The wildest part of the Twitter files is the unhinged framing that they are presented under.
1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
I could go for hours listing these.
Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.
If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not talking about the overall scope of the program. Obviously the Patriot Act is much broader. I’m talking about the double standard of those supporting the FBI. The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam. The same people justifying Twitter working with the FBI to respond to supposed “radicalization” and “domestic terrorism” were against the FBI when the target was foreign terrorists.
I don’t support or cheer on the FBI but I also don’t care at all about them sending these emails.
Doesn’t seem like a great use of FBI resources though — maybe they could put some focus on the crypto scams on Twitter that people keep falling for, or better yet the threads of thousands of videos of police brutality on Twitter from the last 2.5 years alone.
> The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam
Citation needed. The vast majority of the complaints during that era were due to portraying all Muslims as radical or focusing the efforts on Muslims without applying the same standards to the far more numerous (in the U.S., anyway) Christian extremists making anti-gay, anti-black, etc. messages. Clear rules which are fairly applied are a very different level.
> Clear rules which are fairly applied are a very different level.
The disclosure here is that Twitter didn’t have “clear rules which are fairly applied.” It was filtered through people who believed wacky things—for example, ones so blinded by anti-Christian bias they think there is any comparison between Christian “extremism” and the global problem of Islamic radicalism.
Which disclosure was that, specifically? I haven’t seen any evidence of “anti-Christian bias”. If you’re referring to my comment, note that my position is that all radicals should be treated with concern, but their coreligionists shouldn’t be assumed to share their beliefs. In the United States the most common religion is Christianity so we have lots of people making various hate crimes using language derived from that tradition or expressing fears about Islamic immigrants seen as dangerous outsiders, so I’m only talking about risks to the country where the FBI is focused. The Mossad no doubt has a different perspective.
The Twitter internal discussions we are talking about.
> I haven’t seen any evidence of “anti-Christian bias”. If you’re referring to my comment, note that my position is that all radicals should be treated with concern
The anti-Christian bias is in creating a false equivalency between Christian “extremists” and Islamic radicals. You responded to my comment by bringing up “anti-gay anti-Black” statements from “Christian extremists.” That’s an absurd comparison. What you’re talking about is the average person in my Muslim home country: https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2.... The FBI shouldn’t be investigating those people. What I’m talking about is a different level entirely: https://time.com/4365890/bangladesh-arrests-5000-crackdown-r...
The bias reflected in your comment is exactly the sort of biases through which Twitter moderation decisions are filtered. Your average Twitter moderator is the kind of sheltered person who thinks his racist uncle back home in Indiana bears mention in the same breath as Islamic radicalism. These are the same people who flipped out when the FBI was investigating Islamic fundamentalism, but now cheers in the FBI now that the target is white Christians.
> The Twitter internal discussions we are talking about.
Can you point to a specific detail supporting this claim? I have read the thread and don’t know what this is based on.
> You responded to my comment by bringing up “anti-gay anti-Black” statements from “Christian extremists.” That’s an absurd comparison.
Not if you’re looking at who’s threatening or committing crimes here in the US. School children aren’t doing active shooter drills because of Muslims, public events aren’t being cancelled because of bomb threats made by Muslims, etc. This is exactly what I’d expect based on demographics, so again my point is simply that I’m not surprised that the FBI is finding more crimes committed by nominal Christians in a majority Christian country.
> Because at least that was directed at a foreign terrorist threat that
And even with that prerogative, we all saw how the NSA's 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' expanded quickly, in breach of law, to encompass American citizens.
Government surveillance is going to be a hot button issue for the forseeable future, and if every time somebody does something bad is an excuse to expand its reach, there won't be anything beyond its reach before long.
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.
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?
"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 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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?
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?
"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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.
2:
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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:
"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."
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.
"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."
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.
I’ve never been a big fan of Taibbi. But all the things you’re mentioning are characteristic of his journalistic style, which made him famous in his coverage of Wall Street back in 2008. It’s uncharitable and filtered through a fundamental distrust of moneyed corporations, but I’ve never heard it described as “unhinged.”
And I’m not sure “unhinged” is an appropriate description. For example, while “internal lingo” may be common, isn’t it also fair to observe that much corporate internal lingo is pretty Orwellian? Similarly, as to your second point, is it unreasonable to draw an inference that Twitter is doing what some agency wants it to do, when the agency asks Twitter to do something and then Twitter does it?
I think the biggest thing that chafes at people is that Taibbi is meant to be uncharitable and distrustful of big corporations. But he's not. He's charitable and trustful of the current management of Twitter. It's the exact opposite of speaking truth to power. The old twitter was a set of weak, fragmented, individuals doing their best and getting absolutely excoriated for it constantly. Now the company is run by the richest man on earth beholden to no one, and he faces literally no skepticism from Taibbi (although it looks like Weiss is about to break).
Musk has been at the helm of Twitter for five minutes and has done nothing of consequence. The previous management played a major role in US politics for years. It had a major impact on a U.S. presidency and suppressed true information that could have significantly impacted a Presidential information. Taibbi is entirely correct to focus on what happened before and not on Musk’s mean tweets.
Orwellian does not just mean changing terms or using euphemisms. It is about terms that make the expression of undesirable thoughts actually impossible. Do any of the scare-quoted terms do this? I can't see any.
The term "Orwellian" in describing language comes directly from the properties of Newspeak.
"Orwellian" can mean other things when describing state power or surveillance technology, but in this context it is being used to describe language so the connection to Newspeak is the relevant one.
No, "Orwellian" means almost the opposite: Winston and Julia are perfectly capable of thinking dissident thoughts, despite being immersed in Ingsoc. "Orwellian" refers to dominating people to the degree that you can force them to use the words you specify and make them say things that they know aren't true.
Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" [0]:
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
> Orwellian does not just mean changing terms or using euphemisms. It is about terms that make the expression of undesirable thoughts actually impossible. Do any of the scare-quoted terms do this? I can't see any.
Per [1]:
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past [...]
The label in this context doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
In the context of authoritarian states and surveillance technology that definition matches. But this is specifically about language and jargon. Even if we decide that my definition is nonsense, it is clear that using terms like "escalation" internally isn't "a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda."
> Even if we decide that my definition is nonsense, it is clear that using terms like "escalation" internally isn't "a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda."
Sure, innocuous sounding words like "rendition" would never be reappropriated as code for something more sinister, right?
Seems to me that innocuous sounding jargon actually makes Orwellian doublethink much easier to swallow. Like a frog in a slowly heated pot of water, you get exposed to and acclimatize to progressively more problematic uses of power until you simultaneously believe that you are a patriot upholding citizen's rights while routinely violating them.
I'm not really sure why you think this process can't happen in a private company.
The problem for me was never that Twitter had their own in-house term for shadowbanning. It was that they obfuscated and hid behind the term in order to avoid accusations of shadowbanning. It's like saying "this is not a sub sandwich, it's a hoagie!"
> There is a very well understood definition for shadowbanning - only the poster can see their own posts.
Except that's not how most people understand the term. Terminology is defined by its usage, so if you're in the minority of how this term is used, you've lost. We already had this debate about hacker/cracker over 20 years ago. Hacker is still here, so get used to the broader meaning of shadowbanning.
verb: shadowban -
block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
Yes, which matches exactly what Twitter did, and which is how most people understand the term. Or did you miss the part where they delisted some accounts from being discoverable by search.
The way Twitter defines shadowban is more narrow than that.
"
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).
"
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden.
Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
Twitter is free to invent whatever narrow definition of shadowbanning they want, and we are free to call out their obfuscation for the bullshit it is.
Language is about effective communication. Right now we're all trying to have an important conversation about relevant social issues which requires a common understanding. You cited the common understanding, I pointed out how Twitter engaged in practices covered by that common understanding, and that should be the end of that. Can we move on now?
Instead of bikeshedding over this irrelevant minutae, engage with the actual substance of the discussions, like whether they should shadowban in the way they've been doing it, whether there should be limits to moderation policies for online public squares, what the guidelines for censoring speech should look like, whether to deplatform people entirely or merely deprioritize their speech, etc.
They don't prevent people seeing tweets of anyone. If you follow soneone you see their tweets, if you dont follow them but gonto their profile you see their tweets.
Tweets are universally publically viewable. The policies they use are not secret.
Trying to start a conversation about their secret shadowbanning policy is a dead end as the policy is not shadow banning and it is not secret.
And still you persist. Go read the definition you provided again. Then read my immediate reply where I pointed out they delisted people from search. That is literally a case where Twitter was "making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users" and they did so "without their knowledge".
That is shadowbanning by your own definition, and each ban was not disclosed and thus done in secret, because that's what it means to be shadowbanned.
There is a perfectly obvious interpretation of the language being used to describe this situation, and all you're doing is adding noise because people aren't using terms in the way you want while ignoring the substance. That's textbook bad faith arguing, which ironically is what you were accusing the original poster of doing.
> That is literally a case where Twitter was "making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users" and they did so "without their knowledge".
This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers. The only thing twitter is not doing is having their algorithm highlight them to people who weren’t following them or participating in a conversation with them. That doesn’t fit any common definition of shadow-banning.
> This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers
No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this: if you use Twitter's search to try to find a delisted user on Twitter, you can't find them. Sometimes you can't even @ them. This fits the general definition of shadowbanning that the other poster provided, wherein their content cannot be found using Twitter, thereby that qualifies as being shadowbanned on Twitter.
The fact that you can sometimes find that content via other means is totally irrelevant.
> No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this
Your frustration stems from angrily telling people something is wrong based on your misunderstanding of a term. You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
> You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
It's not my redefinition, it's literally the definition the other poster provided which they discovered via Google, and the application of that definition matches how thousands of tech and laypeople are using it in this conversation, and how the media is covering it. But, you do you.
Finally, I'm not sure where your ability to surmise my emotional state based only on text comes from, but I think it needs some tuning.
The argument seems to be that what the FBI is doing is more or less analogous to you clicking the report button, which hardly makes you a shadowy figure controlling Twitter if they act on your report.
> The argument seems to be that what the FBI is doing is more or less analogous to you clicking the report button
Weekly meetings between the FBI and top Twitter executives is "akin to clicking the report button"? Name one other Twitter user that had this privilege. I think that's a pretty strong sign that you're trying to stretch this analogy too far.
It is very clearly an improper purpose. The FBI is trying to suppress 1A protected speech by reporting the tweets. The FBI is not allowed to suppress 1A protected speech. Imagine there was a button that would delete a Tweet and anyone could press it. Just because anyone could press the button would not make it legal for the FBI to press it.
> It is very clearly an improper purpose. The FBI is trying to suppress 1A protected speech by reporting the tweets. The FBI is not allowed to suppress 1A protected speech. Imagine there was a button that would delete a Tweet and anyone could press it. Just because anyone could press the button would not make it legal for the FBI to press it.
I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments) in re: far more onerous and demanding requests than just an agent clicking a Report button, and in fact with far more official processes you can see the stats where they actually do just that. https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...
> I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
It is protected from the government. Of course, Twitter can decide to censor whatever they want, but if the government was threatening either Twitter or individuals on the platform, over protected speech, eg. criticizing the president, that would certainly implicate the 1A.
The government simply asking, with no implied threat, seems to be OK [1]. But, I don't think it builds confidence amongst the citizens if they were seen doing this very often.
Thanks for bringing some actual legal citations and interpretations to this discussion. Most of this thread appears to be a lot of handwaving about the constitution.
I can also say no to the feds if they ask me to assassinate someone but it doesn’t mean they aren’t breaking a law by asking me.
Would be a crazy constitutional loophole if the govt simply needs to ask citizens to censor each other (1a), steal their neighbors guns (2a), tell husbands to prevent their wives from voting (19a), etc.
If these censorship request were about bomb threats or something that’s one thing, but they are mostly just spicy political takes. FBI needs to stay in their lane.
Twitter’s data model stores Tweets as a stream of records. When you delete a tweet, it stores another record which consumers are required to honor saying that the first record’s ID was deleted.
Twitter’s internal tools still have all of that data. In most cases the Internet Archive also does, too, which is how people have confirmed that, for example, the tweets in the famous “handled” email were nudes in violation of the non-consensual policy with no overriding news value.
Personal accounts in your own time and not in any way as a representative of the US govt, and tax payer dollars aren’t paying for my time? Seems more reasonable to me. Especially if it isn’t a regular thing. a good question for a court to decide.
Perhaps it’s not a 1A issue when the FBI clamps down on a corporate platform, but it reminds me of how fascist states operate, not a democratic republic.
In the end the public political discourse needs to move away from corporate run forums. Not sure about Mastodon, but I’m hopeful future iterations of online forums will be more decentralized again.
A government whose representatives frequently rail against big tech companies, call for regulation, and drag executives in for hearings, "politely requests" something to be removed. It's pretty easy to see that Twitter might think that saying no has consequences.
Furthermore, the FBI is a police force. They have no business searching Twitter for content to remove unless that particular content is involved directly in the investigation of and filing of criminal charges.
What case did they rule that? It seems pretty routine that they get in contact with newspapers for this purpose so I'd be at least a little surprised to learn that it's been ruled unconstitutional but they're just flagrantly doing it anyway.
So if they contact the WSJ and try to get them to spike a story that's fine, but if they tell Twitter "we think you should remove these tweets for violating your policies" that's not? I would love to see what the case is because I can't understand how that would make sense.
But they can't contact Twitter and express their opinions?
The government routinely speaks to news papers about the government opinion on articles and how they are wrong. That's not censorship. Holding a figurative pistol to someones head and say "change this line" is censoring and supressing free speech.
Of course they can express their opinions. But it's not black and white.
The Twitter Files already has a statement from a Congressperson that Twitter's actions with the Hunter laptop will "result in a blood bath" during Congressional hearings.
If the 800 lb gorilla that is the US government is threatening a "blood bath", do you really have a choice when they ask for your "cooperation"?
Right, so instead of exposing themselves legally they do an end run of telling Twitter to ban and writing smear campaigns. Which is they did to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard.
> Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments)
In practice, can they? Leave out the part about other governments for a second, just consider the US govt
If you're doing moderation at twitter and Yoel Roth is above you, are you going to tell the FBI to screw off? Especially considering Roth is (apparently, according to Taibbi) meeting regularly with them. From a job security standpoint, how do you think the average white collar employee will behave?
I have worked at another organization (hosted server provider) where I was in contact with the FBI and other law enforcement.
There's a world of difference between what was shown they did at twitter by noting things that were "worrisome" or against a reasonable site's ToS and forcing anyone to take things down.
I have told agents that certain materials were acceptable and that we would take no action. Not much they could do there without an actual warrant.
i'd probably just do whatever the fbi wanted so as to save myself a possible hassle. which is the point: the fbi can fuck with me. to say, "well, the fbi is just reporting stuff" ignores that the fbi has power. power is something people seem to have an odd tendency to ignore.
> power is something people seem to have an odd tendency to ignore.
Indeed, just as you seem to ignore Twitter’s power. They are protected from the FBI by the Constitution and the courts, and they have the money (read: power) to actually enforce those protections had they felt threatened or coerced by the government. The FBI may have power but they are not all powerful, not even close.
Except it's not clicking the report button. See the FBI could have a special agent assigned to clicking the report button instead of directly emailing Twitter asking for the removal of things that are in some cases obvious jokes.
> Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
This is an extension of the whole “Three Felonies a Day” idea: it’s likely any prolific account will violate Twitter Terms of Service at some point, so you can target almost anyone by looking hard enough.
And Twitter is likely to look harder at reports from the FBI than your average user, therefore the FBI has more influence over who they can silence. Maybe they’re abusing it, maybe they’re not, either way it feels improper at best.
Is it improper? It obviously creates room for impropriety, but I personally find it very obvious that organizations responsible and equipped for e.g. finding CSAM or for mitigating foreign influence campaigns (yes, real things!) or for reducing the spread of ISIS recruitment material should have their reports sit above those of newuser1737382847.
You’d really suggest that all reports must be treated equally?
I am also rather skeptical of the notion of a series of purportedly journalistic exposes of a company presented in collaboration with the new boss. Of course any source has an agenda but it seems too much like the tail wagging the dog here.
> 1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
Internal jargon can be Orwellian. These are not mutually exclusive.
> But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
No, this chummy relationship is presented as problematic. Nowhere does he imply that the FBI controls what Twitter does. It's not a priori wrong to think that the government should not have such a close involvement with Twitter in its act of moderating/censoring. Having a lower threshold than you for risk of malfeasance is not a priori wrong. If you think your risk assessment is better, now you can make that argument using actual data, and those who disagree can make theirs. Fostering public debate is exactly what good journalism is supposed to do.
> But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
Sounds like standard journalism to me. Maybe your beef is not with Taibbi and the "Twitter files" but with how journalism as a whole is conducted. I agree, but don't apply a higher bar here where it's inconvenient.
Journalism should present things in the correct context, and contextualize statements, situations, etc.
If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism. Journalism is about informing. Not saying everyone does it perfectly, in the same way you can do bad science that is still technically science.
> Journalism should present things in the correct context, and contextualize statements, situations, etc.
Even if we agree that that's what journalism should be, what is your assessment of how accurately this definition matches most high profile journalism today? How much context did the Covington kids get, or how much context did the rail workers who wanted to strike get? There are very clearly some contexts that get priority coverage and are hammered non-stop, and some contexts that barely get any coverage at all.
To be clear, I'm not sure that I do agree with your definition. I think journalists typically do what you describe, but I think merely reporting raw data without context is also perfectly valid journalism. This "contextualisation" narrative is how some journalists are excusing their lack of support for Assange, and it's bullshit IMO.
> If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism
Unbiased journalism is a fiction. I agree that the best journalists try for objectivity, but this is an ethos that is slowly being pushed out of mainstream journalism, and activism has become standard practice (edit: this is probably because outrage generates more clicks/views, so activism "sells" in a sense).
I also think some professional journalists absolutely do outright lie for utilitarian reasons, such as "fighting evil" (typically Republicans). This goes back to the activism point.
Far more common are various forms of well known bias, my side bias, bias blind spot etc. This leads to one convincing oneself of a falsehood and then vehemently arguing for it, despite countervailing evidence.
If you spend time doing raw info dumps from one side of an argument, say the unions in the rail strike, you're not telling the whole story.
Telling the whole story is important to journalism. It's why you always see "X did not respond to a request for comment." They attempt to give the other side to speak.
Telling only one side of the story makes you a mouthpiece, not a journalist.
I didn't say journalism is without bias, but that's a completely separate topic. Let's try to keep this from turning into a "here's all of the things wrong with journalism and no solutions" rant thread.
You can be biased and also not attempt to push an agenda. The inverse is true, too.
> Telling the whole story is important to journalism.
I disagree. I think journalism is simply "presenting a factual story". I think presenting a contextual story is better journalism, but it's not necessary to qualify as journalism.
I think the goal is to anchor the discourse around "the gov is censoring speech" and let high-rank politicians talk about it openly, since now they are backed by undeniable facts. A few weeks ago anyone auggesting the gov is censoring twitter would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Now anyone who says the opposite will be seen as a fool or a shill. The goal has been achieved, in other words.
What you’re actually seeing is people who already believed govt is censoring speech now feeling like they have evidence of that claim despite none actually being put forward. On the flip side you have people who figured that, yeah, the government asks private entities to control information in certain ways and sometimes companies oblige despite not being required to. This latter claim remains the only one “evidenced” by the Twitter Files but it has also been evidenced by about 200 years of case law.
It is clear that Taibbi et al. are cherry-picking FBI interactions that will draw the most clicks and outrage from fans of the new management.
If they had published communications between the FBI and Twitter from, say, June 2020, I imagine their audience would not be able to muster quite as much indignation.
His story is slanted, but it's not fair to suggest he is 'cherry picking' - that's what the press does, they 'find the stuff that matters' and filters out the stuff that does not.
It would be 'cherry picking' if the result was something out of context and therefore misrepresented.
There's a legit story here, probably not to the extent made out to be but it's newsworthy.
What could be 'cherry picking' in the grand context, is that SpaceX has 'deep ties' with state apparatus, even the military, and we just don't talk about that. So by highlighting 'this thing over here' and not 'that thing over there' we lose context that Musk is in bed with the Pentagon while lambasting something happening with the FBI. And I'm not suggesting working with either is wrong, but that it's a bit hypocritical.
Musk is the one cherry picking by choosing which data journalists get. Taibbi alleges that the Biden Campaign was censoring content but leaves out that it was revenge porn. He says the Trump team made requests for removal of other content but leaves those out entirely. Bari Weiss was given an incomplete dataset which showed only Democratic messages but left out those from Republicans. There’s more, but that’s not enough cherry picking to make the entire thing dubious.
I have no dog in this fight (I thought Twitter was a cesspool then, and I know it is now), but before we go much farther in the conversation about collusion between LE and big business, we must remember how Qwest lost an enormous contract (and more, arguably) for refusing to cooperate with the NSA's plan to gobble everyone's data. The fact that this happened at all, creates a chilling effect, a shining example for all to see. In such light, American business that call themselves 'common carriers' all know the score: Cooperate or it would be a shame if something happened to you. Would anyone be shocked that Twitter kept a cordial relationship with the agency that murdered Fred Hampton? Of course not.
It’s Matt Taibbi. Unhinged framing designed to inflame populist rage is something he’s been doing since the 2008 financial crisis when he made his career on it.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
This thread is about the FBI, aka the actual jackboots, compelling private companies extralegally in order to shift democratic narratives.
And you're saying it's conservative to be opposed to that?
I understand it lined up with the liberal side regarding the election but that doesn't make Taibbi (or myself) a conservative for opposing it. Distrusting the FBI ought to be a liberal value.
I'm a leftist and not a liberal. I recognize that the FBI is a largely unrestrained organization that's responsible for a lot of evil, including the assassination of civil rights figures.
Fascism is when you're critical of federal agencies having a privileged relationship with the media to the point of weekly meetings to influence moderation policy? What?
Actual fascists attempted a coup on January 6th 2020. Taibbi is working to bolster their case by deliberately slanting and spinning this stuff.
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
Sorry bro, entering a building without any greater plan and then leaving peacefully is not a "right wing coup" and Trump supporters are not Fascists, they're just a little odd. The fact that it isn't a coup and was not a coup is why its participants cannot be charged as such.
If you want to see a "fascist coup" plan, go look at Golden Dawn being busted with blueprints to parliament that indicated they were going to break down the walls with tanks.
What you're effectively saying here is that people should not be concerned about massive FBI overreach and should discard what he has covered elsewhere because 'orange man bad', when Trump barely factors into anything here. That's deranged, and it's not going to be taken seriously outside of your bubble.
It failed because the bombs were found and because Mike Pence defected or at least chickened out at the last minute.
That’s why they were chanting “hang Mike Pence” not “hang Nancy Pelosi.” What you saw was a rage filled riot in the wake of a failing coup attempt.
Had the bombs gone off and Pence stopped the count a state of emergency would have been declared. I’m not totally convinced of this part but I’ve read that they were expecting a bunch of radical left counter protestors and that the role of the mob was supposed to be to start a big street brawl with Antifa or whoever was supposed to show to help feed into the state of emergency ploy to suspend the election.
It was more elaborately planned than Hitler’s beer hall putsch which was a bunch of Nasis getting blasted at the bar and having a street brawl with police that ended in a very asymmetrical gun fight.
Luckily it probably will end here this time though since Trump is too old, Flynn and Bannon are too obviously kooky, and DeSantis doesn’t have it in him. He knows how to troll the woke for attention but I don’t get hard core fascist vibes from him. He will try to do a Viktor Orban but it won’t work here because America has courts and federalism, and he doesn’t have the balls to attempt a coup. Say what you will about Trump but he did have balls.
I agree. I am a supporter of the freedom of speech angle, but this is all a total nothing-burger. A few TOS violations and some internal debate. I also suspected that BAU was much worse than presented.
There is no proof of any agency threatening (or implied threat) in these emails. Just some hints and voluntary action from Twitter.
I imagine these agencies do put pressure on private entities on a regular basis, but without actual further proof this is all just ridiculous hand waving.
Why are they contacting Twitter as the FBI in a backchannel to report potentially ToS offending tweets as opposed to the way we all report tweets to Twitter? Or indeed at all when they're not illegal tweets.
It's not a backchannel... every social media company has a dedicated response team that handles requests from law enforcement, partners, big media companies, etc. Do you think Disney just hits the report button on YouTube? This is an official method of reporting content. Literally every major company does this and the reasons why have been explained for years.
IDK if you understand what back channel means... This was an official of communication for the FBI. Back channel would be using personal devices and emails.
Thsi is completely normal for any business. If you are ‘important’, like an authority or a large customer, you have priority channels to go through. When Tesla wants to contact the Department of Transportation, do you think they go to their website, fill in the public contact form and wait two months for a response?
Think of it as a priority queue in terms of software. Does it make more sense now?
If the FBI had to go through the same queue as Joe Average then their requests may well end up at the head of the queue too late for action. The same goes for celebrities, advertisers and so on. All of these have different contact points. And because law enforcement contact is one step away from the company doing something that is potentially illegal their messages are given a higher priority.
Because more important users get special treatment? If you are a user that are of special importance to the business (like politicians, news outlets, or major Twitter users), then of course their requests are going to get escalated more quickly. Twitter isn’t a democracy; some users matter a lot more to them than others, and it’s not really based on political lines.
Transparency would be full and open disclosure. Cherry-picking for right-wing writers to base stories on is pretty different, as evidenced by all of the people who think there was anything new revealed this week. This showed some of the internal conversations but the story matched what we already knew from statements at the time and subsequent testimony before the Congress. From a transparency win that seems small to non-existent but it’s clearly been successful at giving partisans more ammunition.
Umm, during the run-up to the 2020 election Trump was the president. He appointed Christopher Wray as head of the FBI. So whatever is in this tweets was done by a Trump appointee
I think there is a strong argument that if you are working for the FBI you are not allowed to even click the report button as part of your duties for 1A protected speech.
You can imagine how this could be weaponised. For example FBI agents could be tasked to report tweets from people who hold disfavoured opinions. This interpretation is also inline with the court’s finding over Trump’s use of the block button: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte...
This is not meant for anything but stirring up the far right and hoping it'll radicalize more right wingers. Being unhinged is part of the strategy.
Musk is out on revenge for being force to buy Twitter, and for being framed as an idiot in the media. He is using his newly acquired media sledgehammer to do exactly what he bought it for. Creating the narrative for advancing his personal interests.
This is why it's bad for society to let individuals be richer than nation states. This is why aristocracy was bad. Too bad the notion of freedom was used to rebuild aristocracy.
Look at it from another perspective, proponents of free speech and platform neutrality were talking about this and were considered 'conspiracy theorists', then it got out and its 'unhinged framing' in a few weeks it will be 'we all knew about it and its good'.
I work at a much smaller shop than Twitter, but notable enough to get reporters sniffing around when we have internal scandals. Without giving any details I was an insider on few actions that got media coverage that was framed in a very nefarious way. Having personally witnessed the deliberations, I can confirm it was a mix of inside baseball that outsiders just don't usually see and a handful of sincere people really trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation and not really knowing one way or the other how things will work out.
> Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag. All kinds of phrases get used like selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, or disguising a gag. Each is a form of censorship, but that's a bad word since the days of Anthony Comstock so it is never used. Censors never describe themselves as censors. See the book "The Mind of the Censor",
> The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag
It can be, and you're zeroing on sense where vague lingo like "enhanced interrogation" replaces plain "torture".
But that's a stretch. Every profession develops their own lingo over time. They're called "term of art" (1)
An example is when one sysadmin asks another to "bounce the box" - these words have specific meanings which are opaque to outsiders, but are brief and precise to insiders.
This "internal lingo" developing is normal, inevitable, even necessary, and not in any way a "red flag".
If the admins of twitter had several different terms instead of calling them all the same thing then ... maybe they just needed to be brief and precise, to distinguish between them, in order to do the job effectively? You're trying to invent a problem where there is none.
> Every profession develops their own lingo over time.
In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.
I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].
The man who was just forced to buy a 44B company, and is liquidating shares in his self-driving car company to pay twitters rent, and is now beholden to weird Saudi financiers who bailed him out, is certainly not steering lol.
Yes, that's a great case for considering ideas for their merit rather than idolizing individuals.
I'm also curious to know what his guiding principles are but maybe we're stuck reverse engineering them based on his actions. Sticking to an ideal doesn't seem to be his style.
I'm probably missing something. I don't follow him too closely.
The government working with Twitter to create broad misinformation policies and then issuing requests for takedowns under those policies once adopted is a great way for the government to violate the first amendment with plausible deniability. I guess we’ll see what the courts think.
Ya facism (gov in bed with private biz) used to manipulate election results (hunter laptop, muffling conservatives en mass) and treading all over free speech is "unhinged framing". What twitter, the fbi and the white house did are th opposite of what the USA is supposed to stand for.
The Tweets the FBI were asking to be removed were speech protected under the first amendment. It is very likely that this is unconstitutional but at a minimum this violates a strong norm in the US that the State does not interfere with people’s speech. When it comes to twitter a court had previously found that Trump could not even block people from his personal Twitter account (a final ruling was never made because trump left office: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte... )and now people are going to seriously argue that it’s ok for government officials to advise that Tweets or people should be banned.
The government’s right to request information control and private entities’ right to decline those requests is well established and non-controversial. They cannot coerce or threaten, but there’s no evidence of that happening, and if Twitter felt otherwise they could go ahead and sue the government and win. Well established.
There is no issue with the FBI investigating crimes using the Twitter platform. I would hope that Twitter tells the FBI to “come back with a warrant” if they want non-public information.
But the FBI flagging content for removal. Including “disinformation”?
That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech.
A good analogy would be a debate club being held in a private bar and the police coming by and saying "yeah, that guy you invited to debate, you think you can "handle" that for us?".
It’s frankly shocking how many people on HN are like “meh…what’s the big deal?”
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
If that debate club guy was spreading voter misinformation, the FBI would come by and investigate him, too.
Right, investigate them for committing a crime. That’s the FBI’s job. If they see voter suppression on Twitter they can get a warrant forcing Twitter to turn over the account identity (and prosecute them) and take down the tweet.
But that’s not what’s happening here is it? The FBI is asking Twitter to take down tweets (some of them obvious jokes) without a warrant or evidence of any crime being committed.
That’s what’s happening.
No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
> [A.] Generally speaking, courts have said "yes, that's fine," so long as the government speech doesn't coerce the intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here's a sample of appellate cases so holding:
> [B.] On the other hand, where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional.
> [C.] Does it matter whether the government acts systematically, setting up a pipeline for requests to the media? One can imagine courts being influenced by this, as they are in some other areas of the law; but I know of no First Amendment cases so holding.
> [D.] Now in some other areas of constitutional law, this question of government requests to private actors is treated differently, at least by some courts. Say that you rummage through a roommate's papers, find evidence that he's committing a crime, and send it to the police. You haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because you're a private actor. (Whether you might have committed some tort or crime is a separate question.) And the police haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because they didn't perform the search. The evidence can be used against the roommate.
> But say that the police ask you to rummage through the roommate's papers. That rummaging may become a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, at least in the eyes of some courts: "the government might violate a defendant's rights by 'instigat[ing]' or 'encourag[ing]' a private party to search a defendant on its behalf."
> Likewise, "In the Fifth Amendment context, courts have held that the government might violate a defendant's rights by coercing or encouraging a private party to extract a confession from a criminal defendant." More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
> So maybe there's room for courts to shift to a model where the government's mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government's part.
So basically it sounds like this could be the makings of a very fascinating case, if it holds up in court, but there is ample legal precedent of the government doing pretty much what happened on Twitter, already.
> No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
Would that be ok?
I may not like it, and it may not be morally okay, but I am almost certain cops are able to do that, because that is the system we have created.
It comes down to coercion, which can sometimes be hard to prove. In the earlier Twitter Files, a Congressperson mentioned how banning the Hunter Biden Laptop story was going down poorly and the Congressional hearings “would be a blood bath”.
Is that coercion? For the courts to decide I guess.
But I’m in the same camp as you. I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
Sounds like Twitter just went along with it, without coercion. Which you may choose to criticize as weakness or cowardice, but maybe that's just how they chose to do business.
> I don’t disagree with what you posted at all.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
> And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
For the record, my stance is that it's not a nothingburger, but it is so insignificant so as to provide a convenient distraction for actual malicious acts that are going on, like the Z-Library shutdown. And that all of this is underwhelming, much like this other poster's opinion:
"A whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations" seems to be an adequate summation of this whole situation. Which this thread, like all culture wars, has made a mountain out of.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
No I don’t agree. “Norms” are separate from the legal context you gave.
If no coercion took place, that doesn’t make what the FBI did “ok” even if no laws were broken.
Like my earlier analogy, if my local cops started asking businesses to kick people out (and the businesses agreed) that’s a major problem, even if not illegal.
Law enforcement’s job is to identify crimes and arrest people.
When their scope starts expanding into working with willing private companies to silence individuals who have committed no crime, that should worry everyone, whether it happens with Twitter or your local bar.
It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
> It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
The problem is that people are getting at the FBI for the wrong things. They should be getting mad at the shutting down of Z-Library instead, which holds far more impact for far more people than the two dozen accounts discussed in the OP (who weren’t even all suspended). When people are concerned about petty crimes, the big ones get unnoticed.
3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
How is this constant? This is just 1 request every 7 days . I figured it would be more. Also, it's called the FBI. Their job is to investigate federal matters, which includes content on social social media. They do with with all major social networks. It's not just politics or the media, but things related to safety, terrorism, kidnaping, child exploitation, etc.
It seems like these files are becoming more and more underwhelming.
The goal seems to be to distract from Musk selling off Tesla at breakneck speed. Every time there is a big hoopla around Musk the first thing I do is check the stock price and sure enough it seems to be dropping like a stone in tandem with the news releases.
I think the goal is to drive engagement. Unfortunately for Musk the engagement will cost him more compute resources even though he's lost a lot of advertising revenue.
If Twitter had a proper functioning board doesn't everyone think they would have prevented him from driving away advertisers and then threatening them with lawsuits for not advertising? If I was an investor in Twitter I would be livid. It appears most investors take it in stride because they worship Musk.
I replied to a tweet that referenced Musk and Tesla, and simply mentioned that I sold my Tesla shares at the beginning of this week (and made a loss) because I didn't want any association with Musk any more.
The replies I got from Musk fans were shockingly (maybe not so shockingly) vile.
Turns out Musk sold his Tesla shares at the same time as I did — I wonder how those people replying to me would square that with their insults.
As a Musk fan (well, sorta, this twitter posturing is mega cringe), I applaud your common sense in selling a grossly overvalued stock (which I am confident Musk also thinks is overvalued).
I'm certainly not going to defend the people insulting you, but suggesting that you sold for moral, and not financial, reasons comes off as very sanctimonious and invites that type of reply in a cesspit like Twitter.
Good point, Musk is now in direct competition with Truth Social, Parler and so on. I had not given that any thought but it explains some of the more bizarre moves of the last weeks.
It would be foolish to see this as a left v. right issue. This is an authoritarian vs. libertarian battle.
This sort of activity is what the government 100% shouldn't be involved in. Having a department of What is Allowed To Be Said is one of those ideas that gets tried regularly and has a terrible track record that - inevitably - ranges between a source of mild shame in hindsight to a nightmare influence on society.
There are nearly no scenarios where it is acceptable for the FBI to be in regular contact with Twitter asking for Tweets to be taken down, and if there are it should be transparent and documented - in public, in real time. It shouldn't take Elon Musk spending too much money to get details on the FBI's censorship programs (similarly it should have taken Assange-Manning-Snowden to get details on the pervasive spying).
Are there any scenarios where it is acceptable for the President to threaten private companies to change their moderation policies to suit his needs? That's what Trump did repeatedly.
There's a fundamental contradiction in the narrative presented in the Twitter Files, apparently we're supposed to believe that Twitter is this overwhelmingly liberal place where employees were highly biased against conservatives in their content moderation and also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution, coerced Twitter in a highly biased way to get them to silence conservative narratives. If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion. If Twitter was being forced, it remains to be shown exactly how. And to the extent that Twitter is institutionally biased towards liberals, then it's those that sit on the opposite political spectrum that are most suspicious. After all, if Twitter was going out of their way to help the Democrats, why would they need to be coerced in that same direction?
There's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians including the sitting President threatened Twitter and other social media companies in order to influence their moderation policies. Where's the outrage among the "FBI asking Twitter nicely is a First Amendment issue" crowd?
> Are there any scenarios where it is acceptable for the President to threaten private companies to change their moderation policies to suit his needs?
If he's asking for something completely reasonable that ~80+% of people think is a good idea, sure. The appropriate thing for Twitter to do would still probably be to ignore him.
Giving Trump influence of Twitter's moderation policies is one of those obviously bad ideas (much like giving the FBI influence, in fact, for similar reasons).
> If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion.
Yeah it isn't really a question of coercion, obviously if Twitter wants to support the FBI in political causes they are free to do that. The issue is that the FBI is being funded by taxpayers, not leftists, and shouldn't be deployed in a political capacity to support partisan management policies like what Twitter turned out to have. The easy way to achieve that is a blanket rule - something like "the government doesn't police what people say" which is fair and reasonably objective.
> ...also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution...
There was the institutional support for the Trump-Russia hoax and the FBI's help in suppression of the Hunter Biden story. While I agree the FBI probably isn't leftist (I'm arguing it is authoritarian and status-quo biased, for what it is worth - they'd pull all the same tricks on someone like Bernie Sanders if he had made it through the primary), it is politically active and spreading a lot of this "misinformation" stuff to try and keep Trump out of office. That is corrupt, and it shouldn't be working with Twitter like it is.
So the big scandal here isn't that the FBI is implicitly threatening Twitter in a way that raises 1st Amendment concerns, but rather that the FBI is using public funds to help a social media company do its job. This has nothing to do with free speech and there's also no evidence the FBI's actions were motivated by partisan concerns.
To me, it's rather clear that a bunch of people who are not particularly principled or have a strong understanding of the ethics or laws involved, but are prone to thinking that anyone working against their own agenda must be evil or nefarious in some ways, reverse-engineering their way into finding faults with how things more or less have always worked. This also isn't some nefarious hidden secret motivated by partisan concerns. Trump's own Director of FBI, Christopher Wray stated that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election:
> Russia is determined to interfere in U.S. elections despite sanctions and other efforts to deter such actions before the next presidential election in 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday.
And he specifically told the public what the FBI is doing about this:
> FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, said social media remains a primary avenue for foreign actors to influence U.S. elections, and the bureau is working with companies on the problem.
> “What has continued virtually unabated and just intensifies during the election cycles is this malign foreign influence campaign, especially using social media,” Wray said. “That continues, and we’re gearing up for it to continue and grow again for 2020.”
Well, the scandal here is the FBI were rolling in, giving Twitter a list of random bystanders with the expectation that they will be silenced. US Federal government agencies are specifically not supposed to do that.
All the stuff observing that the FBI is politically active (and has been pretty much since inception I suspect) is interesting but not really news. It is context for why they are supposed to avoid chummy relationships with Twitter's team of moderators.
> Trump's own Director of FBI, Christopher Wray stated that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election
Yeah, but the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem; raising the question of what exactly Wray was trying to stir up. He looks like part of the anti-Trump crowd that has been active in the FBI for the last few years.
> Well, the scandal here is the FBI were rolling in, giving Twitter a list of random bystanders with the expectation that they will be silenced. US Federal government agencies are specifically not supposed to do that.
Which is substantially less problematic that the sitting President threatening Twitter. Yet here we are.
> Yeah, but the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem; raising the question of what exactly Wray was trying to stir up. He looks like part of the anti-Trump crowd that has been active in the FBI for the last few years.
This is so far off the mark that it's hard to take you seriously. The Mueller report extensively documented Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election.
> However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion
It didn't exonerate the Trump campaign either. It more or less said that it couldn't prove the collusion in large part due to extensive attempts by the President's attempt to torpedo the investigation. It describes these attempts at obstruction of justice, without specifically accusing him (or exonerating) because Mueller didn't think it would be fair even if he believes a crime occurred:
> The report describes ten episodes where Trump may have obstructed justice while president and one before he was elected, noting that he privately tried to "control the investigation". The report further states that Congress can decide whether Trump obstructed justice and take action accordingly, referencing impeachment
> Mueller's belief that it would be unfair to accuse the president of a crime even without charging him because he would have no opportunity to clear his name in court; furthermore it would undermine Trump's ability to govern and preempt impeachment
> Which is substantially less problematic that the sitting President threatening Twitter.
No, in fact quite the reverse. It is quite problematic. Active cooperation between the FBI and Twitter is a threat to the institutions of democratic governance. That is why it is a scandal and there are things like the 1st amendment that basically say "government shouldn't do this, it is illegal".
Part of the draw of Trump was his ongoing battles with every reporting institution on the face of the earth. His Fake News routine was entertaining. And, critically, all happening publicly and with extensive documentation of every act and insult. Compare that to the FBI here where it is almost coincidence that we even have firm evidence of what is going on despite the fact they were handing out names to be blocked.
> The Mueller report extensively documented Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election.
Which aspects of the Russian interference do you think are a bigger deal than the FBI interference in the political process that are being documented in the linked twitter thread?
You can refer to the Muller report if you like. I ask people to cite which bits of it they are worried about and usually their turn out to be bluffing about there being anything defensible in it. There is a lot of bark and no bite, it looks like to maintain credibility they were relying on the report being so think that nobody reads it.
To take the Muller report seriously requires someone to believe in devious Russian plans to reveal the truth to Americans. And that the Chinese are all angels and have no influence operations of note whatsoever. The whole scenario that Muller tried to paint is an insult to the intelligence, which casts a poor light on Wray because he had presumably read and understood the report.
> It didn't exonerate the Trump campaign either.
I'm going to be polite and listen to your opinion despite you likely not being exonerated for any horrible crimes.
That was always political weasel language, and goes a long way to discrediting Muller as purposefully adding spin to the situation. He was looking very hard for a problem and couldn't find anything. When the politicians are forced back to insinuation that means they don't have any actual evidence - because if they have it they lead with it.
It's virtually impossible for the government to do its job without the private individuals and institutions "actively cooperating" with them. Nearly all interactions between the government and private institutions can be described that way.
> That is why it is a scandal and there are things like the 1st amendment that basically say "government shouldn't do this, it is illegal".
This is completely incoherent - the first amendment of course does not say that the government shouldn't cooperate with private individuals or institutions. Like how is it even possible to interpret the first amendment that way? I mean, it's very obvious you have no idea what you're talking about and your motivation here is entirely political, but how is it possible to get things so wrong?
I mean there are so many things wrong here, but one additional thing is that the Constitution enumerates and limits the power of the federal government. The Constitution does not grant the FBI any power whatsoever, except indirectly through the President.
What you're saying (rather extremely incoherently) amounts to saying President Trump was unconstitutionally abusing his powers to hurt his own campaign.
Also, this is how you started:
> the Muller report came out around the time he said that and basically debunked the issue as a serious problem
And this is where you ended:
> To take the Muller report seriously requires someone to believe in devious Russian plans to reveal the truth to Americans
> That was always political weasel language, and goes a long way to discrediting Muller as purposefully adding spin to the situation
And no the Mueller report doesn't insinuate - it extensively documents criminal ways in which Trump obstructed the investigation. He simply felt it was the job of Congress to act on the evidence he found.
The stupid H Biden lap top story shows that factually the government can twist a private company's arm outside of legal channels and said company will do as it is told. That is very bad. I'm not sure people realize this. Every incriminating leak showcases it more and more and yet people are generally not worried about it because they themselves have not been affected. Yet.
We learned before Taibbi's scoop that Twitter disallowed sharing of the story including in DMs. Blocking content in DMs was supposedly only used for illicit underage material until that story. Facebook's Zuck outright admitted in plain English that they got contacted by the government (maybe FBI, can't remember) so they buried the story. This is not my opinion or guessing. We know this to be absolute fact.
> We learned before Taibbi's scoop that Twitter disallowed sharing of the story including in DMs. Blocking content in DMs was supposedly only used for illicit underage material until that story
You might not have been aware of that but it was common knowledge years before. During the hours when that story was blocked using the same mechanism they used for other hacked materials like you might have seen if some celebrity’s nudes had been leaked. Within a day that was removed for the NY Post news story since they were individually taking down the tweets with the actual nudes.
> This is not my opinion or guessing. We know this to be absolute fact.
What we know as absolute fact is that you’re getting your information from people who carefully lie to you, and you didn’t verify the source. It sounds like you’re referring to Zuckerberg’s interview with Rogan, where he said this:
“The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'."
That’s important because what he said doesn’t support that narrative:
Rogan: “Did [the FBI] specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?”
Zuckerberg: “No, I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern.”
Now, this is all off topic from the “Twitter Files” but again it’s important to remember that the mythology around conservative oppression is being used to distract from the real point that the laptop story failed to have the impact Giuliani & Trump wanted was because there wasn’t much of substance there and the evidence was tainted by sloppy handling. They’re trying to market it as a tale of censorship because they know that it wasn’t effective as a scandal.
It's common knowledge yet here we are arguing whether these social media outlets block useless content that happens to be embarrassing to the State when suggested to by the FBI. You seem to agree with this but frame it as a counterpoint. "Mythology around conservative oppression"? I don't follow conservative whinings about how their hate speech is oppressed.
"arm twisting" doesn't mean flat out forcing but strongly recommending with the idea that it may go further if their recommendation isn't followed. The laptop story being suppressed is now fact and admitted by both Twitter and Facebook and months before these Taibbi stories.
I kind of wonder whether Tesla, a company making cars with GPS, microphones and video cameras embedded in it is also regularly contacted by crime agencies.
That's very low for how often law enforcement might contact a social media service. Sometimes it's because people report "illegal" posts to them instead of you. Sometimes it's just because they're old people and aren't going to go through your report form when they could email you.
What controls when you have to respond to them is the law, not them. You'll know when that is, because it'll come with legal process.
It's so low that I'm pretty sure they missed the bulk of the communications between LE and Twitter. But hey, more installments, more eyeballs, more outrage and so more money for Musk.
Yes and yes. As well as things such as suicide attempts, missing kids and so on.
To give you some numbers: I operated an international community with about 1 million members over the course of 20 years. During that time the number of requests were larger than the number of requests that have been detailed here regarding Twitter, which is one of the reasons why I believe that we are seeing a highly colored picture.
That's a possibility, but unlikely. Twitter execs were probably well aware of the long arm of the law and that their ability to stay in business to a large extent depended on staying on the right side of the line legally. That's precisely why you see them arguing about this to such a degree in these articles, they are well aware of their position vis-a-vis the law.
I've had some contact with the FBI over the years regarding stuff happening on one of my sites and they were - it has to be said - polite and arguing their case quite well, in no way did I feel like figuring out whether if I refused them what the next step would be, it felt like I would be the unreasonable party. But if they had made an unreasonable request I would have told them to fuck off.
Not only have they missed a lot, but what they have presented is laughably devoid of context. So a user tweeted "mostly jokes"? What about the exceptions? Ten jokes and a death threat is still a problem. What about the DMs? What about the follow rings, building up social capital (including with jokes) for the accounts that did much worse? What about steganography? It's not like these are obscure tactics in modern disinformation campaigns. They're standard tools of the trade.
It's absurdly easy for Musk and his cronies to cherry-pick which pieces of context they do or do not include, to make any user's behavior seem more benign or nefarious than it really was. Every time they reveal something, we should ask what they're leaving out. Anyone who fails to do so, whether they're a journalist or an HN commenter, is effectively doing Musk's dirty work for free.
Having gone through an acquisition, I guarantee that our acquired org gets more than 150 emails from our acquirer every two years. Let alone each day. To call it a "subsidiary" is ludicrous.
Pop a few custodians worth of emails into Brainspace or any of the other tools to parse the information and you'll find that 300~ emails over 3 years is next to nothing (i'll double the number listed by Taibbi to be charitable). I'd expect that volume of contact in less than 2 days if there was a $100M construction project going on. And that's emails, not slack messages or other records. Just emails.
Additionally an email isn't an individual issue; an email thread almost always has multiple replies, forwards, etc. On the low end, if we assume only 4 emails per topic between the parties, that means the FBI only approached twitter 75ish times in three years, or 25 issues per year.
I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions.
If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel.
If the worst Taibbi can find is the FBI trying to take down a tweet trying to get republicans to vote on the wrong day, he's found fuck all.
> I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions.
> If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel.
... or it could be they're not wanting to identify and act on their own entrapment (oops I mean sting) operations.
It seems really tiny to me. With something like 30 million Americans on Twitter, the FBI only sent about one email a week to the person in charge of safety for that “town square.”
It’s still very interesting data. Now I want to know how this compares to the other big tech companies.
We had a couple Us dedicated to the feds in our datacenter for their wiretap box, in addition to weekly emails. We had like 1/16 twitter’s revenue. That’s what I’d consider constant!
How many tweets are published in a day? How many tweets are removed by automation in a day. How many tweets were removed yesterday for linking to mastodon? Surely more than 150.
And that's total emails, each communication on an issue is probably 3-4 emails at least, so 150 in that many years is incredibly small. It's more like one issue a month.
The FBI's building is named after the guy who saw MLK Jr as the biggest national security threat and most likely had a strong hand in trying to silence and murder him. The FBI does plenty of heroic things daily, but they are also deeply rooted in guarding the status quo of those in power over actual justice.
Poe's Law. No one can tell your dumbass joke saying the election is on a Wednesday is a joke. Especially when it's right next to a bot account from eastern Europe that said the same thing.
You seem to have some incredibly strong opinions on how you think national security is supposed to work while not seeming to understand even the basic functionality of the role and remit of the FBI.
The basic functionality of the role and remit of the FBI does not entail helping Twitter enforce its terms of service. They’re supposed to be a law enforcement agency that performs criminal investigations to support federal prosecutors, not a secret police force that engages in extrajudicial measures against political dissidents, though I suppose Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King would have something to say about the latter.
Even if these people were not joking it is not clear that this is illegal. The statutes that try to prevent election misinformation likely violate the first amendment or they may not apply in these specific cases. The FBI should be prosecuting people so these statutes have a chance of being challenged in court and these people have a chance to defend themselves. Either that or twitter should have informed them that the report was originated by the US government. If this information was never leaked then the people effected by the FBI’s secret speech suppression may never have known and would never had a chance to contest it in court.
> The statutes that try to prevent election misinformation
Do such statutes even exist? I suspect the answer is no, and that the FBI is just engaging in extralegal, extrajudicial monkeyshines.
> If this information was never leaked then the people effected by the FBI’s secret speech suppression may never have known and would never had a chance to contest it in court.
From a certain point of view (which seems distressingly popular on HN lately) that’s considered a feature and not a bug.
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
> Help defend the right to vote by reporting any suspected instances of voter suppression—especially those received through a private communication channel like texting—to your local FBI field office or at tips.fbi.gov.
In that case I’m with benmmurphy: they should be enforcing the law by actually prosecuting people in court (or, to be pedantic, performing arrests and investigations to support a prosecution by a US Attorney), not engaging in extrajudicial monkeyshines.
I agree with the spirit of this, but the point is this neither extrajudicial nor monkeyshines, nor out of the ordinary, which means this entire discussion has been bamboozled by business as usual, while more interesting controversies have been neglected.
For the past couple of years, the defense of Twitter’s aggressive moderation has been that Twitter is a private company and that the First Amendment only stops the government from censoring speech. Now we know that Twitter was doing this, in part, at the behest of a government agency. If this isn’t “out of the ordinary” it’s only because of the FBI’s well-established reputation for doing far worse things.
As Snowden’s revelations illustrate, Big Tech is inherently compromised. Caveat emptor. I shed no tears for Twitter. I know that they are likely constantly moderating not only on the behalf of the federal government, but quite possibly your own local authorities, but also for any business who might have an interest and hold leverage over Twitter. Including individuals as well.
In this milieu, I find all of this alarmism to be misplaced, and thus worth calling out.
They blocked some links, as did other social networks, but the story was not suppressed by any stretch. It was still all over the place and everyone was talking about it in real time, on Twitter even.
>They blocked some links, as did other social networks, but the story was not suppressed by any stretch. It was still all over the place and everyone was talking about it in real time, on Twitter even.
Twitter's actions almost guaranteed that this would blow up, prompting the wider media ecosystem to respond to the story about the blocked tweet, letting many, many more people know about the laptop story (which anyone/everyone could still read without hindrance) to people (like me) who don't read the Post or use Twitter.
In fact, had Twitter not flagged the NY Post's tweet about the article, I might never have heard about the laptop story at all.
The FBI doesn't get to decide what's "important in the context of an election."
The contents of Hunter's laptop didn't stop me from voting for Biden, but that's because I'm a cynical jerk that already thinks politicians are corrupt by default.
I wasn't talking about the FBI, I was talking about Hunter Biden's laptop, and what an entirely bullshit story it is from start to finish. Read the comment I was responding to.
Lots of crackheads get jobs on the boards of foreign energy firms, and lots of crackheads dads withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the nation where their crackhead sons have these jobs unless they fire the prosecutor looking into their sons business. Total nothing burger. Another one for the big guy.
I'm not deciding anything for anyone, I'm merely pointing out a fact. Also, you're presuming the truth of the allegations that the FBI did anything to materially suppress this story, and that's not in evidence, Musk-driven hyperventilation aside.
"The Hunter Biden story is insignificant" is a judgement, not a fact, it's a judgement. I'd say that calling it "misinformation" is bizarre, except that most prominent allegations of misinformation boil down to judgements too.
Why should a laptop repair shop be allowed to publish the contents of a customer's hard drive? Especially explicit content intended to aid harassment of the owner?
Can you imagine the reaction of Elon Musk if this happened? Musk can't even handle public information being published (i.e. elon jet). He would go nuclear if nude pictures were leaked.
My guess is every three letter agency, the White House, members of Congress, everybody. Just like the current admin and previous admin. They would all be in conversation with all the major social platforms, for lots of reasons.
> Imagine if you had the Trump admin suggesting whose accounts to review?
The highly publicized examples of taking down tweets with nude images of Hunter Biden happened when Trump was president. Is everybody ignoring that fact in this story and just assuming that the FBI is aligned with the democrats regardless of who runs the executive branch?
That's not how it works. How it works is that they come across something that is either illegal or that could snowball into a problem and it happens to violate the TOS. This gives them enough grounds to ask for a removal. If it isn't against the TOS but they feel that they need to have it removed anyway they'll go by a judge and get an order, or, if contact is good they might first ask you politely.
Presumably, those fielded by agents would, given the distribution of online crime, fall all over the political spectrum, then and would not lean one way or the other?
What crimes are vaccine sceptics guilty of? Given they had some sex crimes going on on the platform, where the mounds of those ToS review requests?
In the examples, are they alleging the potential crime or just saying, hey, guys, it looks like these accounts may be violating your ToS, can you take a look?
As for vaccine sceptics: there were a lot of people amplifying utter bullshit messages around that theme and arguably shutting those accounts down saved a bunch of lives. You may well disagree with that but in a fluid situation I can see why they did what they did. It does not deserve the beauty prize but since we're still learning how to deal with this social media thing where everybody has a megaphone that can reach around the world in a heartbeat I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For the record, I'm pro-vaxx, but against mandatory vaccination.
>As for vaccine sceptics: there were a lot of people amplifying utter bullshit messages..."
What is the actual crime that precipitates their appetite to nonchalantly ask for review? Moreover, the CDC and govt officials, including Biden himself, spread bullshit messages about Covid and its vaccines.
Did they ask Twitter to suspend Antifa accounts because of the violent nature of some of their demos? Or people amplifying bullshit stories about cops such that "ACABs"? Where were they supplicating for those reviews?
As an independent it looks to me, the FBI trod dangerously close to censorship (as in the Government censoring speech unwanted by the gov).
> As an independent it looks to me, the FBI trod dangerously close to censorship (as in the Government censoring speech unwanted by the gov).
That's possible, but only a judge will be able to determine that and possibly your ideas about censorship do not line up with the views of that judge. The questions is who will bring suit?
The problem was that it was entirely biased to one side. They were actively looking to sway an election. Some were fairly innocuous small accounts. And they couldn't make exceptions for jokes or satire.
It was definitely not neutral. But any effort by a government body to censor public forums crosses a dangerous line. It's not the FBI's job to do that, and they lose credibility in the public eye as a neutral arm of law-enforcement.
In an earlier release they also mention regular meetings (weekly?). That was not the only guy being contacted by the FBI either.
Regardless, while you may call this “underwhelming” it’s actually hard proof of illegal activity. The FBI cannot censor people, period. That’s fascism and illegal in the US, per multiple Supreme Court rulings.
This effectively gives trump, et al a direct path to a lawsuit against the federal government and AGs of states cause to sue the federal government. It could very well (and imo will) lead to a church committee of sorts.
That said, not sure if the powers are established enough to just resist all of it (they might be).
> The FBI cannot censor people, period. That’s fascism and illegal in the US
The FBI emailing Twitter to report possible violations of Twitter's terms of service is not censorship and it is not illegal.
> This effectively gives trump, et al a direct path to a lawsuit against the federal government
The FBI reported to Trump during the 2020 election cycle. It was headed by his own handpicked director, under the supervision of his own handpicked Attorney General.
Could you please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it (regardless of what they're battling for or against).
Could you please run HN effectively? I don't like banning websites at my work, but honestly the way "dang" runs shit at HN it seems like the only option is to start IP filtering you.
How about you take a look at the rules and consider which of them are wrong, and what got you into this situation in the first place.
The FBI reported tweets from Democrats as well as Republicans, and also apparently a parody of the pro wrestler The Undertaker where the joke is that he craps his pants regularly. Not seeing any evidence that there's any political bias to the reports, and if there was I certainly wouldn't expect the FBI of all organizations to be biased against conservatives.
So far this whole Twitter Files thing seems underwhelming, but not exactly a "nothing burger". I feel like it's a good thing that they got published, but the details aren't big news, more like a whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations that probably should be addressed by people directly involved.
For example FBI trawling through social media and flagging accounts for review doesn't seem like a strict constitutional violation unless you can prove some coercion; but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.
Maybe this sort of stuff (i.e. government/law enforcement communications with social media companies) should be automatically in the public domain if it isn't part of a criminal investigation.
>but it does seem like a questionable use of the FBI to be doing content moderation for Twitter absent a criminal investigation.
Law enforcement, people in corporate risk, and business intelligence groups very often use social media to perform open source research. In fact, when they don't, people exclaim that the police are incompetent for not knowing the shooter said he was going to shoot a place up after a history of deranged posting and a call to violence on facebook or something.
There are platforms built on top of Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Etc that will do automated sentiment analysis, key into keyword trends, etc. You can build reports, see how much impact or reach certain calls to violence have, etc. and then triage the threats that you think are credible vs. those that are full of shit.
There are people out there trying to recruit people to firebomb tax buildings. Telling Twitter to shadowban them before they develop networks and get off the platform is a lot more innocuous than raiding the guy's house to see if he has bombmaking equipment.
> a lot more innocuous than raiding the guy's house to see if he has bombmaking equipment.
Musk himself has recently used a similar example, asking journalists how they'd feel if somebody actually got hurt as a result of doxxing on Twitter. So how would folks at Twitter feel if they ignored an FBI report of activity that then led to a terrorist attack? They wouldn't just feel bad, they might actually be liable for helping to facilitate it. Companies do all sorts of things to avoid potential liability, or forego doing things even if those things are perfectly legal and the company would prefer to do them otherwise. It's not weird or nefarious at all for a company to err on the side of caution when the receipt of information increases their potential liability.
It's also extremely hypocritical of Musk (or his fans) to oscillate between maximalist free speech and protection of privacy, invoking extreme examples in both cases, clearly according only to which one suits him personally at any particular moment.
It would certainly be a lot more interesting if new Twitter had a real solution/policy for each of these situations. It just feels like a lot of mud-slinging, but to what end besides culture war points?
A moderate, and reasonable position. I would definitely agree that this sort of stuff should be readily available for review, not requiring FOIA requests.
I disagree. For instance: LE might become aware of a sexting or suicide attempt or some other thing that people do that is not strictly illegal but that might be embarrassing or that could cause the person trouble in their private life. Having a degree of confidentiality helps to both speed up the process because not every word has to be weighed on the scale of 'how does this look in the public arena' and it helps to preserve the privacy of all parties involved.
We heared it many times, but we're talking about a govermental agency meddling with election results. Politics and these cases are very different in nature. Personally I wouldn't be comfortable not taking action when the FBI would ask anything from me, because it's safer to just comply.
Keeping investigations private in order to protect those presumed innocent in a normal part of any law enforcement.
Should police officers dump the body cam footage of every domestic abuse situation they walk into online?
If you want to fault the oversight and transparency of the goals of these agencies, then sure. But let's also not pretend that making all elements of investigations public would be a good idea.
>We heared it many times, but we're talking about a govermental agency meddling with election results. Politics and these cases are very different in nature.
Which specific government agency meddling in which specfic election? The Trump Administration meddling in the 2020 election with Hatch Act violations[0]? The FBI releasing a statement (which turned out to be nothing at all) about Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner's computer[1]?
Or was it the FBI demanding that Twitter take down the NY Post's tweet about their "Hunter Biden laptop" article[2]?
>Personally I wouldn't be comfortable not taking action when the FBI would ask anything from me, because it's safer to just comply.
Then you don't know or understand your rights. And more's the pity.
This is actually an argument for why Twitter shouldn't exist.
Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot.
What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly on online conversation. "I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596751751532937217
We shouldn't have all of our conversations, political or otherwise, in one place. That's a giant mistake. We need decentralization for our own safety and freedom.
I've occasionally noticed some sketchy article flagging in the new submissions feed. (A recent article explaining how to add snow animations to HTML pages comes to mind.)
I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy.
However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article" like the downvote button.
On mobile, I accidentally hit flag quite often trying to tap the link of the article below it. I do go back every time and unflag, but I can imagine not everyone would.
HN is a lot larger than you probably think and YC has an excellent legal department and even if I do not know for sure that there has been contact between LE and HN/YC about this forum given the fact that we are looking at a decade+ of operation and many millions of interactions, including threats of bodily harm and other nonsense I would expect the chances of there having been such interaction to be better than even.
A typical homepage link can cause between 40 and 50K visitors to your website. And that's a small fraction of the total number of users. Millions of pageviews per day, 250K+ registered users and a multiple of that in lurkers.
> I think the average HN users could do a lot more damage to society than the average Twitter user.
How so? How many HN comments have "gone viral"? How many news stories are about a HN comment? How many politicians and journalists and pro athletes and Hollywood celebrities are commenting on HN?
Any given HN comment can receive only a theoretical maximum of 250K upvotes, if (improbably) every registered user upvoted it, and those upvotes would be superfluous anyway, because they would only bring the comment to the top of a single HN submission.
Most technical people are not perceived a threat all because they do not pose any social damage. Tech threats can be handled in all kinds of passive or escalated to cruel and insane ways without any risk of public backlash.
Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.
Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.
I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.
There's a bunch of these analytics platforms available. Government isn't the only one using them, and twitter isn't the only platform being used.
Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.
Spreading the conversation elsewhere doesn't change the ability of these analytics platforms to cover them, although it does introduce more noise into the signal; the smaller the forum, the less an impact it has in the analytics rankings. If you slice up the pie into a ton of tiny chunks, the data received becomes less useful.
That said, some of the uses of these platforms are completely reasonable and very pro-social. We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
> Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.
I suspect that these tools are all looking at the world's largest social networks with 9-10 figure user bases. The same argument applies to them: they're too big. None of them should exist. Once you break it down to thousands or millions of different platforms, each with much smaller user bases, it becomes prohibitively expensive to surveil them all.
> We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
Has this ever prevented a shooting? They always find these posts after the fact.
All internet companies at this point are doing "mass warrantless surveillance" at this point then. Google makes money off matching people to advertisers by learning what they search, post, and how they use their computers.
No. Are you ok with the government putting cameras everywhere in public? Setting up auto license plate readers everywhere?
You don't have the expectation of privacy in public in the sense that someone can see what you're doing. But there's also the expectation that a democratic (small d) government isn't watching your every move in public, because that's a sign of totalitarianism.
In a system of free speech, the government may also speak.
I think that is where a lot of people are getting confused or hung up. They think the First Amendment means the government is not allowed to speak at all. That is incorrect. It prohibits "abridging the freedom of speech," in other words, forcibly restraining other people from speaking.
So: it is legal for the FBI to call up a company and say what they think. And the company is free to act on that, or not, as they wish.
If the FBI wishes to apply the force of law, that is when they would need to show evidence, get a warrant, etc. But just speaking to companies is normal, and often welcomed by the company if the FBI is sharing information that is useful.
It seems that to be included in the billionaire tech bro club you must adhere to a certain right-wing worldview. Or, if you are more Marxist in bent, that the accumulation of capital naturally and inevitably leads to the internalization of right-wing worldviews.
These companies are just as afraid, if not far more afraid, of "the implication" from other companies, namely their advertisers and sponsors, as well as influential individuals such as celebrity influencers who drive traffic for their sites. The G-men will have to get in line for Twitter bending over backwards to all of these interests. Threats to the bottom line are probably even more menacing than legal threats- and many of these businesses and individuals are just as litigious as the FBI, as well.
> FBI calls you up and tell you what they think, and you'll totally ignore FBI. Totally.
The OP literally says that's an option that certain companies have opted to do:
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
This is getting a bit ridiculous. I’ve interacted with FBI agents in the course of my employment, and it did not feel like sexual harassment. It was fine; they helped us with a security problem and we appreciated the help.
The main problem with your analogy is that sexual advances in a boss/employee power dynamic excludes many critical distinctions with respect to law enforcement vs a big tech company.
I'll concede that the big tech companies certainly have an incentive to comply with law enforcement because of their legal authority, however as we all know, big tech companies are well equipped in terms of political influence as well as powerful legal teams that ensure these companies don't have to do anything they don't want to if they're complying with the law, especially if law enforcement isn't issuing a legal command and is merely "telling you what they think".
> This is why it's such a big no even if employees have mutual romantic interests.
In all cases of boss vs subordinate there is a near total power asymmetry in favor of the boss unless the boss is egregiously abusive or retaliatory, and often times even that doesn't matter. A boss also never has a genuine business interest in making sexual advances, whereas law enforcement may have a genuine law enforcement interest in asking for a company's cooperation.
> whereas law enforcement may have a genuine law enforcement interest in asking for a company's cooperation.
Then, getting a subpoena shouldn't have been an issue since they have a genuine law enforcement interest. Judges would have an easy time signing the subpoena since this would be totally justified and reasonable. right? right?
Yet FBI decided not to do that and decided to ask Twitter to "volunteer" the information.
"Hi man, yeah, it's the FBI. Yeah, we see here you fished a small lobster. Yeah, that's a felony, but don't worry about it. So hey, that thing you said on your blog, we don't like that. Yeah. Yeah, good. Talk to you later, take care man."
> But just speaking to companies is normal, and often welcomed by the company if the FBI is sharing information that is useful.
But how do you know that the FBI was "just speaking" and merely that? We all are looking at the same source here, there's clearly ambiguity with respect to what was discussed in the FBI's repeated calls with Roth
It seems to me like you're incredibly eager to assume that there's nothing more to this, and that the FBI is just merely "speaking to companies" and nothing more
I'm not saying that the FBI is merely speaking or doing more than speaking, I'm saying that we don't know and there's insufficient information available to make that kind of judgement
You have a fundamental lack of understanding about coercion, you don't have to make a direct threat of physical force to stop free speech and be in violation of the 1st Amendment.
Nope, free speech applies to individuals, not to the government as a single entity. And this for good reasons, since they wield much more power than a single individual.
"The Bill of Rights guarantees that the government can never deprive people in the U.S. of certain fundamental rights including the right to freedom of religion and to free speech and the due process of law."[1]
> Does the First Amendment protect intimidating speech?
Not always. The First Amendment does not protect intimidation in the form of “true threats,” “where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence” against another person or group. Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 360 (2003).
Even when speech is not openly threatening, states and localities nonetheless may impose some restrictions on speech in order to protect the integrity of elections and the rights of voters to cast their ballots free from intimidation. In Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191 (1992), the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that banned campaigning within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place.
> Long before the Court affirmed the right to vote as constitutionally protected, Congress had passed a series of laws which extended civil rights protections, including suffrage protections, to recently emancipated slaves following the civil war. These laws, deemed the “Enforcement Acts,” are to some extent still in place today, and those statutes continue to be the primary method by which the federal government enforces the civil rights of individual citizens. 18 U.S.C. §§241 and 242 provide broad jurisdiction to prosecute corruption of rights. The statutes cover the intentional deprivation of any right protected under the Constitution or federal law. §241 makes it unlawful for two or more persons “to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”38 §242 makes it unlawful for anyone “acting under color of law” to deprive a person of such a right.
> The Supreme Court acknowledged the broad scope of §241 when it opined that “[t]he language of §241 is plain and unlimited. [It] embraces all of the rights and privileges secured to citizens by all of the Constitution and all of the laws of the United States....We think [its] history leaves no doubt that, if we are to give §241 the scope its origins dictate, we must accord it a sweep as broad as its language.”51 The broad scope of the law allows for the sweeping protection of federally recognized rights. At the same time, it constructs some barriers for applying the law when new types of violations must be articulated. To that end, the statute has been the target of a vast number of vagueness challenges in federal courts – although to little avail.
Part 1 complained about "censoring" even well known actors in favor of a political party, and 'proved' it by displaying an email asking to take down tweets and a response saying 'handled'.
Archive.org archived the tweets listed in the email screenshot that has been shared, it was tweets posting leaked nude of a politic, of course it has to be censored, actor or not, that's simply illegal.
It's actually good that there is transparency and oversight but this is a study in journalism and populism more than anything.
The media is under incredible pressure to make stories, particularly in the US.
All of us have seen how MSNBC veered politically over the last 15 years - as have other news outlets.
Matt Taibbi is a good guy, smart, down to earth.
But he's a 'lone warrior' now, his income comes from substack subs, he has to make noise just like any other entity.
The substack people tend to market themselves as 'alt something' which is legit in some ways, but they push it pretty hard.
Taibbi has really been ginning it up lately.
It's a bit sad really, but we see this happen all over - I think most of our 'venerable' media institutions are at the same level so we can't fully blame him.
All of that said this is a legit story and there are 'kernels of truth' to this notion that Twitter is doing things maybe it should not, or inconsistently etc.
Elon is not wrong to be suspicious, of course now he's banning actual, legit journalists who dare to question him, in a feat of absolute hypocrisy that should completely undermine is 'free speech' credentials. Sadly I'm doubtful his fanboys will care.
> Elon is not wrong to be suspicious, of course now he's banning actual, legit journalists who dare to question him,
As far as I know he's only banning those that link to ElonJet. He's been a bit irrational since his two year old kid had a close encounter with a crazy person a few days ago.
He banned a number of MSM journalists who have nothing to do with ElonJet. There was an outcry, he immediately backpedalled and blamed it on some kind of 'internal problem'. It was a big deal, international entities spoke up and fired some warning shots. On one hand it's a private media company, on the other it's an issue when people interfere directly with the press. I'm afraid we don't have our boundaries figured out on this issue yet.
Because every time I look up a claim about him lying (as opposed to being delusionally optimistic about the future) I find it's false. E.g. felt last heartbeat, private information required for plane tracking, didn't get much parental help in business.
By default I believe people unless I have a reason to think they are lying.
"Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content."
Is this a violation of the 1st Amendment or a way to skirt around it?
Neither. Social media companies are in regular contact with all major governments about lots of issues. A weekly "hey all here are some accounts we noticed, have a great week" email to a designated Twitter contact for review requests is completely ordinary. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, everyone hears from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Australia, Japan.... and decides what to do with the information.
You run a bar. There’s a drunk guy on one end of the patio screaming at people. If a cop walks by and tells the bouncer “that guy seems pretty drunk”, is it a 1A violation when they subsequently enforce their rules?
The question to ask is whether any of these accounts would have been allowed if reported by people. There’s no evidence that the FBI was making threats that something otherwise allowed had to be removed.
Your last paragraph is pure supposition. This thread clearly shows Twitter staff receiving reports and seeing whether those accounts did in fact violate the rules. What’s missing is any sign of what you’re confidently saying happened: something otherwise allowed being blocked because the FBI insisted. Please feel free to provide specific examples.
They didn't - as I said before, this kind of communication is commonplace between large tech properties and governments, other large companies, NGOs, etc. It wasn't anything like a direct order. Local law enforcement, city councils, lobbyists, PR people, anyone with information or access will often have a more direct line to Twitter, Youtube, etc than the 'report' button.
There do exist direct orders to reveal or conceal information that do require a judge to sign, things like National Security Letters. It's remarkable that NSLs and other compelling documents don't get more play in these conversations. They actually are what people think these friendly emails are.
You do realize that the police have been vested with the authority to enforce the law?
A bar owner that does not follow the instructions of the authorities is going to find their bar closed in short order because they have to comply with the law and with instructions by parties authorized to give them.
To paraphrase the trope that those that don't like Twitter are free to create their own: if you don't like the way society works then you are free to create your own. On Mars or something.
What is your definition of policing? If those FBI agents had been individual citizens who found misinformation and hit the report button, little different would have occurred. They got to cut the line, perhaps, but I doubt it would be much ahead of organizations like Microsoft, Stanford University, or the Archdiocese of Boston, to name some random bigwig organizations who could potentially complain to Twitter about something on Twitter.
But if all they’re doing is politely asking for the company’s own policy to be enforced, and doing so evenly as shown in the thread it’s really hard to see this in the light which right-media is hyping it. This is the most they’ve found and it’s notable for what we don’t see: no hint of threats, nothing which isn’t a policy violation getting taken down, just a bunch of people doing their jobs and dealing with grey areas.
It doesn't matter, and I don't care, if the FBI requests were "even" on some partisan scoreboard.
>all they’re doing is politely asking for the company’s own policy to be enforced
This makes the incorrect assumption that the FBI's stated concerns are equal to their actual concerns. But this is the FBI we're talking about here. If they were actually investigating a crime it would be one thing. But randomly harassing private citizens by rules-lawyering is not appropriate.
For the most part, the US government is allowed to ask anyone to voluntarily remove anything (a few limits such as those set by the establishment clause notwithstanding). That's what happened here.
If you run a social media company and the government tells you, "Hey, we want these people banned", and you ban them, is the company "voluntarily" choosing to ban them?
Or are they doing it under duress?
Of course it's the latter.
The US gov. has been threatening to take down social media companies for years. Do you think Twitter really wanted to upset them now?
Where is current twitter's lawsuit if that's the case? There hasn't been anything released that indicates these moderation actions were taken under duress. Old twitter wanted to moderate their platform in that way.
It's like when people "voluntarily" do things that cops ask during traffic stops that are beyond what's necessary by law. It's not that people want, they are just scared and don't want to get in trouble.
> If you run a social media company and the government tells you, "Hey, we want these people banned", and you ban them, is the company "voluntarily" choosing to ban them?
Yes? When the CDC says "we recommend you get vaccinated against the flu", and you get vaccinated, you're acting voluntarily, despite the government recommendation.
What duress was Twitter under? It sounds like they happily cooperated because they mostly agreed with the FBI’s recommendations. Perhaps you can call that bias in favor of Trump’s government. But based on the OP account, it was freely voluntary.
They reported users/posts for review. Happens on my forum all the time from all sorts of users (public, lawyers, etc). Up to the publisher to make their call from that point. In one case I bothered reading in this set, they mentioned that legal docs would follow if they were seeking to identify and pursue an author (pre-action discovery).
It didn’t seem that the FBI were going into detail on any cases. I wondered if some were likely to be considered concerted foreign interference that they’d unearthed and policing that was within their remit. I assume there’s some overlap between Twitter’s ToS re misinformation and the FBI’s assessment, if that makes sense.
>"Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content."
>Is this a violation of the 1st Amendment or a way to skirt around it?
Which specific security contractors? Which specific think tanks? The above assertion that you quoted makes several assertions, none of which (at least AFAICT) have any facts, data or evidence attached to them. Perhaps I'm missing something important? If so, what might that be?
What's more,. I receive multiple contacts from DHS daily[0]. And I (as an individual with minimal resources and little ability to "fight" the government) have never felt pressured by the Federal government to do anything.
I'd expect that corporations with multiple billions in revenue (like Twitter) and lawyers on staff would zealously protect their independence and reputation rather than being seen as shills for some shadowy "government conspiracy."
The problem was that it was entirely one way. This was not about dangerous misinformation. Many of the accounts they wanted suppressed were low-follower accounts making jokes. A ton of FBI agents paid to sway an election. Even if you are comfortable with the outcome of the election, what about future elections when they decide to back a candidate you do not support?
It doesn't matter if they were pro-dem or pro-republican. They were doing nothing wrong. What business is it to the FBI. The FBI had partisan agents working on government time to censor American citizens during an election. If you step out of your partisan headspace for a moment, you might realize how dangerous this is.
Imagine how this my play out in a future election with different candidates.
This is what you could say a classic goal post moving comment from the initial position of "it's only ok because it helped you"(which in and of itself is projection and also pointedly false) to "that doesn't matter they were censoring" (which again is false since they asked for the content team to review it.)
Huh? You can simulataneously point to a bias, while at the same time realizing that individual accounts don't always neatly fall into one of two positions. There was a clear indication they wanted to suppress anything that would suggest an idea counter to a certain narrative. That effort even extended to parody and jokes. Everyone makes jokes.
But there is no partisan headspace if both parties were impacted. Clearly their lack of interest is due to other factors, which you must learn to appeal to. Not everyone fails to care because of petty political concerns.
Based on Taibbi's own evidence, it is perhaps arguably so. But to me, more important is the total number of accounts looked at, which appears to be in the mere dozens, if not around a dozen accounts, with none more notable than a lesser Baldwin brother.
In principle, certainly it is not great for security services to meddle in public spaces. In reality, I am willing to believe that the federal government is a tiny fish in the sea of requests from local authorities, individual police departments, private individuals via reports, not least of all the legally persons we call corporations. I bet any day, Twitter's moderation teams are blanketed with requests from companies and businesses of every type and size, both advertisers and not. All equipped with legal teams that could potentially target Twitter.
In short, I find it to be performative virtue-signaling to be concerned about around a dozen small potatoes that the FBI asked for the mods to take a look at. Especially if this might just be cover for the real large-scale systemic censorships that occur at some deeper level that no FOIA or Taibbi journalism would be able to unearth. Especially when the PRISM programs are right there if you want something of substance to be outraged about. This, in comparison, is no different from a mom and pop store asking Twitter to go after an abusive account spreading slander about them. Litigiousness is an all-American custom. This didn't even trigger any warrant canaries. Hysteria over this is concern-trolling.
There is a major difference when a branch of government makes these requests as compared to another business entity. Especially, the federal government. For one, it becomes more of a command than a request. The consequences for not complying is orders of magnitude greater.
It's not performative virtue signalling to push back on a lesser threat just because you are not pushing back on the greater threat. The gov't has been very good at hiding the existence of these programs. We do not know much about PRISM, so there's less to go on. You need to push back whereever it occurs. We still have no idea how widespread this is. Not to mention, it is likely going on with google, facebook, instagram as well.
It sounds like most of this discussion is entirely driven by normative fancies rather than any actual knowledge of how these processes are already being run in the industry, let alone how the first amendment actually applies. For the latter, it would seem that a whole bevy of court cases undergird this whole endeavor:
Individuals accounts cannot always be categorized in one of two ways. There was a consistent attempt to counter any ideas that ran counter to a certain narrative.
No, government should not be policing speech on private platforms, period. At most, they should concern themselves with clearly illegal things—threats of violence, child pornongraphy, etc. It doesn't matter whether or not they are being "balanced".
> 7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
There's an odd new risk for startups: someone buys your company and then releases all the internal documents with hostile intent. The Twitter stuff that's come out now has been pretty uninteresting, surprising and often basically telling a story of people doing the best job they could in difficult circumstances. But if you are at a small company consider what all could be acquired and used to defame your employees and mission.
Corporate records and correspondence can be made public due to a lawsuit. So the risk of disclosure isn't new, and anyone should consider it whether they work at a startup or at a large company.
Just another incentive to act with integrity and keep personal correspondence out of corporate systems.
I don't think the point was that "corporate records and correspondence can be made public", but "corporate records and correspondence that do not reflect the full picture and that are cherry-picked to make the company look bad while the company was not bad can be made public while the rest of the picture can be kept not public".
I worry about this risk a lot. There is no way to delete DMs on Twitter; even if you delete them they stay in the system so the other side of the conversation has them. To folks below saying "that was always true", yes, but I trusted the previous management of Twitter to not snoop on my private DMs. I do not trust the current owner the same way.
(I had a typo in my original comment btw; I said "surprising" but meant "unsurprising".)
What's really worrying to me is that he can change those DMs to say whatever suits his fancy, coupled with the fact nobody remaining at Twitter is in any position to blow the whistle on such conduct. It would likely remain secret indefinitely.
I had not even considered that, good point, data integrity is not to be expected going forward. This also puts a rather interesting twist on any of the evidence presented.
Really? News to me. If NSA has had this secret ability, and if it is indeed a secret, how is it that some random person knows all about it and now feels perfectly safe revealing it on a public web site? Changing data in real time on private databases goes way beyond traffic monitoring & intelligence-gathering.
Someone like Zuckerberg has access to your data as well. And what about the government having access to DMs? That’s far scarier. Has Snowden not taught us anything? We are only just now worried about this? Complaining about Musk without complaining about Zuckerberg or the government is just hypocrisy.
He means someone who doesn't share your political perspective. Not someone with actual threat of force.
We haven't seen Twitter arbitrarily leak DMs yet. Even Matt Taibbi said they only have access to screenshots of admin interfaces directly related to their specific stories around uncritical FBI/DHS access, shadowbanning for questionable political purposes, and the whole Trump thing. It's far from the ideological free-for-all people are suggesting.
But Elon has already shown he's willing to play dangerous games with his power. So far we haven't seen the FUDy stuff yet beyond the stupid new doxxing rule for which he's burned tons of good will. Nothing comes without costs.
Insider leaks would be a higher risks given Twitter is still in SF. Typically the public benefits from leaks and whistleblowers, right? Unless you mean purposeful 'hacks' with a specific agenda that only leaks private DMs of a select group? Yes, that would be bad.
A hacker pulling off an exfiltration of the entire DB of any major tech company I'm very skeptical about that happening.
> A hacker pulling off an exfiltration of the entire DB of any major tech company I'm very skeptical about that happening.
Under normal circumstances I would agree, but after firing so many people I can't imagine that security at Twitter is still priority #1, they likely have trouble keeping the lights on.
I would not at all be surprised. At the rate Twitter is going down the drain you can expect anything, up to and including their hardware being sold at auction to the highest bidder, with some bad luck harddrives included.
I guarantee that someone like Zuckerberg does not have access to my data.
And the moment it became inevitable that Musk took over Twitter I deleted my account. And that was one of many reasons.
The only two social media sites that I partake in are HN and up to Elons acquisition Twitter and that is because I had/have a fairly high degree of faith in their ability to at least try to do the right thing. With Musk, Zuckerberg and several others I have the conviction that given the opportunity that they will do the wrong thing.
Would you bet that Musk has not already abused his position to gain information from private communications on Twitter?
> Internal documents and Twitter employees reveal the need for massive investment to remove illegal content — but executives haven’t listened
> Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.
Appreciate the verge link. The post link doesn’t really bring new info to the conversation until the trial.
It doesn’t seem like there are good answers on how to resolve this issue sadly. I wish there was more transparency on how much these social media giants are spending on this issue, how much is removed per year and average time the content was accessible. It’s hard to judge on the outside the size and scope of this problem and the resources being thrown at it. And that doesn’t even get into the psychological issues that this has to do for the reviewers. This is truly some of the darkest stuff that humanity has and scale makes it hard to resolve.
> It doesn’t seem like there are good answers on how to resolve this issue sadly.
Actually, the article highlights the internal working group of 84 employees that spent months evaluating Twitter's ability to suppress this exploitive material , concluding that Twitter had major problems in this area and submitting a list of recommendations to fix them that were mostly ignored.
> Aside from enabling in-app reporting of CSE, there appears to have been little progress on the group’s other recommendations.
> Employees say that Twitter’s executives know about the problem, but the company has repeatedly failed to act.
They do remove it. I've reported illegal pornography on Twitter several times and they removed it faster than any other kind of abuse report I made there. And it's not like I went out to look for it, if you're on Twitter long enough you will end up with DMs from the weirdest people.
The story is saying they are not even trying. That seems to show they don't care and/or they have other priorities like trying to make a buck off porn.
The employees and the internal working group that reported on the state of Twitter's ability to shutdown exploitive content and made recommendations that weren't followed through on.
> Employees say that Twitter’s executives know about the problem, but the company has repeatedly failed to act.
The revelations I have read so far have been extremely underwhelming. Content moderation of any kind is hard. The easy cases don’t take up most of your time or energy. These emails read like people doing their best. Maybe my decision would have been different but maybe not.
And that's before you get into the hairy territory created by multiple jurisdictions, nations, pressure groups, grass roots organizations and so on. From personal experience: it is a minefield and it is impossible to satisfy everybody and to get everything right.
Yeah. Which would probably reveal that not only are content moderation decisions really hard, they are extremely boring, require a huge number of meetings, and probably in many cases involve consulting lawyers
Weiss goes into it on her site, but it's more complicated than just emails. She says they are using some lawyer SW that is meant for speeding up discovery in legal battles.
Seems like she should be a real tech person and just learn how to use grep. Her explanations all just feel like a first year journalism student trying to explain the hot new program she just learned about and everyone else has been just suffering through for a decade.
Completely blocking the spread of a news story that could have a major effect on an election is not moderation.
Moderation is about moderating bad behaviour of individuals. Censorship is blocking entire topics from discussion.
If you think it's underwhelming, just think how you'd feel if it would have been revealed that Don Trump Jr was smoking crack with prostitutes, and twitter blocked the story from spreading. 10 days before an election. Like seriously, think about that. Would you be fine with that?
>Like seriously, think about that. Would you be fine with that?
Maybe they wouldn't be fine with it, but still fine with the H Biden story being censored, because they've got no integrity and want their political opponents censored but not their own.
This was flagged previously. What makes an article qualify for manual unflagging? I've seen plenty of articles with relevance to the tech community remain flagged.
I think Part One and Part Two had significant frontpage time on HN, then not so much until now. That raises the question (at least in my mind) what's different about Part Six? I think part of the answer is random fluctuation (you can think of HN's frontpage as a slot machine with 30 slots—it's not random, but randomness is involved), and part of it is maybe that the government involvement aspect makes the information here more significant.
When it comes to divisive topics, HN moderation spends a lot of time in the uncanny valley between the major ideological camps. This topic is a good example. One passionate subset of the community would like all of these submissions to get major attention, while an opposing passionate subset would like all of them to be soundly ignored. Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position*, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture.
Really appreciate that you take the time to weigh in with these explanations. The moderation can feel heavy handed and arbitrary at times so these comments help to shine a light on the difficult balance you're trying to maintain.
The explanation about SNI especially helped me understand some of the tough judgement calls that the mods need to make.
Is there a manifesto of some sort that defines the philosophy and approach of HN moderation? Or is just tribal knowledge that mods have built over time?
It's kind of in between. There's no manifesto other than the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which leave out a ton of information—we keep them brief in the hope that people will actually read them. But there's a trove of knowledge about all of this embedded in past moderation comments, which is why I constantly post HN Search links. I realize it's not a convenient format at all, but you can learn a lot if you start with those links and then tweak the searches either by adding terms or excluding them (as in "-foo"). If you (or anyone) do that and still have questions which I haven't answered in the past, I'd be interested in hearing the questions.
It's my intention to distill a bunch of those explanations into a set of loose commentaries on how HN and HN moderation work. But it's the sort of thing that never rises above the middle of the todo list. Maybe one day.
The emphasis on there being an FBI connection seems naive to me, as I had always assumed some gov agency coordination on some level, both in software and hardware companies. Furthermore their involvement does not sound that deep/frequent, some pointed out once a week on average, if viewed in context proportional to amount of users, both real and fake, this does not seem that large.
While LE probably has legitimate reason to have contacts in every major company SV company, its still chilling to see how friendly and obedient Twitter was, makes you wonder what other social media companies are doing with the government, and how they respond to "suggestions".
The positions I see on this are either conspiratorially raising questions about FBI involvement at Twitter or insisting that those questions are conspiratorial and that there's nothing more here
Which one is correct? I have no idea, but I'd bet that regardless of any additional releases, convincing or unconvincing, the same pods of people are going to keep making the same assumptions and insisting on the same bullshit. That's the one thing that never changes
The implication of chipping in might mean an unwise alignment with Roth's PhD idea.
His idea wasn't even "Grindr for teens". It was worse because he wasn't proposing a separate service. His idea was to update those sites to accommodate young people. Yoth wrote: "those services should consider offering toned-down content alongside adult fare."
Even if we're charitable, Yoth's use of the word "alongside" was unfortunate. Less charitable, a serious error. It's unrealistic to expect a service with such a concentrated historical purpose for gay adults, could pivot to a harmonized family-friendly vibe for young and old.
I wonder how he landed such a role at Twitter over other applicants, and what criteria he met, that others did not.
Your assumption appears to be that gay teens are not already on the existing adult Grindr, lying about their age, and being forced to wade their way through some of the darkest, seediest corners of the Internet.
I don’t know much about his proposed solution, I haven’t read his work, but judging by my own teenage use of Grindr (many years ago), a toned down, protected version of something gay teens were already going to use seems like a net gain for their safety and sanity.
I doubt anything like it would ever be legally possible, though. There’s just no amount of moderating that would keep a teen Grindr safe and PG-13. If even one thing slips through - and it would - it’s not hard to picture the media coverage. No sane company is touching this idea with a ten foot pole.
We can't speak for all teens, gay or otherwise. They are not all the same mind. The degree of sexual activity and relationships among teens would range from zero to highly active. They are not all concentrated in the highly active segment.
"Grindr" services are commercial. Inherently promoting, advertising, "luring" target customers with a wide net. That would mean luring all segments of teenagers, if Roth's idea was realized. It's gross.
If some teens already use those services, parents and educators of the teens, and the services should do more to keep them away. Roth's "embrace" idea says more about his personal angle than consideration of teens in general and their families.
I see that Penn State removed access to Roth's paper. Nobody seemed to care. But it should be made available because free speech means we record bad ideas, discuss why they're bad, avoid them in future, or evolve them to better ideas.
This is the height of hypocrisy. Everything the "twitter files" have disclosed so far is in line with what most people expected was happening, but Musk's censorship of the platform has been far more egregious than anything that came before. This isn't to defend the actions that Twitter took, which were arguably partisan in some cases, but it's difficult to make the case that Twitter wasn't making a best effort to curate a healthy platform.
Musk by contrast has shown that he only cares about limiting speech that damages himself, and he will say or do anything to obscure that fact. He promised not to ban the elonjet account, and then reversed course: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/14/elons-promise-not-to-ban...
If someone did want to assassinate lil X as he flew on a plane, they would simply buy a radio and listen in to his pilot, who is constantly "doxxing" Musk in real time, every minute of every day, as he talks to air traffic control. Why would you rely on some kid posting to social media very inaccurate and second-hand information, when you could just listen in to his coordinates broadcasting live on the radio, or at least install an app such as Flightly?
I am right wing, and I hear right-wing commentators say things like "for left-wing authoritarians, the hypocrisy is the point" all the time. Seriously, the article you linked sounds exactly like something I would read from "my" side, just with good guys and bad guys reversed.
Yes, it's a common rhetorical approach to take a valid point from the opposing side and to parrot it back at them, even if it doesn't make sense, in order to dilute the original. Say it enough times and people believe it without thinking.
I'd consider myself a centrist democrat (registered Democrat, vote mostly for Democrats, had a wonderful childhood in a very multicultural region of California, spent several years living in Berkeley CA, my sister who I'm close to works for her local Democrat party) and I've been surprised by the strong element of left-wing extremism on HN. The culture of the site has changed quite a bit in the past few years. It used to be that there was room for more perspectives here. I feel that my interest in building a coherent political worldview puts me in a minority compared to HN users who just want to sling mud at people they see as their opponents.
I don’t think there’s any left wing extremism on HN. This is an insanely capitalist site. It could help your political worldview to not see the world from an overweighted American perspective, which is quite right wing.
This is probably the best quote about conservatism: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
That's not what conservatism is. If you want the actual best quote about conservatism, it's this one:
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
- G. K. Chesterton
(Also, "conservative" and "right-wing" are not the same thing)
I think thats an obviously false cover story, along the lines of "states rights". By plotting when these "principles" are followed or broken you can map the real motives.
> It argues that conservatism from the 17th century to today is based on the principle "that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others".[1]: 18 [2] Robin argues that rather than being about liberty, limited government, resistance to change, or public virtue, conservatism is a "mode of counterrevolutionary practice" to preserve hierarchy and power.[1]: 17
I should think that I know my own mind, and those of my self-described conservative friends and acquaintances, better than some randon guy I've never heard of. But please, tell me more about my secret plots
You're describing small c conservatism, actually being conservative about change. It's a valid point of view and at least debatable. Even the most progressive person is conservative about some things.
The GP's comment is describing the capital C Conservatism brand. It's subsumed the idea about being politically conservative and combined it with an astounding mix of racism, bigotry, and in many cases outright fascism. It's weaponized the Chesterson Fences concept describing some fantasy "back in the day" utopia that only institutionalized racism, bigotry, and fascism will bring back into existence.
Unfortunately for the small c conservatives the big C Conservatives have turned their descriptor into their brand name and polluted debate about conservative politics.
While I agree that's a great description of the general concept of conservativism, it has absolutely nothing to do with the people calling themselves conservatives these days. The best I can come up with is that it describes where they started off before they got so mad and wanting to tear everything down.
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election before, but in 2020 I found myself voting for Biden out of a genuine sense of conservatism.
>This is the height of hypocrisy. Everything the "twitter files" have disclosed so far is in line with what most people expected was happening
Twitter repeatedly denied that right-wing users were being shadowbanned. That turned out to be false.
A month ago, someone on HN patronizingly explained to me that Twitter's moderation was "primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652282 The Twitter files have made it clear that this user's claim, "Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views", was false.
If Twitter's moderation was primarily about staying advertiser-friendly, they would've announced their shadowbans publicly, so advertisers would know they were safe advertising on Twitter as a platform. There wouldn't be any interesting revelations to be had.
As for doxxing, I see rules against doxxing as pro free speech. Doxxing doesn't contribute meaningfully to the public discourse. It just intimidates people into silence, interfering with speech exercise.
>he has doxxed critics in the past in much more damaging ways
Can you point to a case of, say, Yoel Roth's real-time location staying up on Twitter even after the recent rule change which prevents doxxing?
It appears to me, based on the article you linked, that Yoel fled his home in the wake of ordinary criticism. Not doxxing specifically. Ordinary criticism kind of has to be allowed -- it's essential for our democracy that e.g. citizens are allowed to criticize politicians. But doxxing is where I draw the line.
Elon is far from perfect. But his child was physically threatened, and he responded by implementing restrictions which I consider to be correct anyways (as I stated -- doxxing is anti-free speech IMO). I think people are making more of this than it deserves. It's good if you have a CEO who's capable of changing their mind.
In any case, whatever happened to the old "Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want" argument? Right-wingers aren't the only hypocrites here.
> Twitter repeatedly denied that right-wing users were being shadowbanned. That turned out to be false.
Nobody has demonstrated any difference between Twitter's description of its own policies and the actual facts. They said they did not shadowban (prevent a user's posts from appearing to other users without their knowledge) and Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitter.
There's similarly no evidence that Musk's child was "physically threatened" other than his own say-so, and he's a known liar.
>Nobody has demonstrated any difference between Twitter's description of its own policies and the actual facts.
For both the Trump ban and the Hunter Biden story, it seems Twitter did not follow its own policies.
>Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitter.
Where?
In any case, I think this depends heavily on exactly how you define "shadowbanning". You can define "shadowbanning" so it conveniently excludes all the account-level suppression Twitter did. But the broader point is: Why weren't they transparent about the type of account-level suppression they were doing?
>There's similarly no evidence that Musk's child was "physically threatened" other than his own say-so, and he's a known liar.
I'm not sure what lying you are referring to. In any case, are you willing to grant that Elon's actions are understandable if he's telling the truth about his child?
Please don't change subjects. We were talking about "shadowbanning", not Hunter Biden. Twitter has stated for years that they have controls to prevent algorithmic recommendation of particular users, content, or trends, and that's precisely what we saw reported on by Taibbi and Weiss. They had direct access to Twitter internals and did not report any "shadowbanning" functionality. It's fair to assume that they would have reported it if it existed.
No, I don't think it's understandable for Musk to respond to someone stalking him by modifying Twitter policies to retaliate against another person with no connection to the stalking.
In any case, whatever happened to the old "Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want" argument? Right-wingers aren't the only hypocrites here.
People mocking the "Twitter Files" are saying that it's stupid, there's not really anybody calling for the government or some other actor to step in and stop them from doing it.
I think the most damning stuff will be difficult to discover because that probably happened in the regular meetings between Joel and the FBI of which I’m sure there are no records right?
this is already been done and we know what the outcome is. what facinating is how people respond. are we dealing this (or perceiving it if your not us citizen) with high standard?
I can remember when the patriot act came out, and everyone argued what a disgusting infringement on privacy and civil liberties it was. Now everyone seems to be arguing for even greater infringements.
I used to hear that it wasn't censorship when it was just a company censoring voices. That they didn't have any obligations to broadcast anyones speech.
He previously said the safety risk was ok as banning it would violate free speech.
And Musk has been fine with accounts that use their freedom of speech even if they resulted is safety risks. For example @libsoftiktok is an account Musk unbanned, and has likes their tweets, who post misleading information resulting in direct threats against people and organisations (e.g. children's hospitals).
For example they just recently tweeted a video* that was purposefully edited in a way to make it seem someone was pro-pedophilia, when they weren't.
Twitter staff taking action against users at the direction of the FBI does seem like a topic worthy of discussion, though it seems like there are a lot of people here who would rather just pretend it never happened.
So the Trump administration then? because we haven't seen anything to indicate that the Biden administration has asked for things to be censored, only that the Trump administration made requests whilst he was still in power.
The FBI certainly wasn't acting on behalf of Obama when they sat on the revelation of Hilary's emails found on Huma Abedin's laptop to manufacture an October surprise. The fact that folks like Giuliani knew about it before it was made public goes to show that the FBI isn't a unified organization all moving in the same direction.
Maybe the FBI director was under orders from the president to prevent opposition hacks from spreading misinformation about the date of the election, thereby costing him the election.
Wait, are you saying this was all to ensure Trump wins? Are you saying this is proof of a Watergate type situation?!?
A private website that was taking signals from the federal government and taking action on them with no pushback. They were censoring people the government was asking them to censor.
The relationship was cozy. It's OK if people are cool with that. It takes all kinds.
I care. And I don’t care about most of the reasonings here, like:
* It is not new, so I don’t care
* Elon is conservative, so I don’t care
* It is not true, or at least conflicts with my beliefs, so I don’t care
* twitter is evil, so I don’t care
* …
You may not mind it because you're side won. But that is incredibly short-sided. What if the FBI decides to sway an election to a candidate you don't support sometime in the future? See where this is going?
Yeah, like what if one of the parties had their emails hacked by a foreign state, and then a week or so before the election, against their own policy, the FBI issued a press release about how they were urgently reopening an investigation not into the hack but into possible wrongdoing by the hacked candidate? And then later acknowledged there was no wrongdoing?
You're right; I really hate to think about what the fallout would be if the FBI inappropriately swayed an election.
But the FBI was not actively hacking the emails. You are really just proving my point about the FBI unnecessarily involving itself in these issues. They are supposed to be impartial. That's this story should be taken seriously from a bipartisan perspective.
Not everything is a partisan. The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. These accounts he cited were low-follower accounts that were doing nothing illegal or immoral. This is a threat to everyone, no matter what side of the fence you are on. How is that so difficult to understand?
So, you're saying someone is going to try to vote on the day some random low-follower account told them was the correct date? Despite consistent messaging from a variety of other sources telling them the correct date? You really don't have a high estimation of the average voter.
It was clearly a joke. Anyone getting fooled here is clearly the most uninformed voterimaginable. Not even low-informed, but completely uninformed.
We differ on the fact “clearly a joke”. I don’t think that is as self evident as you. I have no issue with my government asking a private company to take down posts with incorrect voting dates. I also believe that Twitter should have a government transparency report where they shed light on these requests.
> The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period.
Have you considered the real consequences of this? If the FBI for example finds accounts linked to child exploitation, drug trafficking, or terrorism; should they not ask Twitter to take down those accounts? If they find accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian farms who are using it to amplify certain messages in order to try to destabilize the US, should they just say hey that’s fine?
Further, from what I read of the tweets, it appears what those accounts wrote may have been illegal after all.
Here’s a quote from an FBI website:
> Report potential election crimes—such as disinformation about the manner, time, or place of voting—to the FBI.
I’m not sure exactly what laws those are referring to, but it appears deceiving people about voting may be illegal. So although you and I and other smart people might read their tweets and think “haha!”, not everyone may read it as a joke.
It is the government’s job to protect the rights of its citizens. Freedom of speech is not absolute (slander, libel, threats, yelling fire in a crowded theatre, etc.), and in this case I think it’s reasonable that one’s right to freedom of speech shouldn’t supersede another’s right to vote.
A Twitter ban is certainly less damaging than criminal charges over whatever statute it violates.
Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation. It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.
The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have. It is not the governments job to protect people's rights. The gov't violates rights all the time. It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.
So really, your complaints go up further than you think. This is something that has been happening for decades based on judicial decisions, you just weren’t aware of it.
> Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation.
Your original statement conveys the FBI should never ask Twitter to take down accounts. My response was such that there _are_ good reasons for the FBI to ask Twitter to take down accounts.
If we now agree on that, the issue is no longer requesting to ban accounts vs not requesting to ban accounts, but instead where the line on account bans exist. This is a much more gray debate, wouldn’t you agree?
> It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.
I agree these were intended as jokes, and parody and satire are given wide interpretations in court. But they do have limits. Presumably you wouldn’t want someone to lose their right to vote because someone else intentionally misinformed them, even if its intention was satire. I do think instead of an account ban it could be resolved with a misinformation notice, but we might be presuming the FBI official has more knowledge of online platforms than they do. It did seem from the emails Twitter was ultimately the one to decide the correct handling, so I don’t blame the FBI for just alerting Twitter of potential violations.
> The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have.
Having worked for the federal government, I can inform you it is a huge hassle to get anything published. If they publish it, every line would be analyzed for compliance and in this case probably put in front of lawyers. They can still make mistakes, but it’s overly paranoid to believe a government website would advertise unconstitutional violations of rights for years.
> It is not the governments job to protect people's rights.
Objectively false.
> The gov't violates rights all the time.
True! But these violations are failures in the government for doing its job properly. Violations often lead to punishment or scandal. It wouldn’t be a scandal if people held the belief the government wasn’t supposed to protect your rights.
> It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.
The point is you alleged that the apathy in this was due to partisan selfishness. It’s clearly not if even the “winning side” is ambivalent about the feds cracking down on their partisans.
That's because the winning side won. It's very short sided. That may be fine for now, but just imagine future elections, when those FBI agents have a different narrative they wish to enforce. It really is not that hard to imagine.
Trying to appeal with the “future elections” angle is amusing. Many on that “winning side” blame FBI interference for losing in 2016. So you would think your appeal would carry weight, yet it doesn’t. One wonders why?
No, they blame the former head of the FBI Comey for announcing that he's not going to prosecute Clinton for her carelessness with her emails, and then sort of reversing himself days ahead of the election. Maybe Clinton bears some blame here for being so careless with her classified emails in the first place? Comey was in an impossible situation and bound to get criticized no matter what he did. This was not the institution itself. This was a bungling director. Was the FBI supposed to not investigate lost/leaked emails from a SoS? Emails that contain all sorts of national security info?
Clinton’s loss can be blamed on a multitude of reasons, not least a failure to campaign in the relevant Rust Belt and Midwest states where she lost. Be that as it may, there is a running narrative in her party that the FBI’s actions under Comey, when it comes to the timing of the investigation and how the announcements regarding it were delivered, contributed to her loss.
At any rate, I am just pointing out the humorous irony involved in appealing to that party to watch the FBI lest “they might lose a future election”… they already believe themselves the losers of one because of FBI involvement!
"According to security researchers at Secureworks the email leak was caused by Threat Group-4127, later attributed to Fancy Bear, a unit that targets governments, military, and international non-governmental organizations. The researchers report moderate confidence that the unit gathers intelligence on behalf of the Russian government.[101]"
The above quote is really just a runabout way of saying that the Russians hacked the emails.
> That's what the intelligence agencies who were simultaneously infiltrating the opposing political campaign claim, yes.
It’s actually what SecureWorks and other private companies said, SecureWorks is a private company that is a subsidiary of Dell but I’m sure you’ll find some other reason not to believe it.
Those who say they were leaked with absolutely no evidence: Trump Campaign, Wikileaks
Those who say they were hacked and who have provided evidence of such: FBI, CIA, NSA Crowdstrike, Mandiant, Secureworks, Mueller Report, Republican Senate Report, Democratic Senate Report, Dutch Security Services, UK Security Services, the Russians themselves, Donald Trump himself.
Your inability to be persuaded isn’t an asset here. Seriously, read the Muller report and Crowdstrikes attribution. It’s persuasive beyond a reasonable doubt if you’re moderately technical.
I fully support such communications from the government entities being made public to the full extent possible, just as with DMCA requests.
But just take a step back for a second. Are you arguing that the FBI headed by a Trump appointee strong armed a very liberal silicon valley tech company into rigging the election for Biden? What?
Just because Wray was appointed by Trump does not mean the FBI operated at the whims of Trump. For one, these positions are merely nominated by the president. They still have to be confirmed by the senate. The president is effectively given a list of people from whom he can nominate. There is also strong institutional inertia here.
A lot of people get strong armed by the FBI. They hold a lot of power. This is not conspiracy territory either. There are congressional oversight committees, but their ability to use classified information gives them a lot of leverage.
That's false. Matt Taibbi never said that. Read the whole thread. He claimed the Twitter was effectively operating as a subdiary to the FBI. You can claim that was perhaps hyperbole, and that the Trump admin did make some requests. But the FBI was having regular meetings with Twitter staff, most of which had nothing to do with the Trump administration.
It's a request, not an order, it's the FBI, not congress passing a law.
I'm the former owner/operator of ww.com, in its day a pretty large video streaming community, think 'twitch' but many years earlier. We had fairly regular contact with the police to ensure that our members were operating within the law, and some of them repeatedly decided to test where the line was. As responsible operator of a large web property you are an extension of society and society has - fairly universally - come to the conclusion that having a police force is both useful and necessary. As a forum operator you can choose to go head-to-head with the authorities or you can choose to work with them, we - just like Twitter - chose to do the latter because we believed that this was in everybody's best interest.
On occasion it wasn't the authorities initiating the request but us because we came upon acts and or proof of crimes to despicable to relate here and they were uniformly courteous and acted with surprising speed against the perpetrators. Law enforcement and corporations have regular contact, anybody that believes that this is not the case at the level of a Twitter or a Facebook is utterly naive.
> We had fairly regular contact with the police to ensure that our members were operating within the law, and some of them repeatedly decided to test where the line was.
Key words: "the law". That's not what was going on here.
As long as you are given the option to decline a request (a real option, not a Hobson's choice), it doesn't cross the line into state action. The distinction in legal jurisprudence is pretty damn clear here, there needs to be some element of coercion by the government; if the government has the same power as private actors (e.g., to flag things), then that doesn't meet the bar.
The FBI would upon such a refusal then most likely go by a court to see if they could get a judge to sign off on an order and those you refuse at your peril.
I mean, Twitter has (successfully) refused subpoenas for things like demasking pseudonymous users in the past. Of the big social media companies, (pre-Musk) Twitter has probably historically been the most pro-user in refusing to bow to legal pressure.
Good point, they went to bat for their users on multiple occasions.
I have huge respect for the former legal department of Twitter, being under pressure from so many sides including many state level actors must have been extremely difficult. And to see it all squandered like this must be extremely painful.
So the harm to Twitter in refusing the original request is zero, right? There's no "stick" if the downside of refusing is just them asking a different way that you may have to actually listen to.
That depends on the request. If the request was made about something that they felt wasn't legal then they could refuse it, then the ball would be in the court of law enforcement to decide whether or not to escalate (go by a judge) or to drop the matter.
I'm pretty sure all of those have happened over the course of Twitter's life span, but obviously those do not make for sexy releases so I doubt we'll hear from them.
It's bad that it wasn't transparent to the public. I don't like the idea of the government actively playing a role in moderating content that isn't illegal unless it's transparent and there's oversight by voters.
Twitter as a private company can moderate content as it sees fit. But the government is supposed to be constrained by the First Amendment. And here, they technically are, because they're not forcing Twitter to take action. But there's always the background threat of regulation if Twitter doesn't play nice, so it's not as black and white as this.
Can you outline a scheme that would satisfy your needs for transparency while at the same time not result in compromising active investigations, tipping off the perps that they are under surveillance and so on? Because I don't see a practical way to achieve that ideal that would still work.
Having been on the receiving end of such requests I was pretty happy all of them were made in a confidential manner, it saved everybody a ton of headaches and reduce the amount of grip the various miscreants had on our community. Doing that in the open would have caused massive issues, some of these people were downright dangerous and others simply needed help, keeping their data and our interaction around that data confidential was - in my opinion - a good thing all around.
The problem is that there is this assumption that the FBI is working in good faith. There is a mountain of evidence that they have arbitrarily acted in the interests of the ruling class and not within the confines of the constitution.
Just look at COINTELPRO for the most egregious example.
Then there's Waco, Ruby Ridge, the campaign finance corruption, infiltration of latin American governments, and modern operations similar to COINTELPRO to take down various movements like occupy wall street.
They are a mafia, not some benign group that can be blindly trusted with secret carte blanche powers.
The bulk of the people in LE and the bulk of the people running the government are doing so with the best of intentions. They get it wrong, sometimes spectacularly so and a lot of stuff has been done that should have never ever happened.
But none of that seems to have any bearing on what happened here at Twitter, which is so far - to put it mildly, given the amount of noise made by Musk et al - underwhelming.
If you feel differently then that's fine but personally I think there are far bigger transgressions by the FBI than requesting that Twitter take down objectionable content and rabble rousers.
In NL Twitter was successfully weaponized by our most despicable - outright pro-Nazi - political party and the aftereffects are still felt today. Compared to what happened in the US it obviously pales but you have to wonder how the 6th of January 2020 would have ended if it weren't for the good contacts between the FBI and Twitter.
I'll give you one example: I was called up on my cell phone in the middle of the night by the police in NL that a person was attempting suicide on camera on our website. We fished their IP number out of the logs and passed it on which allowed LE (after contact with the relevant ISP) + medical assistance to get there in record time and help the person who ended up surviving and being quite happy that their attempt had failed (it's been more than a decade and I still have that image etched into my brain). There is no 'best before' date on something like that, just knowing the account name would be enough to cause trouble for that person all over again.
You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity. What you could do is to come up with a set of workable rules for which requests would have to be made public and which not, but I don't think I would be capable of coming up with such a set of rules that would not in the future lead to issues. So to default to secrecy seems prudent.
In that light, the sale of Twitter and the subsequent exposure of all these interactions presumably has the effect of such communications becoming more opaque rather than less resulting in the opposite effect of what you desire.
> The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity.
Nobody has a problem with the FBI doing takedown requests for that kind of content. It's about political content (labelled "civic misinformation") on accounts like @RSBNetwork. The FBI isn't supposed to be taking sides and potentially influencing elections by encouraging social media companies to ban accounts of political actors.
Personally I'm of two minds about this whole thing. While I have concerns, the right-wing in the US at the moment are an authoritarian movement and social media companies are doing not nearly enough in the way of moderation. Ideally the FBI would have stayed out of it and Twitter would have upped their game.
> You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
I'd put the burden on the FBI. If they want to exclude all clearly non-political content (e.g. suicide videos) from the transparency report that's ok by me.
I think in the end it will come down to a decision about workload. As soon as the matter is dealt with any further cycles are wasteful and since the ocean of work is endlessly deep they probably would prioritize newer cases over dotting the i's and crossing the t's on those cases that are already closed. This is not ideal, but having a moderately underfunded law enforcement institution is not necessarily a bad thing, it forces them to prioritize. If you don't then you end up with East Germany or some local equivalent.
So you think it is totally normal that FBI just helps a company to moderate stuff that is legal but doesn't comply with the company's Terms of Service?
Yes. Because 'legal' and 'damaging to society' are different bars and both the FBI and Twitter probably felt that cooperating on that front was better than to let things get out of hand.
The alternative may well have been a dead VP, or worse, so be happy that these channels exist(ed). With that whole department axed we are now in much more dangerous territory. That said I'm pretty sure that Elon Musk knows which side his bread is buttered on and that given an appropriately worded request Twitter will comply just like it did in the past. Or do you think they'll give the FBI the finger now?
It's not in the FBI's charter to "fix society" outside of the bounds of law. It's mind boggling to me that people are acting nonchalant about a government entity shaping public discourse in secret.
If - for instance - Mike Pence had been murdered (and I believe there was a real possibility that that could have happened) I'm pretty sure that you'd be playing an entirely different tune. The FBI is free to interpret the law and you are free to take them to court if you don't agree with their interpretation. This does not normally need to be spelled out.
Next time you receive a request from the police that you think is reasonable try stonewalling them and see what happens. I guarantee you won't like it.
And as far as the secrecy is concerned: records were kept, that's why you are reading about this.
I have no idea how to respond to your comment. You seem to be coming from a world view that has no overlap with mine. I have zero understanding why you'd so condescendingly argue that we should just accept shady behavior by the FBI.
I don't see anything shady. And being pretty anti-authoritarian and having been in contact with LE many, many times over the years including the FBI what struck me first and foremost in all of that is that they did their utmost best to keep it clean.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the subject of this thread, the 'Twitter Files'.
If we're going to discuss the FBI in a larger setting I would consider that to be out of scope, to me the discussion is limited to the interaction between social media companies and law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular.
I am extremely unhappy with what he has been doing on twitter, especially the account bans. But I am not a binary thinker, so I can still make an attempt to look at these releases objectively. And some of them are not that interesting, but some of the details are actually quite bad, and people aren't looking at them due to their disgust with Musk. I almost didn't look at this one.
It could also be said the central issue is that Twitter's political leanings went against many elsewhere, therefor, everything is a conspiracy and nothing done was done with good intentions.
The alternative to censoring "Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9th." and "If you're not wearing a mask, I'm not counting your vote." is a dead VP? I don’t see a connection.
The FBI should absolutely not be trying to manage or control activity that isn't illegal, especially when that activity is speech. When the FBI does, we end up with horrible stuff like COINTELPRO.
> When the FBI does, we end up with horrible stuff like COINTELPRO.
You could. But that's not what happened here, judging by the evidence on display.
All I see is what I expected to see: law enforcement engaging in a careful manner with a company that is dealing with an extremely large flow of communications. And if some of those communications are of a society destabilizing nature it is well within the mandate of the FBI to stick their noses in and make requests. You then have the option to refuse those requests, in which case you may either end up in court, they could forget about the whole thing or you are served with a piece of paper signed off by a judge.
What is illegal and what isn't is ultimately for a judge to decide but not every two-bit issue needs to go by a judge if all parties agree that the world is better off with moderating it out of existence.
What I see is the government involved in pressuring and directing companies to censor legal speech. You seem to think this is OK because you think it will only ever be done to people you disagree with. History has repeatedly shown that is a dangerously naive view.
The whole point is that these cases aren't going in front of a judge or jury to decide. Without that system of checks and balances, "all parties agree" is meaningless because it can't be challenged. "All parties agreed" that the civil rights or anti-war movement were destabilizing and needed to be suppressed...you seem to support that kind of unchecked power. I don't know why people are so quick to forget our very recent history.
If that disagreement were censored, would you know about it?
Getting fired is not a 1st amendment violation. The 1st amendment only covers protection from the government (with a lot of gray ground for "disorderly conduct" laws, but I digress)
The NY Post was banned for breaking a story about revelations contained in a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden. This was just prior to a national election. The FBI was involved in pushing this narrative through Twitter.
The Babylon Bee is a satire site that was banned for doing satire.
The Babylon Bee was not banned, the same way someone who tries to go into a store without shoes on isn't "banned." They just need to put on some shoes, then you're allowed in.
The Babylon Bee was told that 1 Tweet violated Twitter's policy, and that they needed to delete it to unlock their account. They chose not to.
lmao "Twitter made me delete a Tweet that violated their ToS if I want to keep using their platform" is equivalent to renouncing all of your principles and values??
I hope we remember that in the same time period, all mentioning of same story were declared misinformation here, on Hacker News, and posts were flagged, users banned. I wonder if there is any learnings here for the current/future reaction to the ongoing stories?
The thread clearly shows that they were going after misinformation, and trying to make sure they only did so when accurate. At most you could say that the FBI sent some low quality reports, which seems like a better question for your congressional representatives since they have oversight.
It does not show or allege a crime was ignored - can you be precise in what you’re insinuating?
You do realize for this to be true - the FBI, one of the most conservative organizations in this history of the country, one that’s never been led by a democrat - would have to be secretly as liberal as Twitter’s trust and safety team? Do you understand why people might not find that plausible?
The FBI serves the state, and itself. If they need to make friends with a leftist to get something done, why would that stop them? I personally find it hard to believe that Crossfire Hurricane was run by a conservative cabal in the FBI, but maybe you're right. Whoever were doing it were elitist reprobates.
The FBI investigated both Trump and Clinton in 2016. The difference is that they made a big announcement about Clinton immediately prior to the election.
Was that the only difference? Nothing qualitatively different about the reasons or motivations behind the investigations? Like maybe one was investigated because the candidate was mishandling national secrets in order to avoid freedom of information act requests?
While Twitter may think it’s a good idea to police “misinformation” on its platform and has every right to do so, the FBI can’t be in that business.
Maybe one could make a case that the FBI requesting Twitter to enforce its own policies is reasonable, but if the Feds are making judgments on what to complain about based on content or viewpoint rather than time / place / manner, that really starts to conflict with First Amendment jurisprudence.
You have to give credit to whomever came up with it, its a cheap but effective linguistic kill shot. No doubt it was engineered to be divisive, and whomever is wielding it is unlikely to be reasoned with.
Who is saying that people should be harmed? Seriously. Whoever you have in mind, if they're actually advocating violence against people then I'm in agreement with you. That's not cool and they shouldn't be doing that.
Are you referring to calling a trans person by their biological sex?
When a doctor is speaking with a trans person about their body, it's an appropriate time to speak about their biological sex. That is certainly not hate speech.
When a stranger is yelling at a trans person about their biological sex, it's done to inflict emotional harm on the trans person. They transitioned away from that gender to reduce harm (that is the definition of a trans person), and the stranger is intentionally trying to bring that harm back.
Imagine shouting at a woman about her "biological breast size" because she is wearing a push-up bra, or had surgery to enlarge or reduce her breast size. Would that seem like a normal, harm-free way to interact with another person you don't know? Obviously not.
Depends on the context. People have been suspended from Twitter from saying things like "transwomen are actually men so stop letting them compete in women's sports, it's not safe or fair for actual women", which isn't hate speech, doesn't target an individual, and is a legitimate political opinion, so in theory should be fine. Yet bans are handed out anyway.
I’m not familiar with the lightness with which Twitter bans conservatives. Could you provide an example close to the example you gave? Or will any example be even more bigoted?
Stating facts can be hate speech. For example, if someone said "I was just attacked on my way home" and someone said "you're black" in response, yeah. Facts. Hate speech.
So, let's say that someone (like a user of Twitter, or a writer for the Babylon Bee) points out that Rachel Levine, a public figure, is a man.
How does that actually harm him?
He's in an incredibly privileged position, and indeed has enjoyed male privilege for pretty much all of his life.
Should we avoid saying any truth that might slightly upset a public figure, or anyone really, just in case they feel a bit sad if they happen to hear it?
https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/
Good paper, but here's a sentence from the conclusion.
> Findings underscore the importance of risk factors such as emotional neglect within the family, interpersonal microaggressions, and internalized self-stigma
In addition, what reason do you have to not respect a trans persons identity? Biological sex is already much _much_ more complex than just the XY we're taught in middle school. Klinefelter's and intersex people both exist, as do other blurred lines.
There's also nothing inherent about 'sex == gender' - transgender people have existed throughout history:
So everyone just has to lie and pretend, just to make trans people feel better? Push down their own beliefs and feelings in case someone who thinks they are the opposite sex reads anything that may be critical of this?
As a more concrete counterpoint, here's a news article from last year which includes a lesbian woman describing her rape by a man who calls himself a woman: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385
The editors decided to replace the male pronouns she used to describe him with "they" and "them":
> Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.
> "[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."
How do you think she must have felt reading this truthful quote of hers mangled into a lie? A rape victim who isn't permitted to have her rape accurately reported, after she had already been shamed into getting into bed with this man by him weaponising the same ideology that censors her now.
Was she guilty of hate speech by describing her own rape?
I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
I understand the position of the lesbian woman in that story - she is justified in anger, hate and fear, as sad as it is to say.
You're allowed to not be attracted to someone, and trans individuals have to accept that sometimes relationships may not work out as a result of their being trans - it's just a sad but true fact.
> Push down their own beliefs and feelings in case someone who thinks they are the opposite sex reads anything that may be critical of this?
Isn't the quote "facts don't care about your feelings"? All serious modern research points to trans individuals being valid.
> I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
You asked how speech leads to harm, I provided an example. I've also uploaded more since then.
You've missed the point, this about people not being permitted to say the truth, per this ideology.
Even a rape victim isn't allowed to say that a man raped her, despite him forcing his penis inside of her. Is she supposed to pretend that this is a "woman's penis" or something?
That was an extreme example used to illustrate. The other examples elsewhere in this thread include a man taking an accolade that would usually be reserved for women, and a man going around being creepy to women who provide genital waxing services to other women.
If critics aren't allowed to push aside the gender ideology for a minute and discuss these males as men, it entirely undermines any point they're making about women's boundaries being encroached upon - which is also a harm, and a significant one.
The reason that I responded to your previous post was the importance of this extreme example.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women.
The research supports this.
Scumbags are scumbags, regardless of gender or trans status. Some of the people you listed are scumbags, and one was a woman receiving an award for women.
If you're going to dissolve into whataboutisms, we're done here.
This is an ideological belief. We can also accurately describe them as women who want to be men, and men who want to be women.
Of the three examples we're discussing:
* one raped a woman using his penis - this is what men do, not women
* one tried to get women to touch his male genitals - again, the behavior of a man
* one received an accolade as if he's a woman - but spent most of his life making a highly successful career as a man, using his male privilege to its fullest extent
Can you see why people may prefer to refer to these three as men, not women?
I think you may be surprised at how many 'TERFs' are dyed-in-the-wool socialists. I know it's convenient to paint this as some left-right political split, but the truth of the matter is quite different. Look up the history of radical feminism - it didn't originate on the political right, quite the opposite.
Meghan Murphy in particular is a left-wing, socialist, radical feminist, who was raised in a Marxist household. This is no secret, you can search her work online to confirm all this, she's pro-unions, pro-socialism, and speaks against the right on numerous political matters.
Her ban from Twitter was caused by referring to a male (Johnathan/Jessica Yaniv), who was suing female beauticians for refusing to wax his bollocks, as "him".
Now I don't know about you, but I would think if you're going around flashing your testicles to women and demanding they touch them, that is very much a proof of being a man. I mean, you don't find women popping their hairy balls out to be plucked, and haranguing women who politely demur, do you?
Nonetheless, Twitter moderators disagreed. To them, this was the bushy scrotum of a woman. So Murphy was canned.
She keeps saying she is. She doesn't understand (I mean I'm sure she does, but she's a lying bigot) that socialism and all the wonders of it don't work if youre being a SWERF and TERF. Things don't work that way. You have to want better conditions for every one. Otherwise...how are we giving people equal chances to succeed?
I think the problem is the vast majority of people have no clue what socialism is. Most people have read no socialist texts, but are inundated with right wing and capitalistic propaganda all the time.
tldr: SWERFs and TERFs are not leftists. Like how people like Jordan Peterson (before), Tim Pool, Dave Rubin are all right wingers through and through, but keep pretending they are centrists. You have to act the act. Not just talk. This applies to Meghan Murphy too.
I have spent dozens and dozens and dozens of hours getting into TERFs. Radical feminism didn't originate on the political right, but at this point trans people are dying and in danger. This is abundantly clear to any dyed-in-the-wool socialists in the 2020s. Even if it wasn't clear decades ago. Or even a decade ago.
Unfortunately you showed your true colors deadnaming Jessica and using the incorrect pronouns.
The article you linked shows that she upholds left-wing, socialist, feminist principles much more scrupulously then so many who call themselves "the left". It's no wonder she doesn't want to identify with them as a political group, even though her ideological stance is still firmly leftist.
"While I have long been a supporter of labour rights, of unions, and have counted myself as a fighting member of the working class who has waivered somewhere between socialism and Marxism from the moment I understood the concept of class struggle, I've found myself suddenly misaligned with some of those with whom I share my end of the political spectrum."
"These are the people I vote for. They represent my interests and ideologies and yet, when it comes to the issue of prostitution, it feels as though we've been pitted against one another."
"On one hand there seems to be a distinct lack of class analysis – we forget that there are reasons that some women are prostituted while others are not, that some women have a 'choice' while others do not. On the other, because decriminalization has, in part, been framed as a labour issue (i.e. that this is a job like any other and, therefore, should be treated in the same way any other service sector job is, in terms of laws), the gender and race factors fall to the wayside and we forget that prostitution impacts women and, in particular, racialized women in an inordinate way."
And:
"The reason for a man to buy sex from a woman is, without a doubt, because he desires pleasure without having to give anything in return. This is a male-centered purchase. If we are to define sex as something pleasurable for both parties then how on earth can we define prostitution as sex work? There is something decidedly unprogressive about calling something 'sex' when the act is, in fact, solely about providing pleasure for one party (the male party) without any regard for the woman with whom you are engaging in this supposed 'sex' with. Doesn't this defy the whole enthusiastic consent model?"
"While I certainly support human rights and worker rights, I also support women's rights and believe that, as a feminist, I cannot and will not work towards normalizing the idea that women can and should be bought and sold. I certainly will not promote this as part of my progressive politics."
And much more - the whole article is very much worth reading. Do you not agree that she makes many thoughtful and well-considered points?
The fundamental problem is that within many leftist groups, there is a huge blind spot when it comes to women's issues. It should not be too much to ask that women be spared from male sexual violence, and women be permitted female-only safe spaces away from men.
Right so she’s not a leftist as your evidence points out. Every single thing she wrote is so cringe when you say it’s coming from a leftist. It isn’t if you understand socialism and communism.
Like how Tim Pool and his sycophants say he’s a [classic] liberal. As if that means anything to Americans besides code for right-wing. Obviously right wingers can be liberals. Many are. Any one with a nuanced understanding of politics knows that.
Edit: Hilarious. You responded the way you did completely ignoring me having already done the Tim Pool analogy. You’re still going at it Again, have you personally read any socialist or communist or leftist texts? If so, what? It would be embarrassing and shameful for me to be an adult and spout off about different political ideologies without having read up on them.
"I have long been a supporter of labour rights, of unions, and have counted myself as a fighting member of the working class who has waivered somewhere between socialism and Marxism from the moment I understood the concept of class struggle"
I’m sorry I’ve been arrogantly wrong about this as you stated before your edit.
Please cite some left and right wing texts you have read and understood. Please explain why class solidarity excluding trans and sex workers is still leftist. Write in your own words so I know you understand in-depth nuanced politics and can accept you’re right and I’m wrong.
I wrote my comments to help people reading see the truth. I’m sure with your swagger you will respond in good faith.
"I have long been a supporter of labour rights, of unions, and have counted myself as a fighting member of the working class who has waivered somewhere between socialism and Marxism from the moment I understood the concept of class struggle"
“But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
Why were the accounts of interest? Were they controlled by foreign IPs?
When there are mass ransomware attacks from foreign states, the FBI does help private companies.
I think that is probably the charitable perspective.
Either that or the FBI led by James Comey at the time (who arguably single handed sunk Clinton in 2016 by going against FBI policy to re-open the "emails" case), was corrupt and at a rate of one email a week was attempting to control the national discourse thru twitter.
Not sure if that is credible given the FBI could have done far worse to the trump campaign.
Though, without primary source material, I'm not sure how one could tell the difference (Occams razor seemingly might come into play)
In this case reporting two dozen small fry accounts to moderator teams is very weak as far as censorship goes. They’re doing the same thing as everyone else who hits report on Twitter does, except cutting in line. But you can bet there are tens of thousands of businesses, especially Twitter’s advertisers, who have the same if not closer relations with Twitter and, if made displeased, could cause Twitter to censor you even quicker than the FBI could.
I don't see anything about being a "small fry" mattering when it comes to the law. It's pretty cut and dried. What the FBI is doing is unconstitutional and illegal. Why are you minimizing it? That they are doing it all is extremely alarming. It's like saying "the concentration camp only has 5 people, what's the big deal?"
And why are you comparing them to private companies? Private companies are not covered by the same laws when it comes to the first amendment.
Why is the FBI spending tax payer dollars trying to influence media outlets at all? Do you not find this alarming? It's absolutely outside their realm of responsibility.
The FBI accepts reports from the public about people interfering with elections, and they forward on those reports to the relevant platforms. I would like to see the FBI and other law enforcement agencies considerably reduced in scale and power, but as long as they exist I think monitoring threats to free and fair elections is one of the better things they can do with said taxpayer dollars.
No government entity should be involved in the slightest in policing media in order to "protect" elections. It's very subjective and extremely ripe for abuse.
The only reason election outcomes are so vulnerable to media manipulation is because the US political system is captured by cynical corporate interests that draw an arbitrary line unrelated to idealism across a set of issues to split voters almost perfectly at 50/50, then do everything in their power through corporate media to minimize third parties and use legal challenges to remove them from the ballot.
If viable candidates that actually served the interest of the public rather than the ruling class were given fair access to the process, then we wouldn't be so vulnerable to manipulation.
The FBI's role is to protect interests of the corporate elite in their backdoor dealings with various media outlets.
> No government entity should be involved in the slightest in policing media in order to "protect" elections. It's very subjective and extremely ripe for abuse.
The FEC can impose all sorts of fines, they arguably have more teeth than this.
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> However, not all publicly available voting information is accurate, and some is deliberately designed to deceive you to keep you from voting.
Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
> Help defend the right to vote by reporting any suspected instances of voter suppression—especially those received through a private communication channel like texting—to your local FBI field office or at tips.fbi.gov.
So it sounds like they're actively doing this outside of Twitter or social media in general.
IANAL, but here's a Georgetown Law info sheet about how that works, and cites several federal law statues that are applicable:
The Pentagon routinely screens Hollywood blockbusters to ensure the content does not offend the military, and makes suggestions to studio executives as to how to best portray the military. The government is constantly influencing media outlets, none of this is new.
Let me cut and paste my comment with a minor change:
Why is the Pentagon spending tax payer dollars trying to influence media outlets at all? Do you not find this alarming? It's absolutely outside their realm of responsibility.
What does being "new" have anything to do with whether it matters or not?
It's not alarming because it's so pervasive it's the way things are. Thus when something new is brought up their impact needs to be weighed accordingly to prioritize.
Growing up in a fascist regime may make it seem normal but at some point you need to raise your hackles and feel alarmed regardless of the past, because it's a fascist regime.
The FBI says "won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?" while the majority party in congress is dragging social media CEOs to testify about content moderation isn't enough to make you at the very least, suspicious?
The FBI said they are "notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy". One of the accounts was an account parodying a pro wrestler by suggesting he frequently poops in his pants. Not really seeing any evidence of a coordinated political agenda here.
What is the law that is being broken here, and how are punishments measured for its infraction? Is it based on amount of impact? Because if so, then asking moderation for a dozen or two accounts with limited reach is something that might carry a small amount of punishment, if any at all.
The first amendment is about the government making laws to infringe upon free speech. I see no laws being made here. So it is the government behaving exactly like a private company. Which may be problematic, but not unlawful.
I already am. The FBI just shut down the Z-Library with the help of Google and Amazon, which is a far more significant scandal over unjust power than this is. This is nothing more than chaff meant to distract from that atrocity. You are all crying about two dozen low-follower accounts while the FBI has successfully shuttered an immense knowledge repository.
The FBI is putting pressure on Apple to drop Enhanced Encryption, and still refusing to declassify their JFK files. Those are far more urgent issues than getting mad at mods.
We are just trying to achieve concensus on facts here, not strategize on our plan to prosecute the FBI. This is a pseudo anonymous forum, not a law firm or activist group. We can talk about all of these things at once, despite your protestations.
Yes, and my free speech as protected by the First Amendment gives me the right to call this as plainly falling into the FBI's distraction trap, not to mention the whole giving cover to the sell-off of TSLA stock thing.
So how about describing the FBI's dasterdly distraction plan rather than dropping random sketchy details every couple comments as an argumentation tool?
You're posting in it. We're all here while those other threads remain low in replies. I'd say their plan has succeeded, wouldn't you? The proof is, as they say, in the pudding.
Every time the government tells anyone that something possibly harmful is happening, with the hope that folks stop that, it's censorship. The government shouldn't be involved at ALL in talking or thinking about what its citizens do or say. Any time the FBI posts a most-wanted list it's clearly an attempt to shut down speech or behavior. This is censorship and is just like a concentration camp.
Twitter isn't a media outlet; content moderation isn't censorship; routine communications over email aren't "behind closed doors"; suggestions that Twitter investigate certain accounts carry no legal weight.
> What you call a "suggestion" can easily be interpreted as a threat
Anything can be interpreted as a threat if you're paranoid enough, but the text of the emails (if you ignore Taibbi's commentary) is pretty clearly inconsistent with that interpretation.
The FBI contacted trust and safety and said 'Hey we have concerns about these tweets'. Twitter decided to take them down in some cases.
Who is corrupted here? Twitter for taking reports and then deciding how to react to them? The FBI for finding misinformation that might lead to crazies creating mass casualty events?
The FBI at no time FORCED twitter to do anything. So it's not violating the first amendment.
Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.
> Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion.
Strong disagree. I've been on the receiving side of many such requests and all of them came with reasons and citations to back up the request. I've never had a single LE request (including some from the FBI even though we were located in Toronto, Canada and in IJmuiden, NL meaning that we could have refused them simply on account of not being in their jurisdiction) that did not make perfect sense to me.
1. We're not talking about your company which probably had a different context. We're talking about the FBI telling Twitter to silence opinions and facts.
2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
> 1. We're not talking about your company which probably had a different context. We're talking about the FBI telling Twitter to silence opinions and facts.
The context was quite comparable: live conversations, messages both public and private.
> 2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
Twitter had an extensive legal team before Musk fired them all, I'm pretty sure they were well capable of determining which requests were legal and which were not.
"Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account you hold and change them regularly. Using the same passphrase across several accounts makes you more vulnerable if one account is breached."
This is an ask from the FBI. But they obviously aren't coercing you not to use abc123 as your password.
>Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.
By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace.
Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?
Given a large enough transgression they would have gone by a judge and probably gotten an enforceable order, but they chose to first ask nicely. But be assured that if you stonewall such a request and the matter is grave enough that you'll be served next, and rightly so.
This is just an optimization and a way to save everybody a lot of time and headaches, as well as a way to ensure that the genie gets put back into the bottle before something can grow legs and do a lot of damage. And with the degree to which social media has been weaponized that is a good thing.
I can read too, what do you mean when you say that?
I’m not sure how institutions can say “no” to the FBI without feeling fear of retribution, nor do I want the FBI putting pressure on corporations to be something that’s “normal and expected”.
Twitter said 'no' to the feds on multiple occasions (as was pointed out upthread) and you can bet that if they had received an illegal request they would have balked at it.
I'm sure there was some give-and-take but on the whole what I've seen so far is absolutely par for the course, if you were to look into Facebook, Google, Microsoft and any of the ISPs and email providers you would find the exact same thing.
Both Twitter and the FBI were pretty open about the FBI having limited access to Twitters' firehose and that there was constant interaction between the two parties. You can add to that that if you were to look at this internationally and at the state level that such contacts can be expected to exist as well. Any assumption to the contrary is hopelessly naive.
Do you understand why when a person in a position of authority or dominance makes sexual advances towards their subordinate, it is considered sexual assault and abuse of power?
That analogy should help you understand the difference between a random guy writing to Twitter "hey, I think these tweets violate your ToS" and the FBI doing the same thing.
And yet, despite unfettered access to Twitter's internal communications, evidence has yet to be posted by the journalists tasked with exposing that fact.
When people become a sworn officer of the FBI or any other federal LEO officer, they take an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. When instead of upholding the Constitution, they ask a private company to violate people's first ammendment rights, that is an abuse of power.
It may be within Twitters terms of service to ban people and censor people, and that may be fine for Twitter, but for a sworn officer to use Twitter to censor people - that is an abuse of power.
Of course, the files also show that Twitter personnel acted in bad faith and didn't follow their own ToS.
Yeah, so it seems looking at the emails, which is the only piece of information we are allowed to see.
However if you think about it for a minute, if the FBI were this bold in written, subpoena-able communication, what do you think the offline conversations looked like?
"The evidence doesn't show malfeasance, but if you imagine other evidence that does show malfeasance, that would be bad" is not a compelling argument in any situation.
Twitter took stuff down at the government's request even though they couldn't find a violation of their own ToS, let alone determine that things were illegal.
Can you cite an example of that? I've read all of the threads so far and none of them demonstrate an account being taken down at the government's request.
I mean, Twitter was so accomodating of warrantless government requests that they built a friggin portal for government agents to submit them. Does that not set off any alarm bells?
The document dump contains evidence of government agents telling Twitter to "look into" things and Twitter responding that they "handled" it.
Government thugs don't need to give explicit orders to have their wishes followed, especially if the thugs in question make it sound like they share your ideological goals.
Nice little company you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.
This is incorrect. The "handled" response you're referring to was regarding a list of links to leaked nudes of Hunter Biden reported by the Biden campaign:
What was illegal about the NYPost breaking a story about content found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop?
If you have allegations of illegality, who determined that? Are you saying FBI should just say "Trust us, it's illegal - we don't need a jury or a judge"?
Since when does the FBI just get to accuse people of things and take their rights away?
It's one thing for the FBI to contact twitter to say "hey there's this account that's posting instructions on how to make and plant pipe bombs so you should remove it" but a completely different thing for the FBI to say "hey there's thing thing that violates one your arbitrary terms of service so you should take it down".
Why is the FBI spending time and resources looking for TOS violations for a private company?
Why is the FBI spending time looking into _anything_ that's not illegal, period?
Probably because it's relatively small potatoes after the Snowden PRISM revelations. And that the new ownership of Twitter is illustrating that the platform is irrevocably compromised regardless of who was doing it. If it wasn't the feds, it'd be the legions of for-pay spambots that are always there.
I think it's against HN rules to call people shills, but I am too flabbergasted at people acting like it's no big deal that the FBI is working in secret to shut down narratives.
It is neither leftist nor shill to avoid distractions from real scandals like PRISM or Epstein. As Orwell said in 1984, his science fiction novel about big government, “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.” The nitpickers in this thread stress out about content moderation when the FBI is getting away with the big stuff like failing to stop SBF or shutting down the Z-Library.
That’s a case where Google and Amazon aided the FBI, too!
“Don’t focus on the real, proven and documented conspiracy. Focus on the fake ones.” Epstein killed himself which is well documented. No, pizza gate is not real and a anon is a larper.
This Twitter leaks are on the same level as PRISM, except it’s FBI instead of NSA. It’s significant because USG is fairly decentralized and just because one agency has gone rogue does not mean all have. We now have evidence that both FBI and NSA are rogue agencies.
You know what is real? The FBI killed the Z-Library last month. They just let the InfraGard network get hacked. They’re spreading FUD against Apple’s new E2E encryption.
I’d rather us focus our energies on the substantive and real than embarking on another grandstanding set of histrionics about social media first amendment rights.
This is far from PRISM, which was surveillance. This is busybodying and enforcing federal election laws. Ho-hum. You want to call the FBI rogue, call them out for the important things they did wrong.
I’m using the term “rogue” here for a specific reason. Trump was president at the time and was nominally the head of the FBI. Did Trump give a directive to ask the FBI to ban people for political jokes on Twitter? It seems highly unlikely. A rogue agency is an agency which is no longer following its democratically elected leadership and is instead operating independently. The FBI is now proven to do what we all suspected before - operate as a completely parallel oligarchic institution to the democratic ones that are in place.
And if you’re going to whipsaw back to “this was all normal and within Twitter’s rights as a private company”, just stop for a minute and look at yourselves.
SARS-Cov-2 is not novel anymore. Most of the population has immunity some form or other. The disease is almost an afterthought. That doesn't mean that this guy was correct all along, especially when the world was rushing to vaccinate.
The FBI can come after you or your company for any reason they come up with. They just have to make it look like you lied to them. They email you that a user on your site is breaking TOS. If you say they aren’t in their eyes you are lying to them and you could be charged if they don’t like you.
1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
I could go for hours listing these.
Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.
If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.
EDIT: Formatting