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...
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.’