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?
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.
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.
It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"""
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,