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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

#391

Post by belltaco »

poszlem wrote: post #109
petesergeant wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so the "mainstream media" "radio silence" here for an American politics story is in-fact complaining that on a specific date, it wasn't front-page news in ... the UK?

Can you show me when it made front page in the US media?

There are no big revelations in the twitter files. It's mundane things like FBI employees asking Twitter to look at tweets telling Republicans to vote on the Wednesday after election day, when you can no longer vote. And Biden campaign(which was not in power, Trump admin was) sending Twitter links to a few tweets that have Hunter's leaked dick pics that were being spread without his permission(definition of revenge porn), to check if they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. It's a big yawn except for all the lies by the right wing causing outrage.

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

#392

Post by krapp »

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…

>Where are all those “it’s a private company they can do what they like” folks now? I haven’t seen that posted recently.

Those people were responding to arguments that social media platforms banning people, moderating content or even presenting content under an algorithmic feed were violations of the First Amendment, Section 230 and freedom of speech, by pointing out that all of these actions are allowed by the aforementioned principles and laws. That argument hasn't been posted recently because the threads in which the free-speech absolutist arguments to which it replies haven't been posted recently. It isn't germane to the situation wrt Musk and Twitter because, for whatever reason, the free speech absolutists no longer have a problem with censorship by private enterprise when Elon Musk is doing it, and so they no longer post angry, long-winded screeds against it.

And notwithstanding that Twitter banning journalists (even for just 12 hours) is a much more serious deal in terms of freedom of speech implications than banning some shitposting Nazis, no one complaining about that is actually claiming that Elon doesn't have the right to do what he's doing, nor are they calling for the government to make it illegal, as the free speech absolutist crowd has - they're just calling him a hypocrite and an asshole. Because he is.

This really isn't the dunk you and the countless others who keep bringing it up is, it just demonstrates that the free speech absolutist crowd were never arguing in good faith to begin with, because none of them ever bothered to actually listen to or engage with the arguments being made.

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

#393

Post by cactusplant7374 »

colpabar wrote: post #288
lovich wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me.

Yes, but when Musk talked about freedom of speech but not freedom of reach he wasn’t referring to flagging that leads to removal. He meant you might not get as many views as you had hoped.

So your approach of flagging is actually more extreme because the content will be completely removed in some cases.

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

#394

Post by Ygg2 »

belltaco wrote: post #390
Ygg2 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but say a public figure is involved in a scummy situation, and left their laptop detailing their shady dealings (along some naked pictures) at repair shop and forgot about it, but a journalist managed to get docs from said laptop including naked pictures, does it invalidate the whole cotnent of laptop as revenge porn? By point is, having naked pictures on your laptop don't make docs and other stuff found as reven…

You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out. The Biden campaign in 2020(they were not in power, Trump admin was) sent a list of tweets to Twitter asking them to take a look alleging that they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. Twitter took down those tweets. Matt Taibibi implied this was government/Twitter censorship, and the right wing went ape shit over it. People found the archived versions of…

> You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out.

You're misrepresenting the story.

One big omission is this:

> On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

> Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831212310601728 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831435288563712

> and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis

It wasn't. https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... Find me a picture of penis in this news or prove that mtaibbi had somehow distorted this.

They treated a legitimate news, that was obtained by gray means as a child porn and de-ranked it.

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

#395

Post by cactusplant7374 »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #153
bell-cot wrote: post #108

Maybe I'm dating myself...but how different is this, really, from stuff that was routine back in the days of J Edgar Hoover (FBI Director, 1935-1972)? Other than "with computers and the internet" instead of "with paper files and typewriters"? Idealistic youthful utopianism, techno- or otherwise, does not change human nature. And ignorance of history is a really poor recipe for long-term success.

I don't find it incredible that Russia and China conduct disinformation campaigns via social media, regarding our elections and all manner of things. The accusation that they have used social media to inflame groups on both sides of the political divide in the US seems credible to me. However I'm not okay with unilateral censorship as a response necessarily. But I'd be okay with a tag on postings and accounts maybe.…

> However I'm not okay with unilateral censorship as a response necessarily.

For foreign government owned accounts too?

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

#397

Post by theknocker »

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…

[dead]

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

#398

Post by willcipriano »

acdha wrote: post #375
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In District of Columbia County, DC 92.1% of the people voted Democrat Washington DC is overwhelmingly a Democrat bastion, so, regardless of the political appointee SESers, the rank and file that live around DC are likely to have a specific political leaning. Feel free to fact check this. https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-was...

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

Hmmm.

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

#399

Post by acdha »

willcipriano wrote: post #398
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 Hmmm.

Continue that thought?

I have a hunch that you’re about to repeat the usual conservative “the Democrats were the party of slavery” claim which assumes the reader is unaware of the Southern Strategy half a century ago[1], but I’d love to be wrong in that pessimism.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

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

#400

Post by dragonwriter »

acdha wrote: post #375
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In District of Columbia County, DC 92.1% of the people voted Democrat Washington DC is overwhelmingly a Democrat bastion, so, regardless of the political appointee SESers, the rank and file that live around DC are likely to have a specific political leaning. Feel free to fact check this. https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-was...

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 (slavery, and then Jim Crow, etc.), and from the New Deal through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 things were more complicated, but they still had that same base as a key constituency; that didn’t really change until Johnson embraced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republicans followed up the way that had not done with previous times Democratic leadership had alienated that part of the base by actively courting them, especially starting in the 1968 Presidential election.

But you have to realize when discussing D.C. political parties, the District didn’t get to vote for President at all until 1964, didn’t get to vote for a (nonvoting) delegate to Congress (after 1874) until 1970, and didn’t get to vote for its local government until 1974. The history of electoral politics for D.C. residents is much shorter than for most of the rest of the country, and consists almost entirely of the period since the Republicans started actively courting racists as a key constituency.

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