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The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

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Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#201

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

spamizbad wrote: post #163
pannSun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> these relationships wouldn't exist.

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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#202

Post by hermitdev »

phphphphp wrote: post #86
slenocchio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The FBI doesn't change much from administration to administration, no?

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...

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#203

Post by jasmer »

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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#204

Post by acdha »

fragmede wrote: post #142
acdha wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imagi…

Can we ever really be sure there weren't emails from Hillary Clinton that were deleted.

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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#205

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

beej71 wrote: post #172
pannSun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

The First Amendment:

>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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#206

Post by DaftDank »

nverno wrote: post #179
mef wrote: post #9

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…

> 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…

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?

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#207

Post by hermitdev »

retinaros wrote: post #176
bell-cot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the admirals of the Imperial Japanese Navy refused to attack Pearl Harbor when ordered to do so...right? The ones who do Y instead of X are often pretty interesting. But that's partly because they're pretty rare.

[flagged]

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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#208

Post by zmgsabst »

philippejara wrote: post #165
robert_foss wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be CIA and TV. Nothing new under the sun.

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.

Re: The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter

#209

Post by chamwislo »

trentnix wrote: post #54

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 Russi…

This is how soft power works. You only need a few sock puppets to sway a crowd.
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