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The Twitter Files, Part Six

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Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#341

Post by colordrops »

theonething wrote: post #317
colordrops wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how to respond to your comment. You seem to be coming from a world view that has no overlap with mine. I have zero understanding why you'd so condescendingly argue that we should just accept shady behavior by the FBI.

The central issue here is Musk's political leanings go against many here. Therefore, everything is Musk's fault. Nothing he does is good.

I am extremely unhappy with what he has been doing on twitter, especially the account bans. But I am not a binary thinker, so I can still make an attempt to look at these releases objectively. And some of them are not that interesting, but some of the details are actually quite bad, and people aren't looking at them due to their disgust with Musk. I almost didn't look at this one.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#342

Post by jacquesm »

colordrops wrote: post #281
jacquesm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything shady. And being pretty anti-authoritarian and having been in contact with LE many, many times over the years including the FBI what struck me first and foremost in all of that is that they did their utmost best to keep it clean.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies And these are just the big ones. They've pushed for back doors into iPhones for instance. I don't care how trustworthy anyone thinks they are. No one should be able to just arbitrarily transcend the law because they are "clean".

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the subject of this thread, the 'Twitter Files'.

If we're going to discuss the FBI in a larger setting I would consider that to be out of scope, to me the discussion is limited to the interaction between social media companies and law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#343

Post by djur »

simpleblend wrote: post #67
pcwalton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, the US government is allowed to ask anyone to voluntarily remove anything (a few limits such as those set by the establishment clause notwithstanding). That's what happened here.

If you run a social media company and the government tells you, "Hey, we want these people banned", and you ban them, is the company "voluntarily" choosing to ban them? Or are they doing it under duress? Of course it's the latter. The US gov. has been threatening to take down social media companies for years. Do you think Twitter really wanted to upset them now?

Who did the FBI ask to have banned? I'm not seeing that in the emails Taibbi published.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#344

Post by Lendal »

jacquesm wrote: post #248
NelsonMinar wrote: post #236

There's an odd new risk for startups: someone buys your company and then releases all the internal documents with hostile intent. The Twitter stuff that's come out now has been pretty uninteresting, surprising and often basically telling a story of people doing the best job they could in difficult circumstances. But if you are at a small company consider what all could be acquired and used to defame your employees an…

The thing to really worry about is that someone like Musk has direct access to all of your DMs, including those of politicians the world over.

What's really worrying to me is that he can change those DMs to say whatever suits his fancy, coupled with the fact nobody remaining at Twitter is in any position to blow the whistle on such conduct. It would likely remain secret indefinitely.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#345

Post by lp0_on_fire »

belltaco wrote: post #231
lsh123 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.” First amendment? What is that?

Have you read the first amendment? It starts with Congress shall not make a law... FBI is not Congress.

The FBI was created by an act of congress...thus it cannot infringe on first amendment protected activies.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#346

Post by colordrops »

jasonhansel wrote: post #306
colordrops wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> What you call a "suggestion" can easily be interpreted as a threat Anything can be interpreted as a threat if you're paranoid enough, but the text of the emails (if you ignore Taibbi's commentary) is pretty clearly inconsistent with that interpretation.

I was going to ask you to not only respond to my last sentence and ignore the rest of them, but felt it was petty, but I guess I was right.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#347

Post by ShredKazoo »

djur wrote: post #334
ShredKazoo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the height of hypocrisy. Everything the "twitter files" have disclosed so far is in line with what most people expected was happening Twitter repeatedly denied that right-wing users were being shadowbanned. That turned out to be false. A month ago, someone on HN patronizingly explained to me that Twitter's moderation was "primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform": https://news.ycombinat…

> Twitter repeatedly denied that right-wing users were being shadowbanned. That turned out to be false. Nobody has demonstrated any difference between Twitter's description of its own policies and the actual facts. They said they did not shadowban (prevent a user's posts from appearing to other users without their knowledge) and Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitt…

>Nobody has demonstrated any difference between Twitter's description of its own policies and the actual facts.

For both the Trump ban and the Hunter Biden story, it seems Twitter did not follow its own policies.

>Taibbi and Weiss have confirmed that such functionality does not appear to exist in Twitter.

Where?

In any case, I think this depends heavily on exactly how you define "shadowbanning". You can define "shadowbanning" so it conveniently excludes all the account-level suppression Twitter did. But the broader point is: Why weren't they transparent about the type of account-level suppression they were doing?

>There's similarly no evidence that Musk's child was "physically threatened" other than his own say-so, and he's a known liar.

I'm not sure what lying you are referring to. In any case, are you willing to grant that Elon's actions are understandable if he's telling the truth about his child?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#348

Post by theonething »

nickthegreek wrote: post #274
briandear wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Why do people keep saying they knowingly allowed child exploitation. Do I need to be deep in the qanon to get this reference or something?

> Internal documents and Twitter employees reveal the need for massive investment to remove illegal content — but executives haven’t listened

> Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.

https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...

https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#349

Post by lapcat »

abigail95 wrote: post #311
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…

surveillance of public comments is an oxymoron no?

No. Are you ok with the government putting cameras everywhere in public? Setting up auto license plate readers everywhere?

You don't have the expectation of privacy in public in the sense that someone can see what you're doing. But there's also the expectation that a democratic (small d) government isn't watching your every move in public, because that's a sign of totalitarianism.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#350

Post by RetpolineDrama »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #236

There's an odd new risk for startups: someone buys your company and then releases all the internal documents with hostile intent. The Twitter stuff that's come out now has been pretty uninteresting, surprising and often basically telling a story of people doing the best job they could in difficult circumstances. But if you are at a small company consider what all could be acquired and used to defame your employees an…

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