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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

#301

Post by philippejara »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #243
pyuser583 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning. It seems internal employee activism played a large role. That’s not good. While Twitter has a right as a private company to moderate based on internal popularity, it doesn’t build confidence. It seemed the professional moderators were saying “Trump is pushing the limits, but not crossing them” - the other employees were lobbying to get him banned. And they won.…

> The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning. Trump tried to destroy our democracy. I’m not being hyperbolic. The evidence is all there and all from Trump’s mouth.

and hopefully he'll get prosecuted for it if it is really the case, but that didn't stop even european leaders from saying the ban was a mistake and concerning[0].

[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/11/problemat...

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

#302

Post by XorNot »

mypastself wrote: post #271
XorNot wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an anthromorphization fallacy argument. "Twitter" is a company, not a private individual. If the FBI contacts "Twitter" then they're not talking to any one individual, in fact there's no requirement that be the same person at all. So Twitter cannot be threatened or threatened with implied threats - it's a limited liability corporation, there's no individual who can be overly inconvenienced or have any emoti…

Threats of regulations or hefty fines can definitely inconvenience the company’s owners, who have a stake in the company’s future. And importantly, if the individuals using the platform are (hypothetically) being silenced by government agencies levelling threats against the company unless it complies, this could be seen as tantamount to censorship.

The imagery you and others are trying to invoke is one of burly men in black suits turning up on your doorstep at the family home.

Twitter doesn't have that. The employee handling the request doesn't own Twitter. If something happens to Twitter it doesn't happen to them except in a very abstract way (and the person who did fire them was Elon Musk in the end).

Governments absolutely have a means to intimidate company owners: it's subpoenaing them to testify before Congress. Not emailing a mid-level content moderation supervisor who has no way to directly talk to the board of executives or shareholders.

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

#303

Post by walrus01 »

fallingknife wrote: post #296
cyberphobe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this website full of brain dead right wingers.

[flagged]

I think you greatly underestimate the hardcore "libertarian" ideology that runs through tech-bro culture.

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

#304

Post by wrycoder »

bbbbb5 wrote: post #259
antiterra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am someone who didn’t see anything seriously objectionable in the Twitter files, but I do think it raised some questions worth thinking about. If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. Could anythin…

>I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. That's not the world we live in. If you reply with "Blow me", the FBI will do nothing.

You think.

Senator Markey: “Fix your companies or Congress will.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/senator-ed-markey-tell...

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

#305

Post by cactusplant7374 »

philippejara wrote: post #301
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning. Trump tried to destroy our democracy. I’m not being hyperbolic. The evidence is all there and all from Trump’s mouth.

and hopefully he'll get prosecuted for it if it is really the case, but that didn't stop even european leaders from saying the ban was a mistake and concerning[0]. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/11/problemat...

Your link doesn’t make any sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung

Germany has laws against incitement.

> 2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.

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

#306

Post by barnabee »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #181
barnabee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to think this site of all places might be populated with very intermittent dissenters willing to be or at least support activists trying to change that, with the internet and technology as their tool. It’s always jarring to discover the extent to which it’s not.

Bitcoin is people striving for financial self sovereignty. “Crypto” is a bunch of people trying to get rich using some cool new technology they nobody understands. See how much bigger the second is than the first.

Meh. People will try to get rich off anything— crypto, the internet, SMS scams, every type of physical business, legit or otherwise.

As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?

What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)

What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?

What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?

What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?

What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?

Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.

Let’s see the hackers hack.

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

#307

Post by SyzygistSix »

chaosbolt wrote: post #274
SyzygistSix wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What if I WANT to be tricked by a Russian disinformation campaign? What if I just want a juicy story that justifies my biases and I have no regard for the truth at all? Is there a Mastodon server that straight up admits that it may include Russian disinformation and is primarily for entertainment purposes rather than factual discussion? edit: Or a mix of both true news items and disinformation! See if you ca…

Reading your comment felt like that hearing Anakin saying he knows what's best for the people better than they do. As soon as you start assuming you know more than the people and that you have a right to censor the information they can access because it's bad for them, you become a tyrant. Am I the only one who finds this rotten? I want to read disinformation, tell me the sky is green I don't care, I can stitch stori…

I don't like censorship but I also know that I am not unbiased/intelligent/non-human enough to not fall for disinformation. And so will anyone, if they are honest about it. Not every time but we will fall for it. And foreign operations like that should not have the freedom to be conducted on US soil and in US media.

I think labels that say who has determined something is disinformation, produced by whom, and why they have labeled it thus might be a better solution.

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

#308

Post by mynameishere »

monsecchris wrote: post #13

The people trying to minimise every intelligence agency working with every tech company on behalf of the Democratic Party are the same people calling this a dangerous far right conspiracy theory not long ago.

People have a curious inability to imagine "What if the other side was doing this?" If the FBI was regulating content on Twitter (and god knows where else) in order to swing the election towards Trump, it would be 24/7/365 outrage from liberals for years.

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

#309

Post by prawn »

lurquer wrote: post #166
acdha wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. This is possible but I would expect people to look for evidence of it before presenting it as a fact. Something like that would show up in internal communications either directly or as people talking like they didn’t really have a choice, or as a trend of tweets being taken down for reasons which don…

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…

”The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies.”

This is not their goal. It is part of their method.

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

#310

Post by amanaplanacanal »

zmgsabst wrote: post #198
antiterra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am someone who didn’t see anything seriously objectionable in the Twitter files, but I do think it raised some questions worth thinking about. If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability. Could anythin…

I would argue that selectively recommending political comments which may be censored has a chilling effect on political speech — and therefore is illegal. I also think it’s interesting how many people I know who “protested” things like COINTELPRO, but cheer this.

Did they do that though? Selectively recommend political comments?
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