The Twitter Files, Part Six
twitter.com
twitter.com
1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
I could go for hours listing these.
Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.
If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.
EDIT: Formatting
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/15/tech-groups-supreme...
Imagine Trump is in charge of the FBI.
It is of course tied up with partisan politics, who won or lost this week from some particular story, but more transparency is good.
If the FBI had to go through the same queue as Joe Average then their requests may well end up at the head of the queue too late for action. The same goes for celebrities, advertisers and so on. All of these have different contact points. And because law enforcement contact is one step away from the company doing something that is potentially illegal their messages are given a higher priority.
You can imagine how this could be weaponised. For example FBI agents could be tasked to report tweets from people who hold disfavoured opinions. This interpretation is also inline with the court’s finding over Trump’s use of the block button: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte...
And I’m not sure “unhinged” is an appropriate description. For example, while “internal lingo” may be common, isn’t it also fair to observe that much corporate internal lingo is pretty Orwellian? Similarly, as to your second point, is it unreasonable to draw an inference that Twitter is doing what some agency wants it to do, when the agency asks Twitter to do something and then Twitter does it?
Indeed, just as you seem to ignore Twitter’s power. They are protected from the FBI by the Constitution and the courts, and they have the money (read: power) to actually enforce those protections had they felt threatened or coerced by the government. The FBI may have power but they are not all powerful, not even close.
I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments) in re: far more onerous and demanding requests than just an agent clicking a Report button, and in fact with far more official processes you can see the stats where they actually do just that. https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...
Ummm… yes it is when the speech is being suppressed by the government?
That’s kinda the entire point of the 1st amendment.
The courts have ruled that the government asking a private party to censor is no different than the government censoring itself.
Nothing says they can't contact papers.
The government routinely speaks to news papers about the government opinion on articles and how they are wrong. That's not censorship. Holding a figurative pistol to someones head and say "change this line" is censoring and supressing free speech.
The Twitter Files already has a statement from a Congressperson that Twitter's actions with the Hunter laptop will "result in a blood bath" during Congressional hearings.
If the 800 lb gorilla that is the US government is threatening a "blood bath", do you really have a choice when they ask for your "cooperation"?
I can also say no to the feds if they ask me to assassinate someone but it doesn’t mean they aren’t breaking a law by asking me.
Would be a crazy constitutional loophole if the govt simply needs to ask citizens to censor each other (1a), steal their neighbors guns (2a), tell husbands to prevent their wives from voting (19a), etc.
If these censorship request were about bomb threats or something that’s one thing, but they are mostly just spicy political takes. FBI needs to stay in their lane.
There’s some selection bias here — the tweets we see in the thread are the ones twitter didn’t remove and the accounts twitter didn’t ban.
Twitter surely has the deleted tweets around somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to have been provided to the twitter files reporters.
Twitter’s internal tools still have all of that data. In most cases the Internet Archive also does, too, which is how people have confirmed that, for example, the tweets in the famous “handled” email were nudes in violation of the non-consensual policy with no overriding news value.
In the end the public political discourse needs to move away from corporate run forums. Not sure about Mastodon, but I’m hopeful future iterations of online forums will be more decentralized again.
In practice, can they? Leave out the part about other governments for a second, just consider the US govt
If you're doing moderation at twitter and Yoel Roth is above you, are you going to tell the FBI to screw off? Especially considering Roth is (apparently, according to Taibbi) meeting regularly with them. From a job security standpoint, how do you think the average white collar employee will behave?
I have worked at another organization (hosted server provider) where I was in contact with the FBI and other law enforcement.
There's a world of difference between what was shown they did at twitter by noting things that were "worrisome" or against a reasonable site's ToS and forcing anyone to take things down.
I have told agents that certain materials were acceptable and that we would take no action. Not much they could do there without an actual warrant.
It is protected from the government. Of course, Twitter can decide to censor whatever they want, but if the government was threatening either Twitter or individuals on the platform, over protected speech, eg. criticizing the president, that would certainly implicate the 1A.
The government simply asking, with no implied threat, seems to be OK [1]. But, I don't think it builds confidence amongst the citizens if they were seen doing this very often.
1. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Furthermore, the FBI is a police force. They have no business searching Twitter for content to remove unless that particular content is involved directly in the investigation of and filing of criminal charges.
Weekly meetings between the FBI and top Twitter executives is "akin to clicking the report button"? Name one other Twitter user that had this privilege. I think that's a pretty strong sign that you're trying to stretch this analogy too far.
This set of tweets details 150 emails total over a period of over two and a half years (jan 2020 to nov 2022).
It even specifically quotes their mention of their quarterly meeting.
My biggest problem with people who think the Twitter files are A Big Deal, is their seeming inability to accurately describe the contents.
Or maybe you're just ignorant of the contents:
https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-executive-met-fbi-weekly-0150...
"Orwellian" can mean other things when describing state power or surveillance technology, but in this context it is being used to describe language so the connection to Newspeak is the relevant one.
What Twitter did was not shadowbanning - other people could see the posts.
Pretending it is shadowbanning is bad faith arguing of the worst kind.
Except that's not how most people understand the term. Terminology is defined by its usage, so if you're in the minority of how this term is used, you've lost. We already had this debate about hacker/cracker over 20 years ago. Hacker is still here, so get used to the broader meaning of shadowbanning.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+shadowban&oq=defin...
verb: shadowban - block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
The way Twitter defines shadowban is more narrow than that.
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden. Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
Language is about effective communication. Right now we're all trying to have an important conversation about relevant social issues which requires a common understanding. You cited the common understanding, I pointed out how Twitter engaged in practices covered by that common understanding, and that should be the end of that. Can we move on now?
Instead of bikeshedding over this irrelevant minutae, engage with the actual substance of the discussions, like whether they should shadowban in the way they've been doing it, whether there should be limits to moderation policies for online public squares, what the guidelines for censoring speech should look like, whether to deplatform people entirely or merely deprioritize their speech, etc.
They don't prevent people seeing tweets of anyone. If you follow soneone you see their tweets, if you dont follow them but gonto their profile you see their tweets.
Tweets are universally publically viewable. The policies they use are not secret.
Trying to start a conversation about their secret shadowbanning policy is a dead end as the policy is not shadow banning and it is not secret.
That is shadowbanning by your own definition, and each ban was not disclosed and thus done in secret, because that's what it means to be shadowbanned.
There is a perfectly obvious interpretation of the language being used to describe this situation, and all you're doing is adding noise because people aren't using terms in the way you want while ignoring the substance. That's textbook bad faith arguing, which ironically is what you were accusing the original poster of doing.
This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers. The only thing twitter is not doing is having their algorithm highlight them to people who weren’t following them or participating in a conversation with them. That doesn’t fit any common definition of shadow-banning.
No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this: if you use Twitter's search to try to find a delisted user on Twitter, you can't find them. Sometimes you can't even @ them. This fits the general definition of shadowbanning that the other poster provided, wherein their content cannot be found using Twitter, thereby that qualifies as being shadowbanned on Twitter.
The fact that you can sometimes find that content via other means is totally irrelevant.
Your frustration stems from angrily telling people something is wrong based on your misunderstanding of a term. You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
It's not my redefinition, it's literally the definition the other poster provided which they discovered via Google, and the application of that definition matches how thousands of tech and laypeople are using it in this conversation, and how the media is covering it. But, you do you.
Finally, I'm not sure where your ability to surmise my emotional state based only on text comes from, but I think it needs some tuning.
Per [1]:
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past [...]
Sure, innocuous sounding words like "rendition" would never be reappropriated as code for something more sinister, right?
Seems to me that innocuous sounding jargon actually makes Orwellian doublethink much easier to swallow. Like a frog in a slowly heated pot of water, you get exposed to and acclimatize to progressively more problematic uses of power until you simultaneously believe that you are a patriot upholding citizen's rights while routinely violating them.
I'm not really sure why you think this process can't happen in a private company.
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag. All kinds of phrases get used like selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, or disguising a gag. Each is a form of censorship, but that's a bad word since the days of Anthony Comstock so it is never used. Censors never describe themselves as censors. See the book "The Mind of the Censor",
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58150067-the-mind-of-the...
What he said, says, or will say, doesn’t matter.
Twitter is a global platform ideal for steering public sentiment, opinion, and influencing political outcomes.
I'm also curious to know what his guiding principles are but maybe we're stuck reverse engineering them based on his actions. Sticking to an ideal doesn't seem to be his style.
I'm probably missing something. I don't follow him too closely.
While proposing that Shadowbanning is a tool of the Woke Mind Virus destroying humanity ...
It can be, and you're zeroing on sense where vague lingo like "enhanced interrogation" replaces plain "torture".
But that's a stretch. Every profession develops their own lingo over time. They're called "term of art" (1)
An example is when one sysadmin asks another to "bounce the box" - these words have specific meanings which are opaque to outsiders, but are brief and precise to insiders.
This "internal lingo" developing is normal, inevitable, even necessary, and not in any way a "red flag".
If the admins of twitter had several different terms instead of calling them all the same thing then ... maybe they just needed to be brief and precise, to distinguish between them, in order to do the job effectively? You're trying to invent a problem where there is none.
1 )
https://www.yourdictionary.com/term-of-art
In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.
I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...
[2] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsib...
There is no issue with the FBI investigating crimes using the Twitter platform. I would hope that Twitter tells the FBI to “come back with a warrant” if they want non-public information.
But the FBI flagging content for removal. Including “disinformation”?
That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech.
A good analogy would be a debate club being held in a private bar and the police coming by and saying "yeah, that guy you invited to debate, you think you can "handle" that for us?".
It’s frankly shocking how many people on HN are like “meh…what’s the big deal?”
https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
If that debate club guy was spreading voter misinformation, the FBI would come by and investigate him, too.
But that’s not what’s happening here is it? The FBI is asking Twitter to take down tweets (some of them obvious jokes) without a warrant or evidence of any crime being committed.
That’s what’s happening.
No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
Would that be ok?
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
> [A.] Generally speaking, courts have said "yes, that's fine," so long as the government speech doesn't coerce the intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here's a sample of appellate cases so holding:
> [B.] On the other hand, where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional.
> [C.] Does it matter whether the government acts systematically, setting up a pipeline for requests to the media? One can imagine courts being influenced by this, as they are in some other areas of the law; but I know of no First Amendment cases so holding.
> [D.] Now in some other areas of constitutional law, this question of government requests to private actors is treated differently, at least by some courts. Say that you rummage through a roommate's papers, find evidence that he's committing a crime, and send it to the police. You haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because you're a private actor. (Whether you might have committed some tort or crime is a separate question.) And the police haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because they didn't perform the search. The evidence can be used against the roommate.
> But say that the police ask you to rummage through the roommate's papers. That rummaging may become a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, at least in the eyes of some courts: "the government might violate a defendant's rights by 'instigat[ing]' or 'encourag[ing]' a private party to search a defendant on its behalf."
> Likewise, "In the Fifth Amendment context, courts have held that the government might violate a defendant's rights by coercing or encouraging a private party to extract a confession from a criminal defendant." More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
> So maybe there's room for courts to shift to a model where the government's mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government's part.
So basically it sounds like this could be the makings of a very fascinating case, if it holds up in court, but there is ample legal precedent of the government doing pretty much what happened on Twitter, already.
> No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out. Would that be ok?
I may not like it, and it may not be morally okay, but I am almost certain cops are able to do that, because that is the system we have created.
It comes down to coercion, which can sometimes be hard to prove. In the earlier Twitter Files, a Congressperson mentioned how banning the Hunter Biden Laptop story was going down poorly and the Congressional hearings “would be a blood bath”.
Is that coercion? For the courts to decide I guess.
But I’m in the same camp as you. I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
Taibbi also brings that up -
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603890210252668928
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
Sounds like Twitter just went along with it, without coercion. Which you may choose to criticize as weakness or cowardice, but maybe that's just how they chose to do business.
> I don’t disagree with what you posted at all.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
> And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
For the record, my stance is that it's not a nothingburger, but it is so insignificant so as to provide a convenient distraction for actual malicious acts that are going on, like the Z-Library shutdown. And that all of this is underwhelming, much like this other poster's opinion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024363
"A whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations" seems to be an adequate summation of this whole situation. Which this thread, like all culture wars, has made a mountain out of.
No I don’t agree. “Norms” are separate from the legal context you gave.
If no coercion took place, that doesn’t make what the FBI did “ok” even if no laws were broken.
Like my earlier analogy, if my local cops started asking businesses to kick people out (and the businesses agreed) that’s a major problem, even if not illegal.
Law enforcement’s job is to identify crimes and arrest people.
When their scope starts expanding into working with willing private companies to silence individuals who have committed no crime, that should worry everyone, whether it happens with Twitter or your local bar.
It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
The problem is that people are getting at the FBI for the wrong things. They should be getting mad at the shutting down of Z-Library instead, which holds far more impact for far more people than the two dozen accounts discussed in the OP (who weren’t even all suspended). When people are concerned about petty crimes, the big ones get unnoticed.
This is an extension of the whole “Three Felonies a Day” idea: it’s likely any prolific account will violate Twitter Terms of Service at some point, so you can target almost anyone by looking hard enough.
And Twitter is likely to look harder at reports from the FBI than your average user, therefore the FBI has more influence over who they can silence. Maybe they’re abusing it, maybe they’re not, either way it feels improper at best.
You’d really suggest that all reports must be treated equally?
I imagine these agencies do put pressure on private entities on a regular basis, but without actual further proof this is all just ridiculous hand waving.
If they had published communications between the FBI and Twitter from, say, June 2020, I imagine their audience would not be able to muster quite as much indignation.
It would be 'cherry picking' if the result was something out of context and therefore misrepresented.
There's a legit story here, probably not to the extent made out to be but it's newsworthy.
What could be 'cherry picking' in the grand context, is that SpaceX has 'deep ties' with state apparatus, even the military, and we just don't talk about that. So by highlighting 'this thing over here' and not 'that thing over there' we lose context that Musk is in bed with the Pentagon while lambasting something happening with the FBI. And I'm not suggesting working with either is wrong, but that it's a bit hypocritical.
I've seen people here say, "this is normal" and "the FBI is making no threats, so no big deal." That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding. I've seen other comments "it didn't happen that often, only once a week," it should have never happened at all. Unless there is something that is a threat to an investigation, jury identity, literally against federal law, etc...the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. I'm baffled it has any sort of support.
How benevolent of the fbi to be making sure twitters users are compliant with twitters TOS! What a nice federal agency, making twitters moderation so much easier!
I'd prefer to see the FBI acting in a passive role, here, rather than a proactive one. Meaning, they act more in response to people reporting social media behavior, instead of creating their own missions, so to speak.
One of the problems with this sort of governmental creep, is once it happens it's nearly impossible to take it back - look at the Patriot act/Homeland security, for example, or the god-awful and useless TSA. It's very easy to imagine this social media task force growing into another branch, and, as with all of these agencies, the Big Brother potential is a scary one.
Your whole argument is just "sure this is reasonable now but what if there were 8000 agents online and they could extraordinary rendition you". 80 agents for the whole country is not absurd. That's less than 2 per state.
People with poor information diets hear the FBI is involved with Twitter and immediately think it has something to do with red team blue team politics. These are the people the Twitter Files content is produced for. It's written vaguely enough to give potato chip peddlers creative license, so they can monetize attention.
Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this thread had anything to do with terrorism, but that fear is still guiding many people's responses.
This is seriously some hitleresque reichstag fire stuff. The FBi manufactures a fake domestic terrorism crisis and uses it to justify their further expansion of power.
NYT has published data about the growth of CSAM due to tech companies. [2]
Would you engage with the point of my comment if I called the domestic terrorism non-linear growth, and the CSAM growth exponential?
edit: politeness
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
Instead it feels like vapid virtue signaling, especially as Musk is doing far more to fight CSAM than the previous owners. Also, all the FBI censorship in the Twitter files dump had nothing to do with CSAM.
Anyways, no, your CSIS link doesn't even support the notion of super linear growth. And, if the FBI is inflating domestic terrorism numbers, what other agencies are doing the same?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-fbi-agents-pushed-to-f...
"The FBI leadership’s “demand for [w]hite supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of [w]hite supremacy,” one agent told the Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate [w]hite supremacists than we can actually find.”
The FBI brass has directed the bureau’s investigative efforts primarily toward domestic extremism cases, especially those with racial components, the agent said. The agent suggested that the push is so forceful that otherwise legal activities are sometimes swept up in the FBI’s scrutiny of certain actions for a potential extremist link.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”"
These reports really should disturb you and other readers, that law enforcement agents are being incentivized to act deceitfully on behalf of Partisan politics and as an excuse to broaden their power and influence.
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
The citizens of a democracy who have full political rights and whose government is not allowed to do anything at all without our approval.
Really? I thought you were restricted to voting for your representatives?
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?
Edit: Here’s a link with some relevant case law. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Disagree with the established precedent if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend picking a different battleground than whatever this Twitter Files fiasco is. This stuff isn’t even on the questionable end of the spectrum.
Why would we be wasting government resources alerting private companies of their terms of service anyway?
Also don’t think it’s a waste to try to prevent ISIS recruiting material from reaching more confused and angry young men.
Both are legal though!
This is only confusing starting from your own incorrect premise.
Honestly it’s not very fruitful arguing this stuff with someone who clearly doesn’t understand the basics of the American system. There are plenty of resources online to learn about all this stuff if you’re interested.
But it doesn't outrage you because you're in agreement with the shit they're shoveling.
Lol
Yeah there’s plenty to critique of FBI, but this is a profoundly weak case.
And yes, this definitional/access tension always exists when taking political stances that go against the entrenched power structure. Try to get an antiwar opinion broadcast in 2003 - music DJ's weren't even allowed to play songs whose lyrics might hint that war in general might be a bad thing. Dealing with this is just a completely new experience for those on the right that have gone from being conservative (ie generally supportive of the incumbent power structure and institutions) to revolutionary/reactionary and directly against the status quo power structure.
Social mass media, like all mass media, is now controlled by big capital (as was inevitable), with varying degrees of the individual employees adding some grassroots slant. Focusing on the slight individual flavor and ignoring the overriding power dynamic is just falling into the same old disempowering partisan trap.
"They could sue if they don't want to do it" does not make the request legal.
https://twitter.com/aclu/status/1587198479608303622
What's shocking is that people's perceptions of what's legal have changed so dramatically in just a few years. I can't imagine anyone making these arguments in 2005. It seems some powerful interests have been able to successfully co-opt SV companies and change the entire public conversation about what the First Amendment means. I would like to know a lot more about what's going on here. I don't think the same tired arguments about "disinformation" and "social harmony" that have been trotted out for centuries against free speech have suddenly gained all this credence by accident.
It seems to me rather that all these folks shocked to hear this stuff just haven’t been paying attention to either their high school civics course or to current events of the last 20 years.
You actually think the FBI doesn’t report content? Obviously they do.
You don’t think the FBI gets a privileged reporting line over newuser1848391? Obviously they do.
You don’t think Twitter regularly gets content moderation requests, from governments or elsewhere, that they simply decline? Obviously they do.
And you don’t think they sometimes get content moderation requests from governments or elsewhere that they oblige? Obviously they do.
Here’s a good overview of relevant case law: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Will you also be surprised to hear that almost all private companies can (and many will) simply choose to hand over your private data to the government upon warrantless request?
Nor is it news to me that companies are increasingly voluntarily sharing vast amounts of data with the government, to the point that the surveillance state we feared has come to pass as a corporate-state partnership.
What I’m surprised about is the increasing number of people who see it as normal and acceptable, or choose to dismiss it as “oh, this has been happening.” Yeah, that doesn’t make it okay.
So long as there’s no coercion it’s completely legal. Not considered a controversial topic.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
There are lots of dangers with this pattern but this is simply an extremely extremely poor case to try to take up the fight on.
If the police ask you to do something, do you usually feel generally obligated to comply?
What about an even more powerful organization that can and do prosecute people for simply lying or obstructing?
Uh, no? I'm pretty sure every American schoolchild is educated on his or her rights under the Constitution. It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights.
So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
This comment also totally ignores the fact that the “Twitter files” have also contributed to the realization that these companies are riddled with ex-FBI and other government employees who were partly responsible for responding to these requests, let alone the idea of corporate employees toadying up to the government security state is incompatible with democracy whether or not someone could hypothetically sue.
Also, it’s great to hear my duty is to sue the government if it does wrong. That’s true. That also works out very badly for people all the time and entails spending a lot of money and years of your life on an uncertain outcome.
These stories are additional proof the FBI needs huge reforms and mass layoffs. It’s still the agency of J Edgar Hoover, who to this day was in charge for nearly half its existence. But the culture of these tech companies is also extremely concerning.
And even moreso, as I said in my original comment (and which you misunderstood even in your response), the shocking part is that people think this is fine, and nobody is asking who and what has caused such a massive shift in American beliefs.
What evidence do you have of “a massive shift?” Because on my side there’s 200 years of case law that all pretty much concurs on every single instance of this happening.
Yes I do think it’s fine that our security apparatus attempts to maintain security within the confines of legislated and adjudicated law and that private corporations are able - both in theory and in practice - to resist unlawful pressure to control information. “Checks and balances” is a state of tension. Party X requests, Party Y denies, Party Z adjudicates. That’s how it works.
This is factually not true at all: https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/politics/poll-constitution/in... https://thenewamerican.com/poll-most-americans-dont-know-bil...
People talk to the police and incriminate themselves all the time. This has been a front-line of civil rights activists for decades now. What are you even talking about?
> It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
"Not unusual" is a very subjective term and doesn't mean anything at all. And it is now confirmed that Twitter had daily meetings and contacts with the FBI/DHS, which means they did talk to federal law enforcement. There is no reason to make this statement is absurd knowing that they did talk...
> Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
See the links above. Also Twitter is not a person and this does not apply to most employees and moderators. And the execs who knew what they were doing and wouldn't have done it if it weren't in their interest of those of the company. That's where the de facto coercion comes in. The DOJ coming for the Twitter "asking" or "indicating" that they do not approve some content is an undue pressure in and of itself.
>This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights. So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
Okay Mr. Goodman, at this point you're just grandstanding.
Yes, they did talk of their own volition. As they are free (under their 1st Amendment rights) to do. We have no reason to suspect that they’ve been coerced except for the fact that you disagree with the choice they made! They on the other hand were surely aware of their rights when they chose to talk.
Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
Note however the government is free to ask Twitter to carry people’s speech, as Trump did almost daily for 4+ years whining about so and so getting banned or de-boosted etc.
> Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
You're making a straw man that's not what I said...
The government can't ask or suggest or apply undue pressure to Twitter to ban content. Social media has been sued for this successfully to get people unbanned.
The Twitter files are not even about Twitter being coerced to put things on their site. What are you even talking about?
At least that’s how it works under US law. I get the impression you’re not so familiar with American law though?
Yes they can ask and suggest removal. They cannot coerce but we have no reason to believe they did. I already linked to a long list of case law establishing this. Have a good rest of your weekend!
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16048884298162094...
In fact, most of the comments in support of Twitter and the FBI throughout these threads are pretty decisively debunked in the continued reports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Since then, Apple has stepped up their end to end encryption stance, which seems like the opposite of what you’re implying.
In our system, law including the Constitution is interpreted by the judiciary. You could as well ask "where is the Miranda warning in the Bill of Rights?"
The actual precedents around "jawboning" are murky and contradictory, but it's well-established that the government can step over the line in violating constitutionally protected rights via informal coercion.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
FWIW, to appease the cowardly-downvote brigade, I personally believe the concept of a penumbra is valid and important. But the world doesn't always bend to my will. Merely invoking the concept without considering current context is weak because it won't convince anyone of anything. If you want to make an argument based on that, you'll have to put in a bit more effort than just pasting a link.
Also, please read the guidelines about low-effort comments.
Though having the FBI and Twitter policy people being in such close communication must be eyebrow raising at least. And it a little bizarre honestly.
Imagine if the FBI came to your house and asked you to take down a sign in your front yard.
The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.
2:
Did Congress pass a law authorizing the FBI to snoop on social media and use private companies to censor speach? No? Then by what authority was the FBI doing this?
The root of the FBIs authority is in law passed by Congress.
There is no real oversight at an investigation or agent level since the FBI does not police itself. Few other agencies have the ability to review the FBI and the DOJ often fails to do this as well, they are all part of the same family.
Congress has oversight but that is more of an institutional oversight and not down to the agents themselves.
And it's basically a fact that all law enforcement is slow or almost never holds itself accountable for anything. This is even more true with a quasi international intelligence agency that the FBI has become.
The FBI has always had a unique role in the U.S., and it is disturbing to see corruption hiding behind the political division.
The left historically had many problems with the FBI. The history there is clear. The FBI had historically been a conservative type of institution and was often well regarded by the right. This seems to have flipped lately and I wish people could put all of that to the side and take a rational view of information released even in the Twitter files and things like the MLK Tapes podcast.
I don’t see any sign they resisted or even wanted to resist. That’s not a first amendment issue.
You can make an argument that the FBI should not be doing that, but no laws were broken. Also most of this was under the Trump administration.
Lastly.. Twitter is a private walled garden. It is not a free speech zone. It wasn’t before Musk bought it and it isn’t now and it never will be.
If you think that men in black suits who can put you in jail for simply lying to them or obstructing them then you are vey naive.
And that's not even considering all the trouble the DOJ can put organisations through even though they committed no crime.
Just their reputation and power is enough to apply pressure.
Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments?
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).
People are ghost banned for poor language and insults. You have to imagine that Twitter is generally not very permissive based on how they treat average users. Many of the #NAFO folks are shadow banned.
This whole spectacle seems like a giant straw man in the making. The people that ran Twitter set it up based on their own belief of what is acceptable and there is nothing wrong with that.
https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...
I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department, and at least one person signed off—which, given the rebuffs of more public attempts, seems like anything signed off on was done in good faith. So in my mind the problem isn't Twitter, it's the FBI. To me it's the framing (which was always going to be problematic, it's Matt Taibbi).
And to be clear, I think one isn't paying attention if they try to lay blame at the feet of any one administration for this, this is a long-standing issue originating inside the FBI.
Why would your theory about this be at all relevant when we have direct evidence (original emails, etc.) that the opposite is true, that there was no intermediation or oversight by Twitter legal in takedown requests?
Of course they do, if that speech would likely incite or produce imminent lawless action. IDK if what they were flagging all meets that standard (some of the examples in the thread seem like a stretch to me, but then again they're obviously supposed to), but I think if we're gonna discuss 1A we should actually understand it.
Let met assure you that in St. Petersburg they are working hard and those in Moscow don't complain about the price of steering elections. I invite you to look up the cost of a MiG vs some click farms, alt right bots and blogs.
When I say weapons, you think about rockets. The advantage of the Kremlin is they can use weapons you don't recognize as such. You are even pleading to give them free reign to overthrow democracy.
The fact that the government has to plead with an american corporate to not let other nations fuck things up even more than where you are collectively now, might give you a second thought.
Russian disinformation operations are exactly as effective and competent as the rest of the Russian government, which can't even win a war against Ukraine. Its not remotely scary.
Its comical that people believe Musk is promoting free speech or anything of the sort. Most of everything he does online is antics to draw attention in some way that benefits him, go look at the SEC for details around that with Musk.
I would make a bet one of his next options is to saddle Twitter with more debt as it approaches bankruptcy. Or give insider info to his investors ahead of his next Tesla sell-off so they can recoup their losses with Twitter.
I think what the comment above is saying is that it's not about whether or not speech on Twitter is protected. It's that the government isn't supposed to act to restrict speech in any manner that doesn't cross the lines he listed.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was a big court case because Trump was hiding critical responses to his tweets on Twitter. The judge ruled that Trump violated the 1st amendment even though Twitter is a private company ("private property"?).
This is because the 1st amendment not only protects speech, it restricts government attempts to control speech (or at least that's the argument that would be made).
I have no idea why people like yourself try to twist the argument. Also, there is a thing like "principles" which aren't encoded into law but are encoded into society and makes it work quite well, which includes free speech. So, I can believe a platform should have the maximum amount of free speech possible...and that is not the same as saying it has or needs 1st Amendment protections.
For the amount of backlash HN gives to private companies for harvesting private data and handing it over to government...there are SUPRISING amounts of people here defending the government in coercing on this. Baffling.
I'm quite suspicious of the large amount of anti Elon propaganda going around. Especially on this platform where comments are usually more measured. It just looks different to normal and it has my Spidey senses tingling.
I am a former Tesla fan and remain a SpaceX fan. I hold Tesla stock and I would buy SpaceX stock in a hot minute if I could. And I credit Musk in no small part with making both companies what they are today, the good and the bad, although not nearly as much as Musk credits Musk.
And yet with all of that, I still think he's gone off the deep end. I've voted against him as CEO in the past several shareholders' votes. Defending his recent actions and attitudes at this point is an increasingly untenable position.
If you want to stand in his corner, I suppose that's your choice, but being critical of him is the far more defensible position. Claiming that those who do are all sock puppets is frankly disingenuous.
Do we know this for a fact? The only way to find this out is to test it in courts. There could be executive orders involved, the Patriot Act or related acts, or simply a "state of emergency" or two declarations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Open:
"Now, Therefore, I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code."
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t...
To the extent that "informal coercion" could be problematic. This is pretty standard practice for most politicians of course and I think we all know where all those "Free Speech" proponents that are worried that Twitter was "informally coerced by FBI's emails" stood on this, when Trump was constantly threatening Twitter.
Yes, yes they do.
"That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding."
What evidence of coercion is there?
Internal jargon can be Orwellian. These are not mutually exclusive.
> But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
No, this chummy relationship is presented as problematic. Nowhere does he imply that the FBI controls what Twitter does. It's not a priori wrong to think that the government should not have such a close involvement with Twitter in its act of moderating/censoring. Having a lower threshold than you for risk of malfeasance is not a priori wrong. If you think your risk assessment is better, now you can make that argument using actual data, and those who disagree can make theirs. Fostering public debate is exactly what good journalism is supposed to do.
> But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
Sounds like standard journalism to me. Maybe your beef is not with Taibbi and the "Twitter files" but with how journalism as a whole is conducted. I agree, but don't apply a higher bar here where it's inconvenient.
If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism. Journalism is about informing. Not saying everyone does it perfectly, in the same way you can do bad science that is still technically science.
Even if we agree that that's what journalism should be, what is your assessment of how accurately this definition matches most high profile journalism today? How much context did the Covington kids get, or how much context did the rail workers who wanted to strike get? There are very clearly some contexts that get priority coverage and are hammered non-stop, and some contexts that barely get any coverage at all.
To be clear, I'm not sure that I do agree with your definition. I think journalists typically do what you describe, but I think merely reporting raw data without context is also perfectly valid journalism. This "contextualisation" narrative is how some journalists are excusing their lack of support for Assange, and it's bullshit IMO.
> If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism
Unbiased journalism is a fiction. I agree that the best journalists try for objectivity, but this is an ethos that is slowly being pushed out of mainstream journalism, and activism has become standard practice (edit: this is probably because outrage generates more clicks/views, so activism "sells" in a sense).
I also think some professional journalists absolutely do outright lie for utilitarian reasons, such as "fighting evil" (typically Republicans). This goes back to the activism point.
Far more common are various forms of well known bias, my side bias, bias blind spot etc. This leads to one convincing oneself of a falsehood and then vehemently arguing for it, despite countervailing evidence.
If you spend time doing raw info dumps from one side of an argument, say the unions in the rail strike, you're not telling the whole story.
Telling the whole story is important to journalism. It's why you always see "X did not respond to a request for comment." They attempt to give the other side to speak.
Telling only one side of the story makes you a mouthpiece, not a journalist.
I didn't say journalism is without bias, but that's a completely separate topic. Let's try to keep this from turning into a "here's all of the things wrong with journalism and no solutions" rant thread.
You can be biased and also not attempt to push an agenda. The inverse is true, too.
I disagree. I think journalism is simply "presenting a factual story". I think presenting a contextual story is better journalism, but it's not necessary to qualify as journalism.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
"Disloyal to the team" is not fascism.
And you're saying it's conservative to be opposed to that?
I understand it lined up with the liberal side regarding the election but that doesn't make Taibbi (or myself) a conservative for opposing it. Distrusting the FBI ought to be a liberal value.
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
If you want to see a "fascist coup" plan, go look at Golden Dawn being busted with blueprints to parliament that indicated they were going to break down the walls with tanks.
What you're effectively saying here is that people should not be concerned about massive FBI overreach and should discard what he has covered elsewhere because 'orange man bad', when Trump barely factors into anything here. That's deranged, and it's not going to be taken seriously outside of your bubble.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/politics/washington-pipe-bomb...
It failed because the bombs were found and because Mike Pence defected or at least chickened out at the last minute.
That’s why they were chanting “hang Mike Pence” not “hang Nancy Pelosi.” What you saw was a rage filled riot in the wake of a failing coup attempt.
Had the bombs gone off and Pence stopped the count a state of emergency would have been declared. I’m not totally convinced of this part but I’ve read that they were expecting a bunch of radical left counter protestors and that the role of the mob was supposed to be to start a big street brawl with Antifa or whoever was supposed to show to help feed into the state of emergency ploy to suspend the election.
It was more elaborately planned than Hitler’s beer hall putsch which was a bunch of Nasis getting blasted at the bar and having a street brawl with police that ended in a very asymmetrical gun fight.
Luckily it probably will end here this time though since Trump is too old, Flynn and Bannon are too obviously kooky, and DeSantis doesn’t have it in him. He knows how to troll the woke for attention but I don’t get hard core fascist vibes from him. He will try to do a Viktor Orban but it won’t work here because America has courts and federalism, and he doesn’t have the balls to attempt a coup. Say what you will about Trump but he did have balls.
This is why it's bad for society to let individuals be richer than nation states. This is why aristocracy was bad. Too bad the notion of freedom was used to rebuild aristocracy.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
How is this constant? This is just 1 request every 7 days . I figured it would be more. Also, it's called the FBI. Their job is to investigate federal matters, which includes content on social social media. They do with with all major social networks. It's not just politics or the media, but things related to safety, terrorism, kidnaping, child exploitation, etc.
It seems like these files are becoming more and more underwhelming.
The contents of Hunter's laptop didn't stop me from voting for Biden, but that's because I'm a cynical jerk that already thinks politicians are corrupt by default.
How about this: you don't get to decide what's remotely important to people in the context of the election?
"The Hunter Biden story is insignificant" is a judgement, not a fact, it's a judgement. I'd say that calling it "misinformation" is bizarre, except that most prominent allegations of misinformation boil down to judgements too.
Twitter's actions almost guaranteed that this would blow up, prompting the wider media ecosystem to respond to the story about the blocked tweet, letting many, many more people know about the laptop story (which anyone/everyone could still read without hindrance) to people (like me) who don't read the Post or use Twitter.
In fact, had Twitter not flagged the NY Post's tweet about the article, I might never have heard about the laptop story at all.
Can you imagine the reaction of Elon Musk if this happened? Musk can't even handle public information being published (i.e. elon jet). He would go nuclear if nude pictures were leaked.
Having gone through an acquisition, I guarantee that our acquired org gets more than 150 emails from our acquirer every two years. Let alone each day. To call it a "subsidiary" is ludicrous.
I've had some contact with the FBI over the years regarding stuff happening on one of my sites and they were - it has to be said - polite and arguing their case quite well, in no way did I feel like figuring out whether if I refused them what the next step would be, it felt like I would be the unreasonable party. But if they had made an unreasonable request I would have told them to fuck off.
It's absurdly easy for Musk and his cronies to cherry-pick which pieces of context they do or do not include, to make any user's behavior seem more benign or nefarious than it really was. Every time they reveal something, we should ask what they're leaving out. Anyone who fails to do so, whether they're a journalist or an HN commenter, is effectively doing Musk's dirty work for free.
What controls when you have to respond to them is the law, not them. You'll know when that is, because it'll come with legal process.
One is none of their business the other is expected.
To give you some numbers: I operated an international community with about 1 million members over the course of 20 years. During that time the number of requests were larger than the number of requests that have been detailed here regarding Twitter, which is one of the reasons why I believe that we are seeing a highly colored picture.
It’s still very interesting data. Now I want to know how this compares to the other big tech companies.
BTW every week is of course constant but so is one a year or once every ten years. It's constant but not often.
Additionally an email isn't an individual issue; an email thread almost always has multiple replies, forwards, etc. On the low end, if we assume only 4 emails per topic between the parties, that means the FBI only approached twitter 75ish times in three years, or 25 issues per year.
I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions.
If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel.
If the worst Taibbi can find is the FBI trying to take down a tweet trying to get republicans to vote on the wrong day, he's found fuck all.
> If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel.
... or it could be they're not wanting to identify and act on their own entrapment (oops I mean sting) operations.
It's weird that it's turned into some sort of naive left vs right issue.
I'd be asking what the goal is, but apparently it's that. Point fingers, suggest no solutions beyond vote for us.
Good idea in theory except that many of those users aren't as well-behaved so to speak.
And so the overall quality of the discourse has noticeably dropped since Musk took over.
The replies I got from Musk fans were shockingly (maybe not so shockingly) vile.
Turns out Musk sold his Tesla shares at the same time as I did — I wonder how those people replying to me would square that with their insults.
If Twitter had a proper functioning board doesn't everyone think they would have prevented him from driving away advertisers and then threatening them with lawsuits for not advertising? If I was an investor in Twitter I would be livid. It appears most investors take it in stride because they worship Musk.
This sort of activity is what the government 100% shouldn't be involved in. Having a department of What is Allowed To Be Said is one of those ideas that gets tried regularly and has a terrible track record that - inevitably - ranges between a source of mild shame in hindsight to a nightmare influence on society.
There are nearly no scenarios where it is acceptable for the FBI to be in regular contact with Twitter asking for Tweets to be taken down, and if there are it should be transparent and documented - in public, in real time. It shouldn't take Elon Musk spending too much money to get details on the FBI's censorship programs (similarly it should have taken Assange-Manning-Snowden to get details on the pervasive spying).
You might not have been aware of that but it was common knowledge years before. During the hours when that story was blocked using the same mechanism they used for other hacked materials like you might have seen if some celebrity’s nudes had been leaked. Within a day that was removed for the NY Post news story since they were individually taking down the tweets with the actual nudes.
> This is not my opinion or guessing. We know this to be absolute fact.
What we know as absolute fact is that you’re getting your information from people who carefully lie to you, and you didn’t verify the source. It sounds like you’re referring to Zuckerberg’s interview with Rogan, where he said this:
“The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'."
That’s important because what he said doesn’t support that narrative:
Rogan: “Did [the FBI] specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?”
Zuckerberg: “No, I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern.”
https://nypost.com/2022/08/25/mark-zuckerberg-criticizes-twi...
Now, this is all off topic from the “Twitter Files” but again it’s important to remember that the mythology around conservative oppression is being used to distract from the real point that the laptop story failed to have the impact Giuliani & Trump wanted was because there wasn’t much of substance there and the evidence was tainted by sloppy handling. They’re trying to market it as a tale of censorship because they know that it wasn’t effective as a scandal.
There's a fundamental contradiction in the narrative presented in the Twitter Files, apparently we're supposed to believe that Twitter is this overwhelmingly liberal place where employees were highly biased against conservatives in their content moderation and also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution, coerced Twitter in a highly biased way to get them to silence conservative narratives. If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion. If Twitter was being forced, it remains to be shown exactly how. And to the extent that Twitter is institutionally biased towards liberals, then it's those that sit on the opposite political spectrum that are most suspicious. After all, if Twitter was going out of their way to help the Democrats, why would they need to be coerced in that same direction?
There's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians including the sitting President threatened Twitter and other social media companies in order to influence their moderation policies. Where's the outrage among the "FBI asking Twitter nicely is a First Amendment issue" crowd?
If he's asking for something completely reasonable that ~80+% of people think is a good idea, sure. The appropriate thing for Twitter to do would still probably be to ignore him.
Giving Trump influence of Twitter's moderation policies is one of those obviously bad ideas (much like giving the FBI influence, in fact, for similar reasons).
> If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion.
Yeah it isn't really a question of coercion, obviously if Twitter wants to support the FBI in political causes they are free to do that. The issue is that the FBI is being funded by taxpayers, not leftists, and shouldn't be deployed in a political capacity to support partisan management policies like what Twitter turned out to have. The easy way to achieve that is a blanket rule - something like "the government doesn't police what people say" which is fair and reasonably objective.
> ...also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution...
There was the institutional support for the Trump-Russia hoax and the FBI's help in suppression of the Hunter Biden story. While I agree the FBI probably isn't leftist (I'm arguing it is authoritarian and status-quo biased, for what it is worth - they'd pull all the same tricks on someone like Bernie Sanders if he had made it through the primary), it is politically active and spreading a lot of this "misinformation" stuff to try and keep Trump out of office. That is corrupt, and it shouldn't be working with Twitter like it is.
To me, it's rather clear that a bunch of people who are not particularly principled or have a strong understanding of the ethics or laws involved, but are prone to thinking that anyone working against their own agenda must be evil or nefarious in some ways, reverse-engineering their way into finding faults with how things more or less have always worked. This also isn't some nefarious hidden secret motivated by partisan concerns. Trump's own Director of FBI, Christopher Wray stated that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-security-idU...
> Russia is determined to interfere in U.S. elections despite sanctions and other efforts to deter such actions before the next presidential election in 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday.
And he specifically told the public what the FBI is doing about this:
https://time.com/5548544/russian-internet-trolls-strategies-...
> FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, said social media remains a primary avenue for foreign actors to influence U.S. elections, and the bureau is working with companies on the problem.
> “What has continued virtually unabated and just intensifies during the election cycles is this malign foreign influence campaign, especially using social media,” Wray said. “That continues, and we’re gearing up for it to continue and grow again for 2020.”
All the stuff observing that the FBI is politically active (and has been pretty much since inception I suspect) is interesting but not really news. It is context for why they are supposed to avoid chummy relationships with Twitter's team of moderators.
> Trump's own Director of FBI, Christopher Wray stated that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election
Yeah, but the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem; raising the question of what exactly Wray was trying to stir up. He looks like part of the anti-Trump crowd that has been active in the FBI for the last few years.
Which is substantially less problematic that the sitting President threatening Twitter. Yet here we are.
> Yeah, but the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem; raising the question of what exactly Wray was trying to stir up. He looks like part of the anti-Trump crowd that has been active in the FBI for the last few years.
This is so far off the mark that it's hard to take you seriously. The Mueller report extensively documented Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
> However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion
It didn't exonerate the Trump campaign either. It more or less said that it couldn't prove the collusion in large part due to extensive attempts by the President's attempt to torpedo the investigation. It describes these attempts at obstruction of justice, without specifically accusing him (or exonerating) because Mueller didn't think it would be fair even if he believes a crime occurred:
> The report describes ten episodes where Trump may have obstructed justice while president and one before he was elected, noting that he privately tried to "control the investigation". The report further states that Congress can decide whether Trump obstructed justice and take action accordingly, referencing impeachment
> Mueller's belief that it would be unfair to accuse the president of a crime even without charging him because he would have no opportunity to clear his name in court; furthermore it would undermine Trump's ability to govern and preempt impeachment
No, in fact quite the reverse. It is quite problematic. Active cooperation between the FBI and Twitter is a threat to the institutions of democratic governance. That is why it is a scandal and there are things like the 1st amendment that basically say "government shouldn't do this, it is illegal".
Part of the draw of Trump was his ongoing battles with every reporting institution on the face of the earth. His Fake News routine was entertaining. And, critically, all happening publicly and with extensive documentation of every act and insult. Compare that to the FBI here where it is almost coincidence that we even have firm evidence of what is going on despite the fact they were handing out names to be blocked.
> The Mueller report extensively documented Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election.
Which aspects of the Russian interference do you think are a bigger deal than the FBI interference in the political process that are being documented in the linked twitter thread?
You can refer to the Muller report if you like. I ask people to cite which bits of it they are worried about and usually their turn out to be bluffing about there being anything defensible in it. There is a lot of bark and no bite, it looks like to maintain credibility they were relying on the report being so think that nobody reads it.
To take the Muller report seriously requires someone to believe in devious Russian plans to reveal the truth to Americans. And that the Chinese are all angels and have no influence operations of note whatsoever. The whole scenario that Muller tried to paint is an insult to the intelligence, which casts a poor light on Wray because he had presumably read and understood the report.
> It didn't exonerate the Trump campaign either.
I'm going to be polite and listen to your opinion despite you likely not being exonerated for any horrible crimes.
That was always political weasel language, and goes a long way to discrediting Muller as purposefully adding spin to the situation. He was looking very hard for a problem and couldn't find anything. When the politicians are forced back to insinuation that means they don't have any actual evidence - because if they have it they lead with it.
It's virtually impossible for the government to do its job without the private individuals and institutions "actively cooperating" with them. Nearly all interactions between the government and private institutions can be described that way.
> That is why it is a scandal and there are things like the 1st amendment that basically say "government shouldn't do this, it is illegal".
This is completely incoherent - the first amendment of course does not say that the government shouldn't cooperate with private individuals or institutions. Like how is it even possible to interpret the first amendment that way? I mean, it's very obvious you have no idea what you're talking about and your motivation here is entirely political, but how is it possible to get things so wrong?
I mean there are so many things wrong here, but one additional thing is that the Constitution enumerates and limits the power of the federal government. The Constitution does not grant the FBI any power whatsoever, except indirectly through the President.
What you're saying (rather extremely incoherently) amounts to saying President Trump was unconstitutionally abusing his powers to hurt his own campaign.
Also, this is how you started:
> the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem
And this is where you ended:
> To take the Muller report seriously requires someone to believe in devious Russian plans to reveal the truth to Americans
> That was always political weasel language, and goes a long way to discrediting Muller as purposefully adding spin to the situation
And no the Mueller report doesn't insinuate - it extensively documents criminal ways in which Trump obstructed the investigation. He simply felt it was the job of Congress to act on the evidence he found.
Regardless, while you may call this “underwhelming” it’s actually hard proof of illegal activity. The FBI cannot censor people, period. That’s fascism and illegal in the US, per multiple Supreme Court rulings.
This effectively gives trump, et al a direct path to a lawsuit against the federal government and AGs of states cause to sue the federal government. It could very well (and imo will) lead to a church committee of sorts.
That said, not sure if the powers are established enough to just resist all of it (they might be).
That’s not even remotely true.
> That’s fascism
May I suggest looking up fascism?
The FBI emailing Twitter to report possible violations of Twitter's terms of service is not censorship and it is not illegal.
> This effectively gives trump, et al a direct path to a lawsuit against the federal government
The FBI reported to Trump during the 2020 election cycle. It was headed by his own handpicked director, under the supervision of his own handpicked Attorney General.
What if the FBI only happened to report violations by Asians. Or only violations by women?
I guess it would not be censorship, and I guess it would not be not illegal either, but it would make people wonder if there is an agenda.
It’s as much about the violations reported as the violations left unreported.
Are they the TOS violation cops ala BSA?
What other companies were they helping in hunting down ToS violators?
This is not their scope of work and it has the appearance of impropriety by suggesting accounts that should be reviewed for suspension.
Imagine if you had the Trump admin suggesting whose accounts to review?
What crimes are vaccine sceptics guilty of? Given they had some sex crimes going on on the platform, where the mounds of those ToS review requests?
In the examples, are they alleging the potential crime or just saying, hey, guys, it looks like these accounts may be violating your ToS, can you take a look?
As for vaccine sceptics: there were a lot of people amplifying utter bullshit messages around that theme and arguably shutting those accounts down saved a bunch of lives. You may well disagree with that but in a fluid situation I can see why they did what they did. It does not deserve the beauty prize but since we're still learning how to deal with this social media thing where everybody has a megaphone that can reach around the world in a heartbeat I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For the record, I'm pro-vaxx, but against mandatory vaccination.
What is the actual crime that precipitates their appetite to nonchalantly ask for review? Moreover, the CDC and govt officials, including Biden himself, spread bullshit messages about Covid and its vaccines.
Did they ask Twitter to suspend Antifa accounts because of the violent nature of some of their demos? Or people amplifying bullshit stories about cops such that "ACABs"? Where were they supplicating for those reviews?
As an independent it looks to me, the FBI trod dangerously close to censorship (as in the Government censoring speech unwanted by the gov).
That's possible, but only a judge will be able to determine that and possibly your ideas about censorship do not line up with the views of that judge. The questions is who will bring suit?
They did, for 4 years. I'd certainly be curious to see those emails, but they don't really fit the narrative of these "twitter files" threads.
The highly publicized examples of taking down tweets with nude images of Hunter Biden happened when Trump was president. Is everybody ignoring that fact in this story and just assuming that the FBI is aligned with the democrats regardless of who runs the executive branch?
their job is not to interfere with the 1st amemndment.
That includes content that isn't protected by free speech e.g. child pornography.
It’s ok to just say you don’t know sometimes.
Do such statutes even exist? I suspect the answer is no, and that the FBI is just engaging in extralegal, extrajudicial monkeyshines.
> If this information was never leaked then the people effected by the FBI’s secret speech suppression may never have known and would never had a chance to contest it in court.
From a certain point of view (which seems distressingly popular on HN lately) that’s considered a feature and not a bug.
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
> Help defend the right to vote by reporting any suspected instances of voter suppression—especially those received through a private communication channel like texting—to your local FBI field office or at tips.fbi.gov.
Guess this is in their purview.
In this milieu, I find all of this alarmism to be misplaced, and thus worth calling out.
That is only 1 VIP twitter recipient, not the total received by Twitter.
For example FBI trawling through social media and flagging accounts for review doesn't seem like a strict constitutional violation unless you can prove some coercion; but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.
Maybe this sort of stuff (i.e. government/law enforcement communications with social media companies) should be automatically in the public domain if it isn't part of a criminal investigation.
We heared it many times, but we're talking about a govermental agency meddling with election results. Politics and these cases are very different in nature. Personally I wouldn't be comfortable not taking action when the FBI would ask anything from me, because it's safer to just comply.
Radical transparency only works if you remove all externalities - but we live in the real world.
Should police officers dump the body cam footage of every domestic abuse situation they walk into online?
If you want to fault the oversight and transparency of the goals of these agencies, then sure. But let's also not pretend that making all elements of investigations public would be a good idea.
Which specific government agency meddling in which specfic election? The Trump Administration meddling in the 2020 election with Hatch Act violations[0]? The FBI releasing a statement (which turned out to be nothing at all) about Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner's computer[1]?
Or was it the FBI demanding that Twitter take down the NY Post's tweet about their "Hunter Biden laptop" article[2]?
>Personally I wouldn't be comfortable not taking action when the FBI would ask anything from me, because it's safer to just comply.
Then you don't know or understand your rights. And more's the pity.
[0] https://oversight.house.gov/legislation/hearings/violations-...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/what-fbi-found-emails-anthony-weine...
[2] Except the FBI didn't demand (or request, for that matter) any such thing.
Law enforcement, people in corporate risk, and business intelligence groups very often use social media to perform open source research. In fact, when they don't, people exclaim that the police are incompetent for not knowing the shooter said he was going to shoot a place up after a history of deranged posting and a call to violence on facebook or something.
There are platforms built on top of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Etc that will do automated sentiment analysis, key into keyword trends, etc. You can build reports, see how much impact or reach certain calls to violence have, etc. and then triage the threats that you think are credible vs. those that are full of shit.
There are people out there trying to recruit people to firebomb tax buildings. Telling Twitter to shadowban them before they develop networks and get off the platform is a lot more innocuous than raiding the guy's house to see if he has bombmaking equipment.
Musk himself has recently used a similar example, asking journalists how they'd feel if somebody actually got hurt as a result of doxxing on Twitter. So how would folks at Twitter feel if they ignored an FBI report of activity that then led to a terrorist attack? They wouldn't just feel bad, they might actually be liable for helping to facilitate it. Companies do all sorts of things to avoid potential liability, or forego doing things even if those things are perfectly legal and the company would prefer to do them otherwise. It's not weird or nefarious at all for a company to err on the side of caution when the receipt of information increases their potential liability.
It's also extremely hypocritical of Musk (or his fans) to oscillate between maximalist free speech and protection of privacy, invoking extreme examples in both cases, clearly according only to which one suits him personally at any particular moment.
Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot.
What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly on online conversation. "I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596751751532937217
We shouldn't have all of our conversations, political or otherwise, in one place. That's a giant mistake. We need decentralization for our own safety and freedom.
Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok.
> HN is no different in that respect.
Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.
I'd be interested to know the user number.
Does that help?
That's the relevant number. So Twitter is about 1000x larger than HN.
From a surveillance standpoint, we're really only talking about commenters, on both sites.
How so? How many HN comments have "gone viral"? How many news stories are about a HN comment? How many politicians and journalists and pro athletes and Hollywood celebrities are commenting on HN?
Any given HN comment can receive only a theoretical maximum of 250K upvotes, if (improbably) every registered user upvoted it, and those upvotes would be superfluous anyway, because they would only bring the comment to the top of a single HN submission.
Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.
Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.
I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.
I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy.
However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article" like the downvote button.
HN doesn't even have DM's to release though.
You don't have the expectation of privacy in public in the sense that someone can see what you're doing. But there's also the expectation that a democratic (small d) government isn't watching your every move in public, because that's a sign of totalitarianism.
No matter where or what site you use.
Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.
Spreading the conversation elsewhere doesn't change the ability of these analytics platforms to cover them, although it does introduce more noise into the signal; the smaller the forum, the less an impact it has in the analytics rankings. If you slice up the pie into a ton of tiny chunks, the data received becomes less useful.
That said, some of the uses of these platforms are completely reasonable and very pro-social. We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
I suspect that these tools are all looking at the world's largest social networks with 9-10 figure user bases. The same argument applies to them: they're too big. None of them should exist. Once you break it down to thousands or millions of different platforms, each with much smaller user bases, it becomes prohibitively expensive to surveil them all.
> We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
Has this ever prevented a shooting? They always find these posts after the fact.
I think that is where a lot of people are getting confused or hung up. They think the First Amendment means the government is not allowed to speak at all. That is incorrect. It prohibits "abridging the freedom of speech," in other words, forcibly restraining other people from speaking.
So: it is legal for the FBI to call up a company and say what they think. And the company is free to act on that, or not, as they wish.
If the FBI wishes to apply the force of law, that is when they would need to show evidence, get a warrant, etc. But just speaking to companies is normal, and often welcomed by the company if the FBI is sharing information that is useful.
But how do you know that the FBI was "just speaking" and merely that? We all are looking at the same source here, there's clearly ambiguity with respect to what was discussed in the FBI's repeated calls with Roth
It seems to me like you're incredibly eager to assume that there's nothing more to this, and that the FBI is just merely "speaking to companies" and nothing more
I'm not saying that the FBI is merely speaking or doing more than speaking, I'm saying that we don't know and there's insufficient information available to make that kind of judgement
> Does the First Amendment protect intimidating speech?
Not always. The First Amendment does not protect intimidation in the form of “true threats,” “where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence” against another person or group. Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 360 (2003).
Even when speech is not openly threatening, states and localities nonetheless may impose some restrictions on speech in order to protect the integrity of elections and the rights of voters to cast their ballots free from intimidation. In Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191 (1992), the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that banned campaigning within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place.
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
> Long before the Court affirmed the right to vote as constitutionally protected, Congress had passed a series of laws which extended civil rights protections, including suffrage protections, to recently emancipated slaves following the civil war. These laws, deemed the “Enforcement Acts,” are to some extent still in place today, and those statutes continue to be the primary method by which the federal government enforces the civil rights of individual citizens. 18 U.S.C. §§241 and 242 provide broad jurisdiction to prosecute corruption of rights. The statutes cover the intentional deprivation of any right protected under the Constitution or federal law. §241 makes it unlawful for two or more persons “to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”38 §242 makes it unlawful for anyone “acting under color of law” to deprive a person of such a right.
> The Supreme Court acknowledged the broad scope of §241 when it opined that “[t]he language of §241 is plain and unlimited. [It] embraces all of the rights and privileges secured to citizens by all of the Constitution and all of the laws of the United States....We think [its] history leaves no doubt that, if we are to give §241 the scope its origins dictate, we must accord it a sweep as broad as its language.”51 The broad scope of the law allows for the sweeping protection of federally recognized rights. At the same time, it constructs some barriers for applying the law when new types of violations must be articulated. To that end, the statute has been the target of a vast number of vagueness challenges in federal courts – although to little avail.
This makes me think of "the implication" in it's always sunny in philadephia.
FBI calls you up and tell you what they think, and you'll totally ignore FBI. Totally.
People hate Musk way too much that they are blind. If this was trump, the shitstorm would begin. It would be drummed up as the biggest scandal ever.
> FBI calls you up and tell you what they think, and you'll totally ignore FBI. Totally.
The OP literally says that's an option that certain companies have opted to do:
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603890210252668928
It sounds like Twitter was choosing to play nice with the feds, unless any evidence of coercion arises.
This is like your bosses make sexual advances at you. The power dynamics would make you uncomfortable.
You are getting more and more obtuse. You know this is not the same, but you still use it in your argument.
In this case, FBI asked for the location of the accounts that "Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI". Ref: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1604191731141984256
Why didn't FBI get a subpoena properly? why asking twitter to voluntarily provide information?
Were the FBI afraid of getting a subpoena for some reason?
So what are you saying? The government doesn't actually have a right to speak? Without some evidence of threats or coercion I don't see the problem.
> People hate Musk way too much that they are blind.
You think Musk would act any differently?
> If this was trump, the shitstorm would begin.
Not true.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-granted-requests-fro...
This is like saying employees have the right to reject when their bosses make sexual advances.
In theory, sure. In practice, not really. Employees fear for their careers
This is why it's such a big no even if employees have mutual romantic interests.
Same with the FBI. They can fuck up your life beyond repair if they want to.
Thus, "the implications"!
I'll concede that the big tech companies certainly have an incentive to comply with law enforcement because of their legal authority, however as we all know, big tech companies are well equipped in terms of political influence as well as powerful legal teams that ensure these companies don't have to do anything they don't want to if they're complying with the law, especially if law enforcement isn't issuing a legal command and is merely "telling you what they think".
> This is why it's such a big no even if employees have mutual romantic interests.
In all cases of boss vs subordinate there is a near total power asymmetry in favor of the boss unless the boss is egregiously abusive or retaliatory, and often times even that doesn't matter. A boss also never has a genuine business interest in making sexual advances, whereas law enforcement may have a genuine law enforcement interest in asking for a company's cooperation.
FBI asked for the location of the accounts that "Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI". Ref: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1604191731141984256
> whereas law enforcement may have a genuine law enforcement interest in asking for a company's cooperation.
Then, getting a subpoena shouldn't have been an issue since they have a genuine law enforcement interest. Judges would have an easy time signing the subpoena since this would be totally justified and reasonable. right? right?
Yet FBI decided not to do that and decided to ask Twitter to "volunteer" the information.
Archive.org archived the tweets listed in the email screenshot that has been shared, it was tweets posting leaked nude of a politic, of course it has to be censored, actor or not, that's simply illegal.
The media is under incredible pressure to make stories, particularly in the US.
All of us have seen how MSNBC veered politically over the last 15 years - as have other news outlets.
Matt Taibbi is a good guy, smart, down to earth.
But he's a 'lone warrior' now, his income comes from substack subs, he has to make noise just like any other entity.
The substack people tend to market themselves as 'alt something' which is legit in some ways, but they push it pretty hard.
Taibbi has really been ginning it up lately.
It's a bit sad really, but we see this happen all over - I think most of our 'venerable' media institutions are at the same level so we can't fully blame him.
All of that said this is a legit story and there are 'kernels of truth' to this notion that Twitter is doing things maybe it should not, or inconsistently etc.
Elon is not wrong to be suspicious, of course now he's banning actual, legit journalists who dare to question him, in a feat of absolute hypocrisy that should completely undermine is 'free speech' credentials. Sadly I'm doubtful his fanboys will care.
As far as I know he's only banning those that link to ElonJet. He's been a bit irrational since his two year old kid had a close encounter with a crazy person a few days ago.
By default I believe people unless I have a reason to think they are lying.
His memoir paints a radically different picture.
Is this a violation of the 1st Amendment or a way to skirt around it?
Or are they doing it under duress?
Of course it's the latter.
The US gov. has been threatening to take down social media companies for years. Do you think Twitter really wanted to upset them now?
Yes? When the CDC says "we recommend you get vaccinated against the flu", and you get vaccinated, you're acting voluntarily, despite the government recommendation.
Also, the guidelines ask you not to write comments like that.
It didn’t seem that the FBI were going into detail on any cases. I wondered if some were likely to be considered concerted foreign interference that they’d unearthed and policing that was within their remit. I assume there’s some overlap between Twitter’s ToS re misinformation and the FBI’s assessment, if that makes sense.
It's like when people "voluntarily" do things that cops ask during traffic stops that are beyond what's necessary by law. It's not that people want, they are just scared and don't want to get in trouble.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857581503569929
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857590299103232
Perhaps you should actually read Taibbi's work in this thread.
Imagine how this my play out in a future election with different candidates.
In principle, certainly it is not great for security services to meddle in public spaces. In reality, I am willing to believe that the federal government is a tiny fish in the sea of requests from local authorities, individual police departments, private individuals via reports, not least of all the legally persons we call corporations. I bet any day, Twitter's moderation teams are blanketed with requests from companies and businesses of every type and size, both advertisers and not. All equipped with legal teams that could potentially target Twitter.
In short, I find it to be performative virtue-signaling to be concerned about around a dozen small potatoes that the FBI asked for the mods to take a look at. Especially if this might just be cover for the real large-scale systemic censorships that occur at some deeper level that no FOIA or Taibbi journalism would be able to unearth. Especially when the PRISM programs are right there if you want something of substance to be outraged about. This, in comparison, is no different from a mom and pop store asking Twitter to go after an abusive account spreading slander about them. Litigiousness is an all-American custom. This didn't even trigger any warrant canaries. Hysteria over this is concern-trolling.
It's not performative virtue signalling to push back on a lesser threat just because you are not pushing back on the greater threat. The gov't has been very good at hiding the existence of these programs. We do not know much about PRISM, so there's less to go on. You need to push back whereever it occurs. We still have no idea how widespread this is. Not to mention, it is likely going on with google, facebook, instagram as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34026457
It sounds like most of this discussion is entirely driven by normative fancies rather than any actual knowledge of how these processes are already being run in the industry, let alone how the first amendment actually applies. For the latter, it would seem that a whole bevy of court cases undergird this whole endeavor:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
You keep referring to a "narrative," but you don't provide any details WRT to the ideas presented in such a "narrative."
As such, I have to reject your claims for lack of detail, facts or evidence. Feel free to change my mind by providing such things.
An attempt by whom? Please be specific and name names.
Counter to which specific narrative? Please be specific and detailed.
Otherwise, you're just making unsupported claims. Not a good look, friend.
No, government should not be policing speech on private platforms, period. At most, they should concern themselves with clearly illegal things—threats of violence, child pornongraphy, etc. It doesn't matter whether or not they are being "balanced".
And to think the gov tried to have a department of disinformation.
That’s how you divide the country even further.
The question to ask is whether any of these accounts would have been allowed if reported by people. There’s no evidence that the FBI was making threats that something otherwise allowed had to be removed.
The cop was telling the bouncer, "Throw that guy out."
And the bar owner did what the cop said, because the police department had threatened to shut down bar owners in the city for the last three years.
A bar owner that does not follow the instructions of the authorities is going to find their bar closed in short order because they have to comply with the law and with instructions by parties authorized to give them.
To paraphrase the trope that those that don't like Twitter are free to create their own: if you don't like the way society works then you are free to create your own. On Mars or something.
Twitter needs such entities to survive. Displeasing then is more existentially threatening than running afoul of the FBI.
If that is true, that would make it government coercion. But no one has properly alleged anything with regards to Twitter on that analogue.
There do exist direct orders to reveal or conceal information that do require a judge to sign, things like National Security Letters. It's remarkable that NSLs and other compelling documents don't get more play in these conversations. They actually are what people think these friendly emails are.
It doesn't matter, and I don't care, if the FBI requests were "even" on some partisan scoreboard.
>all they’re doing is politely asking for the company’s own policy to be enforced
This makes the incorrect assumption that the FBI's stated concerns are equal to their actual concerns. But this is the FBI we're talking about here. If they were actually investigating a crime it would be one thing. But randomly harassing private citizens by rules-lawyering is not appropriate.
Would love to see how something like this would fare in a Supreme Court case.
>Is this a violation of the 1st Amendment or a way to skirt around it?
Which specific security contractors? Which specific think tanks? The above assertion that you quoted makes several assertions, none of which (at least AFAICT) have any facts, data or evidence attached to them. Perhaps I'm missing something important? If so, what might that be?
What's more,. I receive multiple contacts from DHS daily[0]. And I (as an individual with minimal resources and little ability to "fight" the government) have never felt pressured by the Federal government to do anything.
I'd expect that corporations with multiple billions in revenue (like Twitter) and lawyers on staff would zealously protect their independence and reputation rather than being seen as shills for some shadowy "government conspiracy."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructu...
I think this is a typo and should be FITF, the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/foreign-...
We haven't seen Twitter arbitrarily leak DMs yet. Even Matt Taibbi said they only have access to screenshots of admin interfaces directly related to their specific stories around uncritical FBI/DHS access, shadowbanning for questionable political purposes, and the whole Trump thing. It's far from the ideological free-for-all people are suggesting.
But Elon has already shown he's willing to play dangerous games with his power. So far we haven't seen the FUDy stuff yet beyond the stupid new doxxing rule for which he's burned tons of good will. Nothing comes without costs.
A hacker pulling off an exfiltration of the entire DB of any major tech company I'm very skeptical about that happening.
Under normal circumstances I would agree, but after firing so many people I can't imagine that security at Twitter is still priority #1, they likely have trouble keeping the lights on.
And the moment it became inevitable that Musk took over Twitter I deleted my account. And that was one of many reasons.
The only two social media sites that I partake in are HN and up to Elons acquisition Twitter and that is because I had/have a fairly high degree of faith in their ability to at least try to do the right thing. With Musk, Zuckerberg and several others I have the conviction that given the opportunity that they will do the wrong thing.
Would you bet that Musk has not already abused his position to gain information from private communications on Twitter?
I mean NSA has had this capability for 25 years.
They were never "your" DMs.
(I had a typo in my original comment btw; I said "surprising" but meant "unsurprising".)
Just another incentive to act with integrity and keep personal correspondence out of corporate systems.
Seems like she should be a real tech person and just learn how to use grep. Her explanations all just feel like a first year journalism student trying to explain the hot new program she just learned about and everyone else has been just suffering through for a decade.
Moderation is about moderating bad behaviour of individuals. Censorship is blocking entire topics from discussion.
If you think it's underwhelming, just think how you'd feel if it would have been revealed that Don Trump Jr was smoking crack with prostitutes, and twitter blocked the story from spreading. 10 days before an election. Like seriously, think about that. Would you be fine with that?
Maybe they wouldn't be fine with it, but still fine with the H Biden story being censored, because they've got no integrity and want their political opponents censored but not their own.
I think Part One and Part Two had significant frontpage time on HN, then not so much until now. That raises the question (at least in my mind) what's different about Part Six? I think part of the answer is random fluctuation (you can think of HN's frontpage as a slot machine with 30 slots—it's not random, but randomness is involved), and part of it is maybe that the government involvement aspect makes the information here more significant.
When it comes to divisive topics, HN moderation spends a lot of time in the uncanny valley between the major ideological camps. This topic is a good example. One passionate subset of the community would like all of these submissions to get major attention, while an opposing passionate subset would like all of them to be soundly ignored. Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position*, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture.
* for some reason that is a pet peeve of mine - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is there a manifesto of some sort that defines the philosophy and approach of HN moderation? Or is just tribal knowledge that mods have built over time?
It's my intention to distill a bunch of those explanations into a set of loose commentaries on how HN and HN moderation work. But it's the sort of thing that never rises above the middle of the todo list. Maybe one day.
Seems to be going great so far, truly galaxy-brain tier marketing.
Which one is correct? I have no idea, but I'd bet that regardless of any additional releases, convincing or unconvincing, the same pods of people are going to keep making the same assumptions and insisting on the same bullshit. That's the one thing that never changes
His idea wasn't even "Grindr for teens". It was worse because he wasn't proposing a separate service. His idea was to update those sites to accommodate young people. Yoth wrote: "those services should consider offering toned-down content alongside adult fare."
Even if we're charitable, Yoth's use of the word "alongside" was unfortunate. Less charitable, a serious error. It's unrealistic to expect a service with such a concentrated historical purpose for gay adults, could pivot to a harmonized family-friendly vibe for young and old.
I wonder how he landed such a role at Twitter over other applicants, and what criteria he met, that others did not.
I don’t know much about his proposed solution, I haven’t read his work, but judging by my own teenage use of Grindr (many years ago), a toned down, protected version of something gay teens were already going to use seems like a net gain for their safety and sanity.
I doubt anything like it would ever be legally possible, though. There’s just no amount of moderating that would keep a teen Grindr safe and PG-13. If even one thing slips through - and it would - it’s not hard to picture the media coverage. No sane company is touching this idea with a ten foot pole.
We can't speak for all teens, gay or otherwise. They are not all the same mind. The degree of sexual activity and relationships among teens would range from zero to highly active. They are not all concentrated in the highly active segment.
"Grindr" services are commercial. Inherently promoting, advertising, "luring" target customers with a wide net. That would mean luring all segments of teenagers, if Roth's idea was realized. It's gross.
If some teens already use those services, parents and educators of the teens, and the services should do more to keep them away. Roth's "embrace" idea says more about his personal angle than consideration of teens in general and their families.
I see that Penn State removed access to Roth's paper. Nobody seemed to care. But it should be made available because free speech means we record bad ideas, discuss why they're bad, avoid them in future, or evolve them to better ideas.
Musk by contrast has shown that he only cares about limiting speech that damages himself, and he will say or do anything to obscure that fact. He promised not to ban the elonjet account, and then reversed course: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/14/elons-promise-not-to-ban...
He falsely claimed that Twitter refused to take action on child exploitation: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1601302412056473600?s=20&t=4...
He has banned journalists who were critical to him in the past: https://mastodon.world/@kairyssdal/109524620754087441
He has banned Mastodon and Pixelfed's accounts, falsly labeling them as "malware."
And most hypocritically, he claims the reason for all of this is because these people have shared "assassination coordinates" and "doxxed" him, even though first of all, the information is public: https://mastodon.social/@JxckS/109524630642043912 Second, most of the journalists never linked to his private information: https://famichiki.jp/@stopthatgirl7/109522071808584229 There is evidence that his claimed stalker was far from an airport, and worst in my opinion, he has doxxed critics in the past in much more damaging ways: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/37229846-montana-skeptic/... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon... https://futurism.com/the-byte/twitter-employee-flees-home-el...
In group vs out group.
https://level.medium.com/its-always-about-power-f9fca4321e0c
I am right wing, and I hear right-wing commentators say things like "for left-wing authoritarians, the hypocrisy is the point" all the time. Seriously, the article you linked sounds exactly like something I would read from "my" side, just with good guys and bad guys reversed.
See: https://kottke.org/22/12/the-boring-conservatism-of-elon-mus...
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
- G. K. Chesterton
(Also, "conservative" and "right-wing" are not the same thing)
The GP's comment is describing the capital C Conservatism brand. It's subsumed the idea about being politically conservative and combined it with an astounding mix of racism, bigotry, and in many cases outright fascism. It's weaponized the Chesterson Fences concept describing some fantasy "back in the day" utopia that only institutionalized racism, bigotry, and fascism will bring back into existence.
Unfortunately for the small c conservatives the big C Conservatives have turned their descriptor into their brand name and polluted debate about conservative politics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_S...
Vs
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election before, but in 2020 I found myself voting for Biden out of a genuine sense of conservatism.
For a centuries long historical review see:
The Reactionary Mind
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind
> It argues that conservatism from the 17th century to today is based on the principle "that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others".[1]: 18 [2] Robin argues that rather than being about liberty, limited government, resistance to change, or public virtue, conservatism is a "mode of counterrevolutionary practice" to preserve hierarchy and power.[1]: 17
Twitter repeatedly denied that right-wing users were being shadowbanned. That turned out to be false.
A month ago, someone on HN patronizingly explained to me that Twitter's moderation was "primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652282 The Twitter files have made it clear that this user's claim, "Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views", was false.
If Twitter's moderation was primarily about staying advertiser-friendly, they would've announced their shadowbans publicly, so advertisers would know they were safe advertising on Twitter as a platform. There wouldn't be any interesting revelations to be had.
As for doxxing, I see rules against doxxing as pro free speech. Doxxing doesn't contribute meaningfully to the public discourse. It just intimidates people into silence, interfering with speech exercise.
Free speech is a subtle concept: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have... A ban on doxxing advances free speech as I understand it. You're welcome to disagree, but I don't think my position is unreasonable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995312
>he has doxxed critics in the past in much more damaging ways
Can you point to a case of, say, Yoel Roth's real-time location staying up on Twitter even after the recent rule change which prevents doxxing?
It appears to me, based on the article you linked, that Yoel fled his home in the wake of ordinary criticism. Not doxxing specifically. Ordinary criticism kind of has to be allowed -- it's essential for our democracy that e.g. citizens are allowed to criticize politicians. But doxxing is where I draw the line.
It seems this is why Mastodon was banned: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodo...
Elon is far from perfect. But his child was physically threatened, and he responded by implementing restrictions which I consider to be correct anyways (as I stated -- doxxing is anti-free speech IMO). I think people are making more of this than it deserves. It's good if you have a CEO who's capable of changing their mind.
In any case, whatever happened to the old "Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want" argument? Right-wingers aren't the only hypocrites here.
People mocking the "Twitter Files" are saying that it's stupid, there's not really anybody calling for the government or some other actor to step in and stop them from doing it.
Nobody has demonstrated any difference between Twitter's description of its own policies and the actual facts. They said they did not shadowban (prevent a user's posts from appearing to other users without their knowledge) and Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitter.
There's similarly no evidence that Musk's child was "physically threatened" other than his own say-so, and he's a known liar.
For both the Trump ban and the Hunter Biden story, it seems Twitter did not follow its own policies.
>Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitter.
Where?
In any case, I think this depends heavily on exactly how you define "shadowbanning". You can define "shadowbanning" so it conveniently excludes all the account-level suppression Twitter did. But the broader point is: Why weren't they transparent about the type of account-level suppression they were doing?
>There's similarly no evidence that Musk's child was "physically threatened" other than his own say-so, and he's a known liar.
I'm not sure what lying you are referring to. In any case, are you willing to grant that Elon's actions are understandable if he's telling the truth about his child?
No, I don't think it's understandable for Musk to respond to someone stalking him by modifying Twitter policies to retaliate against another person with no connection to the stalking.
you are welcome
Well... that didn't age well.
And Musk has been fine with accounts that use their freedom of speech even if they resulted is safety risks. For example @libsoftiktok is an account Musk unbanned, and has likes their tweets, who post misleading information resulting in direct threats against people and organisations (e.g. children's hospitals).
For example they just recently tweeted a video* that was purposefully edited in a way to make it seem someone was pro-pedophilia, when they weren't.
*https://twitter.com/RobertLouisr/status/1603422570665201664?...
Wait, are you saying this was all to ensure Trump wins? Are you saying this is proof of a Watergate type situation?!?
https://spectator.org/64130_obama-accused-hillary-labeling-h...
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752
That mentions that both parties had access to the tools at the time, and both had requests honoured.
But only party was in power at the time, and that was the Trump administration.
The relationship was cozy. It's OK if people are cool with that. It takes all kinds.
This is sinister music played over a video of someone doing the dishes.
"Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth."
150 emails in 2 years is a partnership?
All the provided examples are actual misinformation and low effort nonsense and at no point was twitter forced to do anything.
This is literally nothing.
I'm the former owner/operator of ww.com, in its day a pretty large video streaming community, think 'twitch' but many years earlier. We had fairly regular contact with the police to ensure that our members were operating within the law, and some of them repeatedly decided to test where the line was. As responsible operator of a large web property you are an extension of society and society has - fairly universally - come to the conclusion that having a police force is both useful and necessary. As a forum operator you can choose to go head-to-head with the authorities or you can choose to work with them, we - just like Twitter - chose to do the latter because we believed that this was in everybody's best interest.
On occasion it wasn't the authorities initiating the request but us because we came upon acts and or proof of crimes to despicable to relate here and they were uniformly courteous and acted with surprising speed against the perpetrators. Law enforcement and corporations have regular contact, anybody that believes that this is not the case at the level of a Twitter or a Facebook is utterly naive.
Key words: "the law". That's not what was going on here.
The First Amendment says "shall make no law", not "shall never ask politely".
I have huge respect for the former legal department of Twitter, being under pressure from so many sides including many state level actors must have been extremely difficult. And to see it all squandered like this must be extremely painful.
I'm pretty sure all of those have happened over the course of Twitter's life span, but obviously those do not make for sexy releases so I doubt we'll hear from them.
You're right; I really hate to think about what the fallout would be if the FBI inappropriately swayed an election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
At any rate, I am just pointing out the humorous irony involved in appealing to that party to watch the FBI lest “they might lose a future election”… they already believe themselves the losers of one because of FBI involvement!
It was clearly a joke. Anyone getting fooled here is clearly the most uninformed voterimaginable. Not even low-informed, but completely uninformed.
Have you considered the real consequences of this? If the FBI for example finds accounts linked to child exploitation, drug trafficking, or terrorism; should they not ask Twitter to take down those accounts? If they find accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian farms who are using it to amplify certain messages in order to try to destabilize the US, should they just say hey that’s fine?
Further, from what I read of the tweets, it appears what those accounts wrote may have been illegal after all.
Here’s a quote from an FBI website:
> Report potential election crimes—such as disinformation about the manner, time, or place of voting—to the FBI.
I’m not sure exactly what laws those are referring to, but it appears deceiving people about voting may be illegal. So although you and I and other smart people might read their tweets and think “haha!”, not everyone may read it as a joke.
It is the government’s job to protect the rights of its citizens. Freedom of speech is not absolute (slander, libel, threats, yelling fire in a crowded theatre, etc.), and in this case I think it’s reasonable that one’s right to freedom of speech shouldn’t supersede another’s right to vote.
A Twitter ban is certainly less damaging than criminal charges over whatever statute it violates.
The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have. It is not the governments job to protect people's rights. The gov't violates rights all the time. It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
And as shady or problematic as their relationship with Twitter is, is borne out of legal precedence:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Not to mention, in the last decade, by the process of jawboning:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
So really, your complaints go up further than you think. This is something that has been happening for decades based on judicial decisions, you just weren’t aware of it.
Your original statement conveys the FBI should never ask Twitter to take down accounts. My response was such that there _are_ good reasons for the FBI to ask Twitter to take down accounts.
If we now agree on that, the issue is no longer requesting to ban accounts vs not requesting to ban accounts, but instead where the line on account bans exist. This is a much more gray debate, wouldn’t you agree?
> It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.
I agree these were intended as jokes, and parody and satire are given wide interpretations in court. But they do have limits. Presumably you wouldn’t want someone to lose their right to vote because someone else intentionally misinformed them, even if its intention was satire. I do think instead of an account ban it could be resolved with a misinformation notice, but we might be presuming the FBI official has more knowledge of online platforms than they do. It did seem from the emails Twitter was ultimately the one to decide the correct handling, so I don’t blame the FBI for just alerting Twitter of potential violations.
> The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have.
Having worked for the federal government, I can inform you it is a huge hassle to get anything published. If they publish it, every line would be analyzed for compliance and in this case probably put in front of lawyers. They can still make mistakes, but it’s overly paranoid to believe a government website would advertise unconstitutional violations of rights for years.
> It is not the governments job to protect people's rights.
Objectively false.
> The gov't violates rights all the time.
True! But these violations are failures in the government for doing its job properly. Violations often lead to punishment or scandal. It wouldn’t be a scandal if people held the belief the government wasn’t supposed to protect your rights.
> It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.
…the courts are part of the government…
But just take a step back for a second. Are you arguing that the FBI headed by a Trump appointee strong armed a very liberal silicon valley tech company into rigging the election for Biden? What?
A lot of people get strong armed by the FBI. They hold a lot of power. This is not conspiracy territory either. There are congressional oversight committees, but their ability to use classified information gives them a lot of leverage.
The Babylon Bee is a satire site that was banned for doing satire.
There are many many examples.
The Babylon Bee was told that 1 Tweet violated Twitter's policy, and that they needed to delete it to unlock their account. They chose not to.
Neat trick, but it doesn't work anymore.
Are you referring to calling a trans person by their biological sex?
See? :)
When a stranger is yelling at a trans person about their biological sex, it's done to inflict emotional harm on the trans person. They transitioned away from that gender to reduce harm (that is the definition of a trans person), and the stranger is intentionally trying to bring that harm back.
Imagine shouting at a woman about her "biological breast size" because she is wearing a push-up bra, or had surgery to enlarge or reduce her breast size. Would that seem like a normal, harm-free way to interact with another person you don't know? Obviously not.
> Who is saying that people should be harmed?
The rights actions speak so loud no one can hear their words.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/briefing/right-wing-mass-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-3...
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/25/filling-the-trump-void-righ...
If someone drops an n-word at a state rep, does it become not hate speech? The answer is (obviously) that hate speech is still hate speech.
It's the tweet that got the Bee suspended from twitter because they refused to delete it.
This isn't hate speech, just social commentary on organizations giving awards and accolades reserved for women to men who want to be women.
More probably it's just a man bringing his fetish to work and expecting everyone to comply, as is the zeitgeist of today.
Come on, do you really believe this is anything other than the usual trolling that goes on over there: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FdXO_XkXgAsIMFy?format=jpg&name=...
It reminds of an old joke:
Conservative: "I keep getting banned for my views"
Rando: "Oh, small government?"
C: "No, not that one"
R: "Oh, so fiscal responsibility?"
C: "Not that either"
R: "So which ones?"
C: "Oh, uh... You know."
That’s just watering down what hate speech is.
A) Harm the target, who has gone out of their way to avoid that harm already (by transitioning/changing pronouns)
B) Dehumanize the target in the eyes of others (this person doesn't matter, their wishes are to be entirely disrespected)
seems like a reasonable candidate for hate speech to me.
It's very silly to claim that this is some type of hate.
E: Removed the troll feeding bits.
> neither causes harm
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/transphobia#effect...
> Nor dehumanizes
Intentionally causing harm (see above) and pushing for it to be acceptable for others to cause harm is in fact dehumanizing.
I note you still fail to present any argument other than "I feel like you're wrong"
How does that actually harm him?
He's in an incredibly privileged position, and indeed has enjoyed male privilege for pretty much all of his life.
Should we avoid saying any truth that might slightly upset a public figure, or anyone really, just in case they feel a bit sad if they happen to hear it?
> just in case they feel a bit sad if they happen to hear it
I recommend you read that source I provided again.
E: And a couple others -
https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/resource/transgender-peopl...
https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/ Good paper, but here's a sentence from the conclusion. > Findings underscore the importance of risk factors such as emotional neglect within the family, interpersonal microaggressions, and internalized self-stigma
In addition, what reason do you have to not respect a trans persons identity? Biological sex is already much _much_ more complex than just the XY we're taught in middle school. Klinefelter's and intersex people both exist, as do other blurred lines.
There's also nothing inherent about 'sex == gender' - transgender people have existed throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
Now then, unless you provide actually interesting input we're done here until you come back with your main :).
As a more concrete counterpoint, here's a news article from last year which includes a lesbian woman describing her rape by a man who calls himself a woman: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385
The editors decided to replace the male pronouns she used to describe him with "they" and "them":
> Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.
> "[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."
How do you think she must have felt reading this truthful quote of hers mangled into a lie? A rape victim who isn't permitted to have her rape accurately reported, after she had already been shamed into getting into bed with this man by him weaponising the same ideology that censors her now.
Was she guilty of hate speech by describing her own rape?
I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
A) Doesn't make her not a woman
B) Doesn't make all trans people scumbags.
I understand the position of the lesbian woman in that story - she is justified in anger, hate and fear, as sad as it is to say.
You're allowed to not be attracted to someone, and trans individuals have to accept that sometimes relationships may not work out as a result of their being trans - it's just a sad but true fact.
> Push down their own beliefs and feelings in case someone who thinks they are the opposite sex reads anything that may be critical of this?
Isn't the quote "facts don't care about your feelings"? All serious modern research points to trans individuals being valid.
> I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
You asked how speech leads to harm, I provided an example. I've also uploaded more since then.
Even a rape victim isn't allowed to say that a man raped her, despite him forcing his penis inside of her. Is she supposed to pretend that this is a "woman's penis" or something?
That was an extreme example used to illustrate. The other examples elsewhere in this thread include a man taking an accolade that would usually be reserved for women, and a man going around being creepy to women who provide genital waxing services to other women.
If critics aren't allowed to push aside the gender ideology for a minute and discuss these males as men, it entirely undermines any point they're making about women's boundaries being encroached upon - which is also a harm, and a significant one.
The reason that I responded to your previous post was the importance of this extreme example.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women.
The research supports this.
Scumbags are scumbags, regardless of gender or trans status. Some of the people you listed are scumbags, and one was a woman receiving an award for women.
If you're going to dissolve into whataboutisms, we're done here.
This is an ideological belief. We can also accurately describe them as women who want to be men, and men who want to be women.
Of the three examples we're discussing:
* one raped a woman using his penis - this is what men do, not women
* one tried to get women to touch his male genitals - again, the behavior of a man
* one received an accolade as if he's a woman - but spent most of his life making a highly successful career as a man, using his male privilege to its fullest extent
Can you see why people may prefer to refer to these three as men, not women?
Meghan Murphy is a left-wing feminist, she was banned for expressing gender critical views.
Meghan Murphy in particular is a left-wing, socialist, radical feminist, who was raised in a Marxist household. This is no secret, you can search her work online to confirm all this, she's pro-unions, pro-socialism, and speaks against the right on numerous political matters.
Her ban from Twitter was caused by referring to a male (Johnathan/Jessica Yaniv), who was suing female beauticians for refusing to wax his bollocks, as "him".
Now I don't know about you, but I would think if you're going around flashing your testicles to women and demanding they touch them, that is very much a proof of being a man. I mean, you don't find women popping their hairy balls out to be plucked, and haranguing women who politely demur, do you?
Nonetheless, Twitter moderators disagreed. To them, this was the bushy scrotum of a woman. So Murphy was canned.
It goes against the essence of socialism and communism.
I know who TERF non-socialist Meghan Murphy is. You can see here that she is not a leftist: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/08/why-i-left-the-left...
She keeps saying she is. She doesn't understand (I mean I'm sure she does, but she's a lying bigot) that socialism and all the wonders of it don't work if youre being a SWERF and TERF. Things don't work that way. You have to want better conditions for every one. Otherwise...how are we giving people equal chances to succeed?
I think the problem is the vast majority of people have no clue what socialism is. Most people have read no socialist texts, but are inundated with right wing and capitalistic propaganda all the time.
tldr: SWERFs and TERFs are not leftists. Like how people like Jordan Peterson (before), Tim Pool, Dave Rubin are all right wingers through and through, but keep pretending they are centrists. You have to act the act. Not just talk. This applies to Meghan Murphy too.
I have spent dozens and dozens and dozens of hours getting into TERFs. Radical feminism didn't originate on the political right, but at this point trans people are dying and in danger. This is abundantly clear to any dyed-in-the-wool socialists in the 2020s. Even if it wasn't clear decades ago. Or even a decade ago.
Unfortunately you showed your true colors deadnaming Jessica and using the incorrect pronouns.
Here's an insightful article she wrote some years ago that dives further into this problem much of "the left" has, framed around their celebration of the prostitution of women: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2011/11/07/why-does-the-left....
She writes:
"While I have long been a supporter of labour rights, of unions, and have counted myself as a fighting member of the working class who has waivered somewhere between socialism and Marxism from the moment I understood the concept of class struggle, I've found myself suddenly misaligned with some of those with whom I share my end of the political spectrum."
"These are the people I vote for. They represent my interests and ideologies and yet, when it comes to the issue of prostitution, it feels as though we've been pitted against one another."
"On one hand there seems to be a distinct lack of class analysis – we forget that there are reasons that some women are prostituted while others are not, that some women have a 'choice' while others do not. On the other, because decriminalization has, in part, been framed as a labour issue (i.e. that this is a job like any other and, therefore, should be treated in the same way any other service sector job is, in terms of laws), the gender and race factors fall to the wayside and we forget that prostitution impacts women and, in particular, racialized women in an inordinate way."
And:
"The reason for a man to buy sex from a woman is, without a doubt, because he desires pleasure without having to give anything in return. This is a male-centered purchase. If we are to define sex as something pleasurable for both parties then how on earth can we define prostitution as sex work? There is something decidedly unprogressive about calling something 'sex' when the act is, in fact, solely about providing pleasure for one party (the male party) without any regard for the woman with whom you are engaging in this supposed 'sex' with. Doesn't this defy the whole enthusiastic consent model?"
"While I certainly support human rights and worker rights, I also support women's rights and believe that, as a feminist, I cannot and will not work towards normalizing the idea that women can and should be bought and sold. I certainly will not promote this as part of my progressive politics."
And much more - the whole article is very much worth reading. Do you not agree that she makes many thoughtful and well-considered points?
The fundamental problem is that within many leftist groups, there is a huge blind spot when it comes to women's issues. It should not be too much to ask that women be spared from male sexual violence, and women be permitted female-only safe spaces away from men.
Like how Tim Pool and his sycophants say he’s a [classic] liberal. As if that means anything to Americans besides code for right-wing. Obviously right wingers can be liberals. Many are. Any one with a nuanced understanding of politics knows that.
Edit: Hilarious. You responded the way you did completely ignoring me having already done the Tim Pool analogy. You’re still going at it Again, have you personally read any socialist or communist or leftist texts? If so, what? It would be embarrassing and shameful for me to be an adult and spout off about different political ideologies without having read up on them.
Please cite some left and right wing texts you have read and understood. Please explain why class solidarity excluding trans and sex workers is still leftist. Write in your own words so I know you understand in-depth nuanced politics and can accept you’re right and I’m wrong.
I wrote my comments to help people reading see the truth. I’m sure with your swagger you will respond in good faith.
Evidence Meghan identifies with ERFs: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2022/12/27/2022-the-year-ter....
It does not show or allege a crime was ignored - can you be precise in what you’re insinuating?
I don't know. Seems like there's a difference.
LEO are 90%+ on the right. We are talking about the famously conservative FBI here.
Maybe one could make a case that the FBI requesting Twitter to enforce its own policies is reasonable, but if the Feds are making judgments on what to complain about based on content or viewpoint rather than time / place / manner, that really starts to conflict with First Amendment jurisprudence.
The FBI contacted trust and safety and said 'Hey we have concerns about these tweets'. Twitter decided to take them down in some cases.
Who is corrupted here? Twitter for taking reports and then deciding how to react to them? The FBI for finding misinformation that might lead to crazies creating mass casualty events?
The FBI at no time FORCED twitter to do anything. So it's not violating the first amendment.
This is just an optimization and a way to save everybody a lot of time and headaches, as well as a way to ensure that the genie gets put back into the bottle before something can grow legs and do a lot of damage. And with the degree to which social media has been weaponized that is a good thing.
Strong disagree. I've been on the receiving side of many such requests and all of them came with reasons and citations to back up the request. I've never had a single LE request (including some from the FBI even though we were located in Toronto, Canada and in IJmuiden, NL meaning that we could have refused them simply on account of not being in their jurisdiction) that did not make perfect sense to me.
2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
The context was quite comparable: live conversations, messages both public and private.
> 2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
Twitter had an extensive legal team before Musk fired them all, I'm pretty sure they were well capable of determining which requests were legal and which were not.
That's just obviously false. It was pretty clearly just a suggestion that Twitter investigate violations of its rules, not a demand.
"Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account you hold and change them regularly. Using the same passphrase across several accounts makes you more vulnerable if one account is breached."
This is an ask from the FBI. But they obviously aren't coercing you not to use abc123 as your password.
By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace.
Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?
All these installments have done is confirm over-and-over again that this was pretty much the normal and expected kind of interaction.
I’m not sure how institutions can say “no” to the FBI without feeling fear of retribution, nor do I want the FBI putting pressure on corporations to be something that’s “normal and expected”.
I'm sure there was some give-and-take but on the whole what I've seen so far is absolutely par for the course, if you were to look into Facebook, Google, Microsoft and any of the ISPs and email providers you would find the exact same thing.
Both Twitter and the FBI were pretty open about the FBI having limited access to Twitters' firehose and that there was constant interaction between the two parties. You can add to that that if you were to look at this internationally and at the state level that such contacts can be expected to exist as well. Any assumption to the contrary is hopelessly naive.
That analogy should help you understand the difference between a random guy writing to Twitter "hey, I think these tweets violate your ToS" and the FBI doing the same thing.
It may be within Twitters terms of service to ban people and censor people, and that may be fine for Twitter, but for a sworn officer to use Twitter to censor people - that is an abuse of power.
Of course, the files also show that Twitter personnel acted in bad faith and didn't follow their own ToS.
However if you think about it for a minute, if the FBI were this bold in written, subpoena-able communication, what do you think the offline conversations looked like?
If you have allegations of illegality, who determined that? Are you saying FBI should just say "Trust us, it's illegal - we don't need a jury or a judge"?
Since when does the FBI just get to accuse people of things and take their rights away?
Who said it was illegal? The FBI? Twitter? Can you highlight a quote here?
Look at the sort of wording used in the examples in the thread.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857573219819529 - "notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service"
It's one thing for the FBI to contact twitter to say "hey there's this account that's posting instructions on how to make and plant pipe bombs so you should remove it" but a completely different thing for the FBI to say "hey there's thing thing that violates one your arbitrary terms of service so you should take it down".
Why is the FBI spending time and resources looking for TOS violations for a private company?
Why is the FBI spending time looking into _anything_ that's not illegal, period?
You can say no to these requests. Possibly, twitter did.
Government thugs don't need to give explicit orders to have their wishes followed, especially if the thugs in question make it sound like they share your ideological goals.
Nice little company you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.
https://i0.wp.com/www.techdirt.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/1...
As I've said, Taibbi has been very clear that he has no evidence of government involvement in any response to the Hunter Biden story.
The alternative may well have been a dead VP, or worse, so be happy that these channels exist(ed). With that whole department axed we are now in much more dangerous territory. That said I'm pretty sure that Elon Musk knows which side his bread is buttered on and that given an appropriately worded request Twitter will comply just like it did in the past. Or do you think they'll give the FBI the finger now?
You could. But that's not what happened here, judging by the evidence on display.
All I see is what I expected to see: law enforcement engaging in a careful manner with a company that is dealing with an extremely large flow of communications. And if some of those communications are of a society destabilizing nature it is well within the mandate of the FBI to stick their noses in and make requests. You then have the option to refuse those requests, in which case you may either end up in court, they could forget about the whole thing or you are served with a piece of paper signed off by a judge.
What is illegal and what isn't is ultimately for a judge to decide but not every two-bit issue needs to go by a judge if all parties agree that the world is better off with moderating it out of existence.
The whole point is that these cases aren't going in front of a judge or jury to decide. Without that system of checks and balances, "all parties agree" is meaningless because it can't be challenged. "All parties agreed" that the civil rights or anti-war movement were destabilizing and needed to be suppressed...you seem to support that kind of unchecked power. I don't know why people are so quick to forget our very recent history.
Next time you receive a request from the police that you think is reasonable try stonewalling them and see what happens. I guarantee you won't like it.
And as far as the secrecy is concerned: records were kept, that's why you are reading about this.
And these are just the big ones. They've pushed for back doors into iPhones for instance.
I don't care how trustworthy anyone thinks they are. No one should be able to just arbitrarily transcend the law because they are "clean".
If we're going to discuss the FBI in a larger setting I would consider that to be out of scope, to me the discussion is limited to the interaction between social media companies and law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular.
First amendment? What is that?
FBI is not Congress.
That includes the Executive.
When there are mass ransomware attacks from foreign states, the FBI does help private companies.
I think that is probably the charitable perspective. Either that or the FBI led by James Comey at the time (who arguably single handed sunk Clinton in 2016 by going against FBI policy to re-open the "emails" case), was corrupt and at a rate of one email a week was attempting to control the national discourse thru twitter.
Not sure if that is credible given the FBI could have done far worse to the trump campaign.
Though, without primary source material, I'm not sure how one could tell the difference (Occams razor seemingly might come into play)
Twitter as a private company can moderate content as it sees fit. But the government is supposed to be constrained by the First Amendment. And here, they technically are, because they're not forcing Twitter to take action. But there's always the background threat of regulation if Twitter doesn't play nice, so it's not as black and white as this.
Having been on the receiving end of such requests I was pretty happy all of them were made in a confidential manner, it saved everybody a ton of headaches and reduce the amount of grip the various miscreants had on our community. Doing that in the open would have caused massive issues, some of these people were downright dangerous and others simply needed help, keeping their data and our interaction around that data confidential was - in my opinion - a good thing all around.
You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity. What you could do is to come up with a set of workable rules for which requests would have to be made public and which not, but I don't think I would be capable of coming up with such a set of rules that would not in the future lead to issues. So to default to secrecy seems prudent.
In that light, the sale of Twitter and the subsequent exposure of all these interactions presumably has the effect of such communications becoming more opaque rather than less resulting in the opposite effect of what you desire.
Nobody has a problem with the FBI doing takedown requests for that kind of content. It's about political content (labelled "civic misinformation") on accounts like @RSBNetwork. The FBI isn't supposed to be taking sides and potentially influencing elections by encouraging social media companies to ban accounts of political actors.
Personally I'm of two minds about this whole thing. While I have concerns, the right-wing in the US at the moment are an authoritarian movement and social media companies are doing not nearly enough in the way of moderation. Ideally the FBI would have stayed out of it and Twitter would have upped their game.
> You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
I'd put the burden on the FBI. If they want to exclude all clearly non-political content (e.g. suicide videos) from the transparency report that's ok by me.
Just look at COINTELPRO for the most egregious example.
Then there's Waco, Ruby Ridge, the campaign finance corruption, infiltration of latin American governments, and modern operations similar to COINTELPRO to take down various movements like occupy wall street.
They are a mafia, not some benign group that can be blindly trusted with secret carte blanche powers.
But none of that seems to have any bearing on what happened here at Twitter, which is so far - to put it mildly, given the amount of noise made by Musk et al - underwhelming.
If you feel differently then that's fine but personally I think there are far bigger transgressions by the FBI than requesting that Twitter take down objectionable content and rabble rousers.
In NL Twitter was successfully weaponized by our most despicable - outright pro-Nazi - political party and the aftereffects are still felt today. Compared to what happened in the US it obviously pales but you have to wonder how the 6th of January 2020 would have ended if it weren't for the good contacts between the FBI and Twitter.
Not all such contacts are bad.