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.
