i wonder why they are cherry-picking and releasing things like this in a drop-drop fashion... shouldn't just release everything and let the media (and that includes fox et al) dig through it and report on it for us?
The problem is that so far there hasn’t been much of interest here. Having a few people tweet unsupported claims gets more traction because some people won’t read past the spin and it allows the more journalistic end of the right-wing media to talk about it without being directly criticized for the spin: Fox News can run a “people are saying” story rather than claiming it as an original story.
The story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was similar: if there’d been anything significant revealed the WSJ or Fox would have covered it directly. There wasn’t and Giuliani’s sloppy handling made it unreliable, so they didn’t want to put their reputations on the line.
Can't wait for Matt to hit the motherlode: Elon banning journalists out of personal spite, making a poll to unban them but underhandedly demanding they delete their (never rule-breaking) tweets.
Just a few more searches and he will hit it for sure! Unless his handlers demand he ignore that, of course.
What on earth happened to Matt Tiabbi and Glenn Greenwald? Does a certain amount of exposure to news and conspiracy break people at a certain point? I occasionally worry that they didn't change but that I did.
I think it’s a combination of never having been as good as we might’ve liked (Taibbi’s stories from when he was working for The eXile suggest where this came from) and valuing being contrary to the establishment more than being right (Matt Yglesias is another good example of that). That can give them a big hit when the establishment is wrong (Iraq, whether bankers should be punished in 2008) but it sets them up for failure when it’s not (Trump), and since they have made their careers on that it’s extra hard to reconsider since that means acknowledging that their defining instinct led them astray.
I’ll engage rather than downvoting. Something always struck me as odd about Assange, and while we can debate whether conspiring with the Russians in hack and leak operations against the US is a departure from their prior behavior, I think it’s unfair to pretend Americans suddenly had a huge value shift in not being okay with that.
Greenwald stuck to his guns as he always did when his audience decided that they'd rather embrace the overbearing/surveillance state as long as the court jester didn't win the election again, that's how I see it at least. I'd like to give a less flippant answer but I honestly can't see any difference in his views now and back then, both in US coverage and Brazil's coverage.
I agree he’s stayed the same, but what was revealed was not some deeply held value system beyond contrarianism for contrarianism and attention’s sake. There was a fascistic attempt to overthrow the government, and the best I can surmise is that Greenwald took the side of the overthrowers because any other journalist with eyes and even the slightest care for truth could see what happened. So he chose to take the path that could let him feel like a smart guy going against the crowd. He’s a hipster journalist unconcerned with the truth.
Keep in mind, this is a guy who has been thrown out of not one but two news organizations, one of which he founded! The level of narcissism and self-obsession that takes must be astounding.
could you give me an example of him "taking the side" of trump? all I remember is him trying to not be fast and loose with the facts to beat the dead horse the entire media was already doing, themselves unconcerned with the truth and more concerned with their soapbox to repeat what the previous 20 journalists already said. Unless bringing up pretty valid skepticism is now being a hipster journalist.
What was the second outlet he was ousted from? I know of the intercept sure, and he was ousted because he wanted to cover the biden laptop, they kept claiming he couldn't(not only in the intercept itself but anywhere else) because it wasn't really true and now...well we all know how that turned out.
Calling him a hipster journalist unconcerned with the truth is just a flat out lie, especially if you conveniently ignore all his ongoing work in brazil. He was one of the main reasons the current president is not in jail and defeated bolsonaro in the elections, something which bolsonaro attempted to prosecute him for, and now with lula in power he an extreme critic of the censorship the supreme court is using to silence people, the same people that absolutely hate him for getting lula out and ousting bolsonaro.
He is an example of being steadfast in his beliefs against censorship and surveillance state, just because the vast majority of journalists are actually reporters parroting whatever party line the newsroom toes at the time doesn't mean someone who actually sticks to his ideals is a hipster.
Yup, it's pretty amazing how a large number of Greenwald's followers immediately jumped ship when Glenn started to hold their side to the same standards.
"Glenn has gone off the rails" is pretty funny to read honestly.
Nothing has changed except who Glenn is talking about about. Apparently as a "good progressive journalist" you're never supposed to turn the spotlight on your own side?
They were not doxxing, and the suspensions were not originally 12 hours. I know Elon started off his Twitter leadership with trying to rewrite history[1][2], but that doesn’t mean you should accept it just because he continues the manipulative behavior
BREAKING: tech companies usually cooperate with law enforcement and government when requested. Data shows they are more than 100 times more likely to continue to respond to requests when paid.
I think the important thing here is the lack of judicial oversight. There used to be needed a court order to request things from companies, so someone would actually weight in the evidence and legality of it.
Now it's just someone from a secret agency shutting down news stories about laptops because it makes one political candidate look bad.
Requests are different from demands. It’s not like the FBI tells Twitter to take something down under threat of violence. They say just ask and Twitter agrees, sometimes, because they are on the same page.
If the FBI requests something, and you ignore or refuse them, they will find a way to make your life unpleasant. Remember, this organization has a long history of human rights abuses and illegal actions. They even tried to blackmail MLK.[1]
While I agree with the premise of your statement, remember that:
1) A court order is only required for a subpoena to request information that the service provider isn't already voluntarily providing. It has been common pratice for decades where telecoms and now social media works together with federal entities outside of a legal action. And this was not limited to trap/trace.
2) It's never so specific to be about protecting an individual candidate. It's about the foreign interference, and if that interference backs a specific candidate and attacks their rivals, then it will look like they're trying to protect the rivals. But at the end of the day it they have to trace it back to the foreign influence campaign if they're going to do anything with it. If Twitter jumps the gun and suspends or bans someone they're trying to work backwards from before having evidence its unfortunate but I blame that on Twitter not having stricter standards about such a partnership.
There has never been need to have judicial oversight when making a request, the FBI can send a request to Twitter just the same as they can ask you to come in for an interview. You're free to refuse.
Ye no. I would certainly worry alot more if FBI sent me an angry letter compared to say Pizza Hut? You always have an implied threat when a government agency is involved.
Companies should cooperate when compelled so by law, not just cause. This gets into the space where many here knock Chinese companies as they are regularly directed partially by the CCP.
The real question is, when does laws that apply only to the government, like the first amendment, start applying to private companies when the private companies are being directed by the government?
They aren’t moderating the site. The FBI was reporting things they felt were under the purview of their election security mandate but they weren’t generally pursuing TOS violations.
If you’re referring to the administrative costs, those were a separate issue where U.S. law allows payment for the cost of complying with court ordered 2703(d) requests:
Companies should cooperate when they want to, and tell the government to !@#$ off when they don’t want to.
Twitter, for me, is a great example of free speech. The government asks them to do things apparently all the time. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they even have a discussion about it internally. That is INCREDIBLE.
Ultimately, Twitter became the primary communications vehicle of the President of the United States. They !@#$ing ban him. Power move. I’m sure many demands were made by all sorts of agencies to reinstate Trump’s account and they said, “No. !$@# off.” You want to talk about China and the CCP? Well, here’s a concrete example of something that, had it happened in China with Weibo, you know would have gotten dozens of people “disappeared”. But Twitter did it with zero recourse from the government. As the kids say these day, “Based.”
Greatest example of free speech in action my life time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
Except if you actually compare the three, you'll see that the WSJ is quite a bit to the left on its news pages, and somewhat left of them on its editorial pages. The quality is a lot higher, of course.
NYT was a huge" booster for invading Iraq. Tom Friedman, particularly: never forget. Anybody who thought NYT was ever "liberal" wasn't paying attention.
WSJ editorials were loony-toons wacky even before Rupert Murdoch bought it.
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.
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?)
> You people are very quick to muddy the waters here.
Funny, I’d say it was people that can’t seem to cite any evidence without dick pics that are “muddying the waters”.
I’ve read these twitter files posts from Taibbi and Weiss. It’s all insinuations based on contact between government agencies and twitter. The actual content being discussed is not interesting.
The biggest red flag this is all raising for me is why FBI agents are sitting around searching for small time election misinformation like talking about voting a day late. Is there nothing higher priority to work on? And how has twitter not automated finding such basic misinformation?
Mismatch in incentives and priority? My impression is that the FBI only has a team or two dedicated to these searches. However, it is much closer to their mandate to keep an eye out on election misinformation and otherwise "protect our democracy"
Citation needed. Even Wikipedia lists it as an abandoned laptop that was trawled for data. Trash as far as I know is legitimate object of search (e.g. police does it).
The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files thread from Taibbi was a request from the Biden Campaign to look at a list of otherwise-undescribed-and-since-removed tweets. This was strongly implied to be a request for censorship of the laptop story.
Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.
> Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.
Yes, he left his images on laptop. That's not revenge porn, as far as I know.
> The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files
Don't quote me on that, but from my memory not only were links to Hunter deleted, but so were discussions of it from even reputable journalist. I think it was a Washington Post that discussed Hunter's laptop, and it got buried or deleted.
That's only Part 1.
They also marked Trump tweets as fake, even though they found some exonerating information and vice versa.
Plus the weekly meetings with FBI/OGA (alias for CIA), around misinformation spreading tweets, etc.
You basically have a government agency labeling stuff as misinformation for deranking/deletion. If that doesn't raise any First Amendment issues, I'm not sure what will? Capturing journalist and keeping them in horrible conditions? Water torture and organ transfer of said journalists?
> In late 2020, a controversy emerged involving data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop.[1] The data was subsequently shared with the FBI, Republican operatives, and later the press.[2]
That's a very strange definition of revenge porn. It was made inadvertently by Hunter Biden, it wasn't used for blackmail and it is related to a bulk of other interesting email.
Revenge porn isn't necessarily always used for blackmail. Why didn't the FBI, Republican operatives, or the press blur Biden Jr.'s penis before making it public? It was obvious political vendetta. What public interest is served by leaking it unredacted?
Definition of revenge porn from a quick googling is:
>Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent
"revenge porn - noun - revealing or sexually explicit images or videos of a person posted on the internet, typically by a former sexual partner, without the consent of the subject and in order to cause them distress or embarrassment."
It's not a question of who took the photos. It's a question of whether the people sharing them had the permission of the subject to share them.
While Blackmail may be a component of some revenge porn, it's not required by this or other definitions.
Ok, but say a public figure is involved in a scummy situation, and left their laptop detailing their shady dealings (along some naked pictures) at repair shop and forgot about it, but a journalist managed to get docs from said laptop including naked pictures, does it invalidate the whole cotnent of laptop as revenge porn?
By point is, having naked pictures on your laptop don't make docs and other stuff found as revenge porn.
You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out.
The Biden campaign in 2020(they were not in power, Trump admin was) sent a list of tweets to Twitter asking them to take a look alleging that they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. Twitter took down those tweets. Matt Taibibi implied this was government/Twitter censorship, and the right wing went ape shit over it. People found the archived versions of those tweets, mainly from politician Republican influencers, and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis. Nothing to do with his business dealings or emails on his laptop that were leaked.
The Republican operatives who privately received the leaked laptop contents didn't even blur the private parts. Are they revenge porn? Arguably. Was this an example of government censorship, or censorship of political discourse? No. The Trump Whitehouse was also reporting problematic tweets to Twitter contacts for potential violation of Twitter terms. Nobody is claiming the Biden laptop business dealings, emails etc. were revenge porn.
> You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out.
You're misrepresenting the story.
One big omission is this:
> On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
> Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
Yet Matt Taibbi used those to spread baseless propaganda without giving the context behind the removal of those tweets. That clouds the rest of the claims too. Matt isn't interested in the truth. He's being a political hack serving partisan interests.
And even he was forced to concede that he couldn't find anything from the govt about the laptop.
The "real story" from the laptop had notjing to do with any pictures but rather emails that were recovered describing payments that were to be made to Joe Buden via Hunter as a bag man.
Thats the only actually serious thing uncovered by the laptop
> The FBI lied to [...] Twitter to stop [...] reporting on [The Hunder Biden laptop story]
OK, that's the takeaway that Taibbi and Musk wants us to absorb. But... can you link to the actual spot in the (sigh) "Twitter Files" that actually shows this? Because like the grandparent poster did and reported, I looked for it. And it's not there.
There's a bunch of mid-level bland communication that if you squint might be understood as a bunch of underlings carrying out orders in pursuit of that. Or it might just be a bunch of folks trying in good faith not to push a suspect story at a sensitive time.
There is absolutely no evidence of the kind of conspiracy you allege here. It's just not there. Which given the sourcing (the CEO is directing the investigation!) means it probably doesn't exist within Twitter. It's just not there. Where's the meat here?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really don't get this response. Cops treating black people horribly is also "nothing new under the sun". Does that make it ok? Has everyone just given up on the idea of reigning in these federal agencies?
I mean we allowed the alphabet agencies to cooperate with social media companies to fight "ISIS propaganda." -- what did you think would happen?
Scorpion, frog, etc.
If we had stood up to them in 2013, drew a line in the sand and said "No, a bunch of poorly edited snuff films aren't going to cause a bunch of American teens to join an Islamic revolution" these relationships wouldn't exist.
By the way, we are currently trying to ban TikTok because of similar concerns about it rotting teens brains. Before we start frothing at the mouth in rage at some problematic app let's do a thought experiment and consider the future blowback from taking such extreme action.
The government has been involved with the data broker industry since well before the dotcom era. That is the underpinning of all current day surveillance capitalism. It's an intelligence resource they will never overlook.
> It is simply a fact that ISIS did successfully radicalize and recruit western teenagers via the internet.
At no meaningful scale. If some dumbass wants to throw their life away in a foreign country we obviously should use all legal means to discourage that but part of being a liberal democracy means you do in fact have to give people enough freedom (rope) to hang themselves.
No one is talking about banning TikTok because it's rotting anyone's brain. They are talking about it because it gives the CCP direct access to data on millions of US citizens.
> I mean we allowed the alphabet agencies to cooperate with social media companies to fight "ISIS propaganda." -- what did you think would happen?
I remember thinking earlier, it's kind of odd that teenagers "running off to join ISIS" was a widespread problem. In hindsight the shills probably blew that whole thing out of proportion to justify more agency scope creep
I'm struggling to understand what punishment needs to be handed out, here. The government asked Twitter to keep some of their fake propaganda accounts online and Twitter did. What laws have been violated?
We are discussing whether the event is notable, not if it is legal. And as someone not from the US, I care more about making people aware that Twitter collaborates with the US to help spread their govt. propaganda (in the same way I would want them to know if the doctor they're discussing smoking with is employed by the tobacco industry), than whether Twitter complies with laws written by that same government.
I.e. claiming no laws were violated (hypothetically) is as much a defense of Twitter as claiming TikTok hasn't broken Chinese law.
>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.
It's since been expanded through court cases to extend from congress to every government entity including local ones.
The government is constitutionally forbidden from meddling with the press, even through private entities via the 14th amendment. The FBI and CIA meddled with twitter. The particulars aren't relevant. They're expressly forbidden from doing what they did.
This isn't true asking for your post to be removed doesn't violate your rights. It would if requests were accompanied by legal threats. Twitter is the one removing content and with every right to do so.
Government “requests” are usually treated as directives, since it’s well understood that they have many seemingly unrelated ways to make life difficult for a company and its officers.
> Overall, Twitter withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 51% of global legal demands, down 5% from the previous reporting period.
I am a strong supporter of the intelligence community when it is focused on its correct mission of nation-state hostiles, real terrorists like Bin Ladin & international/federal criminals, but I think the government overstepped the line in multiple ways that favored partisan political campaigns and certain parties. Though I believe firmly that these institutions are vital to our success as a nation, I also think they can be internally weaponized against specific groups, and that is going on currently.
It is pretty clear that these are Hatch Act violations which is about preventing your tax dollars being put to use as a part of partisan political campaigns, which is what happened.
Civilian "unempowered" agencies fall under the Less Restricted Hatch Act category, and certain Agencies like the IC, fall under a more stringent part of this, the Further Restricted category, see [1]
Some of these IC members in the Further Restricted Category were prompting BigTech censorship, or, running defense for the "Laptop from Hell" story, similar to some of the things they did back in the 60s when they were involved with unlawful activities regarding Civil Rights and Civil Liberties campaigns.
I'd argue in favor of:
(1) Strengthening the Hatch Act
(2) Handling Constitutional violations by the IC under the Hatch Act
(3) Prosecutions of the Hatch Act under existing Law
(4) Clearance revocations
(5) Removal of Section 230 protections for BigTech when acting as an agent of govt censorship
(6) Budget cuts / Budget reformations for some select Federal Agencies, FBI being foremost
(7) Forced retirement / exit from federal service of those involved in these behaviors.
(8) Debarring of contractors involved in some of these heinious activities
(9) Strengthening Federal Acquisition Regulation
(10) Diffusion of Federal Agencies HQs throughout the United States to prevent centralization in overly partisan areas
(11) Applying Diversity & Inclusion to political parties and other important characteristics of job seekers
(12) Adding restrictions or longer "Cooling Off Periods" for the revolving doors between IC, Congress, BigTech, Lobbyists, and the Consultant Class.
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?
> 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.
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.’
So, cops are not allowed to do welfare checks because there is no crime of 'dying alone in your house' and there is no explicit authorization for police to enforce wellbeing? Don't be adsurd.
Cops are agents of their states, and a welfare check on an individual is a very different situation than a check on the welfare of society as a whole. The government doesn't get to decide when society is well, that's for the people to do as a whole.
Yourreasoning is just as arbitrary as just as nonsensical. What is a democracy if not the will of society as a whole? Do you have a different way for society to determine and enforce its needs?
The US Federal Government has only the limited powers granted it by the federal constitution. The States, on the other hand, have general authority… their powers are not limited (except by the specific restrictions set forth in the US Const.) In short, there is a very real and legal and intended difference between FedGov and StateGov. If you don’t like it, change the constitution. But, it’s not matter of opinion… it’s simply the way the USA government is set up. States have ‘general police power’ while the Fed does not.
The Federal Statutes grant specific authority to the FBI. The burden is in the FBI to point to a specific grant of statutory authority to justify any particular action. What federal statute gives the FBI (or any agency) the right to advise, suggest, or even comment on a particular company’s policies? What statute gives the FBI the power to ‘suggest’ certain accounts be blocked?
I note you’re continuing to present vague claims. Can you point to a specific example of something you think they don’t have legal authority for being involved in?
For example, the Twitter Files had a lot of stuff under election misinformation. Since that’s an entire mission, you can argue about effectiveness but it’s not like it’s a stretch:
That's passing into "ignore your lying eyes and read between the lines" territory, which isn't an argument from evidence but an argument from political ideology.
That’s possible but you’d expect to see some sign of it: internal emails or messages, legal advice, etc. when those threats were made or guidelines from the legal department about what things the regular trust and safety people can’t ignore.
What’s telling is that Musk’s people can’t find anything like that. If this was happening you’d think there’d be at least one example where someone is saying they have to yank something even though it’s not in violation of the rules. Instead, what we see is bending over backwards to keep people like Trump or Raichik from having the rules applied to them, with no mention of government pressure to yank them.
First, you’d think the same thing about almost any crime but there’s a long history of that happening.
More importantly, however, as I explained you’d see the presence of that policy even if they managed to keep the conspiracy perfectly. There’d have been cases where something didn’t meet the rules for being banned but someone overruled them to do it anyway, unexplained policy changes following a private meeting, someone setting out hard lines for the moderators, etc. Twitter had a ton of people doing moderation and there’s no way you get that many people to work on a daily basis without stated policies or someone accidentally saying something they knew, or that not a single one of them wouldn’t have gone public or talked to Musk.
Just reaching out in the name of FBI, tacitly threatens repercussions. The government can certainly make life difficult for the most law-abiding company or citizen if you get on the wrong side of it. And everyone knows this.
You have constructed a theory of how government works from whole cloth having nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Limited government means what powers not explicitly granted to government belong to the people. This is to say government can only acquire new powers via legislation or amendment of the constitution it doesn't mean that they are for forbidden from acting beyond the most limited mandate you imagine. No law is therein broken because you feel it's out of scope because the limitation is your invention.
28 USC 531, et seq. sets out the limited authority and mission of the FBI.
Ensuring social media platforms adhere to their own policies is outside the scope.
Government officials — at the federal level - have extremely well-defined scopes of authority. They have no general power to do things. If they exceed the scope, they are abusing the power given to them. A govt agency has no authority outside the scope of its enacting statute. That I what I meant by limited. It’s not a ‘made up’ concept. If an agent engages in ANY action outside its authority, it is exceeding its limited authority and acting outside the law. It as an abuse as the agent (or agency as a whole) is doing something ‘under color of law’ that Congress did not permit.
At the local level, there is a concept of ‘general’ police power where the limits of what your local deputy, for instance, can do is a bit more nebulous. But, not at the federal level.
Can you give an example of where it has been found in a court of law that a government agency has exceeded its mandate and been ordered to alter their behavior entirely on that basis and not for instance because its actions violate someone's rights or harm their interests?
> There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’
The Department of Justice would disagree with you:
“Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign” [1]
Some guy tweeted in 2016 encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to ‘Vote from Home’ by sending an SMS to a certain number. For this and other tweets, he was charged with violating 18 USC 241, which prohibits “conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, [..] any person [..] in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States”, where the right in question was the right to vote. With the justice system being as slow as it is, the indictment only happened in 2021 and the case is still pending at the district court level. [2]
His lawyers argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment; this is a novel legal question with no Supreme Court precedent on point. [3]
It's the slightest whiff of a hint of abuse or intimidation but there's no evidence to suggest they ever even threatened retribution for non-compliance. US intelligence agencies have gone after media a handful of times but the courts have been appropriately skeptical of their claims.
And everytime I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.
> I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.
Indeed - from the perspective of civil liberties there are many issues which seem more pressing.
Chances are, they probably really did violate the TOS. Or most of them did, at least. So then you, as the employee receiving it, probably do feel some real pressure to remove the tweets when the FBI has correctly pointed out that, yes, these tweets are against the site's terms of service. Many tweets likely are against TOS, but nobody would give them any real thought.
I would argue that selectively recommending political comments which may be censored has a chilling effect on political speech — and therefore is illegal.
I also think it’s interesting how many people I know who “protested” things like COINTELPRO, but cheer this.
> 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.
I've seen this hypothetical raised a lot but I don't find it very compelling. If the post isn't in violation of twitter's TOS then twitter has strong legal protections to deny the request and both sides understand this. Without evidence that the FBI actually pressured twitter to take down non-violating content after it was deemed ok, I don't see the issue.
I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.
"Joseph P. Nacchio (born June 22, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American executive... Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.[1]
He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.[3] This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion,[4] which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible.[5] " [0]
>I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.
This is nonsense. In your example the court said "nope" to the defendant trying to push a conspiracy theory which could not possibly have exonerated him.
is it a conspiracy theory because they said it was? you don't know and neither do I, it does sound like he thought that asking the NSA for what he has a right to ask for, a warrant to give up data, wouldn't impact his chances of renewing government contracts, but it seems it did and they were dropped and the stock plummeted. Could be the other way around and he expected it and did commit fraud, I don't know and won't pretend to not be biased against the NSA, but the retaliation from them is pretty convenient in either case. The concept of being able to exclude evidence just because "natsec might be at risk" is also absurd to me, instead of taking the trial to a judge with clearance or something.
The uncertainty of the sentence aside we can zoom out and see that asking to follow legal processes that every single one of those companies should be following in the first place can very well cause retaliation from the NSA, so all else aside invoking legal protections sure does seem to be bad for companies.
It's a conspiracy theory because Nacchio was actually guilty of insider trading regardless of what the NSA may have done.
From the court decision which you didn't bother to read:
>Even if the classified information were presented and established what he said it would, it could not exonerate Mr. Nacchio as he claims. Essentially, Mr. Nacchio argued that undisclosed positive information can be used as a defense to a charge of trading on undisclosed negative information. We disagree. … If an insider trades on the basis of his perception of the net effect of two bits of material undisclosed information, he has violated the law in two respects, not none.
It's also an anthromorphization fallacy argument. "Twitter" is a company, not a private individual.
If the FBI contacts "Twitter" then they're not talking to any one individual, in fact there's no requirement that be the same person at all.
So Twitter cannot be threatened or threatened with implied threats - it's a limited liability corporation, there's no individual who can be overly inconvenienced or have any emotional reaction to the request.
Threats of regulations or hefty fines can definitely inconvenience the company’s owners, who have a stake in the company’s future.
And importantly, if the individuals using the platform are (hypothetically) being silenced by government agencies levelling threats against the company unless it complies, this could be seen as tantamount to censorship.
The imagery you and others are trying to invoke is one of burly men in black suits turning up on your doorstep at the family home.
Twitter doesn't have that. The employee handling the request doesn't own Twitter. If something happens to Twitter it doesn't happen to them except in a very abstract way (and the person who did fire them was Elon Musk in the end).
Governments absolutely have a means to intimidate company owners: it's subpoenaing them to testify before Congress. Not emailing a mid-level content moderation supervisor who has no way to directly talk to the board of executives or shareholders.
You are very naive. Of course the FBI could target an individual at the company to do their bidding if they wanted. Hell, even law enforcement does similar stuff chasing drug dealers. In such cases the govt has no regard for the individuals safety or financial well being.
At the corporate level its also threatening because of the actions the govt could take against the corporation. Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.
You have to be naive and only see the happy path and think the govt always has your best interests in mind to think otherwise.
> Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.
Can you point to examples of this? I hope you’re not referring to things like the earlier investigation of Tesla’s FSD claims when that’s been underway for years and so widely predicted.
Yes, I absolutely think that. Because how the heck are you going to keep that going as a company wide mandate? Where's the directives that things are now this way? Where's the weirdly timed corporate memorandums?
Corporations are not people: you can't "tell" a corporation to do something, because the people who make it up are a mercurial, constantly varying group. Even if the owners know something, the employees don't: training materials have to be updated, policies modified etc. You can't "imply" a threat to a corporation, because how do you "imply" the threat to all the people who have to actually implement the desired action? How do you replace staff who are not in on "the implication"? You can't: somewhere and somehow you would have to have internal emails, training and onboarding materials.
The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning.
It seems internal employee activism played a large role. That’s not good.
While Twitter has a right as a private company to moderate based on internal popularity, it doesn’t build confidence.
It seemed the professional moderators were saying “Trump is pushing the limits, but not crossing them” - the other employees were lobbying to get him banned.
And they won.
The message is, if you want to run for office on a controversial platform, make sure you have supporters among the rank and file at Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc,
The parts about the FBI are less concerning.
Good content moderation creates a firewall between (say) the software development team and the moderation team. While Twitter had such a wall, it didn’t withstand pressure.
and hopefully he'll get prosecuted for it if it is really the case, but that didn't stop even european leaders from saying the ban was a mistake and concerning[0].
> 2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.
I fail to see how having a law against incitement in germany - that doesn't even sound like would apply to jan 6th if it was done there- makes the article of merkel and several other EU leaders condemning twitter's action not make any sense.
The thing about this kind of vague insinuations is that they're impossible to refute, but not necessarily impossible to show examples of. Do you have any?
In the same way that the Beltway connections are somewhat hard to pin down.
I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof.
There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike and know what to do without specific instructions. The FBI acts as the primary point of contact from the letter agencies, as per the title if the article we are discussing. The Beltway revolving door takes care of the rest of the interactions, including providing experts to the media, so the rest of the Beltway can just listen and act.
> Private sector partnerships: The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combating foreign influence actors.
>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.
Sounds like "hey, review it and find any half-assed reason to ban it according to your TOS" to me.
Loose and wide reaching TOS makes it hard for bad actors to get around it, but it also makes it easy for moderators to remove anything they don't want while hiding behind TOS
> Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?
All moderation should be, and with exact violation breached, not generic "it broke something in our TOS", else there is zero accountability. I'd also say that unless it is outright illegal or abhorrent the original should also be viewable so there can be no doubt the moderation is legit. People will save the spicy tweets to archive or screenshot it anyway so there is no real point completely hiding it.
> 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.
While this is true, it is not necessary for twitter to resist requests from the government in order for this kind of contact to be effective state censorship. Twitter has seemed to be eager to do whatever the government says. Why wouldn't they be? It's a favor that the government owes them now, and additionally, they were charging the government for their time. It's a completely profitable interaction. With media consolidation, there are only a few dozen people who ultimately own all western media, and they got that way through good relationships with governments.
The real troubling question is why the FBI has a department of 80 people combing through tweets and tweeting in order to push or suppress policy. Thinking of Twitter as the victim entirely misses the point.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
The internal security is doing fine without NSA and when their biggest "achievement" was making everyone less secure via encryption backdoors you gotta wonder about purpose of existence.
Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress
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”.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I ignored when a national media outlet was banned for a publishing a true story that embarrassed a politician I and the US intelligence apparatus wanted to win… but no one complained about when I was suspended for 12 hours!”
The NY Post was banned for violating the hacked materials policy, and they were unbanned after Twitter changed the policy. It wasn't 12 hours, but it was pretty quick. Meanwhile plenty of other media outlets published embarassing details about the laptop contents on Twitter, and were not banned... because they didn't violate the hacked materials policy. If underlying goal was to suppress the story about the laptop and prevent embarassment, why didn't they also ban those accounts?
Also, what exactly is the rule you want in place re: banning by social media platforms? Do you have a principle behind your positions that you can articulate?
It was more than two weeks and every single bureaucrat, and “Intelligence” community statement that it was “Russian Disinformation” absolutely knew they were lying.
Sorry man, I don't know that. Can you offer any evidence - an email or something - that shows that the intelligence community knew it wasn't Russian disinformation at the time Twitter was deliberating over what to do with the NY Post?
Also, you didn't answer the question about principles. I'm still interested in that. I believe I have a rule about social media moderation that I've applied consistently across a wide variety of circumstances. Can you say the same?
Edited to add: And again, if the intelligence community was trying to pick a winner, why didn't they try to ban all the other stories about the laptop? And why only on Twitter? The NY Post was still going strong on Facebook, right?
>Where are all those “it’s a private company they can do what they like” folks now? I haven’t seen that posted recently.
Those people were responding to arguments that social media platforms banning people, moderating content or even presenting content under an algorithmic feed were violations of the First Amendment, Section 230 and freedom of speech, by pointing out that all of these actions are allowed by the aforementioned principles and laws. That argument hasn't been posted recently because the threads in which the free-speech absolutist arguments to which it replies haven't been posted recently. It isn't germane to the situation wrt Musk and Twitter because, for whatever reason, the free speech absolutists no longer have a problem with censorship by private enterprise when Elon Musk is doing it, and so they no longer post angry, long-winded screeds against it.
And notwithstanding that Twitter banning journalists (even for just 12 hours) is a much more serious deal in terms of freedom of speech implications than banning some shitposting Nazis, no one complaining about that is actually claiming that Elon doesn't have the right to do what he's doing, nor are they calling for the government to make it illegal, as the free speech absolutist crowd has - they're just calling him a hypocrite and an asshole. Because he is.
This really isn't the dunk you and the countless others who keep bringing it up is, it just demonstrates that the free speech absolutist crowd were never arguing in good faith to begin with, because none of them ever bothered to actually listen to or engage with the arguments being made.
These bans weren’t under “their existing TOS”. The policy was rewritten after banning @elonjet to justify it retroactively.
The bans weren’t 12 hours. They were eventually announced as week-long ones; Musk backed down after backlash and his public poll resulted in a “unban now” vote.
Plenty of white nationalists were banned from Twitter due to TOS violations. I seem to recall the free speech "absolutists" still being upset about those bans. Why is TOS violation suddenly a good reason to ban?
Good point. Except the people banned under Musk has been extremely low. The majority complaint is that a handful of people were suspended for less than a day for violating the existing and specific point of the Twitter TOS…
Compared to previously a national media outlet was actually banned for weeks for reporting a completely true story that the US Intelligence bureaucracy decided was in inconvenient to their desired results of an upcoming election.
Falsely equating this isn’t subtle and I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith. Ideologues everywhere.
> to “OMG Elon banned a handful of journalists, freeze peach was a lie!” when it was a suspension for 12 hours.
I think to a lot of people it was banged on so hard about the 'free speech absolutist' that he was, until it was suddenly legal speech he didn't like then he cast those people out as fast as he could.
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?
“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
Collects and shares intelligence, intelligence assessments, and recommendations on mitigating threats indicated by that intelligence with other domestic and friendly government and private sector entities, yes.
That's all very much part of the FBI’s overt, primary, national security role.
Is there potential for confusion that needs careful clarity, especially when communicating with legally unsophisticated parties, when government agency has both advisory/supportive roles and enforcement roles, to avoid confusion about which role it is acting in? Sure.
Is Twitter the kind of unsophisticated entity where this concern is strongest? No. Is there any evidence that the FBI communication blurred the context of communication with Twitter such that there is nevertheless a legitimate concern that they were, explicitly or even implicitly, coercive despite Twitter not being unsophisticated? Not that I’ve seen. Is there, coercion aside, evidence that the FBI was intentionally decieiving Twitter with reports, so as to lead Twitter into actions it would not take but for a misleading perception deliberately created by the FBI? Not, again, that I have seen.
You seem to be getting off topic, and arguing points I never made.
Let me bring it back on topic.
Are you ok with a US law enforcement/intelligence service asking a social media company to silence certain users? To squash stories reported by the media they know are factual?
I mean if you are, that's ok. Just be upfront about it and not try and hide behind a long paragraph that talks about other thing that aren't relevant.
I’d actually argue that the idea that the US tech ecosystem is almost exclusively ultra left leaning is the myth here. You’ve just presented that as some kind of a fact which is in stark contrast to thousands of threads filled with comments demonstrating the opposite.
Judging by the companies I've worked at and the people I know, it clearly is. This is biased towards the sv part of the industry, which is the largest concentration, though. It is also backed up by the data of who employees of large tech companies contribute to, which is overwhelmingly democrats.
I don’t think you seem to have any kind of understanding of what “ultra left leaning” means in this context.
You’re just repeating Fox News headlines here and pretending that it’s some black and white issue once again in spite of the overwhelming evidence in this very thread showing that not to be the case.
Would you also please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments (including ideological battle comments) to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately, even stooping to personal attacks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34131316). None of this is what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we ban that sort of account.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments (including ideological battle comments) to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we ban that sort of account.
The people trying to minimise every intelligence agency working with every tech company on behalf of the Democratic Party are the same people calling this a dangerous far right conspiracy theory not long ago.
Not really. What are the intelligence agencies supposed to do if not exactly what is being “revealed”? Are they not allowed to talk to private companies or citizens?
If it was being revealed that they were making demands and forcing companies to do things that would be a serious issue. Instead they are asking, nicely, and even paying them for their time and work.
The actual wording, of course, was this sort of thing:
"FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy..." (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-employees-notified-twit...)
The distinction between the government "asking nicely" and "making demands" is not strong enough. In theory could Twitter could have resisted but the costs would have been quite high.
The government should be prohibited from making such requests.
It's also apparent that regarding the Hunter Biden story the FBI outright lied in order to make web platforms censor the story.
> The distinction between the government "asking nicely" and "making demands" is not strong enough. In theory could Twitter could have resisted but the costs would have been quite high.
Really? Companies do this all of the time. For example, how many billions did Apple lose for resisting the FBI’s requests with the San Bernardino shooter?
> It's also apparent that regarding the Hunter Biden story the FBI outright lied in order to make web platforms censor the story.
Can you be specific about this? The “Twitter Files” and all extent accounts say the opposite – and that was the best the right-wing media could find – and if you’re thinking about Zuckerberg’s interview, he specifically said the FBI did not make a request in this case.
As far as I understand the FBI knew that the Hunter Biden story was real but encouraged everybody else to believe that it was a Russian hoax. Doesn't this count as lying? It's not just lying, it's explicit disinformation with an electoral goal.
This went so far that major web platforms blocked all forms of disagreement and the public dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. It was highly effective.
I hate Trump's guts but it's important to acknowledge the enormous amount of effort that went into covering up the behavior of Biden's son.
Can you cite any of those claims? What’s been established in public and e.g. Zuckerberg’s interview was that they warned companies to be wary about another repeat of election interference, but nobody is saying that the FBI told them to kill this story.
> This went so far that major web platforms blocked all forms of disagreement and the public dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. It was highly effective
This is imaginary: I’m not even sure why you’re lying about something we all remember, especially since nothing in the laptop data was even substantial even if was all true.
This is really off-topic, but while we can’t prove that she never sent an email we can look at the lack of evidence of this happening and conclude it’s unlikely. For example, the Republicans had years to find evidence of someone receiving or mentioning an email which wasn’t turned over but found nothing. That tells us that anyone confidently claiming that it happened is lying because there’s a 0% chance that they’d have suppressed that evidence for the entire Trump administration.
The FBI seized the laptop in December 2021, nearly an year before it was revealed. They knew it was real but they strongly encouraged media companies to "expect a leak". As a consequence of this the story was strongly suppressed and the general public came to believe the opposite of the truth.
It's true that the FBI didn't force companies to kill the story but the story was still killed as a result of FBI actions. Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?
There is no proof that Joe Biden himself acted improperly but Hunter Biden did receive large consulting fees for performing no work - he spent his time on cocaine and hookers instead. This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.
The story wasn’t killed, it was front page news. The reasons it dropped off were accurate: Giuliani’s sloppy handling tainted the evidence and there wasn’t much there relevant to Joe Biden. Everyone already knew Hunter Biden had a drug problem but he wasn’t the candidate and there was no reason to think his father was going to pull a Trump and install him in the government.
Two years later, that’s held up well - despite a lot of attention, there hasn’t been anything of interest to come out of the dump, which is why Republicans have shifted to claiming the problem was some kind of coverup despite it not being covered up.
> Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?
This is key to your misunderstanding: the FBI was on watch for a repeat of the election interference we saw in 2016. They didn’t mislead the public, so it’s not a question of anyone being okay with it because that never happened.
> This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.
Yes, and lots of rich kids fail up. The question is whether his father actually did something improper to help him. For example, did Joe Biden actually pull strings for Hunter’s clients or did he refuse to violate the ethical rules? If you want this to be a scandal that’s the kind of thing you need to show.
Just to clarify, what part of the hunter Biden story was "real"? The hunter Biden story can mean everything from "a laptop was found with hunters nudes, and it's discovery was probably influenced by Russian state assets" to "hunters laptop contains proof of misdealings my the president".
As far as I can tell, the first is more or less true and the second isn't.
I agree that the way the laptop was claimed to be found sounds incredibly suspicious, but I don't know of any current evidence that the laptop's "discovery was probably influenced by Russian state assets". When you say "the first is more or less true", are you including this part? If so, can you point to evidence linking the find to Russia?
For the second part, I'd also agree that the laptop does not contain clear evidence of wrongdoing by the president. It contains a lot more than just nude photos of Hunter, though. It's real in the sense that everything on the laptop is believed to be authentic. It offers insight of Hunter's business dealings, and I think hints that contrary to the president's claims, he was at least aware of some of the details of those dealings. As such, I think it's reasonable for people to want to inspect the contents and reach their own conclusion as to what it implies, rather than being prevented from doing so.
> As such, I think it's reasonable for people to want to inspect the contents and reach their own conclusion as to what it implies, rather than being prevented from doing so.
I don’t disagree with the desire but that doesn’t make it legal, and in this case it really runs headlong into Giuliani’s incompetent effort to turn it into an October surprise. Much of the data can’t be authenticated and the signs of tampering mean it’s hard to trust. There are some things which have been verifiable (e.g. emails whose recipients confirmed them or with valid DKIM signatures) but the way they restricted access to Republican operatives for over a year suggests that they had no interest in letting people make up their own minds instead of the carefully constructed narrative being shopped around to loyalist websites.
>The government should be prohibited from making such requests.
They are. The first amendment forbids the government from interfering with the press. They're ignoring it and hoping people don't know this fact. The fact that other media outlets aren't pointing this out, means they're all part of the same fascist tribe as the FBI.
Remember, fascism is the union of state and corporate power according to Mussolini's ghost writer. And it's what we're seeing here. The FBI and big tech being on the same side.
If any party was responsible for this FBI behaviour, surely it would be the party that was in power at the time? The Republican party were in control in 2020.
The oil embargo was in response to Japanese Imperialism in the Pacific, having already conquered a fair amount of territory. It wasn't just out of the blue with Japan sitting there behaving themselves.
Donald Trump famously had huge influence over the FBI (and more broadly, the justice department). He fired James Comey because he did not achieve Trump's desired political aims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_James_Comey
The president merely has control of the heads of departments. They don't have control over the rank and file. It is notoriously hard to get rid of non-elected government officials...
Not to mention the only party from which FBI directors have ever been appointed. It is not a culturally liberal/progressive federal agency in the slightest.
Institutions drift in loyalty and direction, but corruption and lack of accountability fester regardless. Is it difficult to believe that it continues to abuse its power, and will ally itself with whichever party endorses that abuse?
I thought Musk and co did a decent job showing that both the Democrats and the Republicans both had access to the tools of censorship and used them at regular intervals. This should have been a nice time for everyone to come together against tool misuse - if everyone is guilty, then there is no need to pass judgement. Instead both sides are blaming one another (justifiably) while ignoring their own misuse (unjustifiably).
It really doesn't matter that it was either Democrats, Republicans or both. It's that it was happening at all. The government should not be inserting itself into censoring speech of any kind, especially the sort they don't agree with. We have constitutional protections against this. It's bad, no matter which political party directed it.
Everything the FBI did here was under republican leadership. It's the fucking FBI, it's a fundamentally right wing organization that has always and will always be so.
> In District of Columbia County, DC 92.1% of the people voted Democrat
Washington DC is overwhelmingly a Democrat bastion, so, regardless of the political appointee SESers, the rank and file that live around DC are likely to have a specific political leaning.
Now do the Virginia suburbs where a large fraction of them actually live — or, since the DC field office is about 5% of their total staff, the other 55 field offices.
DC’s residents skew Democratic for a reason: having such a large black population means that they don’t trust the party which has such a questionable racial history, and that’s important to understand because the FBI’s history means the same people who don’t vote for Republicans are not jumping to join an organization with its history.
> DC’s residents skew Democratic for a reason: having such a large black population means that they don’t trust the party which has such a questionable racial history
I have a hunch that you’re about to repeat the usual conservative “the Democrats were the party of slavery” claim which assumes the reader is unaware of the Southern Strategy half a century ago[1], but I’d love to be wrong in that pessimism.
> DC’s residents skew Democratic for a reason: having such a large black population means that they don’t trust the party which has such a questionable racial history
This seems odd if you think about it in terms of long term party history, because from the founding through the New Deal the Democrats were first and foremost the party of the white Southerners bent on the most extreme de jure racial discrimination (slavery, and then Jim Crow, etc.), and from the New Deal through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 things were more complicated, but they still had that same base as a key constituency; that didn’t really change until Johnson embraced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republicans followed up the way that had not done with previous times Democratic leadership had alienated that part of the base by actively courting them, especially starting in the 1968 Presidential election.
But you have to realize when discussing D.C. political parties, the District didn’t get to vote for President at all until 1964, didn’t get to vote for a (nonvoting) delegate to Congress (after 1874) until 1970, and didn’t get to vote for its local government until 1974. The history of electoral politics for D.C. residents is much shorter than for most of the rest of the country, and consists almost entirely of the period since the Republicans started actively courting racists as a key constituency.
Yes - and these were self-reinforcing since you had huge shifts following the 1968 riots which caused a lot of people to move to the suburbs, removing them from the DC electorate. Combined with the way the District tends to get more pointless meddling & fiscal sabotage when Republicans control the House and that spread isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
This persecution complex the Republicans have promulgated is amazing with how widely believed it is. The republicans have controlled the reigns of power repeatedly over the past few decades and for a greater number of elections than you’d anticipate looking at the popular vote. The timeline the Twitter files is talking about was explicitly during Republican control and not something like a month after the elections where bureaucratic momentum might have still been in play but years after they had taken the executive and legislature. The FBI head was 2-3 years into his job after being placed by a Republican president at this point.
How are they possibly working as an arm of the Democratic Party?
What does anything you just posted have to do with the parent comment talking about intelligence agencies working with every tech company on behalf of the Democrats.
Singling out Democrats doesn’t imply “Uniparty”. And this was the “outsider’s”(Trump’s) FBI attempting to get Twitter to censor things. How is that the “uniparty” working against populists like Trump?
People have a curious inability to imagine "What if the other side was doing this?" If the FBI was regulating content on Twitter (and god knows where else) in order to swing the election towards Trump, it would be 24/7/365 outrage from liberals for years.
I think it's pretty reasonable to worry about a system of punishment (depriving someone of the right to use a communication platform) administered by the government, which doesn't obey the normal rules of justice: 1) right to see evidence 2) right to confront your accuser 3) right to judgement by a jury of your peers.
OFC there is a role for private info and possibly preventing malicious, foreign government manipulation attacks on us - but the power is so strong and so easily misused that we need better checks on it.
Don't forget the NYT and most lefty thought leaders were onboard with the 2nd Iraq war based on phony evidence.
I'm more looking for a gesture towards respecting our values, and a more open negotiation process for developing safe use for this kind of powerful control system. The fact that the administrators of the process on the twitter side were quite polarized politically makes people doubt its fairness, as does the fact that it was mostly done in secret.
i.e. it was more of a China-style "the state doesn't like you and bad things will happen to you and your family" style of punishment where you don't know what has actually happened (limitation of tweet reach, weird glitches in your tweet's spread with no acknowledgement) than a clear "you are charged with X and have received this penalty Y for time Z."
Why not just stop using Twitter? Who cares whether the FBI has its thumb on the scales or if it’s Elon Musk and his friends?
“The world’s digital town square” is a marketing slogan, and nothing more. If you instead accept that is simply just another way to sell eyeballs to advertisers, it’s easier to understand.
If we do need a digital town square, someone needs to build one. If it needs to have free speech protections, then the government needs to run it because they are the only ones who are restrained by the 2nd amendment.
I'm not going to touch bot farm, but the problem with labeling someone a troll and thus is that is subjective and not clearly defined. There's a level of intent behind being a troll vs being thought of as a troll.
Here, in the USA, we do have the right to freedoms of speech, press and association. These freedoms cannot be encroached on by the government without due process, and yes, that means it would need to go in front of a jury. It's on the government to prove that a law was broken before they can intervene with otherwise lawful speech. It's not up to a government bureaucrat to decide.
Just because you disagree with someone does not a troll make.
My problem with modern discourse is we've lost the ability to disagree with people without resorting to labeling and name calling. And that we think we need the government to protect us from things we may find distasteful or offensive. Because matters of taste are individual and subjective.
Right, but there is an exception for carriers such as Twitter from being treated as publishers, responsible for the material they distribute and monetize from their website.
They aren’t treated like press, but they need to be.
How about we settle for at least some decent evidence of wrongdoing before eradication by the three letter agency army?
The examples given in these leaks showcase accounts getting banned simply for the opinion they hold, LACKING any other indicators like account origin, IP logins, email domain registration, etc.
I am still baffled by the radio silence about any of that in the mainstream media. My prediction is that this, the Rittenhouse trial coverage, and the attempts to shut down the discussion about the lab Leak theory are going to be viewed in a few years the same way as the mainstream media's complicity and collusion with the government before the Iraq war.
Ah, so the "mainstream media" "radio silence" here for an American politics story is in-fact complaining that on a specific date, it wasn't front-page news in ... the UK?
I mean it helps that it isn't front page news. It's completely reasonable to disagree about the scale of a story. Most people disagree with you and shellenberger that this is important. What place do you have to demand that we interpret things the same way you do?
"most people" cannot disagree with them about the story's importance, because "most people" haven't heard about the it thanks to the suppression campaign. That's the whole issue you are trying to downplay.
So I'm confused, is any tweet that isn't reposted on the front page of the nyt "suppressed" now?
Those who have seen the story think it's not worth publishing. One of the points of news/media is to vet stories and exercise good judgement and editorial choice about what is worth publishing and what isn't.
There are no big revelations in the twitter files. It's mundane things like FBI employees asking Twitter to look at tweets telling Republicans to vote on the Wednesday after election day, when you can no longer vote. And Biden campaign(which was not in power, Trump admin was) sending Twitter links to a few tweets that have Hunter's leaked dick pics that were being spread without his permission(definition of revenge porn), to check if they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. It's a big yawn except for all the lies by the right wing causing outrage.
Sure, the Rittenhouse coverage and how people responded to it was terrible. People saw what they wanted to see, regardless of the facts. But the whole situation was ammunition for the culture war and not really a matter of public concern more generally, unlike the Iraq war.
A few weeks ago over Thanksgiving, I found out that my aunt believes Rittenhouse killed "several black people". She doesn't live under a rock per-se, she keeps herself steeped in TV news (so she may as well be under a rock.)
This is a common post on Reddit along with them still falsely claiming he “went across state lines with a gun”.
These people did not watch the trial, and have no idea what they are talking about. But are certain that they do… ChatGPT levels of certainty… hmm, might be on to something there.
The argument that "it's not censorship if a private company does it" was always weak.
What these revelations show is that a lot of so-called moderation was done at the explicit direction of government employees. How do you defend this? "it's not censorship if the private company willingly complies with government requests"? A refusal by twitter would have had quite high costs for the company.
The cooperation between private companies and government censors is so deep that this is barely distinguishable from direct censorship.
The fact that comments such as yours are getting downvoted straight to the bottom tells me that people simply aren’t willing to see the implication this has to whatever illusion of freedom the American people still possess.
The truth is much worse. This didnt only happen a twitter, its happening at every major online space including here.
The inability for hn commenters to speak forthright and integrity and principles shows the rot tgat exists here. Hn is largely controlled and nothing they dont want people to see is allowed. Accounts are shadow banned, ips are range banned, individuals here are tracked and not allowed Accounts or voices here. This comment not even allowed because of selective rules to ensure the truth is not seen. You cannot debate people here in good faith. HN is a moral cesspool.
From this thread, it seems by just going "pfft... no big deal."
As long as there's a layer of abstraction ("I didn't kill him. The bullets and the fall did") and it's applying to speech we generally don't care for (misinformation, "hate speech", etc..), then I guess we're cool with it?
It's tough not to be cynical at times. A decade after PRISM, the government controlling speech indirectly via "polite suggestions" mostly just fills me with similar feelings of "no big deal." Not because it isn't, but because it's expected.
If you don't see anything wrong with the government forcing censorship on controversial political questions, such as whether elections are safe and fair, just imagine your own reaction if after the 2016 election, Trump's FBI would be monitoring Twitter for any information about Cambridge Analytica / Russia's interference, labeling them as misinformation and censoring and banning everyone mentioning them.
If your values only apply when they fit your wanted outcome, they aren't values they are pathetic excuses.
By the way, this opens the door to all the other agencies of the world outside US to demand same kind of access. Including European. Maybe China wants it too.
And for the record, I think Elon banning Elon Jet and journalists is wrong too. But there are too many people who only care about the censorship when it hurts them, and cheer for it when it suits them.
It's unsettling to see how lacking in ethical principles some people are. If you truly believe that you would not care if a highly Republican-leaning social media company was collaborating with the government to suppress content from Democratic creators, then I can understand your perspective. However, it's likely that this situation would be viewed differently if the roles were reversed.
I’m fine with the government shutting down anti-democratic movements. I’m not fine with anti-democratic governments shutting down legitimate discussion that looks bad on them, or serving a foreign power. These are not the same thing.
Then all it will take to lose your democracy is for a dictator to proclaim his opponents a danger to democracy. Maybe using a Reichstag fire. You can't fight evil with evil, or fight undemocratic tyrants with undemocratic measures. Introducing vulnerabilities into your democratic system is a double edged sword.
Exactly. What does anti-democratic mean? A brief reminder that North Korea's full name is Democratic People's Republic of Korea and East Germany was German Democratic Republic.
The reason we would usually go for the fullest amount of protection for speech was precisely because most of those issues are not simply a matter of "these people are democratic and those aren't".
Fortunately we can use our brains to think and realize that while both sides are calling the other a danger to democracy, only one of them made a concerted effort to overturn the results of an election (an overtly anti-democratic act)
> If you don't see anything wrong with the government forcing censorship on controversial political questions
Nobody is saying that it wouldn’t be a problem. The debate is whether the Twitter Files shows anything of the sort, and begging the question like that calls into question whether you’re actually interested in a honest discussion.
Is that the debate? Because I think it's pretty settled the files show extensive collaboration of the FBI and Twitter on controversial topics, it shows many instances of twits censored by a request from the FBI. Am I moving the debate position or are you? Did you even read them? Many comments here accept the existing evidence as something normal. I disagree strongly.
I read them, and I know that what I saw was the FBI reporting TOS violations. Can you provide a link to a tweet which you believe was censored but was not in fact a TOS violation?
Americans are living in a world with a land war in Europe with an old foe on one side, and the increasing pressure exerted on Asian trade and policy partners by a Pacific rim empire we've not seen eye to eye with in the past 100 years.
I'd like to see more effort expended on spying and undermining our rivals than ourselves. But such large diplomatic/economic/(hopefully cold)military projects require long term thinking we're poor at. Its so much easier to just fight the latest culture war against domestic weirdos and malcontents.
Every time we have one of these internal thought-purity checks, it sows discord in an already discordant country made of too many different races religions and regional cultures to ever work if we're going to try and weaponize our own governmental security apparatus against each other, vying for control on the airwaves and at the polls, just so we can stick it to our domestic rivals for a few years.
"A well-armed and informed populace governing itself" is a pipe dream by indigenous uncontacted people and certain very intelligent dissenters. The majority of "civilized" people in the world are very happy to live in an authoritarian information-sanitized nation so long as the people in power cater to their own in-group.
I’d like to think this site of all places might be populated with very intermittent dissenters willing to be or at least support activists trying to change that, with the internet and technology as their tool.
It’s always jarring to discover the extent to which it’s not.
The reason Bitcoin got so large so quickly is the same reason that "Crypto" got large so quickly. The majority of people who "invest" in Bitcoin aren't trying to figure out a way to trade goods and services in a way that undermines the Federal Reserve and the IRS, they're trying to increase their holdings in USD in order to better participate in the existing economy.
Meh. People will try to get rich off anything— crypto, the internet, SMS scams, every type of physical business, legit or otherwise.
As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?
What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)
What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?
What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?
What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?
What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?
Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.
That vision of bitcoin died somewhere around 2017, back when blocks filled, commerce ground to a halt and nobody in charge thought this was a problem.
Because the people that were in control already figured that what they wanted to use the system for is to buy low and sell high for huge profits, and so it didn't matter if the network didn't perform well for regular commerce. You don't need a lot of TPS if your ideal scenario is to ever make two.
I've realized this recently too, and I'm trying to just ignore/flag everything even remotely political that gets posted here. If you disagree with the idea that information control is something the government has no business of doing, you're in the minority here. The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.
After all, it's a blog for a VC fund. I'd say a lot of people here are building things that do much worse than what the twitter files exposed.
You don’t like that people aren’t as open minded as you’d like, so you flipped on your values and now try to flag anything you disagree with(i.e. political content)?
I think dang kinda just looks the other way because he knows people want to talk politics, but it's literally the first thing in the "off topic" section of the guidelines.
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
So yeah, you are misinterpreting my comment. I've just realized what HN is meant to be, or at least what dang wants it to be. I think he's an excellent mod, and I respect the guidelines. I want to come here and see cool nerd stuff like "can you play minecraft inside doom inside minecraft" and as soon as I see something political it puts me in a bad mood. And yes, if you scroll my comment history, you will see that I post mostly in political threads. But I have learned my lesson - this place isn't for that. There's no revolution to be started here, given the userbase is mostly financially well-off tech bros who benefit from the status quo. Just like me!
>> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
>The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
You said you were flagging all of political content and then brought it back to Twitter files specifically to justify it not hitting the exception clause.
For me the Twitter files content themselves aren’t interesting, but the effect of the what seems like obviously non interesting content getting so many people up in arms just because a billionaire is claiming it’s bad is an interesting new phenomenon.
I understand this type of content might put you in a bad mood, but given that you weren’t flagging the content until you felt
> The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.
Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.
> Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.
No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.
You do you, but I can’t fathom how to reconcile the public’s reaction to the Twitter files as a “slap in the face” as you said, and then calling this “community moderation”
> I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me.
Yes, but when Musk talked about freedom of speech but not freedom of reach he wasn’t referring to flagging that leads to removal. He meant you might not get as many views as you had hoped.
So your approach of flagging is actually more extreme because the content will be completely removed in some cases.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting
I would say that government agencies trying to stop me from seeing information that it doesn't like is something most good hackers would find interesting.
The age of cypherpunks is dead, we live in the age of the "programmer who blindly believes the same thing everyone at his company believes and thinks he's right because he's intelligent because he's a programmer".
And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it, it's the same thing for Elon Musk, it's crazy how popular he was online and how everyone loved him, he didn't do anything bad between then and now (except insult a couple people here and there and other asshole things we have all done in the past) but went from "invented X" to "merely invested in X", and from "genius" to "idiot", etc.
The people who said they couldn't tame the internet were as wrong as those who said the same thing about crypto.
>And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it
I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.
Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.
The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.
Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.
The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.
If you know a site with reasonable discussions of governance, with voices from all points of view, don't hold back. I am often a dissenter here and take the down votes for it. But HN isn't really for such discussions even if dang let's it fly.
Thanks to dang I do find HN to be much more balanced on most viewpoints than the majority of sites. I can't recall a time here where I have been disgusted with someone's comment like I have on Arstechnica reading comments wishing death to Trump supporters or the unvaccinated.
And a whole lot more people don't want to think too hard - especially about complex & unhappy stuff, where they can't just wait 'till the end of the movie for "happily ever after", nor ask their doctor for the latest pill to fix it.
It is true that governments have always had an influence on how we live our lives, whether through traditional media like newspapers and television, or more modern platforms like social media. This is not a new phenomenon, but rather something that has always existed in society. However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content, and this has led to increased scrutiny and debate about the role of government in moderating online speech.
The United States has a distorted view of free speech, as some people believe that it should be absolute and without any limitations. However, it is important to recognize that the collective good and well-being of society should always be a priority, and that includes protecting against harmful or extremist ideas that could cause harm to others. While it is important to protect individuals' right to express themselves freely, it is also important to ensure that this freedom is not used to spread hateful or harmful messages. In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
I believe your comment represents speech that puts the well-being of society at serious risk, is harmful, and possibly even extremist.
If I manage to convince 50.1% of the population of the same, should we be permitted to censor your speech, and enforce prior restraint on your future speech under penalty of law?
I'll go one further... if even 1 single person (the person who owns HN), decides that they don't like the content of that comment, then they should be free to delete/censor the comment on HN and ban the person in perpetuity from HN.
Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person. That is a completely different situation than what you are alluding to. I can just as easily prevent the reverse question: I have a blog with a comment section, and somebody I don't know posts a horrific, rude and distasteful comment that I don't want associated with my blog post. Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?
>Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person.
Did you read GP? If they were talking about comapnies and not governments, it certainly was not made clear:
>However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content, and this has led to increased scrutiny and debate about the role of government in moderating online speech.
>[...]In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
The initial comment says government has always used their influence through "newspapers", "television" and "social media", all of which have historically been non-government entities who take the government's input and decide if they want to follow it or not. There are obviously major historical cases in which private companies have defied what the government wanted them to do (NYT v Sullivan, NYT vs US, etc), but I'm sure there are countless examples throughout Twitter's history of the government asking for something and then not getting it, but I assume that isn't something those instances are not being highlighted that much as they don't fit the narrative.
That's perhaps a fair reading of the initial comment, although reading "regulate" in "it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content" and "moderating" in "the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet" to both mean simply "government input" is somewhat questionable. See also your own use of the word "moderate" ("Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?"). Also your point that historically non-government entities can decide whether to follow government input or not needs to be qualified considerably. Contempt of court was not considered free speech until relatively recently. for example see Los Angeles Times contempt of court 1938. Then there is of course the Sedition Act of 1918. In any case this is very far from your claim that "everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person." We are most certainly talking about government here. Whether or not the initial comment was refering to government simply "giving input" or outright censoring, we are still talking about government, so your claim is in my view inaccurate even under your own explaination of the comment, which is itself somewhat questionable.
> However, it is important to recognize that the collective good and well-being of society should always be a priority, and that includes protecting against harmful or extremist ideas that could cause harm to others.
As an American, I disagree. We are a sovereign country, and people from other countries don't have any say in how we conduct ourselves. It doesn't whether it's online or offline.
American Nazis and Tankies have the first amendment right to spread their dumb ideas. If they want to make their own websites, that's fine with me. The government should mind its own business unless there are actual crimes taking place.
The rest of the world doesn't have to like it. It's just the way it's going to be.
>In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? Sounds like you either get in the good graces of the "intelligence community" or you are now harmful, as shown pretty clearly with the hordes of "intelligence community" people calling the biden laptop(whatever it had, its content is irrelevant) russian propaganda[0], while even the DOJ and FBI says it isn't[1]. And of course those officials making the stink are contracted by the news agencies to talk about it where journalists will just blindly accept whatever they're given.
The "intelligence community" isn't your friend(neither are the proper agencies but I digress), it never was if you're not an us citizen and it probably stopped being if you are after the patriot act.
> Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government?
An additional related question: Are they even capable of undertaking this task? Our current government officials and bureaucrats don't understand enough about how the Internet works to effectively police it. And more fundamentally, can a government act quickly enough to outwit how quickly the Internet adapts to roadblocks? Governments need to have policies, procedures, go through chains of command, etc. A lot of Internet culture, on the other hand, is driven by random people doing random things. If a topic is forbidden, instead of policing that topic, the government then has to police the 50 ways to get around the block as well as guess which one will take root.
It's similar to trying to win a war against guerrilla insurgents. The high level of organization of a government to some degree works against them.
The government should simply have no hand in determining what information is presented or not presented to anyone, except within the bounds of explicit legal mandate to do so.
That this sort of under-the-table cooperation between three letter agencies and information companies has been allowed to exist and develop is completely outrageous. It should not be put into perspective, but stopped, right here, right now.
Once that is done, a discussion can be had about where it makes sense to create legislation to curtail various behaviors and content that are disturbing to social order. The current list of offenses is fairly comprehensive and includes things such as violent threats, child porn and terrorism recruitment, and any addition has to be well-motivated.
But as long as the cooperation with three-letter agencies happens outside a legal framework, the only proper response, as far as I can see, is pure outrage.
Exactly. What if I WANT to be tricked by a Russian disinformation campaign? What if I just want a juicy story that justifies my biases and I have no regard for the truth at all?
Is there a Mastodon server that straight up admits that it may include Russian disinformation and is primarily for entertainment purposes rather than factual discussion?
edit: Or a mix of both true news items and disinformation! See if you can tell which is which!
> Is there a Mastodon server that straight up admits that it may include Russian disinformation and is primarily for entertainment purposes rather than factual discussion?
It doesn't quite admit it, and its a fork, but Truth Social may be close enough.
Reading your comment felt like that hearing Anakin saying he knows what's best for the people better than they do.
As soon as you start assuming you know more than the people and that you have a right to censor the information they can access because it's bad for them, you become a tyrant.
Am I the only one who finds this rotten?
I want to read disinformation, tell me the sky is green I don't care, I can stitch stories together and arrive to a conclusion myself, false things (won't use that "(d/m)isinformation" media clickbait word) don't make sense, real things do, sure there are false things that do sound correct, but trust the people to make the difference, have your experts argue against falsehoods, let the people hear those arguments, if your expert's arguments disprove X or Y the people will not believe it, if the Russian experts disprove your arguments, then they're right and you're the one spreading falsehoods...
I don't like censorship but I also know that I am not unbiased/intelligent/non-human enough to not fall for disinformation. And so will anyone, if they are honest about it. Not every time but we will fall for it. And foreign operations like that should not have the freedom to be conducted on US soil and in US media.
I think labels that say who has determined something is disinformation, produced by whom, and why they have labeled it thus might be a better solution.
It would not only be the government. It would also involve the media and it would present their case for the labeling. It's not a blanket trust. And it doesn't remove the media, just labels it.
This buck stops with congress. Be alarmed if you want but make sure you address the actual root cause.
In our system of governance, it is the responsibility of Congress to hold the executive accountable. All these agencies are part of the Executive arm of the United States of America. If there is over-reach by secretive agencies of the Executive, it is the duty and responsibility of congressional members, representatives of the public, to be rigorous in the exercise of their duty and hold them accountable.
"Allegations of domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surfaced in the 1970s, triggering public demand for an investigation of federal surveillance operations. In 1975 the Senate established the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s reports exposed abuses and led to legislation governing domestic and foreign surveillance—most notably, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. House and Senate permanent select committees established at that time now oversee U.S. intelligence.
The critical question before the committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security."
I'll admit I never read the Church Committee report before, but it's actually shocking in the sense that an official report from the Senate of the United States would today be read almost as a 'radical' position, which itself is a telling reflection of the changes that have occurred in the past 47 years:
"Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners"," sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens."
The Church Committee Report: "INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND
THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS - Final Report - 1976"
Of course we find it concerning, and we'd want to look closely at it to see if it crosses legal or ethical lines. I don't currently see any line-crossing, but I guess it's good to have the discussion.
The problem with this "Twitter Files" reporting is that it's not making the situation any clearer. If anything it feels like these journalists are being used to do PR work for Twitter's new owner in order to promote the idea that Something Really Bad Happened Here, but this advocacy makes it much harder to see the real picture.
I have to say I’m astonished at the casual dismissal of the blatant lies of the previous Twitter regime, their clear election manipulation, and the governments involvement in drawing attention to utterly trivial social media activity. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the governments attention on small, inconsequential accounts was all a backstop to justify the narratives they were feeding to the press about Russian election manipulation and “misinformation”.
I feel like a frog in the boiling pot watching the other frogs try to convince me there’s no danger. I hope you’re correct.
FBI gets Hunter laptop Dec 2019, knows it's not a forgery. FBI proceeds to warn social media companies about "Russian disinformation campaigns" about a month or two before election. NY Post does story on Hunter laptop (which includes business dealing with Ukraine). "Former" intelligence agents go on media to say "this has all the markings of a disinformation campaign" (which they know 100% is a lie).
Social media proceeds to ban a 100% factual story, about a presidential candidate weeks for an election.
Ask the 50 spook liars, including the formers heads of the CIA and FBI, that made the effort to release a statement calling it "Russian disinformation". They seemed to think it might have an impact.
I really hope this gets through to the person you’re responding to. This stuff isn’t hard to find. It feels like every time they make one of these threads it’s so full of misrepresentations that they might as well be spitting in the faces of their supporters.
The 'intelligence agancies'? Like in cases of a coup, when an institution that is part of the governmental body tries to take over the state by force. It seems pretty similar, just that the means are more peaceful.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of which flavor they favor. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't look closely at which ideology someone is into (it isn't necessary, and we don't care), but I'm pretty sure I banned several accounts yesterday who are on the opposite side from you. Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them, but that's just how the passions operate.
> The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter
Being the primary domestic component of the intelligence community is overtly part of the FBI role, so that would be expected to be true with any domestic actor in the place of “Twitter”.
Similarly, “major international public and private communication platform with a history of being used to recruit and organize insurrections and other acts of violence, execute international influence operations, single out targets for violent reprisals, etc., attracts lots of attention from intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement agencies, of which the FBI is the lead federal domestic agency for all three purposes” is... not surprising.
> Are they supposed to be helping the CIA get around their mandate not to interfere domestically?
In that domestic in intelligence/counterintelligence is the FBIs job, and that they are expected to do it as part of and in close coordination with other parts of the intelligence community including the CIA, yes, but its not getting around anything since its exactly the way things are supposed to work.
> In its 1947 charter, the CIA was prohibited from spying against Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid that the agency would engage in political abuse. But the law didn't stop the CIA from spying on Americans. During the 1960s, in clear violation of its statutory mission to co-ordinate foreign intelligence operations only, the CIA ventured into the domestic spying business through "Operation Chaos," in which it spied on as many as 7,000 Americans involved in the peace movement.[1]
"Liberal" apologists for the CIA will never cease to amaze me.
GP is not defending illegal domestic surveillance of protest movements by the CIA. They are explaining that the CIA handing any domestic concerns it has to the FBI is what the law prescribes, not a circumvention of the law. Note that and we can recognize this is how the law works, and still condemn any unjust actions they partake in together or even the intelligence apparatus as a whole. Indeed, our objections would be better informed and more sound as a result.
> GP is not defending illegal domestic surveillance of protest movements by the CIA.
Right. GP is defending CIA participation in a domestic influence/disinformation campaign, operated by the FBI. You will not convince me that this type of thing was intended to be permissible when the agency was created. See the quote from the ACLU above.
If you read the recent Twitter files, you will see that Elvis Chan included the CIA directly in a meeting with Twitter executives.
> In that domestic in intelligence/counterintelligence is the FBIs job, and that they are expected to do it as part of and in close coordination with other parts of the intelligence community including the CIA, yes, but its not getting around anything since its exactly the way things are supposed to work.
"Expected"
"not getting around anything"
"Supposed to"
Textbook apologia for the CIA's expansive interpretation of its own mandate.
Maybe I'm dating myself...but how different is this, really, from stuff that was routine back in the days of J Edgar Hoover (FBI Director, 1935-1972)? Other than "with computers and the internet" instead of "with paper files and typewriters"?
Idealistic youthful utopianism, techno- or otherwise, does not change human nature. And ignorance of history is a really poor recipe for long-term success.
I don't find it incredible that Russia and China conduct disinformation campaigns via social media, regarding our elections and all manner of things. The accusation that they have used social media to inflame groups on both sides of the political divide in the US seems credible to me.
However I'm not okay with unilateral censorship as a response necessarily. But I'd be okay with a tag on postings and accounts maybe. I'm not sure what the solution is, despite concerns over both foreign influence and domestic censorship.
For now, if an item seems to demonize Americans or Westerners on the right OR the left, I try to be very skeptical.
Any public media entity represents enormous power - and by definition will involve agencies of all kinds from all over.
Foreign actors will absolutely leverage the situation to the maximum extent possible and this is a fact irrespective of claims made by CIA/FBI to justify their existence.
Even the Canadian government has finally admitted publicly that the Chinese government is doing 'full court press' inside the country including having literal Chinese Police Stations hidden within Canada. It's perverse.
And of course, that's just the 'big actor' issue - there are legitimately a lot of small time bad people using these systems. Like they would any other.
We should expect the government to do it's job - meaning that the 'story' should be about 'where the lines are' not 'that they exist'.
Judicial oversight, proportionality, proper procedure, some mechanism for public oversight, lawfulness ... those are the issues.
I'm glad for this bit of transparency because it probably helps us to parse the system a bit to see what's what ... but I suggest that we ought to be vigilant about the nuances, not the ideology. Putin and Xi will forevermore attempt to dust things up, and the CIA/FBI are known to overstep their bounds ... but there's a legit reason those agencies exist so we probably should focus on a way to make it work in a way that preserves freedom, lawfulness, basic civic virtues and common sense.
> The two people Kyle Rittenhouse shot, both had extensive criminal records. That's kind of amazing, that criminals would be such dedicated civil rights protestors. Simpler explanation is that FBI sent informants, or agent provocateurs.
“People protesting against the government were criminals as defined by the government they were protesting against. It unbelievable that anyone who is a criminal could be involved in something positive whether out of an actual belief or just being angry at the government that had punished them previously, therefor it’s obvious that there must be a government conspiracy involved”
And he needn’t be to have been protesting against government power. Him being there for entirely self serving reasons is a much simpler explanation than that he was an fbi plant who was willing to put his life on the line for some sort of social manipulation as you have claimed.
You started with a view and appear to have worked your way backwards to justify it.
B:do you really think that someone with a criminal history would never go to a protest? Are they simply 1 dimensional characters in a play who cant go to a protest or agree with its cause because they are “bad” people? They couldn’t go because even if they didn’t agree, it hurt the government they disliked? They couldn’t have gone because they had friends going and it was a thing to do? They couldn’t just like general mayhem? I do not understand how you think a government conspiracy is the simplest explanation here, especially when the guy went after someone with a gun while armed with a skateboard. That’s the behavior of someone motivated, not someone doing their day job of undercover agent or having been forced to do undercover work by the government in exchange for leniency.
I’ll actually turn this back on you, how exactly do you believe either of the two people killed by rittenhouse were part of a government conspiracy. How we’re they recruited and what was the goal?
> do you really think that someone with a criminal history would never go to a protest?
1. Just because some criminals attend protests, doesn't mean that is it typical. All 3 people that Kyle shot had criminal backgrounds. What are the odds of this happening in a random sample of all protests? Clearly this wasn't your average protest. White criminals protesting for black people's civil rights?
2. It is important to note that everyone has the right to peacefully assemble and express their views, regardless of their criminal history. However this was not a peaceful protest, as property was being actively destroyed.
3. Criminal justice system forces plea bargains in return for cooperation. Even innocent people will plea bargain under duress. Threats of lengthy prison sentences or harsh treatment, or a parole officer revoking parole is how the system extorts cooperation. Becoming an informant is the only leverage someone like Joseph Rosenbaum may have had.
4. Let's assume you're right. They were there for civil rights protest. But that
seems like a conflict in your own thinking. Since the core issue was governments abuse of civil rights. Which would be a giant conspiracy. Which you seem to wave away as being a possibility.
I gave specific examples where other government's intelligence agencies in the past were known to do send in agent provocateurs. Why do you think America is exceptional?
What does point number 2 even mean in terms of your argument, it’s just tossed in there like it’s relevant. And your point 4 makes zero sense? How is protesting the governments abuse of civil rights a conspiracy?
For point 1, people willing to go out and do action are more likely to be criminals than someone who stay home. On top of that this is just large numbers making rare circumstances occur. You’d likely point to the birthday problem[1] as a shadowy conspiracy if this is enough to make you think of government involvement.
For point 3 you’re making the claim that he could have been an informant stretch to imply that he was. You have failed to outline how they would have been recruited or for what purpose. Show some evidence instead of making vague implications. Actually fuck, I’m even letting you get too much leeway there. Informants do not actively go out in public and start physical fights with people holding a gun. Even if he happened to have been an informant that would not imply the government put him up to attacking rittenhouse.
You’ve gotten too conspiracy brained if you look at rittenhouse event and conclude the government must have set it up. What would they have even gained?
I prefer the old, anti-establishment left. Now the left is just comprised of journalists defending three letter agencies while calling the right "bootlickers."
I don't like the idea of any three letter agency having any communication with a company like Twitter unless it is for a specific investigation.
What? Democrats might be defending the TLAs but leftists have always been the explicit target of agencies like the FBI and CIA. So to suggest that they'd somehow be defending them is laughable.
490 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadThe story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was similar: if there’d been anything significant revealed the WSJ or Fox would have covered it directly. There wasn’t and Giuliani’s sloppy handling made it unreliable, so they didn’t want to put their reputations on the line.
Just a few more searches and he will hit it for sure! Unless his handlers demand he ignore that, of course.
Was this a change in their behavior, or a change in American political attitudes towards the role of journalism?
Keep in mind, this is a guy who has been thrown out of not one but two news organizations, one of which he founded! The level of narcissism and self-obsession that takes must be astounding.
What was the second outlet he was ousted from? I know of the intercept sure, and he was ousted because he wanted to cover the biden laptop, they kept claiming he couldn't(not only in the intercept itself but anywhere else) because it wasn't really true and now...well we all know how that turned out.
Calling him a hipster journalist unconcerned with the truth is just a flat out lie, especially if you conveniently ignore all his ongoing work in brazil. He was one of the main reasons the current president is not in jail and defeated bolsonaro in the elections, something which bolsonaro attempted to prosecute him for, and now with lula in power he an extreme critic of the censorship the supreme court is using to silence people, the same people that absolutely hate him for getting lula out and ousting bolsonaro.
He is an example of being steadfast in his beliefs against censorship and surveillance state, just because the vast majority of journalists are actually reporters parroting whatever party line the newsroom toes at the time doesn't mean someone who actually sticks to his ideals is a hipster.
"Glenn has gone off the rails" is pretty funny to read honestly.
Nothing has changed except who Glenn is talking about about. Apparently as a "good progressive journalist" you're never supposed to turn the spotlight on your own side?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-deletes-tweet-wit...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15868716916862238...
Now it's just someone from a secret agency shutting down news stories about laptops because it makes one political candidate look bad.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–King_suicide_letter
Could aswell be the county water utility board or whatever as the FBI. You treat these guys differently. That was my point.
The real question is, when does laws that apply only to the government, like the first amendment, start applying to private companies when the private companies are being directed by the government?
If you’re referring to the administrative costs, those were a separate issue where U.S. law allows payment for the cost of complying with court ordered 2703(d) requests:
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/20/no-the-fbi-is-not-paying...
Nothing in these dumps suggests that those requests are being abused.
Twitter, for me, is a great example of free speech. The government asks them to do things apparently all the time. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they even have a discussion about it internally. That is INCREDIBLE.
Ultimately, Twitter became the primary communications vehicle of the President of the United States. They !@#$ing ban him. Power move. I’m sure many demands were made by all sorts of agencies to reinstate Trump’s account and they said, “No. !$@# off.” You want to talk about China and the CCP? Well, here’s a concrete example of something that, had it happened in China with Weibo, you know would have gotten dozens of people “disappeared”. But Twitter did it with zero recourse from the government. As the kids say these day, “Based.”
Greatest example of free speech in action my life time.
> After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles
these people are delusional
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.
Simply repeating things is a propaganda and brainwashing technique.
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.
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
I'm much more worried about the current state of affairs where a single deranged person (Elon) can arbitrarily issue bans on a whim.
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.
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.
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
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-yo...
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.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Mind you, I felt the same way about the NYT and WaPo.
WSJ editorials were loony-toons wacky even before Rupert Murdoch bought it.
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.
(It was the Trump government FBI, by the way. In case your timeline is a bit mixed up?)
Funny, I’d say it was people that can’t seem to cite any evidence without dick pics that are “muddying the waters”.
I’ve read these twitter files posts from Taibbi and Weiss. It’s all insinuations based on contact between government agencies and twitter. The actual content being discussed is not interesting.
The biggest red flag this is all raising for me is why FBI agents are sitting around searching for small time election misinformation like talking about voting a day late. Is there nothing higher priority to work on? And how has twitter not automated finding such basic misinformation?
Citation needed. Even Wikipedia lists it as an abandoned laptop that was trawled for data. Trash as far as I know is legitimate object of search (e.g. police does it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.
Yes, he left his images on laptop. That's not revenge porn, as far as I know.
> The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files
Don't quote me on that, but from my memory not only were links to Hunter deleted, but so were discussions of it from even reputable journalist. I think it was a Washington Post that discussed Hunter's laptop, and it got buried or deleted.
That's only Part 1.
They also marked Trump tweets as fake, even though they found some exonerating information and vice versa.
Plus the weekly meetings with FBI/OGA (alias for CIA), around misinformation spreading tweets, etc.
You basically have a government agency labeling stuff as misinformation for deranking/deletion. If that doesn't raise any First Amendment issues, I'm not sure what will? Capturing journalist and keeping them in horrible conditions? Water torture and organ transfer of said journalists?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
That's a very strange definition of revenge porn. It was made inadvertently by Hunter Biden, it wasn't used for blackmail and it is related to a bulk of other interesting email.
Definition of revenge porn from a quick googling is:
>Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent
This fits the description 100%.
"revenge porn - noun - revealing or sexually explicit images or videos of a person posted on the internet, typically by a former sexual partner, without the consent of the subject and in order to cause them distress or embarrassment."
It's not a question of who took the photos. It's a question of whether the people sharing them had the permission of the subject to share them.
While Blackmail may be a component of some revenge porn, it's not required by this or other definitions.
By point is, having naked pictures on your laptop don't make docs and other stuff found as revenge porn.
The Biden campaign in 2020(they were not in power, Trump admin was) sent a list of tweets to Twitter asking them to take a look alleging that they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. Twitter took down those tweets. Matt Taibibi implied this was government/Twitter censorship, and the right wing went ape shit over it. People found the archived versions of those tweets, mainly from politician Republican influencers, and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis. Nothing to do with his business dealings or emails on his laptop that were leaked.
The Republican operatives who privately received the leaked laptop contents didn't even blur the private parts. Are they revenge porn? Arguably. Was this an example of government censorship, or censorship of political discourse? No. The Trump Whitehouse was also reporting problematic tweets to Twitter contacts for potential violation of Twitter terms. Nobody is claiming the Biden laptop business dealings, emails etc. were revenge porn.
You're misrepresenting the story.
One big omission is this:
> On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
> Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831212310601728 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831435288563712
> and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis
It wasn't. https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... Find me a picture of penis in this news or prove that mtaibbi had somehow distorted this.
They treated a legitimate news, that was obtained by gray means as a child porn and de-ranked it.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
This shows that they were pornography:
https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598832424754073601
Yet Matt Taibbi used those to spread baseless propaganda without giving the context behind the removal of those tweets. That clouds the rest of the claims too. Matt isn't interested in the truth. He's being a political hack serving partisan interests.
And even he was forced to concede that he couldn't find anything from the govt about the laptop.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744
I don't know man, you could have just googled that yourself.
Figures like Rudy Giuliani had direct and personal access to the laptop and yet what bombshell evidence do we have today?
This story is so damning that the tweets people on the right keep spreading are literally just revenge porn.
Some “real story”.
Thats the only actually serious thing uncovered by the laptop
OK, that's the takeaway that Taibbi and Musk wants us to absorb. But... can you link to the actual spot in the (sigh) "Twitter Files" that actually shows this? Because like the grandparent poster did and reported, I looked for it. And it's not there.
There's a bunch of mid-level bland communication that if you squint might be understood as a bunch of underlings carrying out orders in pursuit of that. Or it might just be a bunch of folks trying in good faith not to push a suspect story at a sensitive time.
There is absolutely no evidence of the kind of conspiracy you allege here. It's just not there. Which given the sourcing (the CEO is directing the investigation!) means it probably doesn't exist within Twitter. It's just not there. Where's the meat here?
The idea that that government is "managing" that liberty is Constitutionally murky. The "private property" fig leaf is scant comfort.
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.
So because the government does something (THANK GOD), we all need to advocate for more government?
...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.
All the while the government was running their own fake bot propaganda accounts and having Twitter white-list them against their bot filters.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111071
Truly a sad sight from those looking hopeful after the occupy movement and all the anti surveillance sentiment post-leaks.
The modern left has become the neo-conservatives.
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.
Scorpion, frog, etc.
If we had stood up to them in 2013, drew a line in the sand and said "No, a bunch of poorly edited snuff films aren't going to cause a bunch of American teens to join an Islamic revolution" these relationships wouldn't exist.
By the way, we are currently trying to ban TikTok because of similar concerns about it rotting teens brains. Before we start frothing at the mouth in rage at some problematic app let's do a thought experiment and consider the future blowback from taking such extreme action.
The government has been involved with the data broker industry since well before the dotcom era. That is the underpinning of all current day surveillance capitalism. It's an intelligence resource they will never overlook.
What if anything the government should do to prevent such recruitment is a matter of debate, but you shouldn't pretend such recruitment didn't happen.
At no meaningful scale. If some dumbass wants to throw their life away in a foreign country we obviously should use all legal means to discourage that but part of being a liberal democracy means you do in fact have to give people enough freedom (rope) to hang themselves.
No one knows what is gonna be credible, but damned if you do and damned if you don’t
There’s probably hundreds of new things at this very second and probably none of them are going to result in anything, but no one knows that for sure
I remember thinking earlier, it's kind of odd that teenagers "running off to join ISIS" was a widespread problem. In hindsight the shills probably blew that whole thing out of proportion to justify more agency scope creep
I.e. claiming no laws were violated (hypothetically) is as much a defense of Twitter as claiming TikTok hasn't broken Chinese law.
Sometimes this is asking that system to print a PSA. Sometimes this is asking that system to maintain propaganda accounts.
This definitely exists, and I'm not sure why people think it wouldn't.
We can complain, but the real remedy is to put laws in place if this is something we really care about.
>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.
It's since been expanded through court cases to extend from congress to every government entity including local ones.
The government is constitutionally forbidden from meddling with the press, even through private entities via the 14th amendment. The FBI and CIA meddled with twitter. The particulars aren't relevant. They're expressly forbidden from doing what they did.
https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/removal-requests...:
> Overall, Twitter withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 51% of global legal demands, down 5% from the previous reporting period.
It is pretty clear that these are Hatch Act violations which is about preventing your tax dollars being put to use as a part of partisan political campaigns, which is what happened.
Civilian "unempowered" agencies fall under the Less Restricted Hatch Act category, and certain Agencies like the IC, fall under a more stringent part of this, the Further Restricted category, see [1]
Some of these IC members in the Further Restricted Category were prompting BigTech censorship, or, running defense for the "Laptop from Hell" story, similar to some of the things they did back in the 60s when they were involved with unlawful activities regarding Civil Rights and Civil Liberties campaigns.
I'd argue in favor of:
(1) Strengthening the Hatch Act
(2) Handling Constitutional violations by the IC under the Hatch Act
(3) Prosecutions of the Hatch Act under existing Law
(4) Clearance revocations
(5) Removal of Section 230 protections for BigTech when acting as an agent of govt censorship
(6) Budget cuts / Budget reformations for some select Federal Agencies, FBI being foremost
(7) Forced retirement / exit from federal service of those involved in these behaviors.
(8) Debarring of contractors involved in some of these heinious activities
(9) Strengthening Federal Acquisition Regulation
(10) Diffusion of Federal Agencies HQs throughout the United States to prevent centralization in overly partisan areas
(11) Applying Diversity & Inclusion to political parties and other important characteristics of job seekers
(12) Adding restrictions or longer "Cooling Off Periods" for the revolving doors between IC, Congress, BigTech, Lobbyists, and the Consultant Class.
[1] https://osc.gov/Services/Pages/HatchAct-Federal.aspx
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?
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.
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.’
The Federal Statutes grant specific authority to the FBI. The burden is in the FBI to point to a specific grant of statutory authority to justify any particular action. What federal statute gives the FBI (or any agency) the right to advise, suggest, or even comment on a particular company’s policies? What statute gives the FBI the power to ‘suggest’ certain accounts be blocked?
For example, the Twitter Files had a lot of stuff under election misinformation. Since that’s an entire mission, you can argue about effectiveness but it’s not like it’s a stretch:
https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...
If Elon Musk’s Twitter refuses to help and as a result people die, I want Elon Musk held responsible.
It seems like Twitter was more or less happy to oblige.
I don't see what the hubbub is about.
What’s telling is that Musk’s people can’t find anything like that. If this was happening you’d think there’d be at least one example where someone is saying they have to yank something even though it’s not in violation of the rules. Instead, what we see is bending over backwards to keep people like Trump or Raichik from having the rules applied to them, with no mention of government pressure to yank them.
More importantly, however, as I explained you’d see the presence of that policy even if they managed to keep the conspiracy perfectly. There’d have been cases where something didn’t meet the rules for being banned but someone overruled them to do it anyway, unexplained policy changes following a private meeting, someone setting out hard lines for the moderators, etc. Twitter had a ton of people doing moderation and there’s no way you get that many people to work on a daily basis without stated policies or someone accidentally saying something they knew, or that not a single one of them wouldn’t have gone public or talked to Musk.
Government officials — at the federal level - have extremely well-defined scopes of authority. They have no general power to do things. If they exceed the scope, they are abusing the power given to them. A govt agency has no authority outside the scope of its enacting statute. That I what I meant by limited. It’s not a ‘made up’ concept. If an agent engages in ANY action outside its authority, it is exceeding its limited authority and acting outside the law. It as an abuse as the agent (or agency as a whole) is doing something ‘under color of law’ that Congress did not permit.
At the local level, there is a concept of ‘general’ police power where the limits of what your local deputy, for instance, can do is a bit more nebulous. But, not at the federal level.
This is not their goal. It is part of their method.
The Department of Justice would disagree with you:
“Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign” [1]
Some guy tweeted in 2016 encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to ‘Vote from Home’ by sending an SMS to a certain number. For this and other tweets, he was charged with violating 18 USC 241, which prohibits “conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, [..] any person [..] in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States”, where the right in question was the right to vote. With the justice system being as slow as it is, the indictment only happened in 2021 and the case is still pending at the district court level. [2]
His lawyers argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment; this is a novel legal question with no Supreme Court precedent on point. [3]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charg...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59249282/united-states-...
[3] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/douglass-ma...
And everytime I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.
Indeed - from the perspective of civil liberties there are many issues which seem more pressing.
I also think it’s interesting how many people I know who “protested” things like COINTELPRO, but cheer this.
I've seen this hypothetical raised a lot but I don't find it very compelling. If the post isn't in violation of twitter's TOS then twitter has strong legal protections to deny the request and both sides understand this. Without evidence that the FBI actually pressured twitter to take down non-violating content after it was deemed ok, I don't see the issue.
"Joseph P. Nacchio (born June 22, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American executive... Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.[1]
He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.[3] This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion,[4] which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible.[5] " [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
>I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.
This is nonsense. In your example the court said "nope" to the defendant trying to push a conspiracy theory which could not possibly have exonerated him.
Here's a decent read on the Nacchio case without weird conspiracy theory bullshit https://truthonthemarket.com/2008/03/31/some-thoughts-on-the...
The uncertainty of the sentence aside we can zoom out and see that asking to follow legal processes that every single one of those companies should be following in the first place can very well cause retaliation from the NSA, so all else aside invoking legal protections sure does seem to be bad for companies.
From the court decision which you didn't bother to read:
>Even if the classified information were presented and established what he said it would, it could not exonerate Mr. Nacchio as he claims. Essentially, Mr. Nacchio argued that undisclosed positive information can be used as a defense to a charge of trading on undisclosed negative information. We disagree. … If an insider trades on the basis of his perception of the net effect of two bits of material undisclosed information, he has violated the law in two respects, not none.
If the FBI contacts "Twitter" then they're not talking to any one individual, in fact there's no requirement that be the same person at all.
So Twitter cannot be threatened or threatened with implied threats - it's a limited liability corporation, there's no individual who can be overly inconvenienced or have any emotional reaction to the request.
And importantly, if the individuals using the platform are (hypothetically) being silenced by government agencies levelling threats against the company unless it complies, this could be seen as tantamount to censorship.
Twitter doesn't have that. The employee handling the request doesn't own Twitter. If something happens to Twitter it doesn't happen to them except in a very abstract way (and the person who did fire them was Elon Musk in the end).
Governments absolutely have a means to intimidate company owners: it's subpoenaing them to testify before Congress. Not emailing a mid-level content moderation supervisor who has no way to directly talk to the board of executives or shareholders.
At the corporate level its also threatening because of the actions the govt could take against the corporation. Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.
You have to be naive and only see the happy path and think the govt always has your best interests in mind to think otherwise.
Can you point to examples of this? I hope you’re not referring to things like the earlier investigation of Tesla’s FSD claims when that’s been underway for years and so widely predicted.
Corporations are not people: you can't "tell" a corporation to do something, because the people who make it up are a mercurial, constantly varying group. Even if the owners know something, the employees don't: training materials have to be updated, policies modified etc. You can't "imply" a threat to a corporation, because how do you "imply" the threat to all the people who have to actually implement the desired action? How do you replace staff who are not in on "the implication"? You can't: somewhere and somehow you would have to have internal emails, training and onboarding materials.
It seems internal employee activism played a large role. That’s not good.
While Twitter has a right as a private company to moderate based on internal popularity, it doesn’t build confidence.
It seemed the professional moderators were saying “Trump is pushing the limits, but not crossing them” - the other employees were lobbying to get him banned.
And they won.
The message is, if you want to run for office on a controversial platform, make sure you have supporters among the rank and file at Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc, The parts about the FBI are less concerning.
Good content moderation creates a firewall between (say) the software development team and the moderation team. While Twitter had such a wall, it didn’t withstand pressure.
Trump tried to destroy our democracy. I’m not being hyperbolic. The evidence is all there and all from Trump’s mouth.
He is still trying; that fact hangs over these conversations like Damocles' sword.
[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/11/problemat...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
Germany has laws against incitement.
> 2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.
https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/vermischtes/article231416...
The Taliban destroyed a democracy. They have Twitter accounts.
The leader of Egypt destroyed a democracy. He has a Twitter account.
The leaders of Myanmar don’t seem to have Twitter accounts, but they outlawed Twitter.
I doubt these people have supporters inside Twitter, but I doubt there’s any Resistance either.
That's not the world we live in. If you reply with "Blow me", the FBI will do nothing.
Senator Markey: “Fix your companies or Congress will.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/senator-ed-markey-tell...
If the Congress wants to force companies work with the FBI, they have the absolute power to do so.
I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof.
There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike and know what to do without specific instructions. The FBI acts as the primary point of contact from the letter agencies, as per the title if the article we are discussing. The Beltway revolving door takes care of the rest of the interactions, including providing experts to the media, so the rest of the Beltway can just listen and act.
[0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/HSAC%20Disin... [pdf]
Please make up your mind!
The IRS however might just suddenly out of nowhere complete coincidence want to crawl into all your accounts, and financial records and tax filings.
they aren't exactly quiet about it.
> Private sector partnerships: The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combating foreign influence actors.
Sounds like "hey, review it and find any half-assed reason to ban it according to your TOS" to me.
Loose and wide reaching TOS makes it hard for bad actors to get around it, but it also makes it easy for moderators to remove anything they don't want while hiding behind TOS
> Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?
All moderation should be, and with exact violation breached, not generic "it broke something in our TOS", else there is zero accountability. I'd also say that unless it is outright illegal or abhorrent the original should also be viewable so there can be no doubt the moderation is legit. People will save the spicy tweets to archive or screenshot it anyway so there is no real point completely hiding it.
While this is true, it is not necessary for twitter to resist requests from the government in order for this kind of contact to be effective state censorship. Twitter has seemed to be eager to do whatever the government says. Why wouldn't they be? It's a favor that the government owes them now, and additionally, they were charging the government for their time. It's a completely profitable interaction. With media consolidation, there are only a few dozen people who ultimately own all western media, and they got that way through good relationships with governments.
The real troubling question is why the FBI has a department of 80 people combing through tweets and tweeting in order to push or suppress policy. Thinking of Twitter as the victim entirely misses the point.
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.
https://apnews.com/article/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial-michiga...
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-sch...
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.
Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress
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_a...
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.
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.
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.
Edited to add: I am a little curious why the free speech absolutists weren't up in arms about those bans though. Hmm.
Also, what exactly is the rule you want in place re: banning by social media platforms? Do you have a principle behind your positions that you can articulate?
They were picking a winner and you know it.
Also, you didn't answer the question about principles. I'm still interested in that. I believe I have a rule about social media moderation that I've applied consistently across a wide variety of circumstances. Can you say the same?
Edited to add: And again, if the intelligence community was trying to pick a winner, why didn't they try to ban all the other stories about the laptop? And why only on Twitter? The NY Post was still going strong on Facebook, right?
Those people were responding to arguments that social media platforms banning people, moderating content or even presenting content under an algorithmic feed were violations of the First Amendment, Section 230 and freedom of speech, by pointing out that all of these actions are allowed by the aforementioned principles and laws. That argument hasn't been posted recently because the threads in which the free-speech absolutist arguments to which it replies haven't been posted recently. It isn't germane to the situation wrt Musk and Twitter because, for whatever reason, the free speech absolutists no longer have a problem with censorship by private enterprise when Elon Musk is doing it, and so they no longer post angry, long-winded screeds against it.
And notwithstanding that Twitter banning journalists (even for just 12 hours) is a much more serious deal in terms of freedom of speech implications than banning some shitposting Nazis, no one complaining about that is actually claiming that Elon doesn't have the right to do what he's doing, nor are they calling for the government to make it illegal, as the free speech absolutist crowd has - they're just calling him a hypocrite and an asshole. Because he is.
This really isn't the dunk you and the countless others who keep bringing it up is, it just demonstrates that the free speech absolutist crowd were never arguing in good faith to begin with, because none of them ever bothered to actually listen to or engage with the arguments being made.
I don’t see how suspending a few journalists for 12 hours and being directly able to point to their existing TOS is the same thing.
The bans weren’t 12 hours. They were eventually announced as week-long ones; Musk backed down after backlash and his public poll resulted in a “unban now” vote.
We have every right to point out he promised not to do such things, and that it calls his supposed dedication to free speech into question.
Compared to previously a national media outlet was actually banned for weeks for reporting a completely true story that the US Intelligence bureaucracy decided was in inconvenient to their desired results of an upcoming election.
Falsely equating this isn’t subtle and I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith. Ideologues everywhere.
Come on.
I think to a lot of people it was banged on so hard about the 'free speech absolutist' that he was, until it was suddenly legal speech he didn't like then he cast those people out as fast as he could.
Now if you're those things, you're a "radical right-wing person".
Amazing how when the shoe is on the other foot the victim becomes the oppressor?
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?
The FBI has a broader official remit than “investigating crimes”.
“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-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
Or do you see a distinction between “law enforcement” and “intelligence agency” when it comes to asking a private business to ban certain customers?
I see no distinction. Both operate with the all the powers vested by the government.
They have no business doing it.
Collects and shares intelligence, intelligence assessments, and recommendations on mitigating threats indicated by that intelligence with other domestic and friendly government and private sector entities, yes.
That's all very much part of the FBI’s overt, primary, national security role.
Is there potential for confusion that needs careful clarity, especially when communicating with legally unsophisticated parties, when government agency has both advisory/supportive roles and enforcement roles, to avoid confusion about which role it is acting in? Sure.
Is Twitter the kind of unsophisticated entity where this concern is strongest? No. Is there any evidence that the FBI communication blurred the context of communication with Twitter such that there is nevertheless a legitimate concern that they were, explicitly or even implicitly, coercive despite Twitter not being unsophisticated? Not that I’ve seen. Is there, coercion aside, evidence that the FBI was intentionally decieiving Twitter with reports, so as to lead Twitter into actions it would not take but for a misleading perception deliberately created by the FBI? Not, again, that I have seen.
Let me bring it back on topic.
Are you ok with a US law enforcement/intelligence service asking a social media company to silence certain users? To squash stories reported by the media they know are factual?
I mean if you are, that's ok. Just be upfront about it and not try and hide behind a long paragraph that talks about other thing that aren't relevant.
You’re just repeating Fox News headlines here and pretending that it’s some black and white issue once again in spite of the overwhelming evidence in this very thread showing that not to be the case.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If it was being revealed that they were making demands and forcing companies to do things that would be a serious issue. Instead they are asking, nicely, and even paying them for their time and work.
The actual wording, of course, was this sort of thing:
"FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy..." (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-employees-notified-twit...)
And is that the case of those accounts? Do we have access to what 5ose accounts have propagated?
The government should be prohibited from making such requests.
It's also apparent that regarding the Hunter Biden story the FBI outright lied in order to make web platforms censor the story.
Really? Companies do this all of the time. For example, how many billions did Apple lose for resisting the FBI’s requests with the San Bernardino shooter?
> It's also apparent that regarding the Hunter Biden story the FBI outright lied in order to make web platforms censor the story.
Can you be specific about this? The “Twitter Files” and all extent accounts say the opposite – and that was the best the right-wing media could find – and if you’re thinking about Zuckerberg’s interview, he specifically said the FBI did not make a request in this case.
This went so far that major web platforms blocked all forms of disagreement and the public dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. It was highly effective.
I hate Trump's guts but it's important to acknowledge the enormous amount of effort that went into covering up the behavior of Biden's son.
> This went so far that major web platforms blocked all forms of disagreement and the public dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. It was highly effective
This is imaginary: I’m not even sure why you’re lying about something we all remember, especially since nothing in the laptop data was even substantial even if was all true.
It's true that the FBI didn't force companies to kill the story but the story was still killed as a result of FBI actions. Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?
There is no proof that Joe Biden himself acted improperly but Hunter Biden did receive large consulting fees for performing no work - he spent his time on cocaine and hookers instead. This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.
Two years later, that’s held up well - despite a lot of attention, there hasn’t been anything of interest to come out of the dump, which is why Republicans have shifted to claiming the problem was some kind of coverup despite it not being covered up.
> Are you OK with the FBI misleading the public? Or are you going to argue that they are incompetent and genuinely believed that it was a Russian operation?
This is key to your misunderstanding: the FBI was on watch for a repeat of the election interference we saw in 2016. They didn’t mislead the public, so it’s not a question of anyone being okay with it because that never happened.
> This strongly indicates that he was hired for political connections.
Yes, and lots of rich kids fail up. The question is whether his father actually did something improper to help him. For example, did Joe Biden actually pull strings for Hunter’s clients or did he refuse to violate the ethical rules? If you want this to be a scandal that’s the kind of thing you need to show.
As far as I can tell, the first is more or less true and the second isn't.
For the second part, I'd also agree that the laptop does not contain clear evidence of wrongdoing by the president. It contains a lot more than just nude photos of Hunter, though. It's real in the sense that everything on the laptop is believed to be authentic. It offers insight of Hunter's business dealings, and I think hints that contrary to the president's claims, he was at least aware of some of the details of those dealings. As such, I think it's reasonable for people to want to inspect the contents and reach their own conclusion as to what it implies, rather than being prevented from doing so.
I don’t disagree with the desire but that doesn’t make it legal, and in this case it really runs headlong into Giuliani’s incompetent effort to turn it into an October surprise. Much of the data can’t be authenticated and the signs of tampering mean it’s hard to trust. There are some things which have been verifiable (e.g. emails whose recipients confirmed them or with valid DKIM signatures) but the way they restricted access to Republican operatives for over a year suggests that they had no interest in letting people make up their own minds instead of the carefully constructed narrative being shopped around to loyalist websites.
A democratic government is usually forbiden fron "asking nicely". So the difference is that one of those exists, the other doesn't.
They are. The first amendment forbids the government from interfering with the press. They're ignoring it and hoping people don't know this fact. The fact that other media outlets aren't pointing this out, means they're all part of the same fascist tribe as the FBI.
Remember, fascism is the union of state and corporate power according to Mussolini's ghost writer. And it's what we're seeing here. The FBI and big tech being on the same side.
The ones who do Y instead of X are often pretty interesting. But that's partly because they're pretty rare.
Of course, the status of a Schrodinger's conspiracy is only known when the truth is revealed and the conspiracy is measured.
When the truth becomes known, it is retconned to have always been known.
Washington DC is overwhelmingly a Democrat bastion, so, regardless of the political appointee SESers, the rank and file that live around DC are likely to have a specific political leaning.
Feel free to fact check this.
https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-was...
DC’s residents skew Democratic for a reason: having such a large black population means that they don’t trust the party which has such a questionable racial history, and that’s important to understand because the FBI’s history means the same people who don’t vote for Republicans are not jumping to join an organization with its history.
Hmmm.
I have a hunch that you’re about to repeat the usual conservative “the Democrats were the party of slavery” claim which assumes the reader is unaware of the Southern Strategy half a century ago[1], but I’d love to be wrong in that pessimism.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Go ahead and tell me when the parties "switched": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senato...
This seems odd if you think about it in terms of long term party history, because from the founding through the New Deal the Democrats were first and foremost the party of the white Southerners bent on the most extreme de jure racial discrimination (slavery, and then Jim Crow, etc.), and from the New Deal through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 things were more complicated, but they still had that same base as a key constituency; that didn’t really change until Johnson embraced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republicans followed up the way that had not done with previous times Democratic leadership had alienated that part of the base by actively courting them, especially starting in the 1968 Presidential election.
But you have to realize when discussing D.C. political parties, the District didn’t get to vote for President at all until 1964, didn’t get to vote for a (nonvoting) delegate to Congress (after 1874) until 1970, and didn’t get to vote for its local government until 1974. The history of electoral politics for D.C. residents is much shorter than for most of the rest of the country, and consists almost entirely of the period since the Republicans started actively courting racists as a key constituency.
This persecution complex the Republicans have promulgated is amazing with how widely believed it is. The republicans have controlled the reigns of power repeatedly over the past few decades and for a greater number of elections than you’d anticipate looking at the popular vote. The timeline the Twitter files is talking about was explicitly during Republican control and not something like a month after the elections where bureaucratic momentum might have still been in play but years after they had taken the executive and legislature. The FBI head was 2-3 years into his job after being placed by a Republican president at this point.
How are they possibly working as an arm of the Democratic Party?
Singling out Democrats doesn’t imply “Uniparty”. And this was the “outsider’s”(Trump’s) FBI attempting to get Twitter to censor things. How is that the “uniparty” working against populists like Trump?
OFC there is a role for private info and possibly preventing malicious, foreign government manipulation attacks on us - but the power is so strong and so easily misused that we need better checks on it.
Don't forget the NYT and most lefty thought leaders were onboard with the 2nd Iraq war based on phony evidence.
I'm more looking for a gesture towards respecting our values, and a more open negotiation process for developing safe use for this kind of powerful control system. The fact that the administrators of the process on the twitter side were quite polarized politically makes people doubt its fairness, as does the fact that it was mostly done in secret.
i.e. it was more of a China-style "the state doesn't like you and bad things will happen to you and your family" style of punishment where you don't know what has actually happened (limitation of tweet reach, weird glitches in your tweet's spread with no acknowledgement) than a clear "you are charged with X and have received this penalty Y for time Z."
“The world’s digital town square” is a marketing slogan, and nothing more. If you instead accept that is simply just another way to sell eyeballs to advertisers, it’s easier to understand.
If we do need a digital town square, someone needs to build one. If it needs to have free speech protections, then the government needs to run it because they are the only ones who are restrained by the 2nd amendment.
Here, in the USA, we do have the right to freedoms of speech, press and association. These freedoms cannot be encroached on by the government without due process, and yes, that means it would need to go in front of a jury. It's on the government to prove that a law was broken before they can intervene with otherwise lawful speech. It's not up to a government bureaucrat to decide.
Just because you disagree with someone does not a troll make.
My problem with modern discourse is we've lost the ability to disagree with people without resorting to labeling and name calling. And that we think we need the government to protect us from things we may find distasteful or offensive. Because matters of taste are individual and subjective.
They aren’t treated like press, but they need to be.
The examples given in these leaks showcase accounts getting banned simply for the opinion they hold, LACKING any other indicators like account origin, IP logins, email domain registration, etc.
I'm not arrogant enough (surprisingly) to think I am not vulnerable to disinformation and yet I'm also uncomfortable with unilateral censorship.
Do any of these help?
Those who have seen the story think it's not worth publishing. One of the points of news/media is to vet stories and exercise good judgement and editorial choice about what is worth publishing and what isn't.
These people did not watch the trial, and have no idea what they are talking about. But are certain that they do… ChatGPT levels of certainty… hmm, might be on to something there.
What these revelations show is that a lot of so-called moderation was done at the explicit direction of government employees. How do you defend this? "it's not censorship if the private company willingly complies with government requests"? A refusal by twitter would have had quite high costs for the company.
The cooperation between private companies and government censors is so deep that this is barely distinguishable from direct censorship.
The inability for hn commenters to speak forthright and integrity and principles shows the rot tgat exists here. Hn is largely controlled and nothing they dont want people to see is allowed. Accounts are shadow banned, ips are range banned, individuals here are tracked and not allowed Accounts or voices here. This comment not even allowed because of selective rules to ensure the truth is not seen. You cannot debate people here in good faith. HN is a moral cesspool.
From this thread, it seems by just going "pfft... no big deal."
As long as there's a layer of abstraction ("I didn't kill him. The bullets and the fall did") and it's applying to speech we generally don't care for (misinformation, "hate speech", etc..), then I guess we're cool with it?
It's tough not to be cynical at times. A decade after PRISM, the government controlling speech indirectly via "polite suggestions" mostly just fills me with similar feelings of "no big deal." Not because it isn't, but because it's expected.
If your values only apply when they fit your wanted outcome, they aren't values they are pathetic excuses.
By the way, this opens the door to all the other agencies of the world outside US to demand same kind of access. Including European. Maybe China wants it too.
And for the record, I think Elon banning Elon Jet and journalists is wrong too. But there are too many people who only care about the censorship when it hurts them, and cheer for it when it suits them.
The reason we would usually go for the fullest amount of protection for speech was precisely because most of those issues are not simply a matter of "these people are democratic and those aren't".
This is true, but your framing of it as something that could be stopped if… something? is absurd
Hmm, now where have I heard that recently?
The irony is apparently lost on them.
Nobody is saying that it wouldn’t be a problem. The debate is whether the Twitter Files shows anything of the sort, and begging the question like that calls into question whether you’re actually interested in a honest discussion.
Which of the removed tweets shows the FBI was acting in obvious bad faith? I just don’t see it.
I'd like to see more effort expended on spying and undermining our rivals than ourselves. But such large diplomatic/economic/(hopefully cold)military projects require long term thinking we're poor at. Its so much easier to just fight the latest culture war against domestic weirdos and malcontents.
Every time we have one of these internal thought-purity checks, it sows discord in an already discordant country made of too many different races religions and regional cultures to ever work if we're going to try and weaponize our own governmental security apparatus against each other, vying for control on the airwaves and at the polls, just so we can stick it to our domestic rivals for a few years.
The cowboy and the indian are both Americans.
Diversity is our strength.
Sections of your government worked directly with Twitter to control what information you saw.
Much bigger organizations - Facebook comes to mind - must be doing the same thing every.single.day. And no one finds this even a little bit alarming?
It’s always jarring to discover the extent to which it’s not.
“Crypto” is a bunch of people trying to get rich using some cool new technology they nobody understands.
See how much bigger the second is than the first.
As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?
What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)
What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?
What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?
What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?
What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?
Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.
Let’s see the hackers hack.
Because the people that were in control already figured that what they wanted to use the system for is to buy low and sell high for huge profits, and so it didn't matter if the network didn't perform well for regular commerce. You don't need a lot of TPS if your ideal scenario is to ever make two.
After all, it's a blog for a VC fund. I'd say a lot of people here are building things that do much worse than what the twitter files exposed.
Am I misinterpreting your comment?
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
So yeah, you are misinterpreting my comment. I've just realized what HN is meant to be, or at least what dang wants it to be. I think he's an excellent mod, and I respect the guidelines. I want to come here and see cool nerd stuff like "can you play minecraft inside doom inside minecraft" and as soon as I see something political it puts me in a bad mood. And yes, if you scroll my comment history, you will see that I post mostly in political threads. But I have learned my lesson - this place isn't for that. There's no revolution to be started here, given the userbase is mostly financially well-off tech bros who benefit from the status quo. Just like me!
>The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".
You said you were flagging all of political content and then brought it back to Twitter files specifically to justify it not hitting the exception clause.
For me the Twitter files content themselves aren’t interesting, but the effect of the what seems like obviously non interesting content getting so many people up in arms just because a billionaire is claiming it’s bad is an interesting new phenomenon.
I understand this type of content might put you in a bad mood, but given that you weren’t flagging the content until you felt
> The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.
Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.
No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.
Yes, but when Musk talked about freedom of speech but not freedom of reach he wasn’t referring to flagging that leads to removal. He meant you might not get as many views as you had hoped.
So your approach of flagging is actually more extreme because the content will be completely removed in some cases.
I would say that government agencies trying to stop me from seeing information that it doesn't like is something most good hackers would find interesting.
And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it, it's the same thing for Elon Musk, it's crazy how popular he was online and how everyone loved him, he didn't do anything bad between then and now (except insult a couple people here and there and other asshole things we have all done in the past) but went from "invented X" to "merely invested in X", and from "genius" to "idiot", etc.
The people who said they couldn't tame the internet were as wrong as those who said the same thing about crypto.
I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.
Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.
The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.
Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.
The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.
Thanks to dang I do find HN to be much more balanced on most viewpoints than the majority of sites. I can't recall a time here where I have been disgusted with someone's comment like I have on Arstechnica reading comments wishing death to Trump supporters or the unvaccinated.
The United States has a distorted view of free speech, as some people believe that it should be absolute and without any limitations. However, it is important to recognize that the collective good and well-being of society should always be a priority, and that includes protecting against harmful or extremist ideas that could cause harm to others. While it is important to protect individuals' right to express themselves freely, it is also important to ensure that this freedom is not used to spread hateful or harmful messages. In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
If I manage to convince 50.1% of the population of the same, should we be permitted to censor your speech, and enforce prior restraint on your future speech under penalty of law?
Your argument doesn't really make any sense because everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person. That is a completely different situation than what you are alluding to. I can just as easily prevent the reverse question: I have a blog with a comment section, and somebody I don't know posts a horrific, rude and distasteful comment that I don't want associated with my blog post. Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?
Did you read GP? If they were talking about comapnies and not governments, it certainly was not made clear:
>However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content, and this has led to increased scrutiny and debate about the role of government in moderating online speech.
>[...]In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet.
Where was GP talking about companies?
The initial comment says government has always used their influence through "newspapers", "television" and "social media", all of which have historically been non-government entities who take the government's input and decide if they want to follow it or not. There are obviously major historical cases in which private companies have defied what the government wanted them to do (NYT v Sullivan, NYT vs US, etc), but I'm sure there are countless examples throughout Twitter's history of the government asking for something and then not getting it, but I assume that isn't something those instances are not being highlighted that much as they don't fit the narrative.
As an American, I disagree. We are a sovereign country, and people from other countries don't have any say in how we conduct ourselves. It doesn't whether it's online or offline.
American Nazis and Tankies have the first amendment right to spread their dumb ideas. If they want to make their own websites, that's fine with me. The government should mind its own business unless there are actual crimes taking place.
The rest of the world doesn't have to like it. It's just the way it's going to be.
Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? Sounds like you either get in the good graces of the "intelligence community" or you are now harmful, as shown pretty clearly with the hordes of "intelligence community" people calling the biden laptop(whatever it had, its content is irrelevant) russian propaganda[0], while even the DOJ and FBI says it isn't[1]. And of course those officials making the stink are contracted by the news agencies to talk about it where journalists will just blindly accept whatever they're given.
The "intelligence community" isn't your friend(neither are the proper agencies but I digress), it never was if you're not an us citizen and it probably stopped being if you are after the patriot act.
[0]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
[1]: https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-doj-fbi-confirm-hunt...
An additional related question: Are they even capable of undertaking this task? Our current government officials and bureaucrats don't understand enough about how the Internet works to effectively police it. And more fundamentally, can a government act quickly enough to outwit how quickly the Internet adapts to roadblocks? Governments need to have policies, procedures, go through chains of command, etc. A lot of Internet culture, on the other hand, is driven by random people doing random things. If a topic is forbidden, instead of policing that topic, the government then has to police the 50 ways to get around the block as well as guess which one will take root.
It's similar to trying to win a war against guerrilla insurgents. The high level of organization of a government to some degree works against them.
That this sort of under-the-table cooperation between three letter agencies and information companies has been allowed to exist and develop is completely outrageous. It should not be put into perspective, but stopped, right here, right now.
Once that is done, a discussion can be had about where it makes sense to create legislation to curtail various behaviors and content that are disturbing to social order. The current list of offenses is fairly comprehensive and includes things such as violent threats, child porn and terrorism recruitment, and any addition has to be well-motivated.
But as long as the cooperation with three-letter agencies happens outside a legal framework, the only proper response, as far as I can see, is pure outrage.
Is there a Mastodon server that straight up admits that it may include Russian disinformation and is primarily for entertainment purposes rather than factual discussion?
edit: Or a mix of both true news items and disinformation! See if you can tell which is which!
It doesn't quite admit it, and its a fork, but Truth Social may be close enough.
As soon as you start assuming you know more than the people and that you have a right to censor the information they can access because it's bad for them, you become a tyrant.
Am I the only one who finds this rotten?
I want to read disinformation, tell me the sky is green I don't care, I can stitch stories together and arrive to a conclusion myself, false things (won't use that "(d/m)isinformation" media clickbait word) don't make sense, real things do, sure there are false things that do sound correct, but trust the people to make the difference, have your experts argue against falsehoods, let the people hear those arguments, if your expert's arguments disprove X or Y the people will not believe it, if the Russian experts disprove your arguments, then they're right and you're the one spreading falsehoods...
I think labels that say who has determined something is disinformation, produced by whom, and why they have labeled it thus might be a better solution.
What in all of human history, would make you think that?
In our system of governance, it is the responsibility of Congress to hold the executive accountable. All these agencies are part of the Executive arm of the United States of America. If there is over-reach by secretive agencies of the Executive, it is the duty and responsibility of congressional members, representatives of the public, to be rigorous in the exercise of their duty and hold them accountable.
https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/artifact/senator...
[p.s. Support archive.org .. ^ is archived below]
"Allegations of domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surfaced in the 1970s, triggering public demand for an investigation of federal surveillance operations. In 1975 the Senate established the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s reports exposed abuses and led to legislation governing domestic and foreign surveillance—most notably, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. House and Senate permanent select committees established at that time now oversee U.S. intelligence.
The critical question before the committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security."
https://web.archive.org/web/20180227204516/https://www.visit...
--
I'll admit I never read the Church Committee report before, but it's actually shocking in the sense that an official report from the Senate of the United States would today be read almost as a 'radical' position, which itself is a telling reflection of the changes that have occurred in the past 47 years:
"Our investigation has confirmed that warning. We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners"," sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens."
The Church Committee Report: "INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS - Final Report - 1976"
https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1976Churchcommittee.pdf
The problem with this "Twitter Files" reporting is that it's not making the situation any clearer. If anything it feels like these journalists are being used to do PR work for Twitter's new owner in order to promote the idea that Something Really Bad Happened Here, but this advocacy makes it much harder to see the real picture.
It is hard to generalize one off concepts like fascism in my opion.
I feel like a frog in the boiling pot watching the other frogs try to convince me there’s no danger. I hope you’re correct.
I’m confused here. I only see Republicans trying to manipulate elections with unsubstantiated voter fraud claims.
FBI gets Hunter laptop Dec 2019, knows it's not a forgery. FBI proceeds to warn social media companies about "Russian disinformation campaigns" about a month or two before election. NY Post does story on Hunter laptop (which includes business dealing with Ukraine). "Former" intelligence agents go on media to say "this has all the markings of a disinformation campaign" (which they know 100% is a lie).
Social media proceeds to ban a 100% factual story, about a presidential candidate weeks for an election.
You don't see the issue?
Another way of asking that is - why was so much effort put into squashing the story if there is nothing there of concern?
Can you provide specific examples of these “blatant lies”? For example, Taibbi’s earlier dumps showed that the testimony to Congress was accurate.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/twitter-will-start-hidi...
Bari Weiss tried to misrepresent what shadow banning means but especially here I’d expect people to be familiar with what the term means.
That's the Constitutional definition of treason in the United States.
Who's levying war against the United States here?
The FBI telling Twitter about potential TOS violations is treasonous as this comment is murderous, i.e. not at all.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's too bad new accounts are so expensive.
You'll be seeing me again soon.
An also, fuck you, cunt.
Being the primary domestic component of the intelligence community is overtly part of the FBI role, so that would be expected to be true with any domestic actor in the place of “Twitter”.
Similarly, “major international public and private communication platform with a history of being used to recruit and organize insurrections and other acts of violence, execute international influence operations, single out targets for violent reprisals, etc., attracts lots of attention from intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement agencies, of which the FBI is the lead federal domestic agency for all three purposes” is... not surprising.
https://nitter.moomoo.me/mtaibbi/status/1606701405443874816#...
In that domestic in intelligence/counterintelligence is the FBIs job, and that they are expected to do it as part of and in close coordination with other parts of the intelligence community including the CIA, yes, but its not getting around anything since its exactly the way things are supposed to work.
"Liberal" apologists for the CIA will never cease to amaze me.
1.https://www.aclu.org/other/more-about-intelligence-agencies-...
This isn't apologia.
Right. GP is defending CIA participation in a domestic influence/disinformation campaign, operated by the FBI. You will not convince me that this type of thing was intended to be permissible when the agency was created. See the quote from the ACLU above.
If you read the recent Twitter files, you will see that Elvis Chan included the CIA directly in a meeting with Twitter executives.
Please show me the phrase where they do this.
"Expected" "not getting around anything" "Supposed to"
Textbook apologia for the CIA's expansive interpretation of its own mandate.
Idealistic youthful utopianism, techno- or otherwise, does not change human nature. And ignorance of history is a really poor recipe for long-term success.
However I'm not okay with unilateral censorship as a response necessarily. But I'd be okay with a tag on postings and accounts maybe. I'm not sure what the solution is, despite concerns over both foreign influence and domestic censorship.
For now, if an item seems to demonize Americans or Westerners on the right OR the left, I try to be very skeptical.
For foreign government owned accounts too?
Foreign actors will absolutely leverage the situation to the maximum extent possible and this is a fact irrespective of claims made by CIA/FBI to justify their existence.
Even the Canadian government has finally admitted publicly that the Chinese government is doing 'full court press' inside the country including having literal Chinese Police Stations hidden within Canada. It's perverse.
And of course, that's just the 'big actor' issue - there are legitimately a lot of small time bad people using these systems. Like they would any other.
We should expect the government to do it's job - meaning that the 'story' should be about 'where the lines are' not 'that they exist'.
Judicial oversight, proportionality, proper procedure, some mechanism for public oversight, lawfulness ... those are the issues.
I'm glad for this bit of transparency because it probably helps us to parse the system a bit to see what's what ... but I suggest that we ought to be vigilant about the nuances, not the ideology. Putin and Xi will forevermore attempt to dust things up, and the CIA/FBI are known to overstep their bounds ... but there's a legit reason those agencies exist so we probably should focus on a way to make it work in a way that preserves freedom, lawfulness, basic civic virtues and common sense.
“People protesting against the government were criminals as defined by the government they were protesting against. It unbelievable that anyone who is a criminal could be involved in something positive whether out of an actual belief or just being angry at the government that had punished them previously, therefor it’s obvious that there must be a government conspiracy involved”
Does that capture the gist of your argument?
Yes, I'm skeptical that he was there because he was a civil rights advocate.
You started with a view and appear to have worked your way backwards to justify it.
B:do you really think that someone with a criminal history would never go to a protest? Are they simply 1 dimensional characters in a play who cant go to a protest or agree with its cause because they are “bad” people? They couldn’t go because even if they didn’t agree, it hurt the government they disliked? They couldn’t have gone because they had friends going and it was a thing to do? They couldn’t just like general mayhem? I do not understand how you think a government conspiracy is the simplest explanation here, especially when the guy went after someone with a gun while armed with a skateboard. That’s the behavior of someone motivated, not someone doing their day job of undercover agent or having been forced to do undercover work by the government in exchange for leniency.
I’ll actually turn this back on you, how exactly do you believe either of the two people killed by rittenhouse were part of a government conspiracy. How we’re they recruited and what was the goal?
1. Just because some criminals attend protests, doesn't mean that is it typical. All 3 people that Kyle shot had criminal backgrounds. What are the odds of this happening in a random sample of all protests? Clearly this wasn't your average protest. White criminals protesting for black people's civil rights?
2. It is important to note that everyone has the right to peacefully assemble and express their views, regardless of their criminal history. However this was not a peaceful protest, as property was being actively destroyed.
3. Criminal justice system forces plea bargains in return for cooperation. Even innocent people will plea bargain under duress. Threats of lengthy prison sentences or harsh treatment, or a parole officer revoking parole is how the system extorts cooperation. Becoming an informant is the only leverage someone like Joseph Rosenbaum may have had.
4. Let's assume you're right. They were there for civil rights protest. But that seems like a conflict in your own thinking. Since the core issue was governments abuse of civil rights. Which would be a giant conspiracy. Which you seem to wave away as being a possibility.
I gave specific examples where other government's intelligence agencies in the past were known to do send in agent provocateurs. Why do you think America is exceptional?
For point 1, people willing to go out and do action are more likely to be criminals than someone who stay home. On top of that this is just large numbers making rare circumstances occur. You’d likely point to the birthday problem[1] as a shadowy conspiracy if this is enough to make you think of government involvement.
For point 3 you’re making the claim that he could have been an informant stretch to imply that he was. You have failed to outline how they would have been recruited or for what purpose. Show some evidence instead of making vague implications. Actually fuck, I’m even letting you get too much leeway there. Informants do not actively go out in public and start physical fights with people holding a gun. Even if he happened to have been an informant that would not imply the government put him up to attacking rittenhouse.
You’ve gotten too conspiracy brained if you look at rittenhouse event and conclude the government must have set it up. What would they have even gained?
I don't like the idea of any three letter agency having any communication with a company like Twitter unless it is for a specific investigation.