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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

That's all well and good, and I am not a fan of Elon's latest moves toward Twitter (banning some journalists and sources of freely available information on other platforms), but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. That's a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. This is a story because the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. There is no "framing" in that, the FBI has overstepped its bounds, forget Twitter and Elon Musk.

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.

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Nothing posted on some companies website is governed by free speech or the USA’s 1st amendment. The Terms Of Service apply and typically a user has agreed to those by simply participating on the site. This includes account bans, blocking content, etc. the company can do whatever it pleases, if it benefits them to listen to a gov’t agency request then they might do it.

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.

Just responding to one part of this, if that's cool.

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).

The base of those thoughts is that user contributed content is somehow an expression of free speech. Is it? what if it the user contributed content is from someone from another nation? what if its a bot/ChatGPT generated content? I think there are arguments that user content online can’t be universally treated as protected by one countries laws. IANAL so I could be wrong.

I never said Twitter was protected by the 1st Amendment, that specifically is about government. I said once government (which is limited by the 1st) intervenes to try to get a company to stop free speech, that's an affront to the 1st Amendment. It's coercion. Do you really think governments don't try to kill speech and ideas through coercion? Do you really see no problem with that?

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.

People? Or sockpuppets?

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.

Criticism is very different from propaganda.

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.

Your base argument is asserting that user contributed content on websites is governed by free speech, its not. I’m not for or against anything, just pointing out that the base of thinking user contributed content is somehow governed by 1st amendment is wrong. Does the US 1st amendment apply to people from other countries?

But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS? That sounds as tame as it could possibly be. The same option is open to me as an ordinary user.

They're not a normal user. Wouldn't you expect more transparency from your government? It appalls me that many find this okay.

What more transparency do you want? Their right to request moderation actions and Twitter’s right to refuse those requests is extremely well documented in court cases. You want a published list of every request FBI made? So that way FBI can become the primary curator of information that FBI doesn’t like?

Exactly, we need more transparency.

You could absolutely submitted a freedom of information request to the FBI about this activity

They had direct email exchange, it wasn't just normal flagging.

> But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS?

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!

What bothers me most about the FBI's behaviour here is that it is unnecessary. Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?

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.

I think using social media to gather intel is entirely reasonable. Given the number of people who have committed mass shootings and other acts of domestic terrorism after being radicalized online, they would be negligent to not be proactively looking at the internet.

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.

Social media products have been critical to the exponential growth of domestic terrorism and CSAM. So I definitely want the FBI being proactive on these platforms and to have a much, much, bigger team than 80. It should be 80 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.

This is the same type of reasoning that gave us the Patriot Act/Homeland security etc., though. I'm sure there is some truth to it, I just hope people push back against giving the FBI, or whatever agency arises, free reign. Tilting in favor of extreme safety measures sounds pretty bad to me, but I guess this is largely a matter of personal risk tolerance.

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.

“Poor information diets.” What on Orwellian statement in support of government thought policing.

What evidence do you have that domestic terrorism has experienced "exponential growth", whatever that means, as I'm pretty sure you're not using "exponential" in the mathematical sense? https://www.dailywire.com/news/whistleblowers-accuse-fbi-of-...

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.

CSIS has published data on the rise of domestic terrorism. [1]

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-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Your concern for CSAM would be more meaningful to me if I wasn't aware that one FBI whistleblower said he was pulled off his very successful sex trafficking cases because January 6 witch hunting was a higher priority to the FBI: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/child-sex-abuse-cases-no...

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.

I think it’s clear, by implication, that this is where a lot of the expunged headcount at Twitter spent their time: policing accounts, according to both internal and external machinations.

> Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?

They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?

> 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.

> whose government is not allowed to do anything at all without our approval

Really? I thought you were restricted to voting for your representatives?

They could be proactive in protection us companies from ransomware attacks but instead they worry about social media posts.

They do both, with considerable other effort in the federal government on infrastructure protection as well as election integrity. You might not hear about it as much because there isn’t a big lobby opposed to infosec but it’s definitely there.

What do think the FBI does? They monitor threats. Just following media (social and traditional) is pretty mandatory first step in collecting intel. A lot of Jan 6 insurrections were organizing on digital platforms. Foreign adversaries are using it too.

Amazing, a government agency paid by the taxpayers, voluntary combing through twitter and report users that violate twitter's TOS. Is FBI doing pro-bono work for other companies as well?

Even if that's all they are doing, it is too much. The FBI is not the enforcement arm for Twitter's TOS. Their job is to investigate and prosecute crimes. If the FBI is attempting, in any way, to remove legal speech it doesn't like (even if the removal process is itself also completely legal) that is overstepping its authority as a government law enforcement agency.

So why didn't they use the same option you do rather than getting their own special web portal for it?

Prioritisation of requests. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter wasn't already prioritising standard requests too. If you get at the same time 1 request each: from FBI, from someone with multiple actioned past reports, and from an account created 10 sec ago, it makes complete business and community safety sense to handle them in a specific order. (But not with different rules)

And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.

Here's the 1st amendment for reference:

"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?

When governments ask companies to do something, they usually must comply though lol

Literally not true. They can simply decline and if the Govt wants to come after them they can sue each other and in cases where it’s legal content then Twitter will win. This is extremely well established and not even remotely weird or some dark unexplored corner of Constitutional law.

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.

Any voluntary request from the government comes with an implied consequence for refusal or an implied benefit for acceptance. They don’t have to say it out loud for the message to come across.

By this logic the government can’t use the Report Tweet button either, right?

Unless it’s in the furtherance of catching or stopping an active criminal, I’d say no.

Why would we be wasting government resources alerting private companies of their terms of service anyway?

I don’t think it’s a waste of government resources to be reporting people who are trying to suppress voting by e.g. giving incorrect polling dates or locations.

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!

The Taliban were on Twitter...

And?

Well clearly the FBI don't find the Taliban bad enough for some reasons...

Or… it turns out that the FBI has specific mandates and they include things like “counter election disinformation” and it doesn’t include things like “report every bad guy on Twitter.”

This is only confusing starting from your own incorrect premise.

The FBI don't have "mandates" against the Talibans? That doesn't seem to make sense...

The FBI is a domestic law enforcement agency. The Taliban does not really break US laws as a matter of course. If you hear otherwise please report them to the FBI.

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.

Literally first search result: https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorinfo/sirajuddin-haqqani

No. The FBI is prioritizing certain things and not prioritizing others. They're doing this for political reasons, which should outrage everyone.

But it doesn't outrage you because you're in agreement with the shit they're shoveling.

The FBI: notoriously left wing

Lol

The FBI is notoriously subversive, regardless of the political denomination.

And your evidence of subverting the right wing here is that they reported people to Twitter for posting incorrect polling locations/dates?

Yeah there’s plenty to critique of FBI, but this is a profoundly weak case.

If you think that's the only piece evidence, I strongly suggest you keep looking. I'm not even a right-winger and it's obvious to me.

You've hit the nail on the head - the term "political" is being used as a motte and bailey to take advantage of our intuition about bona fide political speech to cover for activities that aren't related to good faith debate. Like sure, tricking people into not voting is in some sense a "political" game, but it's not the kind of thing we'd consider "political speech" that needs protection. Same thing with assembling a flash mob to trash the capitol.

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.

If Twitter was being coerced by the government, they could have said so in court. They are a multibillion dollar multinational corporation with deep pockets and connection in high places, not a helpless mom and pop.

Republicans - and Trump specifically - have been directly threatening Twitter for years to try to get them to act in a way that benefits them and you think this "implied consequence for refusal" is some big issue?

You're right, this isn't unexplored. The ACLU says this specific example is unconstitutional. There's also been legal cases about this in the past. It's illegal for the government to do this.

"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.

Not clear what you mean by “this specific example” given that your linked article is about DHS’s defunct Disinformation board and AFAIK this board never even became operational (and in any case hasn’t been mentioned in Twitter Files).

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?

I never said I was shocked about it. The government and particularly agencies like the FBI have long engaged in illegal abuses of their power, ranging from illegal speech restrictions like this to the knowing legal persecution of innocent people to outright murder and blackmail.

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.

Shocked to learn that it’s legal, not that it happens.

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.

> So long as there’s no coercion it’s completely legal.

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?

> If the police ask you to do something, do you usually feel generally obligated to comply?

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!

Twitter and tech companies are regularly threatened with additional regulation and their executives called before Congress. This is the pressure. It’s already taken place and it’s ongoing. Sure, they could sue. They might or might not win. And Congress can make their life difficult in either outcome. There’s not much you do about that since, very nominally, Congress is supposed to represent the people and not security state interests.

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.

Government employees get job in related field in private sector… not a groundbreaking revelation and not clear what to do about it. e.g. Trump’s proposal to ban former DoD employees from having jobs relating to American data for 7 years after service is a horrible solution. Well it’s a good way to further cripple our veterans and in general eliminate any remaining appeal of a government job for any half-competent person.

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.

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16048884298162094...

> Uh, no? I'm pretty sure every American schoolchild is educated on his or her rights under the Constitution.

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.

Most people not exercising their rights is entirely distinct from people not having been educated on them. The Bill of Rights is surely a required item on every single curriculum in the country. I, having paid attention in high school, am aware that I have no obligation to comply with arbitrary LEO requests, and certainly not those pertaining to the content of speech.

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.

The problem is not the rights of Twitter employees, it's the right of the people banned...

What? They have no “rights” to use Twitter. This is also not even remotely controversial.

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.

> What? They have no “rights” to use Twitter. This is also not even remotely controversial.

> 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?

Requiring that Twitter not ban Person X is tantamount to requiring that they carry Person X’s content. Which is why people have no “right” to use something like Twitter - making that a right would infringe upon others’ rights.

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!

I guess it's too late for you to see this, but the latest Twitter Files show that Twitter did, in fact, feel pressured and coerced.

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.

That’s why every company has adopted NISTs password guidance and those that refused had their CEOs thrown in prison.

What do you hope to accomplish with a low-effort comment which everyone knows is wrong? We’re talking about the FBI here so one of the events I’d expect most HN commenters to be familiar with is their dispute with Apple:

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.

How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?

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...

In that case, Republican politicians publicly complaining about social media moderation in threatening terms would be far more problematic than the FBI notifying Twitter of tweets that are in violation of their TOS. Yet I don't remember the "Free Speech" proponents doing anything but applauding these types of "informal coercion."

That's one of the falsiest equivalencies I ever did see

It's actually not equivalent - we're seeing a lot of accuasations here that the FBI "coerced" Twitter or that the FBI requests were "partisan" - there's actually no evidence in these files for these claims. On the other hand, there's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians were trying to coerce Twitter to accomplish explicitly partisan aims. Yet here we are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)

Oh, you mean the doctrine that is openly vilified by the "originalist" majority of the US Supreme Court? Not that consistency is their strong point or anything, but maybe that's not the authoritative answer you thought it was.

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.

And your point is?

Clearly if you read the context, that emmelaich's invocation of the "penumbra" doctrine to suggest that the first amendment covers Twitter's actions is weak. It does not, even when there's a connection to reports from a government agency. There are other arguments for why Twitter's actions were wrong, perhaps even that it's a first-amendment issue, but that one just doesn't work in the context of how the constitution is currently being interpreted. The one-line slam dunk is really anything but.

Also, please read the guidelines about low-effort comments.

Actually, I just thought it was a useful concept for anyone arguing about the literal meaning of the constitution. Wasn't especially arguing for either side.

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.

> How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?

Imagine if the FBI came to your house and asked you to take down a sign in your front yard.

It would definitely make me question how much I cared about the sign, and ask myself difficult questions about why the FBI were getting involved. I’d probably even engage a lawyer. But it’s not clear to me I’d take it down if — after all of this — I’d decided keeping it up was the right choice?

That might cause me to ask questions like how I felt about the message on the sign. If it was, say, my support for a political candidate I’d be calling the ACLU and local media. If, as in the case of Twitter, it was something untrue about the upcoming election left by someone at a party who I’d already had to ask to behave better, I would probably regret only that I hadn’t asked them to take their sign and leave earlier.

The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.

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.

The FBIs authority like many other law enforcement agencies is unfortunately only based on what they are caught doing. Now this is more complicated than it seems because for the longest time, decades, they never even fired an agent for any reason.

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.

AFAIK if the FBI asked, Twitter resisted, and the FBI strong armed them that would be a first amendment issue.

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.

"We just want to ask a few question"

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.

See also, Elons companies getting audited out the wazoo since he broke the establishments favourite toy.

> but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech.

Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments?

https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...

From that thread: Some were domestic takedowns of, say, QAnon accounts

So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).

The government suggests something and the person making the decision at Twitter agrees with it or doesn't. But the government isn't compelling Twitter to do anything.

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.

Given the number of crimes and things like bomb threats linked to QAnon, it seems pretty reasonable to monitor them.

https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...

> the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech

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.

Okay, let's take all you said as unassailable - shouldn't this whole thing be called the FBI files, and not the Twitter files?

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.

> I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department

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?

This is what actual problematic coercion looks like:

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.

> the FBI has overstepped its bounds

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...

Your mistake is that you confuse deliberate misinformation campaigns with free speech. I assume you are not in the know, because --strangely-- the very alarming research results do hardly leave academia.

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 misinformation campaigns" are an excuse that a certain political party used for why it lost a slam dunk election to a cheese colored used car salesman, and the FBI found convenient to justify expanding its power.

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.

Ironically, these same people were bending over backward to protect and justify obvious Russian propaganda in America during the Soviet era.

"FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech."

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?

When I hear about FBI trying to get people banned on some stupid website named twitter, all I can think about is this:

https://i.imgur.com/p7Nrm4R.png

I feel that it makes a good case for the federated approach to social media. Very large centralized services controlled by public corporations are easy targets for this kind of abuse.

If there is information/data freely available on other platforms, why is it that Twitter also has to host that content? The accounts tracking people's movement were clearly troll accounts. Correct ban imo. Also correct to ban journalists for the same rules.

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