12 ms·

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 othe

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.

benjaminwootton 4y ago
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.
- hgfdhgdhg 4y ago
  They're not a normal user. Wouldn't you expect more transparency from your government? It appalls me that many find this okay.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    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?
  - synergyS 4y ago
    Exactly, we need more transparency.
  - crimsoneer 4y ago
    You could absolutely submitted a freedom of information request to the FBI about this activity
- xiphias2 4y ago
  They had direct email exchange, it wasn't just normal flagging.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  > 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!
- nverno 4y ago
  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.
  - bigtex 4y ago
    They could be proactive in protection us companies from ransomware attacks but instead they worry about social media posts.
    - acdha 4y ago
      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.
  - canucklady 4y ago
    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.
  - somehnacct3757 4y ago
    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.
- nec4b 4y ago
  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?
- fallingknife 4y ago
  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.
- mikrotikker 4y ago
  So why didn't they use the same option you do rather than getting their own special web portal for it?
  - viraptor 4y ago
    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.
beebmam 4y ago
Here's the 1st amendment for reference: "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?
- spoiler 4y ago
  When governments ask companies to do something, they usually must comply though lol
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    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. Edit: Here’s a link with some relevant case law. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-private-entities-to-restrict-others-speech/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p... 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.
    - koolba 4y ago
      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.
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        By this logic the government can’t use the Report Tweet button either, right?
cactusplant7374 4y ago
> but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments? https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/1603859660431167488?s=46&t=cKJVnMldhGDSf1jrEW8QDw https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
- pannSun 4y ago
  From that thread: Some were domestic takedowns of, say, QAnon accounts So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    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.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Given the number of crimes and things like bomb threats linked to QAnon, it seems pretty reasonable to monitor them. https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united-states https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...
sethd 4y ago
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.
borbulon 4y ago
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.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  > 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?
camgunz 4y ago
> 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.
gardenhedge 4y ago
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.
exceptione 4y ago
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.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  "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.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Ironically, these same people were bending over backward to protect and justify obvious Russian propaganda in America during the Soviet era.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
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.
- miedpo 4y ago
  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).
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    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.
- partiallypro 4y ago
  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.
eternalban 4y ago
> the FBI has overstepped its bounds 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i... Open: "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." https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD-2001-09-17-Pg1310.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD...
nirvgorilla 4y ago
When I hear about FBI trying to get people banned on some stupid website named twitter, all I can think about is this: https://i.imgur.com/p7Nrm4R.png https://i.imgur.com/p7Nrm4R.png
candybar 4y ago
This is what actual problematic coercion looks like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-twitter-executive-order/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t... 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.
clifmo 4y ago
"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." What evidence of coercion is there?

benjaminwootton 4y ago

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.

hgfdhgdhg 4y ago
They're not a normal user. Wouldn't you expect more transparency from your government? It appalls me that many find this okay.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  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?
- synergyS 4y ago
  Exactly, we need more transparency.
- crimsoneer 4y ago
  You could absolutely submitted a freedom of information request to the FBI about this activity
xiphias2 4y ago
They had direct email exchange, it wasn't just normal flagging.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cloutchaser 4y ago
> 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!
nverno 4y ago
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.
- bigtex 4y ago
  They could be proactive in protection us companies from ransomware attacks but instead they worry about social media posts.
  - acdha 4y ago
    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.
- canucklady 4y ago
  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.
- somehnacct3757 4y ago
  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.
nec4b 4y ago
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?
fallingknife 4y ago
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.
mikrotikker 4y ago
So why didn't they use the same option you do rather than getting their own special web portal for it?
- viraptor 4y ago
  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.

beebmam 4y ago

Here's the 1st amendment for reference: "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?

spoiler 4y ago
When governments ask companies to do something, they usually must comply though lol
- ethanbond 4y ago
  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. Edit: Here’s a link with some relevant case law. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-private-entities-to-restrict-others-speech/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p... 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.
  - koolba 4y ago
    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.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      By this logic the government can’t use the Report Tweet button either, right?

cactusplant7374 4y ago

> but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments? https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/1603859660431167488?s=46&t=cKJVnMldhGDSf1jrEW8QDw https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...

pannSun 4y ago
From that thread: Some were domestic takedowns of, say, QAnon accounts So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  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.
- acdha 4y ago
  Given the number of crimes and things like bomb threats linked to QAnon, it seems pretty reasonable to monitor them. https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united-states https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...

sethd 4y ago

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.

borbulon 4y ago

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.

puffoflogic 4y ago
> 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?

camgunz 4y ago

> 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.

gardenhedge 4y ago

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.

exceptione 4y ago

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.

fallingknife 4y ago
"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.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Ironically, these same people were bending over backward to protect and justify obvious Russian propaganda in America during the Soviet era.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

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.

miedpo 4y ago
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).
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  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.
partiallypro 4y ago
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.

eternalban 4y ago

> the FBI has overstepped its bounds 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i... Open: "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." https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD-2001-09-17-Pg1310.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD...

nirvgorilla 4y ago

When I hear about FBI trying to get people banned on some stupid website named twitter, all I can think about is this: https://i.imgur.com/p7Nrm4R.png https://i.imgur.com/p7Nrm4R.png

candybar 4y ago

This is what actual problematic coercion looks like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-twitter-executive-order/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t... 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.

clifmo 4y ago

"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." What evidence of coercion is there?