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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

#281

Post by XorNot »

mushbino wrote: post #234
spamizbad wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like if someone made a bunch of threats on Twitter and then followed through with them people would be completely outraged why the FBI didn’t stop them. Anyway it’s interesting we are having this debate TODAY when after 9/11 and a decade later the adroit use of social media by ISIL the alphabet agencies were crawling all over the internet. Pandora’s box was opened years ago.

If you look at most mass shootings you'll find articles saying the suspect was "known to the FBI." For some reason they rarely stop them ahead of time. The Whitmer kidnapping is a recent example. Well, I guess they started AND stopped it in that case.

That's because most mass shootings have no crime committed until the suspect opens fire.

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

#282

Post by Mezzie »

philippejara wrote: post #194
whatsu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that governments have always had an influence on how we live our lives, whether through traditional media like newspapers and television, or more modern platforms like social media. This is not a new phenomenon, but rather something that has always existed in society. However, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online conten…

>In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet. Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? Sounds like you either get in the good graces of the "intelligence community" or you are now harmful, as shown pretty clearly with the hordes of "intelligence community" people calling the biden laptop(w…

> Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government?

An additional related question: Are they even capable of undertaking this task? Our current government officials and bureaucrats don't understand enough about how the Internet works to effectively police it. And more fundamentally, can a government act quickly enough to outwit how quickly the Internet adapts to roadblocks? Governments need to have policies, procedures, go through chains of command, etc. A lot of Internet culture, on the other hand, is driven by random people doing random things. If a topic is forbidden, instead of policing that topic, the government then has to police the 50 ways to get around the block as well as guess which one will take root.

It's similar to trying to win a war against guerrilla insurgents. The high level of organization of a government to some degree works against them.

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

#283

Post by [deleted] »

epivosism wrote: post #82
tosc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So every troll and bot farm should be able to have each tweet judged by a jury?

Definitely not. I'm more looking for a gesture towards respecting our values, and a more open negotiation process for developing safe use for this kind of powerful control system. The fact that the administrators of the process on the twitter side were quite polarized politically makes people doubt its fairness, as does the fact that it was mostly done in secret. i.e. it was more of a China-style "the state doesn't l…

[deleted]

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

#284

Post by lovich »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #273
lovich wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he needn’t be to have been protesting against government power. Him being there for entirely self serving reasons is a much simpler explanation than that he was an fbi plant who was willing to put his life on the line for some sort of social manipulation as you have claimed. You started with a view and appear to have worked your way backwards to justify it.

Why would would anyone ride a bicycle when the simpler unicycle exists. Is that the crux of your argument?

A:have you never heard of Occam’s razor?

B:do you really think that someone with a criminal history would never go to a protest? Are they simply 1 dimensional characters in a play who cant go to a protest or agree with its cause because they are “bad” people? They couldn’t go because even if they didn’t agree, it hurt the government they disliked? They couldn’t have gone because they had friends going and it was a thing to do? They couldn’t just like general mayhem? I do not understand how you think a government conspiracy is the simplest explanation here, especially when the guy went after someone with a gun while armed with a skateboard. That’s the behavior of someone motivated, not someone doing their day job of undercover agent or having been forced to do undercover work by the government in exchange for leniency.

I’ll actually turn this back on you, how exactly do you believe either of the two people killed by rittenhouse were part of a government conspiracy. How we’re they recruited and what was the goal?

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

#286

Post by matthewdgreen »

froggertoaster wrote: post #29

You can downplay this all you want - but remember: stuff like this is a microcosm of a larger issue. Sections of your government worked directly with Twitter to control what information you saw. Much bigger organizations - Facebook comes to mind - must be doing the same thing every.single.day. And no one finds this even a little bit alarming?

Of course we find it concerning, and we'd want to look closely at it to see if it crosses legal or ethical lines. I don't currently see any line-crossing, but I guess it's good to have the discussion.

The problem with this "Twitter Files" reporting is that it's not making the situation any clearer. If anything it feels like these journalists are being used to do PR work for Twitter's new owner in order to promote the idea that Something Really Bad Happened Here, but this advocacy makes it much harder to see the real picture.

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

#287

Post by acdha »

trentnix wrote: post #267
acdha wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m astonished at the casual dismissal of the blatant lies of the previous Twitter regime, their clear election manipulation Can you provide specific examples of these “blatant lies”? For example, Taibbi’s earlier dumps showed that the testimony to Congress was accurate.

“We don’t shadow ban”

Clearly true – as shown by the Twitter they followed their stated policies, as explained in the public interviews they did back in 2018.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/twitter-will-start-hidi...

Bari Weiss tried to misrepresent what shadow banning means but especially here I’d expect people to be familiar with what the term means.

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

#288

Post by colpabar »

lovich wrote: post #270
colpabar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think dang kinda just looks the other way because he knows people want to talk politics, but it's literally the first thing in the "off topic" section of the guidelines. > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-To…

>> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. >The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new". You…

> Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.

No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.

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

#289

Post by sixQuarks »

cloutchaser wrote: post #236
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…

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…

Exactly. This is why history repeats itself, people never learn, everyone is on their own cults/tribes and the ends justify the means

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

#290

Post by KurvaKing »

Mezzie wrote: post #282
philippejara wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In short, the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet. Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? Sounds like you either get in the good graces of the "intelligence community" or you are now harmful, as shown pretty clearly with the hordes of "intelligence community" people calling the biden laptop(w…

> Who defines what is harmful or extremist in the government? An additional related question: Are they even capable of undertaking this task? Our current government officials and bureaucrats don't understand enough about how the Internet works to effectively police it. And more fundamentally, can a government act quickly enough to outwit how quickly the Internet adapts to roadblocks? Governments need to have policies…

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