Who else suspects this is retaliation for Twitter files?
There’s literally nothing to retaliate about in the Twitter files it’s entirely a nothingburger dressed up for outrage points.
This data is also from 2021 to early 2022 before Twitter files was even a thing.
Even if it’s a nothingburger, putting out bad PR for FBI and CIA has got to make you some powerful enemies.
> Twitter patched this in early 2022 so breach data is 2021 to 2022
Timeline of releasing the breached data can be correlated with another event, but the date that they obtained the loot is irrelevant. They could have simply purchased this from an unknown 3rd party themselves. We simply don't know.
1. The FBI/CIA hacked Twitter and leaked their database in retaliation for the "Twitter files"
2. The FBI/CIA hacked Twitter (or someone else did and they obtained the data) back in early 2022 (for an unknown reason), and are now leaking the data in retaliation for the "Twitter files"
3. FBI/CIA hack Twitter as soon as they can compile enough justification. Use data whenever it is useful, including retaliation.
Based on Snowden leaks, it wouldn’t surprise me if Twitter was hacked very soon after it was created.
The seller could be lying about that, but there is relatively strong circumstantial evidence that suggests they are telling the truth.
It’s moot anyway, since they can always filter their stolen databases by potential methods of exfiltration, so the dump looks like it only used a certain vulnerability.
To be honest the evidence for anything in this discussion is circumstantial and probably spurious at best.
All the skeptic comments in this thread seem to worry about the veracity of the claims, but that’s irrelevant to the question of would FBI/CIA retaliate.
Also, I wouldn't call Twitter's original moderation fair or balanced. There were clearly voices within who thought they were trying to fit policy to decisions they'd already made post-hoc. (Unfortunately if anything it's even worse now.)
There’s no right to post CSAM or revenge porn on the internet, so of course the FBI “drives the removal” of that, it is their job.
I’ve done legal compliance for this elsewhere, I have turned down government requests without being persecuted in return, and I know for a fact Twitter’s previous administration was one of the most aggressive at fighting back here and put a great deal of legal effort into it. Example of a more cooperative response would maybe be Amazon Ring.
There’s also no right for foreign intelligence ops to post on US social media so of course the CIA has opinions on that, it’s their job. Etc.
(Current example of this one: a Chinese group is flooding Twitter search for different Chinese city names with ads for sex workers, to block people searching covid news.)
All these things happen under the rule of law, not random emails. If you don’t like it, change the law. I don’t know why you’d want to do that though.
I agree people might’ve said something other than this, but those people are amateurs and are wrong; talk to the EFF if you actually need advice here.
You clearly have no idea what's in them judging from your comment...
It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.
Why would the FBI be involved with anything related to revenge porn? Posting revenge porn is not a federal crime.
(Tangentially, it appears that there remain two states in which revenge porn is not a crime. Yuck.)
I don’t think it’s a crime to literally leave it up in the same way distributing CSAM is, but it’s evidence someone is committing a crime, which is a TOS violation most places as most sites don’t want to encourage that. And Twitter’s TOS is what Twitter cares about. Whether reports come in as emails or their annoying inefficient report form is not important.
See: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701436104245248?s=46&... and earlier parts that show that their own influence campaigns had free reign: https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605294195975114765?s=46&t...
Some of them aren’t; these are mistakes. law enforcement can report posts the same way anyone else can, and if they report the wrong ones you can ignore them. They don’t have special powers. It’s fine.
(Also, Taibbi moved to Russia in the 90s, assaulted underage women, and publicly wrote about it in his publication the Exile. This is also a kind of bias.)
It makes zero sense to me that this email (https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701482308669440?s=46&...) would have anything to do with Hunter Biden's penis. The Twitter employee is clearly talking about feeling unable to not act on a pro-russian tweet even though they hadn't been able to support any action on it using Twitter's own policies.
The point is, the US government partially infiltrated Twitter, and then applied regular external pressure on it to applying badly defined policies against their targets.
If you want Twitter to be upset about that one, you may have to get them to move to some non-aligned country. Maybe there’s some kind of Yandex Twitter? In the meantime, it’s probably against TOS insofar as it’s a spambot, but state media like VOA seem okay.
Also I don't understand why non-US citizens should be allowed to have their speech rights crushed by the US government. Many people of different nationalities live in the US and should be free to speak -- they shouldn't be censored by the US government wearing a glove ("US Tech Organisations") but effectively calling the shots.
I don’t think the EU is capable of making a popular social media site either unfortunately. They don’t have the culture.
Twitter does have blatant Chinese propaganda up, like their wolf warrior diplomats and Chen Weihua, which is another good sign for what they’re allowing elsewhere. Maybe that’s just because Chen is so incompetent it’s funny to let him post…
Isn’t Twitter blocked in China? Do wolf warriors not see any hypocrisy in using it?
Not being hypocritical isn’t even a universal virtue.
He could’ve just had Bari Weiss release everything. (Weiss has, in the meantime, been unfollowed and presumably fired as Elon’s journalist because she tried to mildly criticize him once.)
But this is something in the real world, not a logic puzzle, and unfortunately in the real world you actually do need to consider the context of everything using all available information. I mean, you going “this guy is just coincidentally a sex offender” is not the common man on the street’s response, and most journalists are literally not sex offenders.
I don’t know what Elon is doing. He’s of course extremely compromised by multiple governments, I mean he owns SpaceX and a Chinese Tesla factory, and Saudi Arabia (who’s planted spies at Twitter before) is a major investor now. I also suspect Elon doesn’t know what he’s doing, though.
Him saying “oh I didn’t mean it” only in 2017 when people asked about during a MeToo wave isn’t, I think, particularly convincing.
And, who is doing the retaliating?
FBI or “OGA”
Which we know they did, in spades, in other contexts; but I've seen no evidence in the "Twitter files" to indicate anything illegal was going on in this context. The government briefed Twitter that they expected disinformation campaigns and to be on the lookout for them. The government also flagged a bunch of tweets as "hey, these are sus and might violate your rules, you ought to take a look" like anyone else can do.
Whatever Musk and Taibbi are trying to cook up, they seem to have forgotten who was running the federal government at the time. It wasn't Joe Biden or tHe LiBeRaLs. The whole thing is stupid.
One thing I can’t get my head around is Twitter censoring joke accounts. Do you think it was because they were under so much time pressure that they erred on the side of trusting the Government suggestions?
If a joke account specifies it's a joke account in it's profile information, great. But that content doesn't get displayed when someone shares a tweet made by that account.
Now, think about how many times you may have come across something on the internet that was a joke, but also easy to misread as a serious comment. Such is the nature of a lot of online dialogue.
You've now got a tweet that can easily be (mis)read as truthful, being shared by people on their accounts who could insist to their own followers (who might not do their own due diligence and look at the joke account's profile to see that it's fake) that it's real, and voila, suddenly you've got a joke being used to spread misinformation.
I'm not defending Twitter or taking a side here, nor am I saying that's what happened. But it's a possibility that that's one perspective taken.