Scorpion, frog, etc.
If we had stood up to them in 2013, drew a line in the sand and said "No, a bunch of poorly edited snuff films aren't going to cause a bunch of American teens to join an Islamic revolution" these relationships wouldn't exist.
By the way, we are currently trying to ban TikTok because of similar concerns about it rotting teens brains. Before we start frothing at the mouth in rage at some problematic app let's do a thought experiment and consider the future blowback from taking such extreme action.
What if anything the government should do to prevent such recruitment is a matter of debate, but you shouldn't pretend such recruitment didn't happen.
At no meaningful scale. If some dumbass wants to throw their life away in a foreign country we obviously should use all legal means to discourage that but part of being a liberal democracy means you do in fact have to give people enough freedom (rope) to hang themselves.
No one knows what is gonna be credible, but damned if you do and damned if you don’t
There’s probably hundreds of new things at this very second and probably none of them are going to result in anything
The government has been involved with the data broker industry since well before the dotcom era. That is the underpinning of all current day surveillance capitalism. It's an intelligence resource they will never overlook.
I remember thinking earlier, it's kind of odd that teenagers "running off to join ISIS" was a widespread problem. In hindsight the shills probably blew that whole thing out of proportion to justify more agency scope creep
I.e. claiming no laws were violated (hypothetically) is as much a defense of Twitter as claiming TikTok hasn't broken Chinese law.
Sometimes this is asking that system to print a PSA. Sometimes this is asking that system to maintain propaganda accounts.
This definitely exists, and I'm not sure why people think it wouldn't.
We can complain, but the real remedy is to put laws in place if this is something we really care about.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's since been expanded through court cases to extend from congress to every government entity including local ones.
The government is constitutionally forbidden from meddling with the press, even through private entities via the 14th amendment. The FBI and CIA meddled with twitter. The particulars aren't relevant. They're expressly forbidden from doing what they did.
https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...:
> Overall, Twitter withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 51% of global legal demands, down 5% from the previous reporting period.
It is pretty clear that these are Hatch Act violations which is about preventing your tax dollars being put to use as a part of partisan political campaigns, which is what happened.
Civilian "unempowered" agencies fall under the Less Restricted Hatch Act category, and certain Agencies like the IC, fall under a more stringent part of this, the Further Restricted category, see [1]
Some of these IC members in the Further Restricted Category were prompting BigTech censorship, or, running defense for the "Laptop from Hell" story, similar to some of the things they did back in the 60s when they were involved with unlawful activities regarding Civil Rights and Civil Liberties campaigns.
I'd argue in favor of:
(1) Strengthening the Hatch Act
(2) Handling Constitutional violations by the IC under the Hatch Act
(3) Prosecutions of the Hatch Act under existing Law
(4) Clearance revocations
(5) Removal of Section 230 protections for BigTech when acting as an agent of govt censorship
(6) Budget cuts / Budget reformations for some select Federal Agencies, FBI being foremost
(7) Forced retirement / exit from federal service of those involved in these behaviors.
(8) Debarring of contractors involved in some of these heinious activities
(9) Strengthening Federal Acquisition Regulation
(10) Diffusion of Federal Agencies HQs throughout the United States to prevent centralization in overly partisan areas
(11) Applying Diversity & Inclusion to political parties and other important characteristics of job seekers
(12) Adding restrictions or longer "Cooling Off Periods" for the revolving doors between IC, Congress, BigTech, Lobbyists, and the Consultant Class.
Truly a sad sight from those looking hopeful after the occupy movement and all the anti surveillance sentiment post-leaks.
The modern left has become the neo-conservatives.
Also, the “Woke” psyop used to destroy Occupy Wall St has now destroyed corporate America with ESG and Woke media scandals. As usual, the CIA and friends are bad at managing blowback.
> the bush jr wars
Agree with this; there really are threats out there, and the manipulation techniques they use are sophisticated.
The problem I have was that the system was developed in secret, didn't really seem to be guarded very carefully from misuse, and was administered by highly politicized leadership at Twitter.
All the while the government was running their own fake bot propaganda accounts and having Twitter white-list them against their bot filters.
That is not “protecting Democracy from foreign interference”, it’s literally the opposite, a government agency convincing private companies to suppress information they knew to be true, leading to a less informed electorate.
If the FBI had done exactly the same thing but it was Trump’s drug addict son’s laptop, it’s likely that all the “nothing to see here” people here would have been screaming for FBI heads to roll (figuratively) for the last two years.
The bottom line is that our bureaucracies are not supposed to act in a partisan fashion, and they did.
Sure, Twitter’s new management is changing who is being censored and tossing out juicy bits of dirt, and the set of owners after this will presumably do the same. Waving jazz hands and saying influence doesn’t move these discussions forward.
Twitter went even further and prevented people from exchanging the story with each other in DMs.
I honestly don't see how you could be comfortable with this, unless you're willing to disregard their actions because they happen to protect the party you agree with at the moment; or because you're presuming that the FBI would never use this relationship to operate in bad faith.
Twitter didn't go to the FBI to ask for verification, the FBI on their own accord decided to take their "intelligence" to Twitter for action that they desired. This is obviously backwards.
If Twitter wants to call up the FBI for verification or for information on a particular subject, tweet, or account because they wanted to investigate.. that would obviously be fine. That is clearly not what is happening here.
(It was the Trump government FBI, by the way. In case your timeline is a bit mixed up?)
It's mindbending that a topical, polite comment like that would be flagged/dead when the rest of the thread is (perfectly alive) literal vitriol, but pointed in the other direction.
And just for anyone questioning the factuality of the original comment, here's NPR on the topic: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerg...
I guess we've reached the self-reinforcing point in the evolution of the censorship regime where evidence of censorship is itself censored. Never thought I'd see the day.
Funny, I’d say it was people that can’t seem to cite any evidence without dick pics that are “muddying the waters”.
I’ve read these twitter files posts from Taibbi and Weiss. It’s all insinuations based on contact between government agencies and twitter. The actual content being discussed is not interesting.
The biggest red flag this is all raising for me is why FBI agents are sitting around searching for small time election misinformation like talking about voting a day late. Is there nothing higher priority to work on? And how has twitter not automated finding such basic misinformation?
Citation needed. Even Wikipedia lists it as an abandoned laptop that was trawled for data. Trash as far as I know is legitimate object of search (e.g. police does it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
I don't know man, you could have just googled that yourself.
Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.
Yes, he left his images on laptop. That's not revenge porn, as far as I know.
> The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files
Don't quote me on that, but from my memory not only were links to Hunter deleted, but so were discussions of it from even reputable journalist. I think it was a Washington Post that discussed Hunter's laptop, and it got buried or deleted.
That's only Part 1.
They also marked Trump tweets as fake, even though they found some exonerating information and vice versa.
Plus the weekly meetings with FBI/OGA (alias for CIA), around misinformation spreading tweets, etc.
You basically have a government agency labeling stuff as misinformation for deranking/deletion. If that doesn't raise any First Amendment issues, I'm not sure what will? Capturing journalist and keeping them in horrible conditions? Water torture and organ transfer of said journalists?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
That's a very strange definition of revenge porn. It was made inadvertently by Hunter Biden, it wasn't used for blackmail and it is related to a bulk of other interesting email.
Definition of revenge porn from a quick googling is:
>Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent
This fits the description 100%.
"revenge porn - noun - revealing or sexually explicit images or videos of a person posted on the internet, typically by a former sexual partner, without the consent of the subject and in order to cause them distress or embarrassment."
It's not a question of who took the photos. It's a question of whether the people sharing them had the permission of the subject to share them.
While Blackmail may be a component of some revenge porn, it's not required by this or other definitions.
By point is, having naked pictures on your laptop don't make docs and other stuff found as revenge porn.
The Biden campaign in 2020(they were not in power, Trump admin was) sent a list of tweets to Twitter asking them to take a look alleging that they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. Twitter took down those tweets. Matt Taibibi implied this was government/Twitter censorship, and the right wing went ape shit over it. People found the archived versions of those tweets, mainly from politician Republican influencers, and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis. Nothing to do with his business dealings or emails on his laptop that were leaked.
The Republican operatives who privately received the leaked laptop contents didn't even blur the private parts. Are they revenge porn? Arguably. Was this an example of government censorship, or censorship of political discourse? No. The Trump Whitehouse was also reporting problematic tweets to Twitter contacts for potential violation of Twitter terms. Nobody is claiming the Biden laptop business dealings, emails etc. were revenge porn.
You're misrepresenting the story.
One big omission is this:
> On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
> Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831212310601728 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831435288563712
> and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis
It wasn't. https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... Find me a picture of penis in this news or prove that mtaibbi had somehow distorted this.
They treated a legitimate news, that was obtained by gray means as a child porn and de-ranked it.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
This shows that they were pornography:
https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598832424754073601
Yet Matt Taibbi used those to spread baseless propaganda without giving the context behind the removal of those tweets. That clouds the rest of the claims too. Matt isn't interested in the truth. He's being a political hack serving partisan interests.
And even he was forced to concede that he couldn't find anything from the govt about the laptop.
Figures like Rudy Giuliani had direct and personal access to the laptop and yet what bombshell evidence do we have today?
This story is so damning that the tweets people on the right keep spreading are literally just revenge porn.
Some “real story”.
Thats the only actually serious thing uncovered by the laptop
OK, that's the takeaway that Taibbi and Musk wants us to absorb. But... can you link to the actual spot in the (sigh) "Twitter Files" that actually shows this? Because like the grandparent poster did and reported, I looked for it. And it's not there.
There's a bunch of mid-level bland communication that if you squint might be understood as a bunch of underlings carrying out orders in pursuit of that. Or it might just be a bunch of folks trying in good faith not to push a suspect story at a sensitive time.
There is absolutely no evidence of the kind of conspiracy you allege here. It's just not there. Which given the sourcing (the CEO is directing the investigation!) means it probably doesn't exist within Twitter. It's just not there. Where's the meat here?
The idea that that government is "managing" that liberty is Constitutionally murky. The "private property" fig leaf is scant comfort.
So because the government does something (THANK GOD), we all need to advocate for more government?
...the specific Col. Jessup instance that breaks down and calls away a Code Red.
Our Civil Servants are neither civil nor (apparently) serving any but themselves.
How to avoid becoming a cure worse than the disease?
One thing would be to rotate these staffers more frequently, so they are less prone to what looks like GroupThink.
I stopped after the first one. If there’s any meat to be found then the last vestiges of respectable right-wing media will amplify it. Until the WSJ posts anything more than “This Is Sort Of Bad! But We Already Reported It In Full Last Year!” then there’s no point subjecting yourself to it.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Mind you, I felt the same way about the NYT and WaPo.
WSJ editorials were loony-toons wacky even before Rupert Murdoch bought it.
The impact wasn’t just for a few hours and the final acknowledgement of validity of those files came long after the election.
This is textbook gaslighting.0
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-yo...
Simply repeating things is a propaganda and brainwashing technique.
From a system perspective it looks like the US Gov had elevated access to ban people, and had opportunity and reason to misuse it.
The initial rationale for the US Gov already admits this as a legit reason to ban foreign agents - "undue power/misleading influence". I hold that same view, but also consider that malicious elements in the US Government are also something to worry about, so I'd like their own power to shape the discussion to be limited and tracked, too.
If a tweet didn't violate Twitter's terms, it's been shown the Twitter team wouldn't remove that tweet despite being flagged by the govt
I'm much more worried about the current state of affairs where a single deranged person (Elon) can arbitrarily issue bans on a whim.
I have no agenda or allegiances.
I tried reading them closely. I see some new stuff that is of mild concern given our post-Snowden world, but I am also not able to see the great outrage.
I've seen a lot of hyperbole about the twitter files that, when I read it for myself, is not nearly what was claimed by the hyperbolist. For example, someone said "The FBI bribed Twitter with $3.4M to remove content!" - I looked into it, and the FBI compensated Twitter for work done over time to research and then take action on suspicious accounts. Now, that may be shady to work with the FBI on takedowns without a warrant or court order. But do I call that a bribe? Not really.
I am open to discussing what is wrong and suspicious in the files, but there is quite a correlation between "people raising hell about the Twitter files" and "people who have no problem with hate speech or adversary nation-state propaganda on social networks".
For example, I believe that actions taken by social networks (or any organization ever) on behalf of the government should be documented and released to the public after some period of time, even on the order of years. If the government believes a twitter account, facebook account or email address is a threat to national security, it should be documented. If the account is not a singular "threat" but is known to the IC to be a nation-state troll, that should be documented as the reason. I'm not convinced it should happen over email.
That said, I acknowledge that nation-state trolling and disinformation campaigns absolutely exist on Twitter and elsewhere, and need dealt with.
If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.
Could anything be done to reduce the ability of a large organization to extort an online platform into censoring content that complies with their guidelines? Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?
I've seen this hypothetical raised a lot but I don't find it very compelling. If the post isn't in violation of twitter's TOS then twitter has strong legal protections to deny the request and both sides understand this. Without evidence that the FBI actually pressured twitter to take down non-violating content after it was deemed ok, I don't see the issue.
"Joseph P. Nacchio (born June 22, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American executive... Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.[1]
He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.[3] This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion,[4] which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible.[5] " [0]
>I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.
This is nonsense. In your example the court said "nope" to the defendant trying to push a conspiracy theory which could not possibly have exonerated him.
Here's a decent read on the Nacchio case without weird conspiracy theory bullshit https://truthonthemarket.com/2008/03/31/some-thoughts-on-the...
The uncertainty of the sentence aside we can zoom out and see that asking to follow legal processes that every single one of those companies should be following in the first place can very well cause retaliation from the NSA, so all else aside invoking legal protections sure does seem to be bad for companies.
From the court decision which you didn't bother to read:
>Even if the classified information were presented and established what he said it would, it could not exonerate Mr. Nacchio as he claims. Essentially, Mr. Nacchio argued that undisclosed positive information can be used as a defense to a charge of trading on undisclosed negative information. We disagree. … If an insider trades on the basis of his perception of the net effect of two bits of material undisclosed information, he has violated the law in two respects, not none.
If the FBI contacts "Twitter" then they're not talking to any one individual, in fact there's no requirement that be the same person at all.
So Twitter cannot be threatened or threatened with implied threats - it's a limited liability corporation, there's no individual who can be overly inconvenienced or have any emotional reaction to the request.
And importantly, if the individuals using the platform are (hypothetically) being silenced by government agencies levelling threats against the company unless it complies, this could be seen as tantamount to censorship.
Twitter doesn't have that. The employee handling the request doesn't own Twitter. If something happens to Twitter it doesn't happen to them except in a very abstract way (and the person who did fire them was Elon Musk in the end).
Governments absolutely have a means to intimidate contact owners: it's subpoenaing them to testify before Congress. Not emailing a mid-level content moderation supervisor who has no way to directly talk to the board of executives or shareholders.
At the corporate level its also threatening because of the actions the govt could take against the corporation. Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.
You have to be naive and only see the happy path and think the govt always has your best interests in mind to think otherwise.
Can you point to examples of this? I hope you’re not referring to things like the earlier investigation of Tesla’s FSD claims when that’s been underway for years and so widely predicted.
Corporations are not people: you can't "tell" a corporation to do something, because the people who make it up are a mercurial, constantly varying group. Even if the owners know something, the employees don't: training materials have to be updated, policies modified etc. You can't "imply" a threat to a corporation, because how do you "imply" the threat to all the people who have to actually implement the desired action? How do you replace staff who are not in on "the implication"? You can't: somewhere and somehow you would have to have internal emails, training and onboarding materials.
This is possible but I would expect people to look for evidence of it before presenting it as a fact. Something like that would show up in internal communications either directly or as people talking like they didn’t really have a choice, or as a trend of tweets being taken down for reasons which don’t seem warranted when you look at them. The closest we’ve seen to that were things like the guy who was telling Republicans to vote on Wednesday, which is clearly a dumb joke but also something most people aren’t going to shed tears about when made a couple days beforehand.
No govt agency can do anything for which it isn’t explicitly authorized.
The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies.
If a agent is being paid — with taxpayer dollars - to check on Twitter and give it ‘advice’ on how to run itself, that agent is acting outside the scope of his authority.
It’s an abuse and misuse of power.
It doesn’t matter what the ‘greater good’ is. The FBI’s purpose isn’t to generally look out for the greater good. Rather, it’s to investigate federal crimes. There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’
The Federal Statutes grant specific authority to the FBI. The burden is in the FBI to point to a specific grant of statutory authority to justify any particular action. What federal statute gives the FBI (or any agency) the right to advise, suggest, or even comment on a particular company’s policies? What statute gives the FBI the power to ‘suggest’ certain accounts be blocked?
For example, the Twitter Files had a lot of stuff under election misinformation. Since that’s an entire mission, you can argue about effectiveness but it’s not like it’s a stretch:
https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...
If Elon Musk’s Twitter refuses to help and as a result people die, I want Elon Musk held responsible.
It seems like Twitter was more or less happy to oblige.
I don't see what the hubbub is about.
What’s telling is that Musk’s people can’t find anything like that. If this was happening you’d think there’d be at least one example where someone is saying they have to yank something even though it’s not in violation of the rules. Instead, what we see is bending over backwards to keep people like Trump or Raichik from having the rules applied to them, with no mention of government pressure to yank them.
More importantly, however, as I explained you’d see the presence of that policy even if they managed to keep the conspiracy perfectly. There’d have been cases where something didn’t meet the rules for being banned but someone overruled them to do it anyway, unexplained policy changes following a private meeting, someone setting out hard lines for the moderators, etc. Twitter had a ton of people doing moderation and there’s no way you get that many people to work on a daily basis without stated policies or someone accidentally saying something they knew, or that not a single one of them wouldn’t have gone public or talked to Musk.
Government officials — at the federal level - have extremely well-defined scopes of authority. They have no general power to do things. If they exceed the scope, they are abusing the power given to them. A govt agency has no authority outside the scope of its enacting statute. That I what I meant by limited. It’s not a ‘made up’ concept. If an agent engages in ANY action outside its authority, it is exceeding its limited authority and acting outside the law. It as an abuse as the agent (or agency as a whole) is doing something ‘under color of law’ that Congress did not permit.
At the local level, there is a concept of ‘general’ police power where the limits of what your local deputy, for instance, can do is a bit more nebulous. But, not at the federal level.
This is not their goal. It is part of their method.
The Department of Justice would disagree with you:
“Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign” [1]
Some guy tweeted in 2016 encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to ‘Vote from Home’ by sending an SMS to a certain number. For this and other tweets, he was charged with violating 18 USC 241, which prohibits “conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, [..] any person [..] in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States”, where the right in question was the right to vote. With the justice system being as slow as it is, the indictment only happened in 2021 and the case is still pending at the district court level. [2]
His lawyers argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment; this is a novel legal question with no Supreme Court precedent on point. [3]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charg...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59249282/united-states-...
[3] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/douglass-ma...
And everytime I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.
Indeed - from the perspective of civil liberties there are many issues which seem more pressing.
It seems internal employee activism played a large role. That’s not good.
While Twitter has a right as a private company to moderate based on internal popularity, it doesn’t build confidence.
It seemed the professional moderators were saying “Trump is pushing the limits, but not crossing them” - the other employees were lobbying to get him banned.
And they won.
The message is, if you want to run for office on a controversial platform, make sure you have supporters among the rank and file at Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc, The parts about the FBI are less concerning.
Good content moderation creates a firewall between (say) the software development team and the moderation team. While Twitter had such a wall, it didn’t withstand pressure.
Trump tried to destroy our democracy. I’m not being hyperbolic. The evidence is all there and all from Trump’s mouth.
[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/11/problemat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
Germany has laws against incitement.
> 2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.
https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/vermischtes/article231416...
He is still trying; that fact hangs over these conversations like Damocles' sword.
The Taliban destroyed a democracy. They have Twitter accounts.
The leader of Egypt destroyed a democracy. He has a Twitter account.
The leaders of Myanmar don’t seem to have Twitter accounts, but they outlawed Twitter.
I doubt these people have supporters inside Twitter, but I doubt there’s any Resistance either.
I also think it’s interesting how many people I know who “protested” things like COINTELPRO, but cheer this.
That's not the world we live in. If you reply with "Blow me", the FBI will do nothing.
Senator Markey: “Fix your companies or Congress will.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/senator-ed-markey-tell...
If the Congress wants to force companies work with the FBI, they have the absolute power to do so.
I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof.
There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike and know what to do without specific instructions. The FBI acts as the primary point of contact from the letter agencies, as per the title if the article we are discussing. The Beltway revolving door takes care of the rest of the interactions, including providing experts to the media, so the rest of the Beltway can just listen and act.
[0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/HSAC%20Disin... [pdf]
Please make up your mind!
The IRS however might just suddenly out of nowhere complete coincidence want to crawl into all your accounts, and financial records and tax filings.
they aren't exactly quiet about it.
> Private sector partnerships: The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combating foreign influence actors.
Sounds like "hey, review it and find any half-assed reason to ban it according to your TOS" to me.
Loose and wide reaching TOS makes it hard for bad actors to get around it, but it also makes it easy for moderators to remove anything they don't want while hiding behind TOS
> Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?
All moderation should be, and with exact violation breached, not generic "it broke something in our TOS", else there is zero accountability. I'd also say that unless it is outright illegal or abhorrent the original should also be viewable so there can be no doubt the moderation is legit. People will save the spicy tweets to archive or screenshot it anyway so there is no real point completely hiding it.
While this is true, it is not necessary for twitter to resist requests from the government in order for this kind of contact to be effective state censorship. Twitter has seemed to be eager to do whatever the government says. Why wouldn't they be? It's a favor that the government owes them now, and additionally, they were charging the government for their time. It's a completely profitable interaction. With media consolidation, there are only a few dozen people who ultimately own all western media, and they got that way through good relationships with governments.
The real troubling question is why the FBI has a department of 80 people combing through tweets and tweeting in order to push or suppress policy. Thinking of Twitter as the victim entirely misses the point.
Anyway it’s interesting we are having this debate TODAY when after 9/11 and a decade later the adroit use of social media by ISIL the alphabet agencies were crawling all over the internet. Pandora’s box was opened years ago.
https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michiga...
I doubt people would make FBI change for the better.
Suspicions of people paying cash at flight schools and not seeming to want an airline career was reported to FBI several times before 9/11. FBI filed it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-was-warned-about-flight-sch...
It really all comes down to this- it's largely a matter of personal comfort/risk tolerance. Personally, I'd be happy to see entire agencies wiped out, the CIA and the NSA obliterated, the FBI cut back to where it was in the 60s or so, preferably focused on mob/cartel activity and the like. The CIA should never have been separated out from the military and given so much free reign. From my point of view, the CIA's history is just a series of catastrophic mistakes. There's arguments to made on both sides, but no objectively clear right or wrong choice.
Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress
How many massacres are necessary before people take things like that a bit more seriously? Is it until somebody they know gets murdered?
Commenter said “parody accounts”, what specifically that refers to is ambiguous, so I considered the class of accounts that may be considered parody by some.
When this last happened in the 1960s and 70s, when it was the left that was anti establishment, and didn’t want the Vietnam war, or didn’t want Christian orthodoxy imposed on society, the left was obsessed with free speech and being anti government organisations.
Suddenly no one can think beyond their own party and as long as these organizations interfering with speech are on their side, it’s fine.
People really need to think longer term. It only takes one very determined president or one sided congress and senate to completely change these organisations.
Asking too much.
In the past couple months, HN users went from “it’s a private company they can do what they want” when Twitter was a public company working with the FBI to enact specific user censorship…
to “OMG Elon banned a handful of journalists, freeze peach was a lie!” when it was a suspension for 12 hours.
Where are all those “it’s a private company they can do what they like” folks now? I haven’t seen that posted recently.
Also, what exactly is the rule you want in place re: banning by social media platforms? Do you have a principle behind your positions that you can articulate?
They were picking a winner and you know it.
Also, you didn't answer the question about principles. I'm still interested in that. I believe I have a rule about social media moderation that I've applied consistently across a wide variety of circumstances. Can you say the same?
Those people were responding to arguments that social media platforms banning people, moderating content or even presenting content under an algorithmic feed were violations of the First Amendment, Section 230 and freedom of speech, by pointing out that all of these actions are allowed by the aforementioned principles and laws.
And notwithstanding that Twitter banning journalists (even for just 12 hours) is a much more serious deal in terms of freedom of speech implications than banning some shitposting Nazis, no one complaining about that is actually claiming that Elon doesn't have the right to do what he's doing, nor are they calling for the government to make it illegal - they're just calling him a hypocrite and an asshole.
This really isn't the dunk you and the countless others who keep bringing it up is, it just demonstrates that the "free speech absolutist" crowd were never arguing in good faith to begin with, because none of them ever bothered to actually listen to or engage with the arguments being made.
I don’t see how suspending a few journalists for 12 hours and being directly able to point to their existing TOS is the same thing.
The bans weren’t 12 hours. They were eventually announced as week-long ones; Musk backed down after backlash and his public poll resulted in a “unban now” vote.
We have every right to point out he promised not to do such things, and that it calls his supposed dedication to free speech into question.
Compared to previously a national media outlet was actually banned for weeks for reporting a completely true story that the US Intelligence bureaucracy decided was in inconvenient to their desired results of an upcoming election.
Fsely equating this isn’t subtle and I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith. Ideologues everywhere.
Come on.
I think to a lot of people it was banged on so hard about the 'free speech absolutist' that he was, until it was suddenly legal speech he didn't like then he cast those people out as fast as he could.
Now if you're those things, you're a "radical right-wing person".
Amazing how when the shoe is on the other foot the victim becomes the oppressor?
You don't?
There is nothing special about Twitter as a private business when it comes to acceptable level of government interference. Police agencies are responsible for investigating crimes. That's their remit. They aren't allowed to compel a private individual/business to provide any evidence without a court order. Of course you can always cooperate (and Twitter looks like they were), but any lawyer worth their salt would tell you not to.
But let's tweak the scenario a bit - if the cops were coming to your local bar every day or two, asking about various patrons, maybe suggesting "hey next time maybe you shouldn't let that person in", you think there isn't a problem?
The FBI has a broader official remit than “investigating crimes”.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a national security and law enforcement agency that uses, collects, and shares intelligence in all it does.” https://www.justice.gov/doj/organization-mission-and-functio...
“The FBI is an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national security organization with both intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities. It is the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice and a full member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbi
Or do you see a distinction between “law enforcement” and “intelligence agency” when it comes to asking a private business to ban certain customers?
I see no distinction. Both operate with the all the powers vested by the government.
They have no business doing it.
Collects and shares intelligence, intelligence assessments, and recommendations on mitigating threats indicated by that intelligence with other domestic and friendly government and private sector entities, yes.
That's all very much part of the FBI’s overt, primary, national security role.
Is there potential for confusion that needs careful clarity, especially when communicating with legally unsophisticated parties, when government agency has both advisory/supportive roles and enforcement roles, to avoid confusion about which role it is acting in? Sure.
Is Twitter the kind of unsophisticated entity where this concern is strongest? No. Is there any evidence that the FBI communication blurred the context of communication with Twitter such that there is nevertheless a legitimate concern that they were, explicitly or even implicitly, coercive despite Twitter not being unsophisticated? Not that I’ve seen. Is there, coercion aside, evidence that the FBI was intentionally decieiving Twitter with reports, so as to lead Twitter into actions it would not take but for a misleading perception deliberately created by the FBI? Not, again, that I have seen.
Let me bring it back on topic.
Are you ok with a US law enforcement/intelligence service asking a social media company to silence certain users? To squash stories reported by the media they know are factual?
I mean if you are, that's ok. Just be upfront about it and not try and hide behind a long paragraph that talks about other thing that aren't relevant.
the worst thing about this particular thread seems like the govt agencies talking to Twitter about foreign influence are overreaching a bit (eg asking them to look at Russian oligarchs’ troll farms for promoting anti-Ukrainian spam).
but I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaigns, etc.