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!
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.
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.
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.
Here, the same people who wanted the government to toe the line when it comes to foreign terrorist threats are cheering on the FBI to turn those weapons inwards towards American citizens with disfavored political views.
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.
Comparing Twitter getting reports about ToS violations from FBI via email instead of from users via the report button isn’t in the same galaxy.
I am struggling to think of a more bad faith argument than comparing this to the Patriot act.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NYT has published data about the growth of CSAM due to tech companies. [2]
Would you engage with the point of my comment if I called the domestic terrorism cubic growth, and the CSAM growth exponential? If not, let me know which math library you're compiling my HN comments with and I can make sure my writing passes the lexer.
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
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?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-fbi-agents-pushed-to-f...
"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.
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
The citizens of a democracy who have full political rights and whose government is not allowed to do anything at all without our approval.
Really? I thought you were restricted to voting for your representatives?
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.