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The Twitter Files, Part Six

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Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#71

Post by simpleblend »

Apocryphon wrote: post #59
starkd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if they were pro-dem or pro-republican. They were doing nothing wrong. What business is it to the FBI. The FBI had partisan agents working on government time to censor American citizens during an election. If you step out of your partisan headspace for a moment, you might realize how dangerous this is. Imagine how this my play out in a future election with different candidates.

But there is no partisan headspace if both parties were impacted. Clearly their lack of interest is due to other factors, which you must learn to appeal to. Not everyone fails to care because of petty political concerns.

So it's your estimation that both parties were censored an equal amount?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#74

Post by time_to_smile »

kodyo wrote: post #65
leoh wrote: post #53

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

They were going after political speech while ignoring actual crimes.

I'm seriously out of the loop on this, what were the actual crimes?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#75

Post by simpleblend »

acdha wrote: post #68
simpleblend wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... because it's ordinary it doesn't violate 1A?

You run a bar. There’s a drunk guy on one end of the patio screaming at people. If a cop walks by and tells the bouncer “that guy seems pretty drunk”, is it a 1A violation when they subsequently enforce their rules? The question to ask is whether any of these accounts would have been allowed if reported by people. There’s no evidence that the FBI was making threats that something otherwise allowed had to be removed.

You're not seeing the point.

The cop was telling the bouncer, "Throw that guy out."

And the bar owner did what the cop said, because the police department had threatened to shut down bar owners in the city for the last three years.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#76

Post by jacquesm »

simpleblend wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you probably should re-read all of the text that led you to the conclusion that that was what was happening.

Please, enlighten me. How is this anything but the Government doing an end run around 1A?

It's a request, not an order, it's the FBI, not congress passing a law.

I'm the former owner/operator of ww.com, in its day a pretty large video streaming community, think 'twitch' but many years earlier. We had fairly regular contact with the police to ensure that our members were operating within the law, and some of them repeatedly decided to test where the line was. As responsible operator of a large web property you are an extension of society and society has - fairly universally - come to the conclusion that having a police force is both useful and necessary. As a forum operator you can choose to go head-to-head with the authorities or you can choose to work with them, we - just like Twitter - chose to do the latter because we believed that this was in everybody's best interest.

On occasion it wasn't the authorities initiating the request but us because we came upon acts and or proof of crimes to despicable to relate here and they were uniformly courteous and acted with surprising speed against the perpetrators. Law enforcement and corporations have regular contact, anybody that believes that this is not the case at the level of a Twitter or a Facebook is utterly naive.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#77

Post by wesleywt »

kodyo wrote: post #65
leoh wrote: post #53

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

They were going after political speech while ignoring actual crimes.

Oh please. Link to where Twitter banned someone for being right wing. Hate speech doesn't count.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#79

Post by nkozyra »

starkd wrote: post #25
mikece wrote: post #4

Aside from people in tech and the MAGA crowd, does anyone actually care about the "Twitter Files" stuff?

You may not mind it because you're side won. But that is incredibly short-sided. What if the FBI decides to sway an election to a candidate you don't support sometime in the future? See where this is going?

So far the only claim made that the government directly interfaced was that the Trump admin made requests for content deletion.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#80

Post by jacquesm »

lapcat wrote: post #54

This is actually an argument for why Twitter shouldn't exist. Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot. What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly…

This goes for any large web property where people congregate to communicate. HN is no different in that respect.
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