The FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by pyuser583 » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

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.

Destroying democracy isn’t against Twitters rules.

The Taliban destroyed a democracy. They have Twitter accounts.

The leader of Egypt destroyed a democracy. He has a Twitter account.

The leaders of Myanmar don’t seem to have Twitter accounts, but they outlawed Twitter.

I doubt these people have supporters inside Twitter, but I doubt there’s any Resistance either.

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

#362

Post by mikrotikker » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

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.

Correct the FBI may do nothing.

The IRS however might just suddenly out of nowhere complete coincidence want to crawl into all your accounts, and financial records and tax filings.

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

#363

Post by lovich » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #343

lovich wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>… on behalf of the Democratic Party… This persecution complex the Republicans have promulgated is amazing with how widely believed it is. The republicans have controlled the reigns of power repeatedly over the past few decades and for a greater number of elections than you’d anticipate looking at the popular vote. The timeline the Twitter files is talking about was explicitly during Republican control and not someth…

[flagged]

What does anything you just posted have to do with the parent comment talking about intelligence agencies working with every tech company on behalf of the Democrats.

Singling out Democrats doesn’t imply “Uniparty”. And this was the “outsider’s”(Trump’s) FBI attempting to get Twitter to censor things. How is that the “uniparty” working against populists like Trump?

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

#364

Post by mikrotikker » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #328

DaftDank wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The internal security is doing fine without NSA and when their biggest "achievement" was making everyone less secure via encryption backdoors you gotta wonder about purpose of existence. Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress

Not only that but all the backdoors and 0days they know about but choose to exploit rather than making the whole world safer and fixing/notifying.

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

#365

Post by PartiallyTyped » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

VanTheBrand wrote: post #322

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole parody thing a-la Carl Tuckerson "nobody seriously believes this" while manufacturing outrage that many people believe in and results in stochastic terrorism needs to stop. How many massacres[1] are necessary before people take things like that a bit more seriously? Is it until somebody they know gets murdered? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...

I mean the parody account being referenced here (@madandpissedoff) was one that pretended to be the WWE wrestler undertaker and almost exclusively tweeted denials about shitting his own pants at the mall. I’m not sure it was really leading toward a massacre (unless you count what happened to that mall bathroom stall.)

Using one datapoint to extrapolate to the broader case is really not a good approach to supporting an argument.

Commenter said “parody accounts”, what specifically that refers to is ambiguous, so I considered the class of accounts that may be considered parody by some.

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

#366

Post by cactusplant7374 » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #361

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.

Destroying democracy isn’t against Twitters rules. The Taliban destroyed a democracy. They have Twitter accounts. The leader of Egypt destroyed a democracy. He has a Twitter account. The leaders of Myanmar don’t seem to have Twitter accounts, but they outlawed Twitter. I doubt these people have supporters inside Twitter, but I doubt there’s any Resistance either.

I could have worded it better.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:12 PM UTC

rc_subreme wrote: post #25

Americans are living in a world with a land war in Europe with an old foe on one side, and the increasing pressure exerted on Asian trade and policy partners by a Pacific rim empire we've not seen eye to eye with in the past 100 years. I'd like to see more effort expended on spying and undermining our rivals than ourselves. But such large diplomatic/economic/(hopefully cold)military projects require long term thinkin…

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by bbbbb5 » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:14 PM UTC

mikrotikker wrote: post #362

bbbbb5 wrote: post #259

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. That's not the world we live in. If you reply with "Blow me", the FBI will do nothing.

Correct the FBI may do nothing. The IRS however might just suddenly out of nowhere complete coincidence want to crawl into all your accounts, and financial records and tax filings.

Do you have evidence of this being a thing, or is this just a baseless conspiracy theory?

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

#369

Post by acdha » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

mikrotikker wrote: post #357

XorNot wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are very naive. Of course the FBI could target an individual at the company to do their bidding if they wanted. Hell, even law enforcement does similar stuff chasing drug dealers. In such cases the govt has no regard for the individuals safety or financial well being. At the corporate level its also threatening because of the actions the govt could take against the corporation. Look at all Musks companies now und…

> Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.

Can you point to examples of this? I hope you’re not referring to things like the earlier investigation of Tesla’s FSD claims when that’s been underway for years and so widely predicted.

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

#370

Post by acdha » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #339

joshuamorton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify, what part of the hunter Biden story was "real"? The hunter Biden story can mean everything from "a laptop was found with hunters nudes, and it's discovery was probably influenced by Russian state assets" to "hunters laptop contains proof of misdealings my the president". As far as I can tell, the first is more or less true and the second isn't.

I agree that the way the laptop was claimed to be found sounds incredibly suspicious, but I don't know of any current evidence that the laptop's "discovery was probably influenced by Russian state assets". When you say "the first is more or less true", are you including this part? If so, can you point to evidence linking the find to Russia? For the second part, I'd also agree that the laptop does not contain clear ev…

> As such, I think it's reasonable for people to want to inspect the contents and reach their own conclusion as to what it implies, rather than being prevented from doing so.

I don’t disagree with the desire but that doesn’t make it legal, and in this case it really runs headlong into Giuliani’s incompetent effort to turn it into an October surprise. Much of the data can’t be authenticated and the signs of tampering mean it’s hard to trust. There are some things which have been verifiable (e.g. emails whose recipients confirmed them or with valid DKIM signatures) but the way they restricted access to Republican operatives for over a year suggests that they had no interest in letting people make up their own minds instead of the carefully constructed narrative being shopped around to loyalist websites.