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.
