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

#481

Post by belltaco » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #394

belltaco wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

I am referring to these tweets in the two tweets from Matt Taibbi.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

This shows that they were pornography:

https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598832424754073601

Yet Matt Taibbi used those to spread baseless propaganda without giving the context behind the removal of those tweets. That clouds the rest of the claims too. Matt isn't interested in the truth. He's being a political hack serving partisan interests.

And even he was forced to concede that he couldn't find anything from the govt about the laptop.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744

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

#482

Post by wrycoder » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

bbbbb5 wrote: post #480

wrycoder wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that the Beltway connections are somewhat hard to pin down. I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof. There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike an…

The executive branch essentially works for the congress, what's the issue here?

The Congress is obviously a completely different entity than the FBI.

Please make up your mind!

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

#483

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 4:56 AM UTC

clucas wrote: post #471

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I ignored when a national media outlet was banned for a publishing a true story that embarrassed a politician I and the US intelligence apparatus wanted to win… but no one complained about when I was suspended for 12 hours!”

The NY Post was banned for violating the hacked materials policy, and they were unbanned after Twitter changed the policy. It wasn't 12 hours, but it was pretty quick. Meanwhile plenty of other media outlets published embarassing details about the laptop contents on Twitter, and were not banned... because they didn't violate the hacked materials policy. If underlying goal was to suppress the story about the laptop an…

It was more than two weeks and every single bureaucrat, and “Intelligence” community statement that it was “Russian Disinformation” absolutely knew they were lying.

They were picking a winner and you know it.

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

#484

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 5:10 AM UTC

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #477

dang wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of which flavor they favor. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombina…

It's obvious which ideologies are allowed here, you're just too steeped in them to see it. It's too bad new accounts are so expensive. You'll be seeing me again soon. An also, fuck you, cunt.

I don't look closely at which ideology someone is into (it isn't necessary, and we don't care), but I'm pretty sure I banned several accounts yesterday who are on the opposite side from you. Every passionate ideologue thinks that the mods are secretly against them, but that's just how the passions operate.

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

#485

Post by clucas » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #483

clucas wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NY Post was banned for violating the hacked materials policy, and they were unbanned after Twitter changed the policy. It wasn't 12 hours, but it was pretty quick. Meanwhile plenty of other media outlets published embarassing details about the laptop contents on Twitter, and were not banned... because they didn't violate the hacked materials policy. If underlying goal was to suppress the story about the laptop an…

It was more than two weeks and every single bureaucrat, and “Intelligence” community statement that it was “Russian Disinformation” absolutely knew they were lying. They were picking a winner and you know it.

Sorry man, I don't know that. Can you offer any evidence - an email or something - that shows that the intelligence community knew it wasn't Russian disinformation at the time Twitter was deliberating over what to do with the NY Post?

Also, you didn't answer the question about principles. I'm still interested in that. I believe I have a rule about social media moderation that I've applied consistently across a wide variety of circumstances. Can you say the same?

Edited to add: And again, if the intelligence community was trying to pick a winner, why didn't they try to ban all the other stories about the laptop? And why only on Twitter? The NY Post was still going strong on Facebook, right?

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

#486

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #325

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ok. It’s a private company and they can do what they like. And we can point out the hypocrisy.

And ignore you own, what a wonderful scenario for you.

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

#487

Post by thrashh » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

dbfx wrote: post #406

thrashh wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think there’s only one suspicious thing going on at any given moment?

There’s probably hundreds of new things at this very second and probably none of them are going to result in anything, but no one knows that for sure

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

#488

Post by Eisenstein » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

lurquer wrote: post #478

Eisenstein wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yourreasoning is just as arbitrary as just as nonsensical. What is a democracy if not the will of society as a whole? Do you have a different way for society to determine and enforce its needs?

The US Federal Government has only the limited powers granted it by the federal constitution. The States, on the other hand, have general authority… their powers are not limited (except by the specific restrictions set forth in the US Const.) In short, there is a very real and legal and intended difference between FedGov and StateGov. If you don’t like it, change the constitution. But, it’s not matter of opinion… it’…

Excuse me but you did not address my comment, you addressed what you wanted to address and ignored what I said.

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

#489

Post by bbbbb5 » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 8:15 PM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #482

bbbbb5 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The executive branch essentially works for the congress, what's the issue here?

The Congress is obviously a completely different entity than the FBI. Please make up your mind!

The FBI is a completely different entity which exists below the congress, the FBI can't really threaten you with the congress.

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

#490

Post by helloworld11 » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

chaosbolt wrote: post #293

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.

The age of cypherpunks is dead, we live in the age of the "programmer who blindly believes the same thing everyone at his company believes and thinks he's right because he's intelligent because he's a programmer". And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it, it's the same thing for Elon Musk, it's crazy how popular he…

>And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it

I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.

Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.

The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.

Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.

The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.