But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?

IANAL but restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a “real” thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract.

If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?

This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.

I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like there is a large gray area when it comes to theft of trade secrets.

For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for illegally downloading a spreadsheet containing team goals, metrics, and status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to -- the rest were dropped).

Calling layoffs "trade secrets" is some real double-speak and overreach.

Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.

Nobody is calling the layoffs trade secrets. The thread is about pictures of an internal slack channel, and other private information.

Is your point that it doesn't matter if those "pictures of an internal slack channel" actually contain trade secrets of if they show some people posting blue hearts to cheer up their coworkers? IANAL but I think it does matter what those pictures contain.

I was responding to the parent's statement that "restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a 'real' thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract." This is not the case - you can be convicted of a felony and go to jail for taking a private company's confidential information. Nowhere did I call layoffs a trade secret.

Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where people will misinterpret a statement in the worst possible light just so they can argue against it on the internet.

Until it is publicly released, it is exactly that. You may be surprised to learn that competitors track this information.

All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not disclose private company communications… this is way different than censoring a user who is under no such agreement.

The difference is that Twitter does not enforce those agreements as quickly for any company that's not Twitter.

Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.

And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.

The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.

But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce them at the same speed for other companies. If processing speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of course Twitter will be able to verify their own agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily double standards.

It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.

That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee for all.

But they never claimed to be an equitable platform with regards to that issue, did they? Musk might idealistic, but not that idealistic.

To be fair, some of his early comments indicated that all legal speech was to be allowed.

That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.

To be fair, Musk also pledged that Twitter would not become a "free for all" in terms of speech.

> Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform)

Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.

Was illustrating conceptual. I don't think they have an actual like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Though maybe they should?

Uhh, not from Twitter the product's vantage it's not.

So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?

Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.

But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those agreements? No. How could they?

Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.

But Elon Musk didn’t own the company when they signed those NDAs. He’s a “free speech absolutist”. Why would he allow such abominations to be enforced?

It's not about censorship per se. There will always been censorship. Removing spam is censorship, removing copyrighted material is censorship.

There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.

Yes, it's legal. Twitter can always sue the person that tweeted it to have them remove it, let a judge decide.

This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).

So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content. And the judge would reject the suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its own website then it should just remove it.

I don't believe that's true. For copyrighted work, you can issue a takedown notice to the website - but copyright is federal law. NDAs are just private contracts. If you could sue someone for hosting/posting NDA content, then any leaks or whistleblower content could be hidden from the public just by suing the all the news websites.

Generally I think you can only sue the person who violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who posted the material. The same is even true for classified info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.

> If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website

> So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content.

is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied? if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the request would be immediately approved. At that point, there's no "difference" in the procedures for internal/external moderation requests.

> This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly sued).

That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the law no news agency could ever report anything with anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the situation", because under your definition they are now violating an agreement about which they know nothing.

You could sue the website, but it wouldn't go very far, because website operators are not liable for user uploaded content because of Section 230 of the CDA.

Is a bunch of heart emojis confidential information? If so, lol.

Internal slack communication is confidential.

> But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on it?

I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private contract.

You are conflating "illegal" with "criminal". Civil law is still law.

Assuming this all goes back to Elon's tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376, which reads:

"""

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

"""

I don't think it's reasonable to interpret this as referring to any speech which constitutes a civil wrong. There is simply no way for a third party to have the slightest clue based on the content of a tweet whether that tweet causes someone to suffer a loss, or constitutes a breach of contract,

It's a potential antitrust violation to serve themselves better than other users of the platform. This is what Google and Apple get in trouble for all the time.

Did the screenshot actually expose any confidential information though? Musk seemed fine with leaking confidential information when Mudge was doing it, but now he is suddenly concerned about it?

No it's not. That's a conflation of two different things. Twitter Inc. the Company and Twitter the App.

But they did take down content from Twitter the App...?

Would NYT publish scathing remarks about itself, or publish leaked internal data on itself? If not, I don't think such a thing should be expected of twitter either.

The NYTimes has investigated itself from time to time and publishes remarks that reflect poorly on themselves. Last example I can remember is the Caliphate podcast scandal

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...

Yea doesn't the NYTimes have a section pretty much devoted to retractions? I'll see them in their morning news letter and I think it's pretty common at most news organizations with integrity to understand that sometimes they'll get things wrong like we all do, and just be candid about it and post retractions where necessary.

Do you mean Twitter in it’s entirety is like a respectable newspaper that should edit all their content for correctness and propriety?

The BBC certainly broadcasts criticism of the BBC from time to time. Here’s one of the more trivial examples (easier to bring to mind because it’s amusing): https://youtu.be/MBWfCV4PjyU

Crude, and hilarious to watch those two keep straight faces. Have I Got New For You has very regular criticism of the BBC too, slightly higher brow but entertaining.

> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more interested in discussing if the move is right. If it violated internal company policy, or revealed internal identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the right move?

I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.

Which rule do you think it violated?

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

I think it violates private information policy. The last thing I want is my work name in a screenshot from an internal conversation posted on Twitter, reported by the news like I am a dissenter after getting terminated. I would want to be left completely alone.

Extreme cases i.e. leaked passwords are under hacked materials policy.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info... https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...

Also possible the user(s) deleted some themselves in order to not violate terms and thus retain their severance ---which typically hinge on such things.

I don't think the message that the tweet in question violates Twitter's rules would appear in this case.

> It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

The employees probably sign NDAs. It's only a civil suit, but I think that would still fall outside the realm of what he's been preaching. Note, I'm not taking his side or anyone else's.

> should allow all legal speech.

It is usually illegal or in breach of contract to share internal company communications. This isn't the "gotcha" you're looking for.

The speech is legal, it just breaks a contract between two parities in the US. It's a far cry from a discussion around what kind of speech is acceptable in a public square.

Twitter is using a privileged position to protect it's own IP. It's fine for a company to do, but just doesn't really sit with "we're just running a public square for the good of the world"

But by this logic we'd have to argue that Wikileaks is a public square. Real public squares have police, and those police have a mandate by the people to enforce contract law and private property law.

This is why hate speech I think is a much more controversial topic than copyright.

Continuing that, i think that normally the ball would get rolling with some kind of civil suit. The police aren't judge and jury on contract law just doing blanket enforcement of that on their own. The police might have to enforce a court order sometime later.

This is, to me, more like your neighbor ripping down your derogatory sign about them because he doesn't like what it says, and the neighbor happens to also be your boss and landlord.

Why do you think police enforce "contact law" I.e. civil law?