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Comment by greenhorn360 | Hacker News Reader

You're going to need to be more specific than that.

I read them and you're making this up.

The FBI did send tweets and accounts to specific Twitter employees and repeatedly emailed them about those tweets and accounts asking for a follow-up on their status. The FBI said it was only notifying Twitter of censorship candidates, and allowing Twitter to make any decision it wanted, but the agency has a history of thinly veiling its coercive pressure on private individuals.

https://www.thefire.org/news/yes-you-should-be-worried-about...

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-responds-twitter-files-...

I guess you missed this one: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613932017716195329

one congressman complaining to twitter about some content (some of which does break TOS) and sometimes getting his way is still not the same as being blacklisted by the state. "The Twitter Files" isn't some bombshell report on goberment control under threat of violence, it's a bunch of political agents doing what they do best: Complaining. I cannot stress this enough: government repossession of assets and freedoms like air travel are enforced under threat of violence and imprisonment. Emailing twitter execs because you dont like content is largely toothless and twitter can refuse or sue at any time.

The parent of this thread: "de-platforming isn't a state operation." A sitting Congressman (The State) made the request. And they were eventually shadowbanned (twitter calls it deamplification) So yes, it was a state operation.

The rest of your comment reads like beginning of The Narcissist's Prayer:

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.

I think you are oversimplifying my frustration with the original comment.

The original comment put civil asset forfeiture and no-fly lists on the same moral plane as deplatforming. The difference between deplatforming on twitter and the others is the threat of state violence. My frustration with the outrage around "The Twitter Files" is that y'all equate lobbying with state violence. I do not think that congressmen directly lobbying with twitter execs is necessarily good, but i also don't think its on par with the state disappearing people. I think it is just a distraction from real state overreach domestic and abroad and makes people like you view it as a liberal brainworm thing, when both parties are responsible for the real threat of state violence.

Twitters choice to comply or ignore the lobbying requests is within their rights as a private institution and there is no credible evidence of state coercion other than a congressman complaining.

A dedicated portal for such requests is not lobbying

A staffer of one politician asked Twitter to take content down and they refused. That sure doesn't look like a state level operation to me.

>6.Even when Twitter didn’t suspend an account, that didn’t mean they didn’t act. Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613932028784742400

>7.Twitter policy at the time didn’t ban QAnon, but “deamplified” such accounts. About the batch of tweets that included those above, Twitter execs wrote: “We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification.”

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613932028784742400

Didn't that tweet say that twitter refused to take it down?

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