23 ms·

Learned basically nothing here. So the FBI helped Twitter with content moderation? Who gives a crap.

• kodyo 4y ago
  They were going after political speech while ignoring actual crimes.
  • time_to_smile 4y ago
    I'm seriously out of the loop on this, what were the actual crimes?
    • wesleywt 4y ago
      More accurately. What was the political speech banned?
      • kodyo 4y ago
      • simpleblend 4y ago
        How about prominent Stanford and Harvard doctors disagreeing with the Covid polices of the CDC?
        • jacquesm 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • simpleblend 4y ago
            Huh? Using the term whataboutism doesn't even make sense here. He asked me to list political speech that was censored, which I did. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard.
            • seadan83 4y ago
              If that disagreement were censored, would you know about it? Getting fired is not a 1st amendment violation. The 1st amendment only covers protection from the government (with a lot of gray ground for "disorderly conduct" laws, but I digress)
              • simpleblend 4y ago
                Francis Collins and Fauci specifically targeted those two doctors.
      • tomohawk 4y ago
        The NY Post was banned for breaking a story about revelations contained in a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden. This was just prior to a national election. The FBI was involved in pushing this narrative through Twitter. The Babylon Bee is a satire site that was banned for doing satire. There are many many examples.
        • g42gregory 4y ago
          I hope we remember that in the same time period, all mentioning of same story were declared misinformation here, on Hacker News, and posts were flagged, users banned. I wonder if there is any learnings here for the current/future reaction to the ongoing stories?
        • favorited 4y ago
          The Babylon Bee was not banned, the same way someone who tries to go into a store without shoes on isn't "banned." They just need to put on some shoes, then you're allowed in. The Babylon Bee was told that 1 Tweet violated Twitter's policy, and that they needed to delete it to unlock their account. They chose not to.
          • simpleblend 4y ago
          • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
            "All you need to do is renounce your values and violate your principles. What's the big deal?"
            • Apocryphon 4y ago
              What values and principles did the Babylon Bee renounce and violate, exactly
            • favorited 4y ago
              lmao "Twitter made me delete a Tweet that violated their ToS if I want to keep using their platform" is equivalent to renouncing all of your principles and values??
    • kodyo 4y ago
      There are lots of crimes that happen in the USA that should probably take priority for the FBI over people posting jokes on Twitter.
  • wesleywt 4y ago
    Oh please. Link to where Twitter banned someone for being right wing. Hate speech doesn't count.
    • simpleblend 4y ago
      It's very convenient that one side of the asile is always in a position to define what hate speech is. Neat trick, but it doesn't work anymore.
      • roflyear 4y ago
        Not a trick, but yeah saying we should harm certain groups of people is hate speech.
        • simpleblend 4y ago
          Who is saying that people should be harmed? Seriously. Whoever you have in mind, if they're actually advocating violence against people then I'm in agreement with you. That's not cool and they shouldn't be doing that. Are you referring to calling a trans person by their biological sex?
          • Apocryphon 4y ago
            Why does your mind instinctively go to that example?
            • simpleblend 4y ago
              Because leftists often use that as an example of hate speech.
              • jacquesm 4y ago
                And rightly so.
  • acdha 4y ago
    The thread clearly shows that they were going after misinformation, and trying to make sure they only did so when accurate. At most you could say that the FBI sent some low quality reports, which seems like a better question for your congressional representatives since they have oversight. It does not show or allege a crime was ignored - can you be precise in what you’re insinuating?
    • kodyo 4y ago
      They didn't have to submit high quality reports because they were working with ideological soulmates.
      • mikeyouse 4y ago
        You do realize for this to be true - the FBI, one of the most conservative organizations in this history of the country, one that’s never been led by a democrat - would have to be secretly as liberal as Twitter’s trust and safety team? Do you understand why people might not find that plausible?
        • kodyo 4y ago
          The FBI serves the state, and itself. If they need to make friends with a leftist to get something done, why would that stop them? I personally find it hard to believe that Crossfire Hurricane was run by a conservative cabal in the FBI, but maybe you're right. Whoever were doing it were elitist reprobates.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • djur 4y ago
            The FBI investigated both Trump and Clinton in 2016. The difference is that they made a big announcement about Clinton immediately prior to the election.
• joshuaheard 4y ago
  It's corruption. It's a violation of the First Amendment. It's a dangerous collusion between state and media. We should all be concerned.
  • 7e 4y ago
  • sleepybrett 4y ago
    It's literally none of those things. The FBI contacted trust and safety and said 'Hey we have concerns about these tweets'. Twitter decided to take them down in some cases. Who is corrupted here? Twitter for taking reports and then deciding how to react to them? The FBI for finding misinformation that might lead to crazies creating mass casualty events? The FBI at no time FORCED twitter to do anything. So it's not violating the first amendment.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Given a large enough transgression they would have gone by a judge and probably gotten an enforceable order, but they chose to first ask nicely. But be assured that if you stonewall such a request and the matter is grave enough that you'll be served next, and rightly so. This is just an optimization and a way to save everybody a lot of time and headaches, as well as a way to ensure that the genie gets put back into the bottle before something can grow legs and do a lot of damage. And with the degree to which social media has been weaponized that is a good thing.
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.
      • nobody9999 4y ago
        >Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree. By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace. Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?
• tomohawk 4y ago
  When people become a sworn officer of the FBI or any other federal LEO officer, they take an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. When instead of upholding the Constitution, they ask a private company to violate people's first ammendment rights, that is an abuse of power. It may be within Twitters terms of service to ban people and censor people, and that may be fine for Twitter, but for a sworn officer to use Twitter to censor people - that is an abuse of power. Of course, the files also show that Twitter personnel acted in bad faith and didn't follow their own ToS.
  • sleepybrett 4y ago
    At no point did the FBI order that tweets be taken down.
    • kodyo 4y ago
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      Yeah, so it seems looking at the emails, which is the only piece of information we are allowed to see. However if you think about it for a minute, if the FBI were this bold in written, subpoena-able communication, what do you think the offline conversations looked like?
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        If they had better they would definitely be showing it. So this is what there is.
      • djur 4y ago
        "The evidence doesn't show malfeasance, but if you imagine other evidence that does show malfeasance, that would be bad" is not a compelling argument in any situation.
  • roflyear 4y ago
    Not a violation of free speech to tell Twitter to take down illegal content.
• LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  So you think it is totally normal that FBI just helps a company to moderate stuff that is legal but doesn't comply with the company's Terms of Service?
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Yes. Because 'legal' and 'damaging to society' are different bars and both the FBI and Twitter probably felt that cooperating on that front was better than to let things get out of hand. The alternative may well have been a dead VP, or worse, so be happy that these channels exist(ed). With that whole department axed we are now in much more dangerous territory. That said I'm pretty sure that Elon Musk knows which side his bread is buttered on and that given an appropriately worded request Twitter will comply just like it did in the past. Or do you think they'll give the FBI the finger now?
    • shkkmo 4y ago
      The FBI should absolutely not be trying to manage or control activity that isn't illegal, especially when that activity is speech. When the FBI does, we end up with horrible stuff like COINTELPRO.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        > When the FBI does, we end up with horrible stuff like COINTELPRO. You could. But that's not what happened here, judging by the evidence on display. All I see is what I expected to see: law enforcement engaging in a careful manner with a company that is dealing with an extremely large flow of communications. And if some of those communications are of a society destabilizing nature it is well within the mandate of the FBI to stick their noses in and make requests. You then have the option to refuse those requests, in which case you may either end up in court, they could forget about the whole thing or you are served with a piece of paper signed off by a judge. What is illegal and what isn't is ultimately for a judge to decide but not every two-bit issue needs to go by a judge if all parties agree that the world is better off with moderating it out of existence.
• colordrops 4y ago
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    In this case reporting two dozen small fry accounts to moderator teams is very weak as far as censorship goes. They’re doing the same thing as everyone else who hits report on Twitter does, except cutting in line. But you can bet there are tens of thousands of businesses, especially Twitter’s advertisers, who have the same if not closer relations with Twitter and, if made displeased, could cause Twitter to censor you even quicker than the FBI could.
    • colordrops 4y ago
      I don't see anything about being a "small fry" mattering when it comes to the law. It's pretty cut and dried. What the FBI is doing is unconstitutional and illegal. Why are you minimizing it? That they are doing it all is extremely alarming. It's like saying "the concentration camp only has 5 people, what's the big deal?" And why are you comparing them to private companies? Private companies are not covered by the same laws when it comes to the first amendment.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        What is the law that is being broken here, and how are punishments measured for its infraction? Is it based on amount of impact? Because if so, then asking moderation for a dozen or two accounts with limited reach is something that might carry a small amount of punishment, if any at all. The first amendment is about the government making laws to infringe upon free speech. I see no laws being made here. So it is the government behaving exactly like a private company. Which may be problematic, but not unlawful.
        • colordrops 4y ago
          If the FBI suggested to the various tech companies to shut down all your accounts and they complied, you'd be singing a different tune.
• lsh123 4y ago
  “But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.” First amendment? What is that?
  • belltaco 4y ago
    Have you read the first amendment? It starts with Congress shall not make a law... FBI is not Congress.
    • lsh123 4y ago
      “FBI acted illegally (outside of Congress authorization)” works for me too
    • etchalon 4y ago
      Maybe, but the generally excepted judicial standard is "the government can't impugn freedom of speech, outside of a compelling interest." That includes the Executive.
    • lp0_on_fire 4y ago
      The FBI was created by an act of congress...thus it cannot infringe on first amendment protected activies.
  • seadan83 4y ago
    Why were the accounts of interest? Were they controlled by foreign IPs? When there are mass ransomware attacks from foreign states, the FBI does help private companies. I think that is probably the charitable perspective. Either that or the FBI led by James Comey at the time (who arguably single handed sunk Clinton in 2016 by going against FBI policy to re-open the "emails" case), was corrupt and at a rate of one email a week was attempting to control the national discourse thru twitter. Not sure if that is credible given the FBI could have done far worse to the trump campaign. Though, without primary source material, I'm not sure how one could tell the difference (Occams razor seemingly might come into play)
• russdill 4y ago
• hackerlight 4y ago
  It's bad that it wasn't transparent to the public. I don't like the idea of the government actively playing a role in moderating content that isn't illegal unless it's transparent and there's oversight by voters. Twitter as a private company can moderate content as it sees fit. But the government is supposed to be constrained by the First Amendment. And here, they technically are, because they're not forcing Twitter to take action. But there's always the background threat of regulation if Twitter doesn't play nice, so it's not as black and white as this.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Can you outline a scheme that would satisfy your needs for transparency while at the same time not result in compromising active investigations, tipping off the perps that they are under surveillance and so on? Because I don't see a practical way to achieve that ideal that would still work. Having been on the receiving end of such requests I was pretty happy all of them were made in a confidential manner, it saved everybody a ton of headaches and reduce the amount of grip the various miscreants had on our community. Doing that in the open would have caused massive issues, some of these people were downright dangerous and others simply needed help, keeping their data and our interaction around that data confidential was - in my opinion - a good thing all around.
    • hackerlight 4y ago
      At least give us a retrospective 2 years later on the accounts that were requested to be taken down and why. There are ways around this dilemma.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        I'll give you one example: I was called up on my cell phone in the middle of the night by the police in NL that a person was attempting suicide on camera on our website. We fished their IP number out of the logs and passed it on which allowed LE (after contact with the relevant ISP) + medical assistance to get there in record time and help the person who ended up surviving and being quite happy that their attempt had failed (it's been more than a decade and I still have that image etched into my brain). There is no 'best before' date on something like that, just knowing the account name would be enough to cause trouble for that person all over again. You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped. The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity. What you could do is to come up with a set of workable rules for which requests would have to be made public and which not, but I don't think I would be capable of coming up with such a set of rules that would not in the future lead to issues. So to default to secrecy seems prudent. In that light, the sale of Twitter and the subsequent exposure of all these interactions presumably has the effect of such communications becoming more opaque rather than less resulting in the opposite effect of what you desire.