The wildest part of the Twitter files is the unhinged framing that they are presented under.
1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
3. The people in the company discuss internal matters and are sometimes critical of potential decisions. But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
I could go for hours listing these.
Most quote tweets are people thinking this confirms a suspected malicious intent from twitter and that they intentionally dramatically shifted the outcomes while colluding with one side.
If anything, this confirms that Twitter acted (outside of a couple isolated occurences) in a way tamer way than I ever imagined them acting while handling the issues at hand.
That's all well and good, and I am not a fan of Elon's latest moves toward Twitter (banning some journalists and sources of freely available information on other platforms), but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. That's a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. This is a story because the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. There is no "framing" in that, the FBI has overstepped its bounds, forget Twitter and Elon Musk.
I've seen people here say, "this is normal" and "the FBI is making no threats, so no big deal." That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding. I've seen other comments "it didn't happen that often, only once a week," it should have never happened at all. Unless there is something that is a threat to an investigation, jury identity, literally against federal law, etc...the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. I'm baffled it has any sort of support.
Nothing posted on some companies website is governed by free speech or the USA’s 1st amendment. The Terms Of Service apply and typically a user has agreed to those by simply participating on the site. This includes account bans, blocking content, etc. the company can do whatever it pleases, if it benefits them to listen to a gov’t agency request then they might do it.
Its comical that people believe Musk is promoting free speech or anything of the sort. Most of everything he does online is antics to draw attention in some way that benefits him, go look at the SEC for details around that with Musk.
I would make a bet one of his next options is to saddle Twitter with more debt as it approaches bankruptcy. Or give insider info to his investors ahead of his next Tesla sell-off so they can recoup their losses with Twitter.
I never said Twitter was protected by the 1st Amendment, that specifically is about government. I said once government (which is limited by the 1st) intervenes to try to get a company to stop free speech, that's an affront to the 1st Amendment. It's coercion. Do you really think governments don't try to kill speech and ideas through coercion? Do you really see no problem with that?
I have no idea why people like yourself try to twist the argument. Also, there is a thing like "principles" which aren't encoded into law but are encoded into society and makes it work quite well, which includes free speech. So, I can believe a platform should have the maximum amount of free speech possible...and that is not the same as saying it has or needs 1st Amendment protections.
For the amount of backlash HN gives to private companies for harvesting private data and handing it over to government...there are SUPRISING amounts of people here defending the government in coercing on this. Baffling.
Your base argument is asserting that user contributed content on websites is governed by free speech, its not. I’m not for or against anything, just pointing out that the base of thinking user contributed content is somehow governed by 1st amendment is wrong. Does the US 1st amendment apply to people from other countries?
I'm quite suspicious of the large amount of anti Elon propaganda going around. Especially on this platform where comments are usually more measured. It just looks different to normal and it has my Spidey senses tingling.
I am a former Tesla fan and remain a SpaceX fan. I hold Tesla stock and I would buy SpaceX stock in a hot minute if I could. And I credit Musk in no small part with making both companies what they are today, the good and the bad, although not nearly as much as Musk credits Musk.
And yet with all of that, I still think he's gone off the deep end. I've voted against him as CEO in the past several shareholders' votes. Defending his recent actions and attitudes at this point is an increasingly untenable position.
If you want to stand in his corner, I suppose that's your choice, but being critical of him is the far more defensible position. Claiming that those who do are all sock puppets is frankly disingenuous.
Just responding to one part of this, if that's cool.
I think what the comment above is saying is that it's not about whether or not speech on Twitter is protected. It's that the government isn't supposed to act to restrict speech in any manner that doesn't cross the lines he listed.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was a big court case because Trump was hiding critical responses to his tweets on Twitter. The judge ruled that Trump violated the 1st amendment even though Twitter is a private company ("private property"?).
This is because the 1st amendment not only protects speech, it restricts government attempts to control speech (or at least that's the argument that would be made).
The base of those thoughts is that user contributed content is somehow an expression of free speech. Is it? what if it the user contributed content is from someone from another nation? what if its a bot/ChatGPT generated content? I think there are arguments that user content online can’t be universally treated as protected by one countries laws. IANAL so I could be wrong.
But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS? That sounds as tame as it could possibly be. The same option is open to me as an ordinary user.
What bothers me most about the FBI's behaviour here is that it is unnecessary. Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?
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.
Social media products have been critical to the exponential growth of domestic terrorism and CSAM. So I definitely want the FBI being proactive on these platforms and to have a much, much, bigger team than 80. It should be 80 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.
This is the same type of reasoning that gave us the Patriot Act/Homeland security etc., though. I'm sure there is some truth to it, I just hope people push back against giving the FBI, or whatever agency arises, free reign. Tilting in favor of extreme safety measures sounds pretty bad to me, but I guess this is largely a matter of personal risk tolerance.
Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this thread had anything to do with terrorism, but that fear is still guiding many people's responses.
I’m not talking about the overall scope of the program. Obviously the Patriot Act is much broader. I’m talking about the double standard of those supporting the FBI. The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam. The same people justifying Twitter working with the FBI to respond to supposed “radicalization” and “domestic terrorism” were against the FBI when the target was foreign terrorists.
I don’t support or cheer on the FBI but I also don’t care at all about them sending these emails.
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.
> The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam
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.
> 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.
Which disclosure was that, specifically? 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, but their coreligionists shouldn’t be assumed to share their beliefs. In the United States the most common religion is Christianity so we have lots of people making various hate crimes using language derived from that tradition or expressing fears about Islamic immigrants seen as dangerous outsiders, so I’m only talking about risks to the country where the FBI is focused. The Mossad no doubt has a different perspective.
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.
> The Twitter internal discussions we are talking about.
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.
> Because at least that was directed at a foreign terrorist threat that
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.
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.
Your concern for CSAM would be more meaningful to me if I wasn't aware that one FBI whistleblower said he was pulled off his very successful sex trafficking cases because January 6 witch hunting was a higher priority to the FBI: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/child-sex-abuse-cases-no...
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?
"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.
I think using social media to gather intel is entirely reasonable. Given the number of people who have committed mass shootings and other acts of domestic terrorism after being radicalized online, they would be negligent to not be proactively looking at the internet.
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.
> Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
What do think the FBI does? They monitor threats. Just following media (social and traditional) is pretty mandatory first step in collecting intel. A lot of Jan 6 insurrections were organizing on digital platforms. Foreign adversaries are using it too.
They do both, with considerable other effort in the federal government on infrastructure protection as well as election integrity. You might not hear about it as much because there isn’t a big lobby opposed to infosec but it’s definitely there.
I think it’s clear, by implication, that this is where a lot of the expunged headcount at Twitter spent their time: policing accounts, according to both internal and external machinations.
Prioritisation of requests. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter wasn't already prioritising standard requests too. If you get at the same time 1 request each: from FBI, from someone with multiple actioned past reports, and from an account created 10 sec ago, it makes complete business and community safety sense to handle them in a specific order. (But not with different rules)
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.
Even if that's all they are doing, it is too much. The FBI is not the enforcement arm for Twitter's TOS. Their job is to investigate and prosecute crimes. If the FBI is attempting, in any way, to remove legal speech it doesn't like (even if the removal process is itself also completely legal) that is overstepping its authority as a government law enforcement agency.
> But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS?
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!
What more transparency do you want? Their right to request moderation actions and Twitter’s right to refuse those requests is extremely well documented in court cases. You want a published list of every request FBI made? So that way FBI can become the primary curator of information that FBI doesn’t like?
Amazing, a government agency paid by the taxpayers, voluntary combing through twitter and report users that violate twitter's TOS. Is FBI doing pro-bono work for other companies as well?
"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."
How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?
How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?
In our system, law including the Constitution is interpreted by the judiciary. You could as well ask "where is the Miranda warning in the Bill of Rights?"
The actual precedents around "jawboning" are murky and contradictory, but it's well-established that the government can step over the line in violating constitutionally protected rights via informal coercion.
In that case, Republican politicians publicly complaining about social media moderation in threatening terms would be far more problematic than the FBI notifying Twitter of tweets that are in violation of their TOS. Yet I don't remember the "Free Speech" proponents doing anything but applauding these types of "informal coercion."
It's actually not equivalent - we're seeing a lot of accuasations here that the FBI "coerced" Twitter or that the FBI requests were "partisan" - there's actually no evidence in these files for these claims. On the other hand, there's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians were trying to coerce Twitter to accomplish explicitly partisan aims. Yet here we are.
Oh, you mean the doctrine that is openly vilified by the "originalist" majority of the US Supreme Court? Not that consistency is their strong point or anything, but maybe that's not the authoritative answer you thought it was.
FWIW, to appease the cowardly-downvote brigade, I personally believe the concept of a penumbra is valid and important. But the world doesn't always bend to my will. Merely invoking the concept without considering current context is weak because it won't convince anyone of anything. If you want to make an argument based on that, you'll have to put in a bit more effort than just pasting a link.
Clearly if you read the context, that emmelaich's invocation of the "penumbra" doctrine to suggest that the first amendment covers Twitter's actions is weak. It does not, even when there's a connection to reports from a government agency. There are other arguments for why Twitter's actions were wrong, perhaps even that it's a first-amendment issue, but that one just doesn't work in the context of how the constitution is currently being interpreted. The one-line slam dunk is really anything but.
Also, please read the guidelines about low-effort comments.
Actually, I just thought it was a useful concept for anyone arguing about the literal meaning of the constitution. Wasn't especially arguing for either side.
Though having the FBI and Twitter policy people being in such close communication must be eyebrow raising at least. And it a little bizarre honestly.
Literally not true. They can simply decline and if the Govt wants to come after them they can sue each other and in cases where it’s legal content then Twitter will win. This is extremely well established and not even remotely weird or some dark unexplored corner of Constitutional law.
Disagree with the established precedent if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend picking a different battleground than whatever this Twitter Files fiasco is. This stuff isn’t even on the questionable end of the spectrum.
You're right, this isn't unexplored. The ACLU says this specific example is unconstitutional. There's also been legal cases about this in the past. It's illegal for the government to do this.
"They could sue if they don't want to do it" does not make the request legal.
What's shocking is that people's perceptions of what's legal have changed so dramatically in just a few years. I can't imagine anyone making these arguments in 2005. It seems some powerful interests have been able to successfully co-opt SV companies and change the entire public conversation about what the First Amendment means. I would like to know a lot more about what's going on here. I don't think the same tired arguments about "disinformation" and "social harmony" that have been trotted out for centuries against free speech have suddenly gained all this credence by accident.
Not clear what you mean by “this specific example” given that your linked article is about DHS’s defunct Disinformation board and AFAIK this board never even became operational (and in any case hasn’t been mentioned in Twitter Files).
It seems to me rather that all these folks shocked to hear this stuff just haven’t been paying attention to either their high school civics course or to current events of the last 20 years.
You actually think the FBI doesn’t report content? Obviously they do.
You don’t think the FBI gets a privileged reporting line over newuser1848391? Obviously they do.
You don’t think Twitter regularly gets content moderation requests, from governments or elsewhere, that they simply decline? Obviously they do.
And you don’t think they sometimes get content moderation requests from governments or elsewhere that they oblige? Obviously they do.
Will you also be surprised to hear that almost all private companies can (and many will) simply choose to hand over your private data to the government upon warrantless request?
I never said I was shocked about it. The government and particularly agencies like the FBI have long engaged in illegal abuses of their power, ranging from illegal speech restrictions like this to the knowing legal persecution of innocent people to outright murder and blackmail.
Nor is it news to me that companies are increasingly voluntarily sharing vast amounts of data with the government, to the point that the surveillance state we feared has come to pass as a corporate-state partnership.
What I’m surprised about is the increasing number of people who see it as normal and acceptable, or choose to dismiss it as “oh, this has been happening.” Yeah, that doesn’t make it okay.
> If the police ask you to do something, do you usually feel generally obligated to comply?
Uh, no? I'm pretty sure every American schoolchild is educated on his or her rights under the Constitution. It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights.
So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
Twitter and tech companies are regularly threatened with additional regulation and their executives called before Congress. This is the pressure. It’s already taken place and it’s ongoing. Sure, they could sue. They might or might not win. And Congress can make their life difficult in either outcome. There’s not much you do about that since, very nominally, Congress is supposed to represent the people and not security state interests.
This comment also totally ignores the fact that the “Twitter files” have also contributed to the realization that these companies are riddled with ex-FBI and other government employees who were partly responsible for responding to these requests, let alone the idea of corporate employees toadying up to the government security state is incompatible with democracy whether or not someone could hypothetically sue.
Also, it’s great to hear my duty is to sue the government if it does wrong. That’s true. That also works out very badly for people all the time and entails spending a lot of money and years of your life on an uncertain outcome.
These stories are additional proof the FBI needs huge reforms and mass layoffs. It’s still the agency of J Edgar Hoover, who to this day was in charge for nearly half its existence. But the culture of these tech companies is also extremely concerning.
And even moreso, as I said in my original comment (and which you misunderstood even in your response), the shocking part is that people think this is fine, and nobody is asking who and what has caused such a massive shift in American beliefs.
Government employees get job in related field in private sector… not a groundbreaking revelation and not clear what to do about it. e.g. Trump’s proposal to ban former DoD employees from having jobs relating to American data for 7 years after service is a horrible solution. Well it’s a good way to further cripple our veterans and in general eliminate any remaining appeal of a government job for any half-competent person.
What evidence do you have of “a massive shift?” Because on my side there’s 200 years of case law that all pretty much concurs on every single instance of this happening.
Yes I do think it’s fine that our security apparatus attempts to maintain security within the confines of legislated and adjudicated law and that private corporations are able - both in theory and in practice - to resist unlawful pressure to control information. “Checks and balances” is a state of tension. Party X requests, Party Y denies, Party Z adjudicates. That’s how it works.
People talk to the police and incriminate themselves all the time. This has been a front-line of civil rights activists for decades now. What are you even talking about?
> It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
"Not unusual" is a very subjective term and doesn't mean anything at all. And it is now confirmed that Twitter had daily meetings and contacts with the FBI/DHS, which means they did talk to federal law enforcement. There is no reason to make this statement is absurd knowing that they did talk...
> Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
See the links above. Also Twitter is not a person and this does not apply to most employees and moderators. And the execs who knew what they were doing and wouldn't have done it if it weren't in their interest of those of the company. That's where the de facto coercion comes in. The DOJ coming for the Twitter "asking" or "indicating" that they do not approve some content is an undue pressure in and of itself.
>This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights.
So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
Okay Mr. Goodman, at this point you're just grandstanding.
Most people not exercising their rights is entirely distinct from people not having been educated on them. The Bill of Rights is surely a required item on every single curriculum in the country. I, having paid attention in high school, am aware that I have no obligation to comply with arbitrary LEO requests, and certainly not those pertaining to the content of speech.
Yes, they did talk of their own volition. As they are free (under their 1st Amendment rights) to do. We have no reason to suspect that they’ve been coerced except for the fact that you disagree with the choice they made! They on the other hand were surely aware of their rights when they chose to talk.
What? They have no “rights” to use Twitter. This is also not even remotely controversial.
Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
Note however the government is free to ask Twitter to carry people’s speech, as Trump did almost daily for 4+ years whining about so and so getting banned or de-boosted etc.
> What? They have no “rights” to use Twitter. This is also not even remotely controversial.
> Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
You're making a straw man that's not what I said...
The government can't ask or suggest or apply undue pressure to Twitter to ban content. Social media has been sued for this successfully to get people unbanned.
The Twitter files are not even about Twitter being coerced to put things on their site. What are you even talking about?
Requiring that Twitter not ban Person X is tantamount to requiring that they carry Person X’s content. Which is why people have no “right” to use something like Twitter - making that a right would infringe upon others’ rights.
At least that’s how it works under US law. I get the impression you’re not so familiar with American law though?
Yes they can ask and suggest removal. They cannot coerce but we have no reason to believe they did. I already linked to a long list of case law establishing this. Have a good rest of your weekend!
Any voluntary request from the government comes with an implied consequence for refusal or an implied benefit for acceptance. They don’t have to say it out loud for the message to come across.
Republicans - and Trump specifically - have been directly threatening Twitter for years to try to get them to act in a way that benefits them and you think this "implied consequence for refusal" is some big issue?
I don’t think it’s a waste of government resources to be reporting people who are trying to suppress voting by e.g. giving incorrect polling dates or locations.
Also don’t think it’s a waste to try to prevent ISIS recruiting material from reaching more confused and angry young men.
You've hit the nail on the head - the term "political" is being used as a motte and bailey to take advantage of our intuition about bona fide political speech to cover for activities that aren't related to good faith debate. Like sure, tricking people into not voting is in some sense a "political" game, but it's not the kind of thing we'd consider "political speech" that needs protection. Same thing with assembling a flash mob to trash the capitol.
And yes, this definitional/access tension always exists when taking political stances that go against the entrenched power structure. Try to get an antiwar opinion broadcast in 2003 - music DJ's weren't even allowed to play songs whose lyrics might hint that war in general might be a bad thing. Dealing with this is just a completely new experience for those on the right that have gone from being conservative (ie generally supportive of the incumbent power structure and institutions) to revolutionary/reactionary and directly against the status quo power structure.
Social mass media, like all mass media, is now controlled by big capital (as was inevitable), with varying degrees of the individual employees adding some grassroots slant. Focusing on the slight individual flavor and ignoring the overriding power dynamic is just falling into the same old disempowering partisan trap.
Or… it turns out that the FBI has specific mandates and they include things like “counter election disinformation” and it doesn’t include things like “report every bad guy on Twitter.”
This is only confusing starting from your own incorrect premise.
The FBI is a domestic law enforcement agency. The Taliban does not really break US laws as a matter of course. If you hear otherwise please report them to the FBI.
Honestly it’s not very fruitful arguing this stuff with someone who clearly doesn’t understand the basics of the American system. There are plenty of resources online to learn about all this stuff if you’re interested.
If Twitter was being coerced by the government, they could have said so in court. They are a multibillion dollar multinational corporation with deep pockets and connection in high places, not a helpless mom and pop.
What do you hope to accomplish with a low-effort comment which everyone knows is wrong? We’re talking about the FBI here so one of the events I’d expect most HN commenters to be familiar with is their dispute with Apple:
That might cause me to ask questions like how I felt about the message on the sign. If it was, say, my support for a political candidate I’d be calling the ACLU and local media. If, as in the case of Twitter, it was something untrue about the upcoming election left by someone at a party who I’d already had to ask to behave better, I would probably regret only that I hadn’t asked them to take their sign and leave earlier.
It would definitely make me question how much I cared about the sign, and ask myself difficult questions about why the FBI were getting involved. I’d probably even engage a lawyer. But it’s not clear to me I’d take it down if — after all of this — I’d decided keeping it up was the right choice?
The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.
2:
Did Congress pass a law authorizing the FBI to snoop on social media and use private companies to censor speach? No? Then by what authority was the FBI doing this?
The root of the FBIs authority is in law passed by Congress.
The FBIs authority like many other law enforcement agencies is unfortunately only based on what they are caught doing. Now this is more complicated than it seems because for the longest time, decades, they never even fired an agent for any reason.
There is no real oversight at an investigation or agent level since the FBI does not police itself. Few other agencies have the ability to review the FBI and the DOJ often fails to do this as well, they are all part of the same family.
Congress has oversight but that is more of an institutional oversight and not down to the agents themselves.
And it's basically a fact that all law enforcement is slow or almost never holds itself accountable for anything. This is even more true with a quasi international intelligence agency that the FBI has become.
The FBI has always had a unique role in the U.S., and it is disturbing to see corruption hiding behind the political division.
The left historically had many problems with the FBI. The history there is clear. The FBI had historically been a conservative type of institution and was often well regarded by the right. This seems to have flipped lately and I wish people could put all of that to the side and take a rational view of information released even in the Twitter files and things like the MLK Tapes podcast.
The government suggests something and the person making the decision at Twitter agrees with it or doesn't. But the government isn't compelling Twitter to do anything.
People are ghost banned for poor language and insults. You have to imagine that Twitter is generally not very permissive based on how they treat average users. Many of the #NAFO folks are shadow banned.
This whole spectacle seems like a giant straw man in the making. The people that ran Twitter set it up based on their own belief of what is acceptable and there is nothing wrong with that.
> the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech
Of course they do, if that speech would likely incite or produce imminent lawless action. IDK if what they were flagging all meets that standard (some of the examples in the thread seem like a stretch to me, but then again they're obviously supposed to), but I think if we're gonna discuss 1A we should actually understand it.
Okay, let's take all you said as unassailable - shouldn't this whole thing be called the FBI files, and not the Twitter files?
I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department, and at least one person signed off—which, given the rebuffs of more public attempts, seems like anything signed off on was done in good faith. So in my mind the problem isn't Twitter, it's the FBI. To me it's the framing (which was always going to be problematic, it's Matt Taibbi).
And to be clear, I think one isn't paying attention if they try to lay blame at the feet of any one administration for this, this is a long-standing issue originating inside the FBI.
> I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department
Why would your theory about this be at all relevant when we have direct evidence (original emails, etc.) that the opposite is true, that there was no intermediation or oversight by Twitter legal in takedown requests?
To the extent that "informal coercion" could be problematic. This is pretty standard practice for most politicians of course and I think we all know where all those "Free Speech" proponents that are worried that Twitter was "informally coerced by FBI's emails" stood on this, when Trump was constantly threatening Twitter.
Do we know this for a fact? The only way to find this out is to test it in courts. There could be executive orders involved, the Patriot Act or related acts, or simply a "state of emergency" or two declarations:
"Now, Therefore, I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code."
Your mistake is that you confuse deliberate misinformation campaigns with free speech. I assume you are not in the know, because --strangely-- the very alarming research results do hardly leave academia.
Let met assure you that in St. Petersburg they are working hard and those in Moscow don't complain about the price of steering elections. I invite you to look up the cost of a MiG vs some click farms, alt right bots and blogs.
When I say weapons, you think about rockets. The advantage of the Kremlin is they can use weapons you don't recognize as such. You are even pleading to give them free reign to overthrow democracy.
The fact that the government has to plead with an american corporate to not let other nations fuck things up even more than where you are collectively now, might give you a second thought.
"Russian misinformation campaigns" are an excuse that a certain political party used for why it lost a slam dunk election to a cheese colored used car salesman, and the FBI found convenient to justify expanding its power.
Russian disinformation operations are exactly as effective and competent as the rest of the Russian government, which can't even win a war against Ukraine. Its not remotely scary.
"FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech."
Yes, yes they do.
"That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding."
I feel that it makes a good case for the federated approach to social media. Very large centralized services controlled by public corporations are easy targets for this kind of abuse.
If there is information/data freely available on other platforms, why is it that Twitter also has to host that content? The accounts tracking people's movement were clearly troll accounts. Correct ban imo. Also correct to ban journalists for the same rules.
I’ve never been a big fan of Taibbi. But all the things you’re mentioning are characteristic of his journalistic style, which made him famous in his coverage of Wall Street back in 2008. It’s uncharitable and filtered through a fundamental distrust of moneyed corporations, but I’ve never heard it described as “unhinged.”
And I’m not sure “unhinged” is an appropriate description. For example, while “internal lingo” may be common, isn’t it also fair to observe that much corporate internal lingo is pretty Orwellian? Similarly, as to your second point, is it unreasonable to draw an inference that Twitter is doing what some agency wants it to do, when the agency asks Twitter to do something and then Twitter does it?
I think the biggest thing that chafes at people is that Taibbi is meant to be uncharitable and distrustful of big corporations. But he's not. He's charitable and trustful of the current management of Twitter. It's the exact opposite of speaking truth to power. The old twitter was a set of weak, fragmented, individuals doing their best and getting absolutely excoriated for it constantly. Now the company is run by the richest man on earth beholden to no one, and he faces literally no skepticism from Taibbi (although it looks like Weiss is about to break).
Musk has been at the helm of Twitter for five minutes and has done nothing of consequence. The previous management played a major role in US politics for years. It had a major impact on a U.S. presidency and suppressed true information that could have significantly impacted a Presidential information. Taibbi is entirely correct to focus on what happened before and not on Musk’s mean tweets.
Orwellian does not just mean changing terms or using euphemisms. It is about terms that make the expression of undesirable thoughts actually impossible. Do any of the scare-quoted terms do this? I can't see any.
The term "Orwellian" in describing language comes directly from the properties of Newspeak.
"Orwellian" can mean other things when describing state power or surveillance technology, but in this context it is being used to describe language so the connection to Newspeak is the relevant one.
No, "Orwellian" means almost the opposite: Winston and Julia are perfectly capable of thinking dissident thoughts, despite being immersed in Ingsoc. "Orwellian" refers to dominating people to the degree that you can force them to use the words you specify and make them say things that they know aren't true.
Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" [0]:
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
> Orwellian does not just mean changing terms or using euphemisms. It is about terms that make the expression of undesirable thoughts actually impossible. Do any of the scare-quoted terms do this? I can't see any.
Per [1]:
"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past [...]
The label in this context doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
In the context of authoritarian states and surveillance technology that definition matches. But this is specifically about language and jargon. Even if we decide that my definition is nonsense, it is clear that using terms like "escalation" internally isn't "a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda."
> Even if we decide that my definition is nonsense, it is clear that using terms like "escalation" internally isn't "a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda."
Sure, innocuous sounding words like "rendition" would never be reappropriated as code for something more sinister, right?
Seems to me that innocuous sounding jargon actually makes Orwellian doublethink much easier to swallow. Like a frog in a slowly heated pot of water, you get exposed to and acclimatize to progressively more problematic uses of power until you simultaneously believe that you are a patriot upholding citizen's rights while routinely violating them.
I'm not really sure why you think this process can't happen in a private company.
The problem for me was never that Twitter had their own in-house term for shadowbanning. It was that they obfuscated and hid behind the term in order to avoid accusations of shadowbanning. It's like saying "this is not a sub sandwich, it's a hoagie!"
> There is a very well understood definition for shadowbanning - only the poster can see their own posts.
Except that's not how most people understand the term. Terminology is defined by its usage, so if you're in the minority of how this term is used, you've lost. We already had this debate about hacker/cracker over 20 years ago. Hacker is still here, so get used to the broader meaning of shadowbanning.
verb: shadowban -
block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
Yes, which matches exactly what Twitter did, and which is how most people understand the term. Or did you miss the part where they delisted some accounts from being discoverable by search.
The way Twitter defines shadowban is more narrow than that.
"
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).
"
They literally wrote a blog post about it 4 years ago[1]. This wasn't hidden.
Anyone who is "shocked" by Twitter's definition of shadow banning (which, in my opinion aligns with what I posted anyways) is doing performative outrage of an insincere nature.
Twitter is free to invent whatever narrow definition of shadowbanning they want, and we are free to call out their obfuscation for the bullshit it is.
Language is about effective communication. Right now we're all trying to have an important conversation about relevant social issues which requires a common understanding. You cited the common understanding, I pointed out how Twitter engaged in practices covered by that common understanding, and that should be the end of that. Can we move on now?
Instead of bikeshedding over this irrelevant minutae, engage with the actual substance of the discussions, like whether they should shadowban in the way they've been doing it, whether there should be limits to moderation policies for online public squares, what the guidelines for censoring speech should look like, whether to deplatform people entirely or merely deprioritize their speech, etc.
They don't prevent people seeing tweets of anyone. If you follow soneone you see their tweets, if you dont follow them but gonto their profile you see their tweets.
Tweets are universally publically viewable. The policies they use are not secret.
Trying to start a conversation about their secret shadowbanning policy is a dead end as the policy is not shadow banning and it is not secret.
And still you persist. Go read the definition you provided again. Then read my immediate reply where I pointed out they delisted people from search. That is literally a case where Twitter was "making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users" and they did so "without their knowledge".
That is shadowbanning by your own definition, and each ban was not disclosed and thus done in secret, because that's what it means to be shadowbanned.
There is a perfectly obvious interpretation of the language being used to describe this situation, and all you're doing is adding noise because people aren't using terms in the way you want while ignoring the substance. That's textbook bad faith arguing, which ironically is what you were accusing the original poster of doing.
> That is literally a case where Twitter was "making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users" and they did so "without their knowledge".
This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers. The only thing twitter is not doing is having their algorithm highlight them to people who weren’t following them or participating in a conversation with them. That doesn’t fit any common definition of shadow-banning.
> This continues to be incorrect: their posts are visible to anyone on the internet and show up to their followers
No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this: if you use Twitter's search to try to find a delisted user on Twitter, you can't find them. Sometimes you can't even @ them. This fits the general definition of shadowbanning that the other poster provided, wherein their content cannot be found using Twitter, thereby that qualifies as being shadowbanned on Twitter.
The fact that you can sometimes find that content via other means is totally irrelevant.
> No, I don't know how many times I have to repeat this
Your frustration stems from angrily telling people something is wrong based on your misunderstanding of a term. You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
> You’re welcome not to like the practice or lobby against it but you’re just signing up for frustration trying to get everyone to switch to your redefinition.
It's not my redefinition, it's literally the definition the other poster provided which they discovered via Google, and the application of that definition matches how thousands of tech and laypeople are using it in this conversation, and how the media is covering it. But, you do you.
Finally, I'm not sure where your ability to surmise my emotional state based only on text comes from, but I think it needs some tuning.
The argument seems to be that what the FBI is doing is more or less analogous to you clicking the report button, which hardly makes you a shadowy figure controlling Twitter if they act on your report.
> The argument seems to be that what the FBI is doing is more or less analogous to you clicking the report button
Weekly meetings between the FBI and top Twitter executives is "akin to clicking the report button"? Name one other Twitter user that had this privilege. I think that's a pretty strong sign that you're trying to stretch this analogy too far.
It is very clearly an improper purpose. The FBI is trying to suppress 1A protected speech by reporting the tweets. The FBI is not allowed to suppress 1A protected speech. Imagine there was a button that would delete a Tweet and anyone could press it. Just because anyone could press the button would not make it legal for the FBI to press it.
> It is very clearly an improper purpose. The FBI is trying to suppress 1A protected speech by reporting the tweets. The FBI is not allowed to suppress 1A protected speech. Imagine there was a button that would delete a Tweet and anyone could press it. Just because anyone could press the button would not make it legal for the FBI to press it.
I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments) in re: far more onerous and demanding requests than just an agent clicking a Report button, and in fact with far more official processes you can see the stats where they actually do just that. https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...
> I keep seeing this, and I'm confused every time I see it, because speech on a private platform isn't protected by the first amendment.
It is protected from the government. Of course, Twitter can decide to censor whatever they want, but if the government was threatening either Twitter or individuals on the platform, over protected speech, eg. criticizing the president, that would certainly implicate the 1A.
The government simply asking, with no implied threat, seems to be OK [1]. But, I don't think it builds confidence amongst the citizens if they were seen doing this very often.
Thanks for bringing some actual legal citations and interpretations to this discussion. Most of this thread appears to be a lot of handwaving about the constitution.
I can also say no to the feds if they ask me to assassinate someone but it doesn’t mean they aren’t breaking a law by asking me.
Would be a crazy constitutional loophole if the govt simply needs to ask citizens to censor each other (1a), steal their neighbors guns (2a), tell husbands to prevent their wives from voting (19a), etc.
If these censorship request were about bomb threats or something that’s one thing, but they are mostly just spicy political takes. FBI needs to stay in their lane.
Twitter’s data model stores Tweets as a stream of records. When you delete a tweet, it stores another record which consumers are required to honor saying that the first record’s ID was deleted.
Twitter’s internal tools still have all of that data. In most cases the Internet Archive also does, too, which is how people have confirmed that, for example, the tweets in the famous “handled” email were nudes in violation of the non-consensual policy with no overriding news value.
Personal accounts in your own time and not in any way as a representative of the US govt, and tax payer dollars aren’t paying for my time? Seems more reasonable to me. Especially if it isn’t a regular thing. a good question for a court to decide.
Perhaps it’s not a 1A issue when the FBI clamps down on a corporate platform, but it reminds me of how fascist states operate, not a democratic republic.
In the end the public political discourse needs to move away from corporate run forums. Not sure about Mastodon, but I’m hopeful future iterations of online forums will be more decentralized again.
A government whose representatives frequently rail against big tech companies, call for regulation, and drag executives in for hearings, "politely requests" something to be removed. It's pretty easy to see that Twitter might think that saying no has consequences.
Furthermore, the FBI is a police force. They have no business searching Twitter for content to remove unless that particular content is involved directly in the investigation of and filing of criminal charges.
What case did they rule that? It seems pretty routine that they get in contact with newspapers for this purpose so I'd be at least a little surprised to learn that it's been ruled unconstitutional but they're just flagrantly doing it anyway.
So if they contact the WSJ and try to get them to spike a story that's fine, but if they tell Twitter "we think you should remove these tweets for violating your policies" that's not? I would love to see what the case is because I can't understand how that would make sense.
But they can't contact Twitter and express their opinions?
The government routinely speaks to news papers about the government opinion on articles and how they are wrong. That's not censorship. Holding a figurative pistol to someones head and say "change this line" is censoring and supressing free speech.
Of course they can express their opinions. But it's not black and white.
The Twitter Files already has a statement from a Congressperson that Twitter's actions with the Hunter laptop will "result in a blood bath" during Congressional hearings.
If the 800 lb gorilla that is the US government is threatening a "blood bath", do you really have a choice when they ask for your "cooperation"?
Right, so instead of exposing themselves legally they do an end run of telling Twitter to ban and writing smear campaigns. Which is they did to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard.
> Twitter can always say no to the feds (and other governments)
In practice, can they? Leave out the part about other governments for a second, just consider the US govt
If you're doing moderation at twitter and Yoel Roth is above you, are you going to tell the FBI to screw off? Especially considering Roth is (apparently, according to Taibbi) meeting regularly with them. From a job security standpoint, how do you think the average white collar employee will behave?
I have worked at another organization (hosted server provider) where I was in contact with the FBI and other law enforcement.
There's a world of difference between what was shown they did at twitter by noting things that were "worrisome" or against a reasonable site's ToS and forcing anyone to take things down.
I have told agents that certain materials were acceptable and that we would take no action. Not much they could do there without an actual warrant.
i'd probably just do whatever the fbi wanted so as to save myself a possible hassle. which is the point: the fbi can fuck with me. to say, "well, the fbi is just reporting stuff" ignores that the fbi has power. power is something people seem to have an odd tendency to ignore.
> power is something people seem to have an odd tendency to ignore.
Indeed, just as you seem to ignore Twitter’s power. They are protected from the FBI by the Constitution and the courts, and they have the money (read: power) to actually enforce those protections had they felt threatened or coerced by the government. The FBI may have power but they are not all powerful, not even close.
Except it's not clicking the report button. See the FBI could have a special agent assigned to clicking the report button instead of directly emailing Twitter asking for the removal of things that are in some cases obvious jokes.
> Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or not (and they sometimes did not act or simply temporarily suspended). But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
This is an extension of the whole “Three Felonies a Day” idea: it’s likely any prolific account will violate Twitter Terms of Service at some point, so you can target almost anyone by looking hard enough.
And Twitter is likely to look harder at reports from the FBI than your average user, therefore the FBI has more influence over who they can silence. Maybe they’re abusing it, maybe they’re not, either way it feels improper at best.
Is it improper? It obviously creates room for impropriety, but I personally find it very obvious that organizations responsible and equipped for e.g. finding CSAM or for mitigating foreign influence campaigns (yes, real things!) or for reducing the spread of ISIS recruitment material should have their reports sit above those of newuser1737382847.
You’d really suggest that all reports must be treated equally?
I am also rather skeptical of the notion of a series of purportedly journalistic exposes of a company presented in collaboration with the new boss. Of course any source has an agenda but it seems too much like the tail wagging the dog here.
> 1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
Internal jargon can be Orwellian. These are not mutually exclusive.
> But it's presented as a "deep state"-like collusion where the agencies control if twitter act on them or not.
No, this chummy relationship is presented as problematic. Nowhere does he imply that the FBI controls what Twitter does. It's not a priori wrong to think that the government should not have such a close involvement with Twitter in its act of moderating/censoring. Having a lower threshold than you for risk of malfeasance is not a priori wrong. If you think your risk assessment is better, now you can make that argument using actual data, and those who disagree can make theirs. Fostering public debate is exactly what good journalism is supposed to do.
> But they are presented mostly stripped of context and the focus is on anonymized employees snarky comments to make it seem like decisions were arbitrary, partisan, and without any regard to logic or context.
Sounds like standard journalism to me. Maybe your beef is not with Taibbi and the "Twitter files" but with how journalism as a whole is conducted. I agree, but don't apply a higher bar here where it's inconvenient.
Journalism should present things in the correct context, and contextualize statements, situations, etc.
If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism. Journalism is about informing. Not saying everyone does it perfectly, in the same way you can do bad science that is still technically science.
> Journalism should present things in the correct context, and contextualize statements, situations, etc.
Even if we agree that that's what journalism should be, what is your assessment of how accurately this definition matches most high profile journalism today? How much context did the Covington kids get, or how much context did the rail workers who wanted to strike get? There are very clearly some contexts that get priority coverage and are hammered non-stop, and some contexts that barely get any coverage at all.
To be clear, I'm not sure that I do agree with your definition. I think journalists typically do what you describe, but I think merely reporting raw data without context is also perfectly valid journalism. This "contextualisation" narrative is how some journalists are excusing their lack of support for Assange, and it's bullshit IMO.
> If feels like you're accusing journalists of lying to push an agenda, which is, by definition, not journalism
Unbiased journalism is a fiction. I agree that the best journalists try for objectivity, but this is an ethos that is slowly being pushed out of mainstream journalism, and activism has become standard practice (edit: this is probably because outrage generates more clicks/views, so activism "sells" in a sense).
I also think some professional journalists absolutely do outright lie for utilitarian reasons, such as "fighting evil" (typically Republicans). This goes back to the activism point.
Far more common are various forms of well known bias, my side bias, bias blind spot etc. This leads to one convincing oneself of a falsehood and then vehemently arguing for it, despite countervailing evidence.
If you spend time doing raw info dumps from one side of an argument, say the unions in the rail strike, you're not telling the whole story.
Telling the whole story is important to journalism. It's why you always see "X did not respond to a request for comment." They attempt to give the other side to speak.
Telling only one side of the story makes you a mouthpiece, not a journalist.
I didn't say journalism is without bias, but that's a completely separate topic. Let's try to keep this from turning into a "here's all of the things wrong with journalism and no solutions" rant thread.
You can be biased and also not attempt to push an agenda. The inverse is true, too.
> Telling the whole story is important to journalism.
I disagree. I think journalism is simply "presenting a factual story". I think presenting a contextual story is better journalism, but it's not necessary to qualify as journalism.
I think the goal is to anchor the discourse around "the gov is censoring speech" and let high-rank politicians talk about it openly, since now they are backed by undeniable facts. A few weeks ago anyone auggesting the gov is censoring twitter would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Now anyone who says the opposite will be seen as a fool or a shill. The goal has been achieved, in other words.
What you’re actually seeing is people who already believed govt is censoring speech now feeling like they have evidence of that claim despite none actually being put forward. On the flip side you have people who figured that, yeah, the government asks private entities to control information in certain ways and sometimes companies oblige despite not being required to. This latter claim remains the only one “evidenced” by the Twitter Files but it has also been evidenced by about 200 years of case law.
It is clear that Taibbi et al. are cherry-picking FBI interactions that will draw the most clicks and outrage from fans of the new management.
If they had published communications between the FBI and Twitter from, say, June 2020, I imagine their audience would not be able to muster quite as much indignation.
His story is slanted, but it's not fair to suggest he is 'cherry picking' - that's what the press does, they 'find the stuff that matters' and filters out the stuff that does not.
It would be 'cherry picking' if the result was something out of context and therefore misrepresented.
There's a legit story here, probably not to the extent made out to be but it's newsworthy.
What could be 'cherry picking' in the grand context, is that SpaceX has 'deep ties' with state apparatus, even the military, and we just don't talk about that. So by highlighting 'this thing over here' and not 'that thing over there' we lose context that Musk is in bed with the Pentagon while lambasting something happening with the FBI. And I'm not suggesting working with either is wrong, but that it's a bit hypocritical.
Musk is the one cherry picking by choosing which data journalists get. Taibbi alleges that the Biden Campaign was censoring content but leaves out that it was revenge porn. He says the Trump team made requests for removal of other content but leaves those out entirely. Bari Weiss was given an incomplete dataset which showed only Democratic messages but left out those from Republicans. There’s more, but that’s not enough cherry picking to make the entire thing dubious.
I have no dog in this fight (I thought Twitter was a cesspool then, and I know it is now), but before we go much farther in the conversation about collusion between LE and big business, we must remember how Qwest lost an enormous contract (and more, arguably) for refusing to cooperate with the NSA's plan to gobble everyone's data. The fact that this happened at all, creates a chilling effect, a shining example for all to see. In such light, American business that call themselves 'common carriers' all know the score: Cooperate or it would be a shame if something happened to you. Would anyone be shocked that Twitter kept a cordial relationship with the agency that murdered Fred Hampton? Of course not.
It’s Matt Taibbi. Unhinged framing designed to inflame populist rage is something he’s been doing since the 2008 financial crisis when he made his career on it.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
This thread is about the FBI, aka the actual jackboots, compelling private companies extralegally in order to shift democratic narratives.
And you're saying it's conservative to be opposed to that?
I understand it lined up with the liberal side regarding the election but that doesn't make Taibbi (or myself) a conservative for opposing it. Distrusting the FBI ought to be a liberal value.
I'm a leftist and not a liberal. I recognize that the FBI is a largely unrestrained organization that's responsible for a lot of evil, including the assassination of civil rights figures.
Fascism is when you're critical of federal agencies having a privileged relationship with the media to the point of weekly meetings to influence moderation policy? What?
Actual fascists attempted a coup on January 6th 2020. Taibbi is working to bolster their case by deliberately slanting and spinning this stuff.
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
Sorry bro, entering a building without any greater plan and then leaving peacefully is not a "right wing coup" and Trump supporters are not Fascists, they're just a little odd. The fact that it isn't a coup and was not a coup is why its participants cannot be charged as such.
If you want to see a "fascist coup" plan, go look at Golden Dawn being busted with blueprints to parliament that indicated they were going to break down the walls with tanks.
What you're effectively saying here is that people should not be concerned about massive FBI overreach and should discard what he has covered elsewhere because 'orange man bad', when Trump barely factors into anything here. That's deranged, and it's not going to be taken seriously outside of your bubble.
It failed because the bombs were found and because Mike Pence defected or at least chickened out at the last minute.
That’s why they were chanting “hang Mike Pence” not “hang Nancy Pelosi.” What you saw was a rage filled riot in the wake of a failing coup attempt.
Had the bombs gone off and Pence stopped the count a state of emergency would have been declared. I’m not totally convinced of this part but I’ve read that they were expecting a bunch of radical left counter protestors and that the role of the mob was supposed to be to start a big street brawl with Antifa or whoever was supposed to show to help feed into the state of emergency ploy to suspend the election.
It was more elaborately planned than Hitler’s beer hall putsch which was a bunch of Nasis getting blasted at the bar and having a street brawl with police that ended in a very asymmetrical gun fight.
Luckily it probably will end here this time though since Trump is too old, Flynn and Bannon are too obviously kooky, and DeSantis doesn’t have it in him. He knows how to troll the woke for attention but I don’t get hard core fascist vibes from him. He will try to do a Viktor Orban but it won’t work here because America has courts and federalism, and he doesn’t have the balls to attempt a coup. Say what you will about Trump but he did have balls.
I agree. I am a supporter of the freedom of speech angle, but this is all a total nothing-burger. A few TOS violations and some internal debate. I also suspected that BAU was much worse than presented.
There is no proof of any agency threatening (or implied threat) in these emails. Just some hints and voluntary action from Twitter.
I imagine these agencies do put pressure on private entities on a regular basis, but without actual further proof this is all just ridiculous hand waving.
Why are they contacting Twitter as the FBI in a backchannel to report potentially ToS offending tweets as opposed to the way we all report tweets to Twitter? Or indeed at all when they're not illegal tweets.
It's not a backchannel... every social media company has a dedicated response team that handles requests from law enforcement, partners, big media companies, etc. Do you think Disney just hits the report button on YouTube? This is an official method of reporting content. Literally every major company does this and the reasons why have been explained for years.
IDK if you understand what back channel means... This was an official of communication for the FBI. Back channel would be using personal devices and emails.
Thsi is completely normal for any business. If you are ‘important’, like an authority or a large customer, you have priority channels to go through. When Tesla wants to contact the Department of Transportation, do you think they go to their website, fill in the public contact form and wait two months for a response?
Think of it as a priority queue in terms of software. Does it make more sense now?
If the FBI had to go through the same queue as Joe Average then their requests may well end up at the head of the queue too late for action. The same goes for celebrities, advertisers and so on. All of these have different contact points. And because law enforcement contact is one step away from the company doing something that is potentially illegal their messages are given a higher priority.
Because more important users get special treatment? If you are a user that are of special importance to the business (like politicians, news outlets, or major Twitter users), then of course their requests are going to get escalated more quickly. Twitter isn’t a democracy; some users matter a lot more to them than others, and it’s not really based on political lines.
Transparency would be full and open disclosure. Cherry-picking for right-wing writers to base stories on is pretty different, as evidenced by all of the people who think there was anything new revealed this week. This showed some of the internal conversations but the story matched what we already knew from statements at the time and subsequent testimony before the Congress. From a transparency win that seems small to non-existent but it’s clearly been successful at giving partisans more ammunition.
Umm, during the run-up to the 2020 election Trump was the president. He appointed Christopher Wray as head of the FBI. So whatever is in this tweets was done by a Trump appointee
I think there is a strong argument that if you are working for the FBI you are not allowed to even click the report button as part of your duties for 1A protected speech.
You can imagine how this could be weaponised. For example FBI agents could be tasked to report tweets from people who hold disfavoured opinions. This interpretation is also inline with the court’s finding over Trump’s use of the block button: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte...
This is not meant for anything but stirring up the far right and hoping it'll radicalize more right wingers. Being unhinged is part of the strategy.
Musk is out on revenge for being force to buy Twitter, and for being framed as an idiot in the media. He is using his newly acquired media sledgehammer to do exactly what he bought it for. Creating the narrative for advancing his personal interests.
This is why it's bad for society to let individuals be richer than nation states. This is why aristocracy was bad. Too bad the notion of freedom was used to rebuild aristocracy.
Look at it from another perspective, proponents of free speech and platform neutrality were talking about this and were considered 'conspiracy theorists', then it got out and its 'unhinged framing' in a few weeks it will be 'we all knew about it and its good'.
I work at a much smaller shop than Twitter, but notable enough to get reporters sniffing around when we have internal scandals. Without giving any details I was an insider on few actions that got media coverage that was framed in a very nefarious way. Having personally witnessed the deliberations, I can confirm it was a mix of inside baseball that outsiders just don't usually see and a handful of sincere people really trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation and not really knowing one way or the other how things will work out.
> Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"
The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag. All kinds of phrases get used like selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, or disguising a gag. Each is a form of censorship, but that's a bad word since the days of Anthony Comstock so it is never used. Censors never describe themselves as censors. See the book "The Mind of the Censor",
> The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag
It can be, and you're zeroing on sense where vague lingo like "enhanced interrogation" replaces plain "torture".
But that's a stretch. Every profession develops their own lingo over time. They're called "term of art" (1)
An example is when one sysadmin asks another to "bounce the box" - these words have specific meanings which are opaque to outsiders, but are brief and precise to insiders.
This "internal lingo" developing is normal, inevitable, even necessary, and not in any way a "red flag".
If the admins of twitter had several different terms instead of calling them all the same thing then ... maybe they just needed to be brief and precise, to distinguish between them, in order to do the job effectively? You're trying to invent a problem where there is none.
> Every profession develops their own lingo over time.
In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.
I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].
The man who was just forced to buy a 44B company, and is liquidating shares in his self-driving car company to pay twitters rent, and is now beholden to weird Saudi financiers who bailed him out, is certainly not steering lol.
Yes, that's a great case for considering ideas for their merit rather than idolizing individuals.
I'm also curious to know what his guiding principles are but maybe we're stuck reverse engineering them based on his actions. Sticking to an ideal doesn't seem to be his style.
I'm probably missing something. I don't follow him too closely.
The government working with Twitter to create broad misinformation policies and then issuing requests for takedowns under those policies once adopted is a great way for the government to violate the first amendment with plausible deniability. I guess we’ll see what the courts think.
Ya facism (gov in bed with private biz) used to manipulate election results (hunter laptop, muffling conservatives en mass) and treading all over free speech is "unhinged framing". What twitter, the fbi and the white house did are th opposite of what the USA is supposed to stand for.
The Tweets the FBI were asking to be removed were speech protected under the first amendment. It is very likely that this is unconstitutional but at a minimum this violates a strong norm in the US that the State does not interfere with people’s speech. When it comes to twitter a court had previously found that Trump could not even block people from his personal Twitter account (a final ruling was never made because trump left office: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte... )and now people are going to seriously argue that it’s ok for government officials to advise that Tweets or people should be banned.
The government’s right to request information control and private entities’ right to decline those requests is well established and non-controversial. They cannot coerce or threaten, but there’s no evidence of that happening, and if Twitter felt otherwise they could go ahead and sue the government and win. Well established.
There is no issue with the FBI investigating crimes using the Twitter platform. I would hope that Twitter tells the FBI to “come back with a warrant” if they want non-public information.
But the FBI flagging content for removal. Including “disinformation”?
That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech.
A good analogy would be a debate club being held in a private bar and the police coming by and saying "yeah, that guy you invited to debate, you think you can "handle" that for us?".
It’s frankly shocking how many people on HN are like “meh…what’s the big deal?”
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
If that debate club guy was spreading voter misinformation, the FBI would come by and investigate him, too.
Right, investigate them for committing a crime. That’s the FBI’s job. If they see voter suppression on Twitter they can get a warrant forcing Twitter to turn over the account identity (and prosecute them) and take down the tweet.
But that’s not what’s happening here is it? The FBI is asking Twitter to take down tweets (some of them obvious jokes) without a warrant or evidence of any crime being committed.
That’s what’s happening.
No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
> [A.] Generally speaking, courts have said "yes, that's fine," so long as the government speech doesn't coerce the intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here's a sample of appellate cases so holding:
> [B.] On the other hand, where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional.
> [C.] Does it matter whether the government acts systematically, setting up a pipeline for requests to the media? One can imagine courts being influenced by this, as they are in some other areas of the law; but I know of no First Amendment cases so holding.
> [D.] Now in some other areas of constitutional law, this question of government requests to private actors is treated differently, at least by some courts. Say that you rummage through a roommate's papers, find evidence that he's committing a crime, and send it to the police. You haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because you're a private actor. (Whether you might have committed some tort or crime is a separate question.) And the police haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because they didn't perform the search. The evidence can be used against the roommate.
> But say that the police ask you to rummage through the roommate's papers. That rummaging may become a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, at least in the eyes of some courts: "the government might violate a defendant's rights by 'instigat[ing]' or 'encourag[ing]' a private party to search a defendant on its behalf."
> Likewise, "In the Fifth Amendment context, courts have held that the government might violate a defendant's rights by coercing or encouraging a private party to extract a confession from a criminal defendant." More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
> So maybe there's room for courts to shift to a model where the government's mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government's part.
So basically it sounds like this could be the makings of a very fascinating case, if it holds up in court, but there is ample legal precedent of the government doing pretty much what happened on Twitter, already.
> No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
Would that be ok?
I may not like it, and it may not be morally okay, but I am almost certain cops are able to do that, because that is the system we have created.
It comes down to coercion, which can sometimes be hard to prove. In the earlier Twitter Files, a Congressperson mentioned how banning the Hunter Biden Laptop story was going down poorly and the Congressional hearings “would be a blood bath”.
Is that coercion? For the courts to decide I guess.
But I’m in the same camp as you. I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
Sounds like Twitter just went along with it, without coercion. Which you may choose to criticize as weakness or cowardice, but maybe that's just how they chose to do business.
> I don’t disagree with what you posted at all.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
> And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
For the record, my stance is that it's not a nothingburger, but it is so insignificant so as to provide a convenient distraction for actual malicious acts that are going on, like the Z-Library shutdown. And that all of this is underwhelming, much like this other poster's opinion:
"A whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations" seems to be an adequate summation of this whole situation. Which this thread, like all culture wars, has made a mountain out of.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
No I don’t agree. “Norms” are separate from the legal context you gave.
If no coercion took place, that doesn’t make what the FBI did “ok” even if no laws were broken.
Like my earlier analogy, if my local cops started asking businesses to kick people out (and the businesses agreed) that’s a major problem, even if not illegal.
Law enforcement’s job is to identify crimes and arrest people.
When their scope starts expanding into working with willing private companies to silence individuals who have committed no crime, that should worry everyone, whether it happens with Twitter or your local bar.
It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
> It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
The problem is that people are getting at the FBI for the wrong things. They should be getting mad at the shutting down of Z-Library instead, which holds far more impact for far more people than the two dozen accounts discussed in the OP (who weren’t even all suspended). When people are concerned about petty crimes, the big ones get unnoticed.
They positioned themselves as a low level internet infra provider, they are not technically "giving platform". The closest thing they are doing to giving them a platform is protecting them from DDoS.
This is a bit unsettling, I thought that the emergency threat was moderated off the site (as mentionned by the main [1]).
I know that place is horrendous, but it feels like CF blocked it because of the media attention instead of the threat itself. There is plenty of content online that actively partakes in stochastic terrorism as well as direct threats that are serviced by Cloudflare.
The question of what makes content worth dropping, without the involvement of law enforcement, from such low level infrastructure services is a scary prospect, especially when you consider the issues that current internet has[2].
The moment they caved in, Cloudflare stopped being a simple infrastructure provider, and we can be sure that there will be actors, big and small, that will pull levers to make this happen again.
The silver lining is that a hateful forum will probably cease to operate for good.
