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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> It is very clearly an improper purpose. The FBI is trying to suppress 1A protected speech by reporting the tweets. The FBI is not allowed to suppress 1A protected speech. Imagine there was a button that would delete a Tweet and anyone could press it. Just because anyone could press the button would not make it legal for the FBI to press it.

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...

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> 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.

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...

Thanks for bringing some actual legal citations and interpretations to this discussion. Most of this thread appears to be a lot of handwaving about the constitution.

> Twitter can always say no to the feds

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.

Would it be any different if those FBI agents, after work, hit the report button from personal accounts?

Personal accounts in your own time and not in any way as a representative of the US govt, and tax payer dollars aren’t paying for my time? Seems more reasonable to me. Especially if it isn’t a regular thing. a good question for a court to decide.

> If these censorship request were about bomb threats or something that’s one thing, but they are mostly just spicy political takes.

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.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857596112330758

Twitter’s data model stores Tweets as a stream of records. When you delete a tweet, it stores another record which consumers are required to honor saying that the first record’s ID was deleted.

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.

Perhaps it’s not a 1A issue when the FBI clamps down on a corporate platform, but it reminds me of how fascist states operate, not a democratic republic.

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.

A government whose representatives frequently rail against big tech companies, call for regulation, and drag executives in for hearings, "politely requests" something to be removed. It's pretty easy to see that Twitter might think that saying no has consequences.

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.

Funnily enough according to Taibbi, Twitter was being unusually obsequious when other companies, such as T-Mobile, weren't.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603890210252668928

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.

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.

What case did they rule that? It seems pretty routine that they get in contact with newspapers for this purpose so I'd be at least a little surprised to learn that it's been ruled unconstitutional but they're just flagrantly doing it anyway.

It seems pretty routine that they get in contact with newspapers

Nothing says they can't contact papers.

But they can't contact Twitter and express their opinions?

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.

Right, so instead of exposing themselves legally they do an end run of telling Twitter to ban and writing smear campaigns. Which is they did to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard.

Of course they can express their opinions. But it's not black and white.

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"?

In Germany yes, in the US, I don't know.

So if they contact the WSJ and try to get them to spike a story that's fine, but if they tell Twitter "we think you should remove these tweets for violating your policies" that's not? I would love to see what the case is because I can't understand how that would make sense.

> Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments)

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?

In practice, yes. They did.

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.

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