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I’ve been trying to read these Twitter files threads thoughtfully, and maybe it’s just a sign of the current average level of comfort with government involvemen

by mef 4y ago

I’ve been trying to read these Twitter files threads thoughtfully, and maybe it’s just a sign of the current average level of comfort with government involvement with social media platforms, but I’m generally not seeing much issue with the stuff being revealed. the worst thing about this particular thread seems like the govt agencies talking to Twitter about foreign influence are overreaching a bit (eg asking them to look at Russian oligarchs’ troll farms for promoting anti-Ukrainian spam). but I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaigns, etc.

cyberphobe 4y ago
Yeah, these people are just desperately trying to generate outrage over nothing. It’s really really dumb. No need to give them too much thought
- asynchronous 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - froggertoaster 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - TylerLives 4y ago
      It's a display of power. "Yeah, we're censoring you, so what? Everyone knew this already, and it's a good thing". I'm not sure what the people who decided to publish this were expecting. Who knows though, maybe in the long run it will have some consequences.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    What is good summary that point to the core of the issue as revealed by these “leaks”?
  - cyberphobe 4y ago
    What am I missing then?
  - lawn 4y ago
    Maybe instead of just repeating that we should re-read them, you should point out exactly what is so aggrevating, and where in the files you're referring to? Simply repeating things is a propaganda and brainwashing technique.
    - epivosism 4y ago
      jumping in here, but what makes me worried is a strong power being used without proper controls, auditing, and system design. From a system perspective it looks like the US Gov had elevated access to ban people, and had opportunity and reason to misuse it. The initial rationale for the US Gov already admits this as a legit reason to ban foreign agents - "undue power/misleading influence". I hold that same view, but also consider that malicious elements in the US Government are also something to worry about, so I'd like their own power to shape the discussion to be limited and tracked, too.
      - Jarwain 4y ago
        It really doesn't look like the US Gov had unilateral access to ban people. Just to flag accounts for consideration by Twitter, differing from what normal users can do only in that the flag comes from a "trusted" source and moderation is expedited. If a tweet didn't violate Twitter's terms, it's been shown the Twitter team wouldn't remove that tweet despite being flagged by the govt
      - lawn 4y ago
        If you read the files, it does not say that the US Gov can just ban people. What they did is flag people, and then Twitter reviews the requests. I'm much more worried about the current state of affairs where a single deranged person (Elon) can arbitrarily issue bans on a whim.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - runjake 4y ago
    Please enlighten us. I have no agenda or allegiances. I tried reading them closely. I see some new stuff that is of mild concern given our post-Snowden world, but I am also not able to see the great outrage.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    You are acting contrarian with no evidence, no discussion of any particular component of the revealed data, nothing specific even to debate regarding the original comment. Yet the conspiracy is the downplaying of it! I've seen a lot of hyperbole about the twitter files that, when I read it for myself, is not nearly what was claimed by the hyperbolist. For example, someone said "The FBI bribed Twitter with $3.4M to remove content!" - I looked into it, and the FBI compensated Twitter for work done over time to research and then take action on suspicious accounts. Now, that may be shady to work with the FBI on takedowns without a warrant or court order. But do I call that a bribe? Not really. I am open to discussing what is wrong and suspicious in the files, but there is quite a correlation between "people raising hell about the Twitter files" and "people who have no problem with hate speech or adversary nation-state propaganda on social networks". For example, I believe that actions taken by social networks (or any organization ever) on behalf of the government should be documented and released to the public after some period of time, even on the order of years. If the government believes a twitter account, facebook account or email address is a threat to national security, it should be documented. If the account is not a singular "threat" but is known to the IC to be a nation-state troll, that should be documented as the reason. I'm not convinced it should happen over email. That said, I acknowledge that nation-state trolling and disinformation campaigns absolutely exist on Twitter and elsewhere, and need dealt with.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Banning DMs talking about true events seems like something reasonable to be outraged about.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It happened for a few hours when the story was flagged as hacked materials (just like they’d do for, say, someone’s non-consensual nudes). Twitter did that on their own and removed it shortly later after their internal discussion agreed that it wasn’t a violation (they took down the tweets reposting actual nudes, not the media coverage).
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      Sorry, wasn’t NY Post suspended on Twitter for almost two weeks? The impact wasn’t just for a few hours and the final acknowledgement of validity of those files came long after the election. This is textbook gaslighting.0
      - acdha 4y ago
        I was referring specifically to the URL block we were talking about. They used their existing system for hacked material until confirming that it was not appropriate: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-york-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-yo...
      - asynchronous 4y ago
        I feel like the memory of democracy nowadays is exactly 18 hours long.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    HN bans any and all DMs. Outraged yet?
petesergeant 4y ago
> I’ve been trying to read these Twitter files threads thoughtfully I stopped after the first one. If there’s any meat to be found then the last vestiges of respectable right-wing media will amplify it. Until the WSJ posts anything more than “This Is Sort Of Bad! But We Already Reported It In Full Last Year!” then there’s no point subjecting yourself to it.
- cyberphobe 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - asynchronous 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - cyberphobe 4y ago
      Except no one’s really doing that, they’re just generating outrage bait to prop up a retarded billionaire’s obviously nonsense claim that Twitter, a huge company, is (or was) secretly staffed exclusively by the far left. All evidence that has come out has shown not that, so they’re trying to come up with something else to be outraged about. FBI asking Twitter to stop criminals seems entirely unsurprisingly.
      - dang 4y ago
        We've banned this account for using HN primarily for flamewar and ideological battle. You can't do that here, regardless of which ideology you favor; it's abusive no matter who does it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wrycoder 4y ago
  The WSJ is hardly right wing.
akira2501 4y ago
The Hunter Biden laptop story was real. The FBI knew it was real. The FBI lied to corporations like Twitter to stop accounts from legitimate publications from reporting on it right before an election where it certainly could have impacted the outcome. Twitter went even further and prevented people from exchanging the story with each other in DMs. I honestly don't see how you could be comfortable with this, unless you're willing to disregard their actions because they happen to protect the party you agree with at the moment; or because you're presuming that the FBI would never use this relationship to operate in bad faith. Twitter didn't go to the FBI to ask for verification, the FBI on their own accord decided to take their "intelligence" to Twitter for action that they desired. This is obviously backwards. If Twitter wants to call up the FBI for verification or for information on a particular subject, tweet, or account because they wanted to investigate.. that would obviously be fine. That is clearly not what is happening here.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Ahh yes, all those tweets the FBI reported that Matt forgot to tell you were straight up revenge porn. I really wonder why they were deleted! If only he could have found out using, like, the Web Archive, as many others did afterwards. (It was the Trump government FBI, by the way. In case your timeline is a bit mixed up?)
  - akira2501 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - turtleyacht 4y ago
      Even if flagged, isn't that just a -1? I've seen grey posts return to dark after an upvote before.
      - flagsrule 4y ago
smitty1e 4y ago
We pay fat piles of taxes for the government to secure liberty. The idea that that government is "managing" that liberty is Constitutionally murky. The "private property" fig leaf is scant comfort.
- complex_exp 4y ago
  Uh, no, private property is subjogated to national interest. Personal freedom is subjogated to national interest (you may be conscripted). In all countries. The only way for things not to fall into a terrible state of affairs (like in Russia or Iran) is for the civil society to perform political acts, like engage in honest journalism, activism and critical thinking. And even then freedom and security are not guaranteed. Thinking that you can be a free-from-all libertarian is like being a house cat that does not comprehend the system that keeps him alive. It is only because the system works that you can enjoy personal freedoms. Russians have fully outsourced their both internal politics (resulting in for example the absolutely atrocious state of the courts of law) and foreign politics (mobilization! yay, go die in a trench!) to the tzar and look how that turned out. They also paid taxes and generally speaking accepted the offered social contract, but didn't monitor the situation and react to transgressions.
  - hellfish 4y ago
    > Thinking that you can be a free-from-all libertarian is like being a house cat that does not comprehend the system that keeps him alive. So because the government does something (THANK GOD), we all need to advocate for more government?
    - complex_exp 4y ago
      [dead]
    - smitty1e 4y ago
      I'd like to differentiate between the Col. Jessup "You want me on that wall; you NEED me on that wall" class, and ...the specific Col. Jessup instance that breaks down and calls away a Code Red. Our Civil Servants are neither civil nor (apparently) serving any but themselves. How to avoid becoming a cure worse than the disease? One thing would be to rotate these staffers more frequently, so they are less prone to what looks like GroupThink.
efitz 4y ago
Except the meetings between the US government and Twitter were the influence campaign.
- Retric 4y ago
  You can say that about basically any interaction between any government and social media including anti child porn or other law enforcement activity. The question is if the interaction is unacceptably not if it exists.
  - barbacoa 4y ago
    The FBI were sending Twitter lists of pro-Venezuela, pro-Russian, etc "bot" accounts. Were they really doing forensic analysis to determine they were run by foreign governments or were they just flagging account with opinions that ran against US foreign policy? All the while the government was running their own fake bot propaganda accounts and having Twitter white-list them against their bot filters.
  - efitz 4y ago
    The FBI had had the Hunter Biden laptop and knew its contents were not planted by foreign agents. They knew Giuliani was about to go public with it in October. But what they told Twitter and Facebook was that it was foreign disinformation and/or hacked information, knowing these assertions were false. That is not “protecting Democracy from foreign interference”, it’s literally the opposite, a government agency convincing private companies to suppress information they knew to be true, leading to a less informed electorate. If the FBI had done exactly the same thing but it was Trump’s drug addict son’s laptop, it’s likely that all the “nothing to see here” people here would have been screaming for FBI heads to roll (figuratively) for the last two years. The bottom line is that our bureaucracies are not supposed to act in a partisan fashion, and they did.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The FBI did things to piss off both sides of the isle. The point is bringing up specific actions by specific people is actionable. Sure, Twitter’s new management is changing who is being censored and tossing out juicy bits of dirt, and the set of owners after this will presumably do the same. Waving jazz hands and saying influence doesn’t move these discussions forward.
icare_1er 4y ago
[flagged]
epivosism 4y ago
>I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaign Agree with this; there really are threats out there, and the manipulation techniques they use are sophisticated. The problem I have was that the system was developed in secret, didn't really seem to be guarded very carefully from misuse, and was administered by highly politicized leadership at Twitter.
merpnderp 4y ago
The FBI/CIA was censoring rando Americans for stupid jokes and everything in between that and real journalists covering real stories that the FBI didn’t want ran. It was bad.
pannSun 4y ago
Did you miss [1]? The US govt. used its influence over Twitter to help sell its foreign policy (military interventions included) to the US and global audience. The only way you could not take issue with it, is if you're fine with govt. psyops/undisclosed propaganda. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111071
- robert_foss 4y ago
  It used to be CIA and TV. Nothing new under the sun.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    One would hope that after the patriot act, the bush jr wars, cablegate, the nsa leaks and so on just in the last 20 years people would desire to not keep the old habits, but I suppose all it took was one buffoon to take presidency and all that rolls back. Truly a sad sight from those looking hopeful after the occupy movement and all the anti surveillance sentiment post-leaks.
    - barbacoa 4y ago
      Endless war, domestic surveillance, expanding government power. The modern left has become the neo-conservatives.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      All of that is still happening in the populist movement, both left (Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, etc) and right (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Robert Barnes, etc.). The populist movement which has been gaining traction through new media and new organizations outside of traditional parties. Also, the “Woke” psyop used to destroy Occupy Wall St has now destroyed corporate America with ESG and Woke media scandals. As usual, the CIA and friends are bad at managing blowback.
    - yucky 4y ago
      > the bush jr wars Small correction, we can't call them the Bush Jr. wars when they survived and thrived for 8 years under Obama. These were FULLY bipartisan fuckups of monumental proportion that proves how much both parties are in the pocket of Raytheon & Northrop Grumman.
antiterra 4y ago
I am someone who didn’t see anything seriously objectionable in the Twitter files, but I do think it raised some questions worth thinking about. If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. Could anything be done to reduce the ability of a large organization to extort an online platform into censoring content that complies with their guidelines? Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?
- acdha 4y ago
  > I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. This is possible but I would expect people to look for evidence of it before presenting it as a fact. Something like that would show up in internal communications either directly or as people talking like they didn’t really have a choice, or as a trend of tweets being taken down for reasons which don’t seem warranted when you look at them. The closest we’ve seen to that were things like the guy who was telling Republicans to vote on Wednesday, which is clearly a dumb joke but also something most people aren’t going to shed tears about when made a couple days beforehand.
  - lurquer 4y ago
    The US is a limited govt. No govt agency can do anything for which it isn’t explicitly authorized. The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies. If a agent is being paid — with taxpayer dollars - to check on Twitter and give it ‘advice’ on how to run itself, that agent is acting outside the scope of his authority. It’s an abuse and misuse of power. It doesn’t matter what the ‘greater good’ is. The FBI’s purpose isn’t to generally look out for the greater good. Rather, it’s to investigate federal crimes. There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’
    - acdha 4y ago
counttheforks 4y ago
[flagged]
spamizbad 4y ago
I feel like if someone made a bunch of threats on Twitter and then followed through with them people would be completely outraged why the FBI didn’t stop them. Anyway it’s interesting we are having this debate TODAY when after 9/11 and a decade later the adroit use of social media by ISIL the alphabet agencies were crawling all over the internet. Pandora’s box was opened years ago.
- mushbino 4y ago
  If you look at most mass shootings you'll find articles saying the suspect was "known to the FBI." For some reason they rarely stop them ahead of time. The Whitmer kidnapping is a recent example. Well, I guess they started AND stopped it in that case.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    That's because most mass shootings have no crime committed until the suspect opens fire.
    - mushbino 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's illegal to plan a murder. Also, in many of the FBI cases there are undercover agents imbedded with the group. The Whitmer case being a recent example and they were all arrested before any shots were fired. https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michigan-gretchen-whitmer-grand-rapids-adam-fox-a7dd7bc1a4e5917c3e2c78f599ebc17f https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michiga...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- landemva 4y ago
  > people would be completely outraged why the FBI didn’t stop them. I doubt people would make FBI change for the better. Suspicions of people paying cash at flight schools and not seeming to want an airline career was reported to FBI several times before 9/11. FBI filed it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-was-warned-about-flight-schools https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-was-warned-about-flight-sch...
jinpa_zangpo 4y ago
When your boss tells you to do something, you can always say no, but you don't treat it as a mere suggestion. There's a power imbalance that makes it something more. You can't treat government communications with Twitter as mere suggestions. The government's power makes it more serious than that.
nverno 4y ago
> current average level of comfort with government involvement It really all comes down to this- it's largely a matter of personal comfort/risk tolerance. Personally, I'd be happy to see entire agencies wiped out, the CIA and the NSA obliterated, the FBI cut back to where it was in the 60s or so, preferably focused on mob/cartel activity and the like. The CIA should never have been separated out from the military and given so much free reign. From my point of view, the CIA's history is just a series of catastrophic mistakes. There's arguments to made on both sides, but no objectively clear right or wrong choice.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  The FBI in the 60s was inflitrating and disrupting civil rights groups.
  - nverno 4y ago
    Right, just another example of many mistakes made by these agencies since their inception. I do think there is legitimate need for some form of FBI, though.
  - refurb 4y ago
    What makes you think they've stopped?
- DaftDank 4y ago
  Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?
  - nverno 4y ago
    I may be terribly naive, but I just don't feel any safer b/c the NSA exists. I also don't believe this country has been under any serious threats since the NSA was created, from which it protected us.
  - 4y ago
coredog64 4y ago
The FBI was highlighting obvious parody accounts and accounts with double digit followers for the “crime” of the tired old joke of “(other party) votes on Wednesday”.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  The whole parody thing a-la Carl Tuckerson "nobody seriously believes this" while manufacturing outrage that many people believe in and results in stochastic terrorism needs to stop. How many massacres[1] are necessary before people take things like that a bit more seriously? Is it until somebody they know gets murdered? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...
  - VanTheBrand 4y ago
    I mean the parody account being referenced here (@madandpissedoff) was one that pretended to be the WWE wrestler undertaker and almost exclusively tweeted denials about shitting his own pants at the mall. I’m not sure it was really leading toward a massacre (unless you count what happened to that mall bathroom stall.)
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      Using one datapoint to extrapolate to the broader case is really not a good approach to supporting an argument. Commenter said “parody accounts”, what specifically that refers to is ambiguous, so I considered the class of accounts that may be considered parody by some.
cloutchaser 4y ago
I wonder if you’d have an issue with it if these organisations leaned mostly republican. When this last happened in the 1960s and 70s, when it was the left that was anti establishment, and didn’t want the Vietnam war, or didn’t want Christian orthodoxy imposed on society, the left was obsessed with free speech and being anti government organisations. Suddenly no one can think beyond their own party and as long as these organizations interfering with speech are on their side, it’s fine. People really need to think longer term. It only takes one very determined president or one sided congress and senate to completely change these organisations.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  > People really need to think longer term. Asking too much. In the past couple months, HN users went from “it’s a private company they can do what they want” when Twitter was a public company working with the FBI to enact specific user censorship… to “OMG Elon banned a handful of journalists, freeze peach was a lie!” when it was a suspension for 12 hours. Where are all those “it’s a private company they can do what they like” folks now? I haven’t seen that posted recently.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    Ok. It’s a private company and they can do what they like. And we can point out the hypocrisy.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      And ignore you own, what a wonderful scenario for you.
  - clucas 4y ago
    I'm one of those people. I think Elon can ban whomever he wants, for any reason he wants. I didn't see anyone arguing otherwise though, so I didn't have much to say. Edited to add: I am a little curious why the free speech absolutists weren't up in arms about those bans though. Hmm.
mushbino 4y ago
This is an example of the FBI pushing a specific narrative, is it not?
theCrowing 4y ago
It's called Moral Panic.
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]
refurb 4y ago
but I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaigns, etc. You don't? There is nothing special about Twitter as a private business when it comes to acceptable level of government interference. Police agencies are responsible for investigating crimes. That's their remit. They aren't allowed to compel a private individual/business to provide any evidence without a court order. Of course you can always cooperate (and Twitter looks like they were), but any lawyer worth their salt would tell you not to. But let's tweak the scenario a bit - if the cops were coming to your local bar every day or two, asking about various patrons, maybe suggesting "hey next time maybe you shouldn't let that person in", you think there isn't a problem?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Police agencies are responsible for investigating crimes. That’s their remit. The FBI has a broader official remit than “investigating crimes”.
  - refurb 4y ago
    Please tell me the “remit” of “law enforcement”.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      The FBI isn’t just a law enforcement agency. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a national security and law enforcement agency that uses, collects, and shares intelligence in all it does.” https://www.justice.gov/doj/organization-mission-and-functions-manual-federal-bureau-investigation https://www.justice.gov/doj/organization-mission-and-functio... “The FBI is an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national security organization with both intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities. It is the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice and a full member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbi https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbi
      - 4y ago

by mef 4y ago

cyberphobe 4y ago

Yeah, these people are just desperately trying to generate outrage over nothing. It’s really really dumb. No need to give them too much thought

asynchronous 4y ago
[flagged]
- froggertoaster 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - TylerLives 4y ago
    It's a display of power. "Yeah, we're censoring you, so what? Everyone knew this already, and it's a good thing". I'm not sure what the people who decided to publish this were expecting. Who knows though, maybe in the long run it will have some consequences.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  What is good summary that point to the core of the issue as revealed by these “leaks”?
- cyberphobe 4y ago
  What am I missing then?
- lawn 4y ago
  Maybe instead of just repeating that we should re-read them, you should point out exactly what is so aggrevating, and where in the files you're referring to? Simply repeating things is a propaganda and brainwashing technique.
  - epivosism 4y ago
    jumping in here, but what makes me worried is a strong power being used without proper controls, auditing, and system design. From a system perspective it looks like the US Gov had elevated access to ban people, and had opportunity and reason to misuse it. The initial rationale for the US Gov already admits this as a legit reason to ban foreign agents - "undue power/misleading influence". I hold that same view, but also consider that malicious elements in the US Government are also something to worry about, so I'd like their own power to shape the discussion to be limited and tracked, too.
    - Jarwain 4y ago
      It really doesn't look like the US Gov had unilateral access to ban people. Just to flag accounts for consideration by Twitter, differing from what normal users can do only in that the flag comes from a "trusted" source and moderation is expedited. If a tweet didn't violate Twitter's terms, it's been shown the Twitter team wouldn't remove that tweet despite being flagged by the govt
    - lawn 4y ago
      If you read the files, it does not say that the US Gov can just ban people. What they did is flag people, and then Twitter reviews the requests. I'm much more worried about the current state of affairs where a single deranged person (Elon) can arbitrarily issue bans on a whim.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- runjake 4y ago
  Please enlighten us. I have no agenda or allegiances. I tried reading them closely. I see some new stuff that is of mild concern given our post-Snowden world, but I am also not able to see the great outrage.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  You are acting contrarian with no evidence, no discussion of any particular component of the revealed data, nothing specific even to debate regarding the original comment. Yet the conspiracy is the downplaying of it! I've seen a lot of hyperbole about the twitter files that, when I read it for myself, is not nearly what was claimed by the hyperbolist. For example, someone said "The FBI bribed Twitter with $3.4M to remove content!" - I looked into it, and the FBI compensated Twitter for work done over time to research and then take action on suspicious accounts. Now, that may be shady to work with the FBI on takedowns without a warrant or court order. But do I call that a bribe? Not really. I am open to discussing what is wrong and suspicious in the files, but there is quite a correlation between "people raising hell about the Twitter files" and "people who have no problem with hate speech or adversary nation-state propaganda on social networks". For example, I believe that actions taken by social networks (or any organization ever) on behalf of the government should be documented and released to the public after some period of time, even on the order of years. If the government believes a twitter account, facebook account or email address is a threat to national security, it should be documented. If the account is not a singular "threat" but is known to the IC to be a nation-state troll, that should be documented as the reason. I'm not convinced it should happen over email. That said, I acknowledge that nation-state trolling and disinformation campaigns absolutely exist on Twitter and elsewhere, and need dealt with.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Banning DMs talking about true events seems like something reasonable to be outraged about.
- acdha 4y ago
  It happened for a few hours when the story was flagged as hacked materials (just like they’d do for, say, someone’s non-consensual nudes). Twitter did that on their own and removed it shortly later after their internal discussion agreed that it wasn’t a violation (they took down the tweets reposting actual nudes, not the media coverage).
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    Sorry, wasn’t NY Post suspended on Twitter for almost two weeks? The impact wasn’t just for a few hours and the final acknowledgement of validity of those files came long after the election. This is textbook gaslighting.0
    - acdha 4y ago
      I was referring specifically to the URL block we were talking about. They used their existing system for hacked material until confirming that it was not appropriate: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-york-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-yo...
    - asynchronous 4y ago
      I feel like the memory of democracy nowadays is exactly 18 hours long.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  HN bans any and all DMs. Outraged yet?

petesergeant 4y ago

> I’ve been trying to read these Twitter files threads thoughtfully I stopped after the first one. If there’s any meat to be found then the last vestiges of respectable right-wing media will amplify it. Until the WSJ posts anything more than “This Is Sort Of Bad! But We Already Reported It In Full Last Year!” then there’s no point subjecting yourself to it.

cyberphobe 4y ago
[flagged]
- asynchronous 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - cyberphobe 4y ago
    Except no one’s really doing that, they’re just generating outrage bait to prop up a retarded billionaire’s obviously nonsense claim that Twitter, a huge company, is (or was) secretly staffed exclusively by the far left. All evidence that has come out has shown not that, so they’re trying to come up with something else to be outraged about. FBI asking Twitter to stop criminals seems entirely unsurprisingly.
    - dang 4y ago
      We've banned this account for using HN primarily for flamewar and ideological battle. You can't do that here, regardless of which ideology you favor; it's abusive no matter who does it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wrycoder 4y ago
The WSJ is hardly right wing.

akira2501 4y ago

The Hunter Biden laptop story was real. The FBI knew it was real. The FBI lied to corporations like Twitter to stop accounts from legitimate publications from reporting on it right before an election where it certainly could have impacted the outcome. Twitter went even further and prevented people from exchanging the story with each other in DMs. I honestly don't see how you could be comfortable with this, unless you're willing to disregard their actions because they happen to protect the party you agree with at the moment; or because you're presuming that the FBI would never use this relationship to operate in bad faith. Twitter didn't go to the FBI to ask for verification, the FBI on their own accord decided to take their "intelligence" to Twitter for action that they desired. This is obviously backwards. If Twitter wants to call up the FBI for verification or for information on a particular subject, tweet, or account because they wanted to investigate.. that would obviously be fine. That is clearly not what is happening here.

stefan_ 4y ago
Ahh yes, all those tweets the FBI reported that Matt forgot to tell you were straight up revenge porn. I really wonder why they were deleted! If only he could have found out using, like, the Web Archive, as many others did afterwards. (It was the Trump government FBI, by the way. In case your timeline is a bit mixed up?)
- akira2501 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - turtleyacht 4y ago
    Even if flagged, isn't that just a -1? I've seen grey posts return to dark after an upvote before.
    - flagsrule 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago

We pay fat piles of taxes for the government to secure liberty. The idea that that government is "managing" that liberty is Constitutionally murky. The "private property" fig leaf is scant comfort.

complex_exp 4y ago
Uh, no, private property is subjogated to national interest. Personal freedom is subjogated to national interest (you may be conscripted). In all countries. The only way for things not to fall into a terrible state of affairs (like in Russia or Iran) is for the civil society to perform political acts, like engage in honest journalism, activism and critical thinking. And even then freedom and security are not guaranteed. Thinking that you can be a free-from-all libertarian is like being a house cat that does not comprehend the system that keeps him alive. It is only because the system works that you can enjoy personal freedoms. Russians have fully outsourced their both internal politics (resulting in for example the absolutely atrocious state of the courts of law) and foreign politics (mobilization! yay, go die in a trench!) to the tzar and look how that turned out. They also paid taxes and generally speaking accepted the offered social contract, but didn't monitor the situation and react to transgressions.
- hellfish 4y ago
  > Thinking that you can be a free-from-all libertarian is like being a house cat that does not comprehend the system that keeps him alive. So because the government does something (THANK GOD), we all need to advocate for more government?
  - complex_exp 4y ago
    [dead]
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    I'd like to differentiate between the Col. Jessup "You want me on that wall; you NEED me on that wall" class, and ...the specific Col. Jessup instance that breaks down and calls away a Code Red. Our Civil Servants are neither civil nor (apparently) serving any but themselves. How to avoid becoming a cure worse than the disease? One thing would be to rotate these staffers more frequently, so they are less prone to what looks like GroupThink.

efitz 4y ago

Except the meetings between the US government and Twitter were the influence campaign.

Retric 4y ago
You can say that about basically any interaction between any government and social media including anti child porn or other law enforcement activity. The question is if the interaction is unacceptably not if it exists.
- barbacoa 4y ago
  The FBI were sending Twitter lists of pro-Venezuela, pro-Russian, etc "bot" accounts. Were they really doing forensic analysis to determine they were run by foreign governments or were they just flagging account with opinions that ran against US foreign policy? All the while the government was running their own fake bot propaganda accounts and having Twitter white-list them against their bot filters.
- efitz 4y ago
  The FBI had had the Hunter Biden laptop and knew its contents were not planted by foreign agents. They knew Giuliani was about to go public with it in October. But what they told Twitter and Facebook was that it was foreign disinformation and/or hacked information, knowing these assertions were false. That is not “protecting Democracy from foreign interference”, it’s literally the opposite, a government agency convincing private companies to suppress information they knew to be true, leading to a less informed electorate. If the FBI had done exactly the same thing but it was Trump’s drug addict son’s laptop, it’s likely that all the “nothing to see here” people here would have been screaming for FBI heads to roll (figuratively) for the last two years. The bottom line is that our bureaucracies are not supposed to act in a partisan fashion, and they did.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The FBI did things to piss off both sides of the isle. The point is bringing up specific actions by specific people is actionable. Sure, Twitter’s new management is changing who is being censored and tossing out juicy bits of dirt, and the set of owners after this will presumably do the same. Waving jazz hands and saying influence doesn’t move these discussions forward.

icare_1er 4y ago

[flagged]

epivosism 4y ago

>I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaign Agree with this; there really are threats out there, and the manipulation techniques they use are sophisticated. The problem I have was that the system was developed in secret, didn't really seem to be guarded very carefully from misuse, and was administered by highly politicized leadership at Twitter.

merpnderp 4y ago

The FBI/CIA was censoring rando Americans for stupid jokes and everything in between that and real journalists covering real stories that the FBI didn’t want ran. It was bad.

pannSun 4y ago

Did you miss [1]? The US govt. used its influence over Twitter to help sell its foreign policy (military interventions included) to the US and global audience. The only way you could not take issue with it, is if you're fine with govt. psyops/undisclosed propaganda. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111071

robert_foss 4y ago
It used to be CIA and TV. Nothing new under the sun.
- philippejara 4y ago
  One would hope that after the patriot act, the bush jr wars, cablegate, the nsa leaks and so on just in the last 20 years people would desire to not keep the old habits, but I suppose all it took was one buffoon to take presidency and all that rolls back. Truly a sad sight from those looking hopeful after the occupy movement and all the anti surveillance sentiment post-leaks.
  - barbacoa 4y ago
    Endless war, domestic surveillance, expanding government power. The modern left has become the neo-conservatives.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    All of that is still happening in the populist movement, both left (Russell Brand, Jimmy Dore, etc) and right (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Robert Barnes, etc.). The populist movement which has been gaining traction through new media and new organizations outside of traditional parties. Also, the “Woke” psyop used to destroy Occupy Wall St has now destroyed corporate America with ESG and Woke media scandals. As usual, the CIA and friends are bad at managing blowback.
  - yucky 4y ago
    > the bush jr wars Small correction, we can't call them the Bush Jr. wars when they survived and thrived for 8 years under Obama. These were FULLY bipartisan fuckups of monumental proportion that proves how much both parties are in the pocket of Raytheon & Northrop Grumman.

antiterra 4y ago

I am someone who didn’t see anything seriously objectionable in the Twitter files, but I do think it raised some questions worth thinking about. If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. Could anything be done to reduce the ability of a large organization to extort an online platform into censoring content that complies with their guidelines? Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?

acdha 4y ago
> I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. This is possible but I would expect people to look for evidence of it before presenting it as a fact. Something like that would show up in internal communications either directly or as people talking like they didn’t really have a choice, or as a trend of tweets being taken down for reasons which don’t seem warranted when you look at them. The closest we’ve seen to that were things like the guy who was telling Republicans to vote on Wednesday, which is clearly a dumb joke but also something most people aren’t going to shed tears about when made a couple days beforehand.
- lurquer 4y ago
  The US is a limited govt. No govt agency can do anything for which it isn’t explicitly authorized. The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies. If a agent is being paid — with taxpayer dollars - to check on Twitter and give it ‘advice’ on how to run itself, that agent is acting outside the scope of his authority. It’s an abuse and misuse of power. It doesn’t matter what the ‘greater good’ is. The FBI’s purpose isn’t to generally look out for the greater good. Rather, it’s to investigate federal crimes. There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’
  - acdha 4y ago

counttheforks 4y ago

[flagged]

spamizbad 4y ago

I feel like if someone made a bunch of threats on Twitter and then followed through with them people would be completely outraged why the FBI didn’t stop them. Anyway it’s interesting we are having this debate TODAY when after 9/11 and a decade later the adroit use of social media by ISIL the alphabet agencies were crawling all over the internet. Pandora’s box was opened years ago.

mushbino 4y ago
If you look at most mass shootings you'll find articles saying the suspect was "known to the FBI." For some reason they rarely stop them ahead of time. The Whitmer kidnapping is a recent example. Well, I guess they started AND stopped it in that case.
- XorNot 4y ago
  That's because most mass shootings have no crime committed until the suspect opens fire.
  - mushbino 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's illegal to plan a murder. Also, in many of the FBI cases there are undercover agents imbedded with the group. The Whitmer case being a recent example and they were all arrested before any shots were fired. https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michigan-gretchen-whitmer-grand-rapids-adam-fox-a7dd7bc1a4e5917c3e2c78f599ebc17f https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michiga...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
landemva 4y ago
> people would be completely outraged why the FBI didn’t stop them. I doubt people would make FBI change for the better. Suspicions of people paying cash at flight schools and not seeming to want an airline career was reported to FBI several times before 9/11. FBI filed it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-was-warned-about-flight-schools https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-was-warned-about-flight-sch...

jinpa_zangpo 4y ago

When your boss tells you to do something, you can always say no, but you don't treat it as a mere suggestion. There's a power imbalance that makes it something more. You can't treat government communications with Twitter as mere suggestions. The government's power makes it more serious than that.

nverno 4y ago

> current average level of comfort with government involvement It really all comes down to this- it's largely a matter of personal comfort/risk tolerance. Personally, I'd be happy to see entire agencies wiped out, the CIA and the NSA obliterated, the FBI cut back to where it was in the 60s or so, preferably focused on mob/cartel activity and the like. The CIA should never have been separated out from the military and given so much free reign. From my point of view, the CIA's history is just a series of catastrophic mistakes. There's arguments to made on both sides, but no objectively clear right or wrong choice.

Eisenstein 4y ago
The FBI in the 60s was inflitrating and disrupting civil rights groups.
- nverno 4y ago
  Right, just another example of many mistakes made by these agencies since their inception. I do think there is legitimate need for some form of FBI, though.
- refurb 4y ago
  What makes you think they've stopped?
DaftDank 4y ago
Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?
- nverno 4y ago
  I may be terribly naive, but I just don't feel any safer b/c the NSA exists. I also don't believe this country has been under any serious threats since the NSA was created, from which it protected us.
- 4y ago

coredog64 4y ago

The FBI was highlighting obvious parody accounts and accounts with double digit followers for the “crime” of the tired old joke of “(other party) votes on Wednesday”.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
The whole parody thing a-la Carl Tuckerson "nobody seriously believes this" while manufacturing outrage that many people believe in and results in stochastic terrorism needs to stop. How many massacres[1] are necessary before people take things like that a bit more seriously? Is it until somebody they know gets murdered? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...
- VanTheBrand 4y ago
  I mean the parody account being referenced here (@madandpissedoff) was one that pretended to be the WWE wrestler undertaker and almost exclusively tweeted denials about shitting his own pants at the mall. I’m not sure it was really leading toward a massacre (unless you count what happened to that mall bathroom stall.)
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Using one datapoint to extrapolate to the broader case is really not a good approach to supporting an argument. Commenter said “parody accounts”, what specifically that refers to is ambiguous, so I considered the class of accounts that may be considered parody by some.

cloutchaser 4y ago

I wonder if you’d have an issue with it if these organisations leaned mostly republican. When this last happened in the 1960s and 70s, when it was the left that was anti establishment, and didn’t want the Vietnam war, or didn’t want Christian orthodoxy imposed on society, the left was obsessed with free speech and being anti government organisations. Suddenly no one can think beyond their own party and as long as these organizations interfering with speech are on their side, it’s fine. People really need to think longer term. It only takes one very determined president or one sided congress and senate to completely change these organisations.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
> People really need to think longer term. Asking too much. In the past couple months, HN users went from “it’s a private company they can do what they want” when Twitter was a public company working with the FBI to enact specific user censorship… to “OMG Elon banned a handful of journalists, freeze peach was a lie!” when it was a suspension for 12 hours. Where are all those “it’s a private company they can do what they like” folks now? I haven’t seen that posted recently.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  Ok. It’s a private company and they can do what they like. And we can point out the hypocrisy.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    And ignore you own, what a wonderful scenario for you.
- clucas 4y ago
  I'm one of those people. I think Elon can ban whomever he wants, for any reason he wants. I didn't see anyone arguing otherwise though, so I didn't have much to say. Edited to add: I am a little curious why the free speech absolutists weren't up in arms about those bans though. Hmm.

mushbino 4y ago

This is an example of the FBI pushing a specific narrative, is it not?

theCrowing 4y ago

It's called Moral Panic.

theknocker 4y ago

[dead]

refurb 4y ago

but I don’t see a problem with the FBI/CIA/etc having regular discussions with Twitter about potential threats, influence campaigns, etc. You don't? There is nothing special about Twitter as a private business when it comes to acceptable level of government interference. Police agencies are responsible for investigating crimes. That's their remit. They aren't allowed to compel a private individual/business to provide any evidence without a court order. Of course you can always cooperate (and Twitter looks like they were), but any lawyer worth their salt would tell you not to. But let's tweak the scenario a bit - if the cops were coming to your local bar every day or two, asking about various patrons, maybe suggesting "hey next time maybe you shouldn't let that person in", you think there isn't a problem?

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Police agencies are responsible for investigating crimes. That’s their remit. The FBI has a broader official remit than “investigating crimes”.
- refurb 4y ago
  Please tell me the “remit” of “law enforcement”.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    The FBI isn’t just a law enforcement agency. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a national security and law enforcement agency that uses, collects, and shares intelligence in all it does.” https://www.justice.gov/doj/organization-mission-and-functions-manual-federal-bureau-investigation https://www.justice.gov/doj/organization-mission-and-functio... “The FBI is an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national security organization with both intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities. It is the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice and a full member of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbi https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/what-is-the-fbi
    - 4y ago