BlackCat claims they hacked Reddit and will leak the data | Hacker News Reader

BlackCat claims they hacked Reddit and will leak the data

databreaches.net

216 pointsgeox170 comments

Not to defend Reddit (there's no way I'm using that godforsaken official app), but: who cares?

There is very little in the way of genuinely sensitive data I can imagine them having. So little commerce is done on Reddit that the risk of there being hundreds of thousands of CC numbers and home addresses is almost nil. User passwords? Half of Reddit is creating burner accounts every 3 months to dodge suspensions and bans.

A usernames -> hashed ip table would be enough to doxx anyone that accessed both burners and pseudonymous accounts from the same computer.

I understand what you're trying to say. However, this is not technically correct, and people who are not technically inclined may believe this to be correct.

The truth is that you can use the same computer across many different networks, or even on the same network with a refreshed dynamic IP address, and such a table wouldn't allow the cross referencing you're suggesting.

For a username -> ip address table to provide this functionality, the users would need to access the site from the same IP address, not the same computer.

It's worth noting that the table would become polluted by things like public wifi, shared home internet, VPNs, etc. as well

There will be enough accounts where that statement would be true though.

There was a link posted a while ago on hn: https://stylometry.net/

Methods like stylometry make ip correlation largely unnecessary for finding alts.

There's lots of alts that don't post any text (esp nsfw alts, which I assume is where most of the "dirt" will be).

One thing I like about reddit is that I didn't even need to give them my mail address.

I love you too, HN.

Reddit has been very pushy about getting people email address. Fortunately I only gave them it for my original account, which I don't care about being tied to me.

I don't know what's at stake, but I hope Reddit refuses to negotiate with these extortionists, which will only embolden future ones. If and when the criminals are found, may they be punished to the fullest extent of the law!

It really depends to me - are they about to leak corporate or user data. If it's MY data that's about to be leaked because Reddit was hacked I'm not a fan of the the high principled moral high ground - they should (literally) pay for it because they failed to protect my data.

So basically – cybercrime and extortion is perfectly fine as long as it doesn't affect me. If it does, everyone must be held accountable.

I think that is basically the human condition. That said, we are at a point, at least in US, where information about people has been released several times over. The sheer amount of free monitoring I have received over the past 2 years alone would likely last me at least through my lifetime and I am not sure I am exaggerating much.

If that is the case: fuck it. Lets make it miserable for everyone until the pain is felt to an extent that necessitates changes.

I didn't say the crime was fine. I don't think that in either scenario it shouldn't be investigated.

Reddit failed to keep that information safe, and if it's an user's information they need to do what they can to keep it safe. They don't get to make the choice if it's someone else's information. If it's theirs, go hard, let it leak if they want.

Users should always assume that their data can and probably will be shared, sold, stolen or otherwise mishandled on socials. People already share personal and private information in both public and private subs, almost always using pseudonyms. Unless you’re doing Reddit wrong, more users wouldn’t lose much in terms of privacy.

Just because the information probably won't be damning doesn't mean that the company has no responsibility to keep that information as safe as possible.

Is there any guarantee at all that BlackCat will actually follow through on deleting their ill-gotten gains, or that those files haven't already been shared out elsewhere?

If Reddit leaks my data, Reddit should pay me, not thieves and extortionists.

You're right, there is absolutely no guarantee and I don't trust that the data would disappear, and there should be a real price to be paid to the end user for guaranteeing that trust.

But "we don't negotiate with terrorists" isn't very brave if you're giving up someone else's data.

I hope Reddit refuses and BlackCat releases. Taking corporate money only emboldens bad acting corporations.

Your comment history tied to email address, if you were brave enough to use your email to sign up.

Typical extortionist behavior.

Their first attempt failed, so they just try and piggy back on this media hype wrt to api changes eve tho they dont give a damn, just to blow up this supposed breach and add fuel to the existing fire.

I don't care about your stupid DMs.

But I would very much want to see the IP addresses each account used last time, to identify people with many alt accounts

Hash of the IP would be sufficient for that purpose and would keep location anonymous.

IPv4 isn't that big. You could compute the hashes of all addresses on consumer hardware. You would want to add a private salt.

If you add a private salt, you won't be able to do "grouping" or identifying duplicates, which is what this thread was discussing.

If it was me, and I wanted "independent" researchers to highlight clusters or duplicates I would do the following as a first-pass solution:

Store an internal mapping of IP->unique sequential number, likewise do the same for usernames. The goal is that it's random and not based on any hash or ordering. So people with either the IP, username or username + IP, can't identify the unique internal numbers.

Then release those. Though tbf, if I was part of any sort of "bot prevention" or "sock puppet identification" team at Reddit, I'd be doing this already. But we all know the dirty secret is to not actually track down such abuse, but to appear like you are doing so, so that you can inflate your user count with plausible deniability.

Works just fine with a keyed hash (same key & IV for everyone).

Just make sure to remove the NSFW accounts to avoid future "incidents".

I hope that doesn't happen. This would doxx me by tying my "public" accounts to some of my private accounts.

Get a cheap VPN like SurfShark VPN (follow my links to get 82% off - just kidding but I do use them). It's perfectly safe to use a cheap VPN like that if you're just trying to hide yourself from non-governmental actors to keep your private info private.

I have this theory that every single one of these VPN services is operated by the secret police of some country.

Much easier to let them operate and collect taxes on them and then send the normal police when you want the data they so conveniently have collected and organized for you.

Unfortunately this often results in a shadowban on Reddit. So it's fine for lurking but not interacting.

What you’ve got there is a list of accounts that access reddit from behind a NAT with a few sock puppets thrown in for good measure.

shouldn't that be easy with some stylography?

Minor correction: I think you mean stylometry.

If this turns out to be true it would be crazy. Reddit is hanging off the cliff, soon to be never seen again.

The mismanagement of Reddit is crazy. I wonder will they fire Huffman. His blatant lying is insane when people have emails to back up their claims against him.

Seems like he’s on a media blitz to try and change the narrative. You know when you’re doing interviews with The Verge you’re in bother.

What did he lie about?

Misrepresented and made up discussions with Apollo app creator. Then caught red handed when the creator released recordings of those calls.

That's only the most recent incident... A few years back he was caught silently editing users posts that were critical of him.

Steve Huffman, aka Spez, falsely claimed that Apollo creator (Christian Selig) had threatened and blackmailed Reddit for $10M.

The facts are that no threat nor blackmail attempt was made and Spez had entirely invented and spread the false claims as an attempt to discredit Selig.

In response to the false claims, Christian Selig released a recording of the phone call that disproved the claim and cleared his name. As Selig is in Canada, he was legally entitled to record and release the phone call. Huffman took umbrage at this action because it revealed Huffman's deceptive conduct.

Later in a Reddit "AMA", Huffman continued stating falsehoods about interactions with Selig, in spite of the evidence.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...

Also that the RIF developer didn't want to work with them, which emails showed was false.

There were 4-5 other things that are escaping me at the moment.

> Also that the RIF developer didn't want to work with them, which emails showed was false.

Hadn't heard that one, so thanks for mentioning it. Link for others[0].

Interestingly enough something else is mentioned in the article which is even more damning for Spez.

> RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. (...) Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fu...

You can record conversation in lots of US states as well as long as one party on the call knows it's happening. Just thought I'd toss that out there.

>Spez had entirely invented and spread the false claims

That is not exactly true. It sounds like there was a genuine misunderstanding during their call, and that Huffman might have believed - for a portion of the call - that a blackmail attempt was happening. If you listen to the audio, it really does sound like a blackmail attempt. At least that's how I heard it.

It also seemed clear that Huffman no longer believed that he had been blackmailed by the end of the call. But it wasn't "entirely invented," and I actually think that Huffman might not have fully believed Selig's explanation of his 'pay me $10 million to make this go away' statement (or whatever Selig's exact language was).

Separately, from what I recall, Huffman did not accuse Selig of illegally recording their phone call. Huffman took umbrage over the release of what, IIRC, he referred to as a private conversation, stating that he did not see how he could possibly do business with Selig after that. In fairness, Huffman's statement makes sense in isolation - regardless of whether the call was legally recorded. Which it seems to have been.

I think that Huffman looks really bad in all this. But that's a reason to be particularly careful about accuracy in our statements about what happened.

In fact, it's common for an extortion attempt to be floated in that way leaving some plausible deniability for the one attempting extortion in case they are rebuffed. It's also common for the other party to seemingly accept the reframing of it to move on even though they internally believe that extortion was floated.

I know. I'm just trying to stick to the facts.

(And, interestingly, being downvoted for it. Despite no one presenting evidence that my account of what happened is wrong.)

> Huffman took umbrage over the release of what, IIRC, he referred to as a private conversation

He “took umbrage” after he publicly called out Selig for threatening Reddit, a thing that did not happen, and is immediately made obvious by the Reddit rep apologizing for the misunderstanding repeatedly.

Framing this as “Huffman was mad about Selig releasing a private discussion” is extremely misleading, and ignores the fact that Selig was basically forced to do so by Huffman’s public misrepresentation of that private conversation.

If Huffman doesn’t want a private conversation released, a good start would be avoiding misleading public statements about that private conversation.

> In fairness, Huffman's statement makes sense in isolation

You can make just about anything make sense in isolation, but this doesn’t mean that it makes sense in the real world.

Removing context is as good as lying in many situations, and this is one of those situations.

Link to Recording: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

People can make up their own mind if they think the Dev was trying to blackmail Reddit or not.

>That is not exactly true. It sounds like there was a genuine misunderstanding during their call.

This is false.(1) What I've written there is accurate. Why? Because while there was a misunderstanding, it was immediately corrected including Huffman apologising for his misunderstanding. Despite this Huffman later made the extortion/blackmail claim.

No part of the conversation supports extortion or blackmail, hypothetically even if Selig was serious about being bought out, that still wouldn't be extortion or blackmail.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Transcript of the call here: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...

The recording did not disprove the claim.

It's not a matter of opinion, the recording did not include a threat or blackmail. Asking to be bought, even if done so coyly, is neither extortion nor blackmail.

Blackmail is a threat of revealing damaging information. That didn't happen.

Extortion is a threat of consequences. However it's clear that Selig can't enact consequences on Reddit. It's Reddit who can disable Apollo's API key. Selig can't render any kind of damage onto Reddit. This is further supported by the fact that Selig has no choice but to discontinue the app and will take a loss on the refunding of subscriptions.

Additionally the provided context of the conversation matches the discussions that Reddit has been having with other developers: i.e. API access and the future costs of that.

If one wishes to set a low bar for extortion: Then it would be Reddit attempting to extort 3rd party app developers by levying unrealistic API access costs, effectively ending their businesses. A concept that could actually hold water as Reddit develops a competitor app.

I think parent means there might be another conversation which was not released.

"We have no evidence he's guilty of murder BUT what if there might evidence. That's all I need to make an accusation"

Claim: "you called me an ass on the phone", Proof: "here's a call recording in which I say no such thing". Don't you think the analogy holds?

I just want to echo the OTHER completely astounding thing Hufman did: Back when r/the_donald was a thing, the guy edited posts from other people to change the narrative.

Now, I dont subscribe to the ideas of the morons in the_donald (I'm even ot from the USA) but I really took offense at what he did... like, what freaking integrity can a person have, when he does that kind of sleazy things.

Not even CmdrTaco or his team did it with all the trolls in Slashdoy.

That's not the only thing either.

He also unpersoned Aaron Swartz, removing him from the Reddit Co-founder page, and saying that he wasn't really a founder... After Swartz died. Which is just incredibly scummy.

And then there were the comments about owning slaves after an apocalypse.

And then there's the Ghislaine Maxwell / maxwellhill theories [0], which bring the Swartz stuff to a very dark place...

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...

The longer I'm reading recent stories about reddit, the more H. reminds me of... Bad Luck Brian

Huffman seems to be drawing inspiration from Elon Musk, according to a recent interview.

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

“Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road,” he added, “and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”

The puzzle pieces sort of fell into place when I read that, because he's acting like an Elon knock-off. This is why they should replace him, because just like Elon is driving Twitter into the ground, the frantic Elon-like decisions of Huffman are driving reddit into the ground.

This isn't about Reddit not being allowed to make money or turn a profit or have a good IPO. The decisions made so far seem to run counter to Reddit's ability to do just that. Who will buy into an IPO of a burning platform that is at war with its own users? How do you make money from an API that's too expensive for people to pay for?

But if Reddit survives this, if it's just "clearing house" for a future set of users, and, after a period of lower usage, start growing again, it will be golden; it will be seen as un-killable. Too valuable a resource to fail.

As much as I disagree with the gross consumer-unfriendliness of the direction and choices of management, they're sitting on an incredibly valuable data store that will attract search results - I've read a number of comments recently that "site:reddit" is a required filter on Google these days. That's hard to kill.

Yahoo is hard to kill

Ask Jeeves is hard to kill

Digg is still around too

I expect reddit to survive this because this isn't something that will stop people from visiting it. While they may originally go to reddit for information, they stay for the communities. It's pretty well established that no one there reads beyond the headline before heading to the comments section.

I feel the bigger threat to reddit is that many of the ways that people are introduced to it will be better served by AI-driven services. If people can find what they're looking for without ever visiting reddit, then they won't get involved in the communities, and the communities there slowly thin out.

Amusingly I see part of the reason for reddit's success is how poorly Google has become at finding information on the web. These days it seems that reddit is the go to place to find answers to a myriad of problems.

Reading between the lines, "my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is that a trash fire is as good a business strategy as anything we can think of"

The big difference is that Musk's skullduggery began once Twitter didn't have to disclose anything to public markets. Reddit OTOH is doing this en route to becoming a public company.

Musk also had a bone to pick with Twitter for a long time but no power until recently. The change might be dumb, but it's not unexpected. Huffman OTOH is a founder who has run the company directly or by proxy for most of its life (which is also nearly half his own life!); whatever state Reddit is in is his fault, arguably twice over since he had seemingly a blank check to restructure it again in 2014 after throwing Pao under the bus.

what's funny about him trying to be mini-elon is that elon, before that, had some credibility from landing rockets and making a "cool" ev. he burned up that social cred by being an unmasked white supremacist and edgelord that does wildly irrational stuff after taking over twitter. but hey he's a billionaire backed by saudi money so he has cash to burn and make twitter an alt-right haven... spez has never been really liked at all and his fortune(~10million) is a rounding error compared to elon's

> mismanagement

this might come as a shock, but a few hundred powertripping übermods aren't really an indicator for the state of reddit as a businesss.

They threatened to break their mop, and the custodians immediately surrendered

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36375544

The crazy thing is that this data probably doesn't have all that much value beyond emails/passwords, which are probably decently hashed anyway. Reddit might collect data, but it doesn't enforce an algorithm.

And I think mod tools (the automated ones) are also third-party only?

---

EDIT:

I forgot that Reddit has private messaging and chat, so maybe that does have some value.

Internal communication between CEO etc. would probably be more interesting.

Especially anything from his old days of modding jailbait

modding jailbait?

There was a literal subreddit. I think that he was added as a prank by the head mod but some are using it as an example of his immorality.

Yeah the mod thing is baseless. However I do think letting pedophiles hang out on your website doing pedophile stuff without taking an action about it is maybe immoral. I also think allowing white supremacists or other bigots to hang out and spread bigotry is immoral.

Yeah, I'm not arguing he is moral, just that the one argument is bad but, as you've pointed out, there are certainly better.

Reddit's CEO was a mod of a jailbait subreddit in the early days - the problem here is that it's impossible to prove whether he joined by himself or whether other mods have added him without his knowledge. As a mod you can add other users as mods and they don't need to agree to it.

Not for a long time. I believe that it used to be possible (it actually is on Lemmy, though you need to have posted there first), but nowadays on reddit, it sends a mod request.

It happened when it didn't ask for permission. He could've removed himself (and I suppose he eventually did) but I imagine that, as a joke, he was probably added as mod to thousands of subs, and couldn't be arsed to remove himself from all of them.

He could have removed himself, he’s not a random user but the CEO. I feel like that kinda removes the argument of ‘someone could have added him without his consent’.

That implies he was even aware that it happened, and again, we have no way of knowing that. If someone makes you a mod all that used to happen was that you get a message in your inbox, and he must receive thousands of messages all the time as he's being tagged in things non stop. Also he was literally a mod on thousands of subreddits, unlikely he added himself to all of them, or that he even reviewed the list.

Ah, you're right. Reddit does have private messaging, forgot about it.

If that is part of the data, of course

Not sure how much the internal messaging system is used on Reddit (personally never used the chat, DMS are very rare)

Internal communication between employees doesn't happen on Reddit chat.

Private messages, especially involving admins and mods would be interesting but I'd imagine a lot of people, including famous personalities might have said sensitive stuff in private messages.

A list of user names -> emails is extremely juicy.

I'm pretty sure they do have an algorithm. Not sure how fancy it is, but my feed would prioritise subreddits i interacted with regardless of upvotes for a while. It was one of the things that made me slowly stop using the site beyond specific subreddits.

> doesn't have all that much value beyond emails/passwords

I would bet that it has even lower value than that. They were only able to get 80gigs of data -- basically nothing compared to reddit's actual dataset. This means they probably didnt get anywhere close to any high value databases (or even low value).

Also, the fact that they dont even describe what type of data they managed to get a hold of tells me its probably not that meaningful. Reddit should definitely not be paying these extortionists regardless of what was swiped.

If I were the hacker, I'd edit maxwellhill to have email address ghislainemaxwell@gmail.com just for the shitstorm it'd create, context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838084

Aside from that, email addresses to usernames might be valuable - you could identify high-value targets from finance, crypto, or luxury item subs.

Or you could just make lists of people who post on specific subs for targeted harrassment.

> along with our money or we will leak it

It's interesting that they think it's "their" money.

Also, we have an interesting situation here: 1. Either the data is practically worthless - because reddit didn't bother with them; or 2. The data is critical and Reddit is truly mismanaged.

Guess only time will clear this one out. Wait and see.

I think there's some wiggle room between "worthless" and "critical"...

What brave extortionists - $4.5 million for themselves and also the api changes. Like a modern day Robin Hood, their honor is unassailable.

Well, there was a limited time offer for just the 4.5 million! What a steal that would have been!

The common thing they say these days is that they "helped" you find a vulnerability by breaking in and that's their pentest fee.

They didn't steal the data, it was a surprise off-site backup.

I mean, if you're gonna extort somebody, you might as well force them to do some good as well.

Don't you think they perhaps just considered that making a pro forma altruistic sounding demand on top of the venal one would put public pressure on their target to comply and make themselves merely look like Robin Hood?

Yes, that's pretty much the point of the demand for rollback of the API changes. Its pretty transparent that they want the money, but they clearly have thought of your line too.

$4.5 mil with this inflation in this economy is peanuts.

I'll gladly take $4.5 mil from whoever feels like they don't need them, as I really really do.

Goes pretty far in Russia

yea let's surely blame Russia out of the blue without a shred of evidence! Don't you have a Die Hard movie to write?

Maybe do ten seconds of Googling and see where this hacker group is based

I tried, didn‘t find a source. Where are they based?

Can I have some peanuts, please?

Meh, they openly said they would've taken just the money and kept silent while also warning ahead of time that they'd ask for the API changes in addition to the money publicly if reddit wouldn't comply. So they basically admitted that it's about the money for them - doesn't feel like they tout themselves als modern day Robin Hood.

Consider it a $4.5m asshole tax.

Remind me of the great quote I read somewhere: "hackers are technical debt collectors "

For all you Businesspeople reading this: this is how much that tech debt the Engineering team has been talking about has costed.

"No bad tactics, only bad targets". The only thing the activists would condemn here would be if Huffman were seriously assaulted on the street, or his family being harassed (although it seems like nowadays close adult relatives/associates who fail to denounce a cancellation target become fair game as well.) Anything else - legal or otherwise - would be filed under "actions having consequences". This is sadly the norm for social media activism in 2023. spez needs to accept that he's lost his membership in

Quite frankly, this is a good PR move, although I would assume that it's still better to maintain a low profile. Still, I'm sure a lot of people are hoping for more events like this to occur in order to punish Reddit.

Hopefully we find out who the user “maxwellhill” really was. Can’t believe we never found out who one of the most influential Reddit users of time was.

A lot of CS people use reddit including blackhat hackers, I was wondering if something like this might happen after reddit pisses them off by attacking their fellow CS people via going from beloved place to BS to a full capitalist menace.

Given what’s been found with Twitters censorship and governmental collusion, curious if the data they have is in the same vein and how people will react to it - if what they say is true

> Twitters censorship and governmental collusion

Also known as complying with local laws.

It's always amusing when Americans realise that most of the world doesn't ascribe to their views on free speech.

And in fact governments with broad support from their citizens want social media companies to be regulated.

>Also known as complying with local laws

That's one form of "censorship and governmental collusion". There are others. Parts of government collude with companies outside of actual law too.

Suppressing news stories and users at the behest of the FBI has nothing to do with complying with local laws. Let's not forget that Twitter was actively becoming a host for child porn at the same time, and not addressing that issue simultaneously.

Child porn is a good example of censorship that is both required by local law (in most countries) and widely supported by the population.

"Let's not forget that Twitter was actively becoming a host for child porn at the same time"

I never knew in the first place. Is this a solid fact? I find it hard to imagine people sharing cp via twitter.

Anecdotal but they did have a pretty active team around the time identifying CP and terrorist beheading type videos/images. They did have a pretty big issue with terrorist orgs using Twitter, would not surprise me CP made its way there.

Terrorists want the maximum attention for their videos. Pedophiles usually not, so I really do not see a connection.

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musks-says-the...

And personally, yes, I came across accounts that were doing this. Seemed like they were mostly based outside of the USA, and the exploitation is usually something along the lines of someone using existing porn, advertising a series of link shorteners to access said porn, then profiting from the ad clicks. This is probably not profitable for anyone in a developed country, and is also probably only profitable due to child porn being outright banned from most of the internet, with no free access to material, people will jump through hoops to access said material. I'd been reporting those accounts for years to no avail until recently. Instagram has the same issue. I gave up on reporting on Instagram as I couldn't stomach seeing this stuff and my reports never had any results. The people sharing this stuff on Instagram fall into a few categories, occasionally parents, and other adults selling access to pictures/videos of their young children and toddlers in bikinis, something that would otherwise not be sexual, except that they are selling to an audience that is sexualizing it. Instagram will not take any of this down as it's not technically nudity. Maybe it's changed though. The other class of abusers are usually non USA based, and they'll exploit Instagram live to share, multiple broadcasters will be streaming, but one will be broadcasting hardcore child porn. You can only report one host of the stream, and by the time anyone looks at it, presumably, they've switched to another account to stream. It will usually be another broadcaster that was on the previous stream. I couldn't continue spending time reporting this stuff due to the hardcore nature of it. Instagram really needs to fix their reporting and allow reporting of every single broadcaster that is part of a live stream.

Ok, this is something, even though the articles alone seem blown out of proportion a bit, but if you personally confirm, that you were reporting those accounts with nothing happening and now this changed, then I will take your word for it. And thanks for trying to fight the dark corners.

If you think that's crazy look at the blatant CP ring the WSJ unveiled on Instagram last week.

The FBI enforce local laws, ie US federal law. Cooperation with them sound exactly like compliance with local laws. We might want everyone to "fight the police" in the name of freedom, but in the real world most people cooperate with reasonable police requests, deferring to thier understanding of the law rather than hashing every little thing out in courts. When a cop on the street asks for help, most people do actually lend a hand.

doing whatever the police tells you to do and following the law aren't the same thing.

SCOTUS has already ruled that for first amendment purposes, if the government hires a contractor to censor, it is still censoring and violating the first amendment.

The FBI does not enforce supreme laws to which they are subject to, they have throughout their pathetic existence continue to routinely break laws largely with impunity.

Ya. The government cannot pay twitter to do what the government itself could not do. That says nothing about twitter voluntarily doing something to appease authorities. The police normally cannot force people to cooperate with thier investigations, yet millions of people still do. If everyone exercised thier rights to non-cooperation in each and every cicumstance they could, criminal justice would grind to a halt.

> Also known as complying with local laws.

No. The US executive branch via government agency can't tell a website to silence speech, that's a violation of the first amendement. That's exactly what happened with Twitter. Twitter didn't comply with any law, Twitter just did the binding of the US executive branch when it came to censorship. Completely unlawful.

Was it unlawful for Twitter to voluntary do so?

I think they can. Twitter isnt a public forum. It is a private entity. They very much can shut down any speech they want. They can also do so in response to government requests. Pure unbridled freedom of speech only really exists in public spaces. The insides of privately-owned servers are not a streetcorner, courthouse step or city park.

Free Speech should be America's #1 export. Non compliance with censorship may make other countries block American sites, but then they have to deal with their citizens angry they don't have access to the service because of arbitrary information restriction.

The world doesn't want America's version of free speech.

They prefer a more managed version of it where hate speech, doxxing, abuse, defamation etc aren't rampant.

Speak for yourself. Free speech is a core part of democracy. America has the purest form.

Looks to me most people didn't care about any of that in relation to Twitter.

That's a weird summary on what's been released from Twitter. They've been shown to do moderation and to receive issue reports both from users and third parties including gov sources. That's far from collusion.

Specifically, (unless I missed some document) they received reports and acted on them independently. There were cases of "report received and acted on", but no proof of "action forced even though employee disagreed".

Jack Dorsey has publicly stated he capitulated to the Indian government to censor around the Farmers protests because the Indian government was raiding employees homes and threatening to shut down service in the country. [1]

1. https://time.com/6286814/india-twitter-jack-dorsey-clash/

1. That's not really "governmental collusion"?

2. Elon Musk: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

This whole Twitter Files thing was embarrassing mundane and the amount of censoring twitter does right now is 100x worse. Just look at the Turkish elections...

1. I didn't state that it was. I was replying to the individual who made the claim "There were cases of "report received and acted on", but no proof of "action forced even though employee disagreed".". The censoring of Indian farmers is the clearest example of this claim being false.

2. It is also bad when Elon Musk does it.

I am not interested in any back and forth of "well ackshually now its this percentage worse", I only have a desire for it to stop entirely.

Temporarily complying then reverting the censorship in 2021 then suing the Indian gov in 2022 is not "capitulation".

Only recently did Twitter stop fighting back and Musk just announced it - it wasn't something hidden.

> Temporarily complying then reverting the censorship in 2021 then suing the Indian gov in 2022 is not "capitulation".

Capitulation is the cessation of resistance. It does not stipulate perpetuity. A person/entity can capitulate and then at a later point change their mind. This does not mean they never capitulated.

>Only recently did Twitter stop fighting back

Complying with censorship is not what I consider fighting back. Once you have aided the government in censorship at the moment when dissidents have the opportunity to create change, the damage is done.

>and Musk just announced it - it wasn't something hidden.

I did not state or imply that "it" was hidden.

They've been shown to follow the law in jurisdictions where it's lawful for the government to censor citizens' speech.

What you're missing is it's ILLEGAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL to do such a thing in the US by the US government, which is at the heart of the Twitter Files controversy. Censoring public discourse among the voting electorate especially concerning matters of national importance and electoral candidates is without question a form of election manipulation, which has, and will continue to, affect the outcome. So it is not wrong to say that our elections, or any elections amidst broad, systemic censorship/collusion by the government with contractors, academia and corporations, was a government-manipulated one.

With free speech one can accept that there will be inaccurate takes from all sides that have to be distilled and debated, but that stops when these ideas can't even be spoken about.

> which is at the heart of the Twitter Files controversy

Ok. Could you quote specifically when that was documented to happen? As in actually forced by a government agency, not just links provided to Twitter as "you should check out these tweets".

A person who is more concerned about the source or origin of potential evidence rather than weighing the merits on the content itself isn't engaging in a good faith discussion.

Did you respond to the wrong comment? I'm literally asking you to show us the content itself which corresponds to what you've written above. Please link to specific examples of the illegal and unconstitutional activity from the US Gov.

In case my previous comment was misunderstood, I meant that: I have not seen any cases where Twitter was forced to do anything. Every case I'm aware of, someone provided a tweet/account and twitter employees made the decision themselves (sometimes agreeing, sometimes pushing back).

> They've been shown to follow the law in jurisdictions where it's lawful for the government to censor citizens' speech.

> What you're missing is it's ILLEGAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL to do such a thing in the US by the US government, which is at the heart of the Twitter Files controversy.

You're still missing the point. Read the quoted text. You said once again you haven't seen that Twitter was forced to do anything.

The unconstitutional and illegal bit is the US government merely _asking_ Twitter to censor content.

We are asking where the US government is asking Twitter to censor content? Or is the point that no one has asked yet but if they did, it'd be illegal?

Cite where it's illegal or unconstitutional. The US government makes deals with private corps all the time, and Twitter is under no legal requirement to publish anything that it doesn't want to.

I was replying to yours and took issue with what seemed to be a dismissal of allegations based on where or how these allegations are communicated. My understanding of these specific first amendment violations is in part based on the revelations by Mike Benz, former US State Dept official who is behind the Foundation for Freedom Online. He asserts Twitter Files are the tip of the iceberg.

Here's a bite-sized video of the EIP and Atlantic Council under CISA openly bragging about how they accomplish it - pressure them to draft policy, then pressure them to uphold those policies.

Coercion to self-regulate: https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1608688753052377088

The Election Integrity Project was also recently highlighted in this recent WaPO Article: https://archive.ph/PjiVe

With this retort citing direct conversations that highlight that succinctly lays out everything: https://rumble.com/v2t4bha-censorship-industry-decoded-ep.-1...

It bears repeating how these allegations would make it unconstitutional via Supreme Court precedent and the law of agency (citations within link): https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-colluded-twitter-suppress-free-...

It's not like any of this was a secret, either: CISA openly admitted such on their website and even tried to quietly scrub it. Thanks to the Internet Archive preventing a rewrite of history (archive.org links within): https://theohiostar.com/commentary/commentary-government-cen...

It's not a weird summary at all... contrary to some people's views, the federal government actually does have constraints placed on its actions.

At the very least it's a civil action called 'tortious interference'; using Federal money (employee time) wrongly might rise to the level of 'fraudulent conversion'...

You haven't pointed at anything actually breaking those rules.

I really think you are trolling/sealioning at this point.

TI is when a 3rd party interferes with a the interactions between 2 parties. In this case the feds interfered with the user's use of Twitter.

The second is obvious, you spend Federal money on a wrong purpose , just like if you had employees help you remodel your house while they were supposed to be working.

Working with the government to stop the spread of mass fear and bullshit is considered by some as "the swamp". Lots of people think misinformation and lies are free speech that can be forced on any website. Especially with things like "hunter biden's laptop" which no one had proof of yet were pushing it like it was the next Watergate. Still there is very little we've heard from Hunter's laptop other than he was a coke head. Yet it remains the holy grail of the right.

Eyes wide shut.

The people hacking this and those behind the reddit blackout are not interested in preventing censorship or government collusion for these activities.. in fact, I would argue thats likely the MOTIVE, because its no longer free and anonymous.

I do not believe the claim. At the moment there is a war between reddit users and reddit managment. The managment is looking to IPO and so is trying to demonstrate its ability to wrench profits. The users are reacting through demonstrations of thier power to impact shareholder value. This hacking claim falls squarely into the later: it threatens shareholder value by introducing uncertainty. I will need to see solid evidence to be convinced.

No there is a war between Reddit management and a number of Reddit users. A certain proportion of users do not care about the API at all.

They won't care until the effects affect them.

Barely anyone will be affected.

Redditors are being used as pawns by the third party devs in their fight to maintain their free loading existence. Which was easy, social media is good at riling up people for made up reasons.

Reddit has several hundred million users, and even more anonymous visitors. The two biggest third party apps have 1.5M users combined.

I would bet on it being real. ALPHV/BlackCat is a known group. They hacked Western Digital back in March.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tag/blackcat/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com