421–430 of 965 posts
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Growing up in a fascist regime may make it seem normal but at some point you need to raise your hackles and feel alarmed regardless of the past, because it's a fascist regime .
Yes, and that's how I feel about the shutdown of the Z-Library, and their refusal to declassify their JFK files.
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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.
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> 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. If that is true, that would make it government coercion. But no one has properly alleged anything with regards to Twitter on that analogue.
The FBI would not pass on something in the nature of a direct order without having a paper signed by a judge to back it up.
There do exist direct orders to reveal or conceal information that do require a judge to sign, things like National Security Letters. It's remarkable that NSLs and other compelling documents don't get more play in these conversations. They actually are what people think these friendly emails are.
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The FBI accepts reports from the public about people interfering with elections, and they forward on those reports to the relevant platforms. I would like to see the FBI and other law enforcement agencies considerably reduced in scale and power, but as long as they exist I think monitoring threats to free and fair elections is one of the better things they can do with said taxpayer dollars.
No government entity should be involved in the slightest in policing media in order to "protect" elections. It's very subjective and extremely ripe for abuse. The only reason election outcomes are so vulnerable to media manipulation is because the US political system is captured by cynical corporate interests that draw an arbitrary line unrelated to idealism across a set of issues to split voters almost perfectly at…
The FEC can impose all sorts of fines, they arguably have more teeth than this.
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The FBI is putting pressure on Apple to drop Enhanced Encryption, and still refusing to declassify their JFK files. Those are far more urgent issues than getting mad at mods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33883834
We are just trying to achieve concensus on facts here, not strategize on our plan to prosecute the FBI. This is a pseudo anonymous forum, not a law firm or activist group. We can talk about all of these things at once, despite your protestations.
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> This goes for any large web property where people congregate to communicate. Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok. > HN is no different in that respect. Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.
I've occasionally noticed some sketchy article flagging in the new submissions feed. (A recent article explaining how to add snow animations to HTML pages comes to mind.) I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy. However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article…
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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?
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It's literally none of those things. The FBI contacted trust and safety and said 'Hey we have concerns about these tweets'. Twitter decided to take them down in some cases. Who is corrupted here? Twitter for taking reports and then deciding how to react to them? The FBI for finding misinformation that might lead to crazies creating mass casualty events? The FBI at no time FORCED twitter to do anything. So it's not vi…
Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.
"Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account you hold and change them regularly. Using the same passphrase across several accounts makes you more vulnerable if one account is breached."
This is an ask from the FBI. But they obviously aren't coercing you not to use abc123 as your password.
This was flagged previously. What makes an article qualify for manual unflagging? I've seen plenty of articles with relevance to the tech community remain flagged.
I think Part One and Part Two had significant frontpage time on HN, then not so much until now. That raises the question (at least in my mind) what's different about Part Six? I think part of the answer is random fluctuation (you can think of HN's frontpage as a slot machine with 30 slots—it's not random, but randomness is involved), and part of it is maybe that the government involvement aspect makes the information here more significant.
When it comes to divisive topics, HN moderation spends a lot of time in the uncanny valley between the major ideological camps. This topic is a good example. One passionate subset of the community would like all of these submissions to get major attention, while an opposing passionate subset would like all of them to be soundly ignored. Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position*, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture.
* for some reason that is a pet peeve of mine - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...