being escalated, and that there would be reasonable cases to be made either way; that all internal information should be removed on principle, and that removing this tweet would harm the company without improving it's security posture. Twitter has historically been pretty reluctant to remove tweets, so I wouldn't be surprised if, under normal circumstances, they ended up keeping it up. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either.

But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.

Isn't it more likely that organizational inertia is the culprit? Elon doesn't have the capability to change the day-to-day activities of 7,500 people following established policies and procedures in the amount of time that he's had the authority to do so.

There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's review.

I'm not suggesting he orchestrated a conspiracy, or even personally ordered that this tweet be removed, who knows, it's more likely someone else on his team, but the new management sure does seem to be able to change the day to day activities, given that they've laid many people off and eliminated the entire data science team. Why wouldn't they be able to say, remove this specific tweet, or perhaps, investigate this tweet for violations of our policy? That's not a conspiracy, that's what a company is; management is able to give instructions to the people who carry out the work.

> eliminated the entire data science team.

That was completely fake news indspired by a comedian calling himself "Rahul Ligma [Balls]"

On cursory inspection I'm not finding the articles I saw on HN about this, so I'm assuming you're right. My bad; thank you for calling it out. I'm barely over the time to edit my post, or I would remove that part.

> The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff.

You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.

Draining the swamp is another way to put it.

But it's one thing to have that rule and punish people that leak and another to delete the leaks from your platform. Particularly if you profess to be pro-freedom of speech.

Leaking confidential information that you agreed to not leak is actionable as a contract violation.

It's not a free speech issue.

Are you suggesting that Twitter will similarly remove leaks of other companies' confidential information? Or is this just a special case where they will be free speech absolutists for everyone else but carefully curate what people are allowed to say about Twitter?

Does Twitter have an NDA with other companies that says Twitter will remove other companies' confidential information?

If they don't, they have no obligation to remove it.

They already do that with video game leaks

Twitter has a responsibility to its shareholders to protect its information. Why on earth are people jumping to the conclusion they would take on any similar responsibility for another company??

Because not doing so would fly completely in the face of everything Elon claimed he wanted Twitter to stand for. They would be putting their finger on the scale to censor speech critical of Twitter, and Twitter only. (Or maybe other favored groups and politicians too, who knows? Starting off like this on day 1 kills any trust in neutral moderation immediately).

Edit: that said, I'm not sure it's been confirmed yet whether the employee just deleted the tweet themself - which would be a very different story.

> They would be putting their finger on the scale to censor speech critical of Twitter

That's an entirely different issue. The issue at hand here is Twitter removing Twitter internal confidential material that Twitter employees agreed to not publish as a condition of employment.

This is contract law, not free speech law.

Twitter is a beast. I think it would be a mistake to evaluate what it "stands for" based on some edge case of who/what/why behind a single tweet. Consider the fact that most execs at the top of this thing we call capitalism, are routinely caught in ethical dilemmas. Even the individuals you have decided are on your "side" morally, are forced to occasionally compromise their ethics in the short term, to achieve a longer term goal that is far more complex than people are giving credit here when they use terms like free speech so casually.

Wow. Who besides Trump and Musk gets this treatment of "no reasonable person would believe what he says, yet what he says should be taken seriously"

uhm, paul pelosi?

It makes sense to punish or reprimand someone internally for leaking confidential information. Something like a firing could be appropriate.

But banning someone or their Tweets on Twitter for posting an internal corporate communication is wrong (at least, it's not the Twitter I want to see). That's using one's privileged position as steward of a public platform to enforce internal rules in an extraordinary way. If how Twitter moderates users on its platform is a free speech issue (I believe it is), this is just as much of one.

Of course it is. The contract is merely an agreement that you won't exercise your right. It's actionable in a civil court obviously. That however says nothing about your right to publish or that the content must be removed just that changing your mind might have repercussions.

It isn't.

Are the Twitter terms of use different for employees than they are for other users?

Cause if they use the service under a personal agreement with Twitter that is separate from their employment, then removing the Tweet isn't really so actionable under their employment agreement.

I mean, I guess it probably isn't separate, but I'm also not sure why people are so eager to pat Twitter on the back for using their position to control the public communications of employees/former employees.

I don't believe this is always true. For instance, whistleblower cases, or NDAs that can be broken by supeona.

Considering there is already some legal questions being raised about the firings - and I'm not arguing in favor of the merits of those cases - there is some possible scenario where an internal leak may be justified.

Being banned from Twitter for breaking their TOS agreement is just a contract violation too.

Will Twitter apply that standard to other leaks of data?

They do that with video game leaks, and I'm sure they do it for movie leaks, music leaks, etc.

Again, what information was leaked?

> "no public posting of internal communications"

If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a principle).

Workers should be able to freely talk about their condition with other workers, both internally and externally to the company. And as an absolutist, then the ability of individuals to freely speak without any chilling effects must take precedence over the companies concerns. The employees are effectively being "cancelled" and much more effectively than the people who most complain about that actually have their ability to speak being impaired.

Contracts are not laws. Contracts are an exchange of value. The civil court system enforces those contracts.

For example, failing to pay your mortgage is not theft. It is a contract dispute.

If you freely accept payment in exchange for not revealing certain secrets, that does not violate your free speech rights in any way.

> If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a principle).

I literally wasn't talking about free speech rights.

This! Sometimes it’s not bad behavior, it’s “we just don’t have time for this sh!t.”

Their HR and PR people are busy enough today.

This isn’t a broad defense of Musk or Twitter. Just a comment that there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy around any corner.

Whether it is malicious or lazy, it shows where "free speech" ranks among their values.

You have time for the things you really care about.

There is no expedience exception for free speech. If they want to claim to value free speech, they need to actually do so, and that includes making that kind of judgement call.

Why does it matter how vital the info it is? You "oh, please" people love to split hairs until you miss the overarching point.

the fact there's an internal communication system and what stack it's built on, for starters. I'd imagine employees were required to agree not to disclose that sort of info but I could be mistaken.

If it had anything that's PI under GDPR for example like names

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