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.
