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.
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?