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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

#401

Post by efitz »

Retric wrote: post #115
efitz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the meetings between the US government and Twitter were the influence campaign.

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 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.

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

#402

Post by ceejayoz »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #258
cloutchaser wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> People really need to think longer term. 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 t…

Musk has every right to ban them.

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.

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

#403

Post by pclmulqdq »

Eisenstein wrote: post #184
lurquer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a limited govt. 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 ‘gr…

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.

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

#404

Post by acdha »

dragonwriter wrote: post #400
acdha wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 (sla…

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.

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

#405

Post by Retric »

efitz wrote: post #401
Retric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 convin…

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.

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

#406

Post by dbfx »

thrashh wrote: post #349
spamizbad wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just like how a bunch of random people paid for flight school classes with cash… oh wait, that ended in 9/11 No one knows what is gonna be credible, but damned if you do and damned if you don’t

And what did they do about it once they got this information? Yeah that's what I thought.

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

#407

Post by moloch-hai »

wrycoder wrote: post #314
petesergeant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The WSJ is hardly right wing.

WSJ owner also owns Fox and NYPost. So, definitely, traceably, conspicuously right wing.

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

#408

Post by anankaie »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #138
asynchronous wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would a tag that says "USINT suspects this post/account may be part of a foreign intelligence/disinfo campaign" be a good compromise? I'm not arrogant enough (surprisingly) to think I am not vulnerable to disinformation and yet I'm also uncomfortable with unilateral censorship.

No. Bring it to court, like literally every other case of law enforcement action.

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

#409

Post by lurquer »

michaelmrose wrote: post #268
lurquer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a limited govt. 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 ‘gr…

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…

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.

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

#410

Post by lurquer »

acdha wrote: post #197
lurquer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a limited govt. 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 ‘gr…

Which specific actions do you think the FBI took which aren’t part of their mandate? Please link to the sources for those claims.

You have it backwards.

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?

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