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The Twitter Files, Part Six

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Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#691

Post by pannSun »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #607
partiallypro wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good, and I am not a fan of Elon's latest moves toward Twitter (banning some journalists and sources of freely available information on other platforms), but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. That's a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. This is a story because the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. There is no "framing" in that, the FBI…

> but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments? https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...

From that thread: Some were domestic takedowns of, say, QAnon accounts

So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#692

Post by TOMDM »

xiphias2 wrote: post #598
jacquesm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. For instance: LE might become aware of a sexting or suicide attempt or some other thing that people do that is not strictly illegal but that might be embarrassing or that could cause the person trouble in their private life. Having a degree of confidentiality helps to both speed up the process because not every word has to be weighed on the scale of 'how does this look in the public arena' and it helps to…

Sure, ,,let's think of the children''. We heared it many times, but we're talking about a govermental agency meddling with election results. Politics and these cases are very different in nature. Personally I wouldn't be comfortable not taking action when the FBI would ask anything from me, because it's safer to just comply.

Keeping investigations private in order to protect those presumed innocent in a normal part of any law enforcement.

Should police officers dump the body cam footage of every domestic abuse situation they walk into online?

If you want to fault the oversight and transparency of the goals of these agencies, then sure. But let's also not pretend that making all elements of investigations public would be a good idea.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#693

Post by petesergeant »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #680
beebmam wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the 1st amendment for reference: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?

> How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment? Imagine if the FBI came to your house and asked you to take down a sign in your front yard.

It would definitely make me question how much I cared about the sign, and ask myself difficult questions about why the FBI were getting involved. I’d probably even engage a lawyer. But it’s not clear to me I’d take it down if — after all of this — I’d decided keeping it up was the right choice?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#694

Post by vdbx »

this is already been done and we know what the outcome is. what facinating is how people respond. are we dealing this (or perceiving it if your not us citizen) with high standard?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#695

Post by petesergeant »

nverno wrote: post #636
benjaminwootton wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS? That sounds as tame as it could possibly be. The same option is open to me as an ordinary user.

What bothers me most about the FBI's behaviour here is that it is unnecessary. Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing? I'd prefer to see the FBI acting in a passive role, here, rather than a proactive one. Meaning, they act more in response to people reporting social media be…

> Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?

They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#696

Post by ModernMech »

jasmer wrote: post #621
kweingar wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is clear that Taibbi et al. are cherry-picking FBI interactions that will draw the most clicks and outrage from fans of the new management. If they had published communications between the FBI and Twitter from, say, June 2020, I imagine their audience would not be able to muster quite as much indignation.

His story is slanted, but it's not fair to suggest he is 'cherry picking' - that's what the press does, they 'find the stuff that matters' and filters out the stuff that does not. It would be 'cherry picking' if the result was something out of context and therefore misrepresented. There's a legit story here, probably not to the extent made out to be but it's newsworthy. What could be 'cherry picking' in the grand con…

Musk is the one cherry picking by choosing which data journalists get. Taibbi alleges that the Biden Campaign was censoring content but leaves out that it was revenge porn. He says the Trump team made requests for removal of other content but leaves those out entirely. Bari Weiss was given an incomplete dataset which showed only Democratic messages but left out those from Republicans. There’s more, but that’s not enough cherry picking to make the entire thing dubious.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#697

Post by lapcat »

ABCLAW wrote: post #587
lapcat wrote: post #54

This is actually an argument for why Twitter shouldn't exist. Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot. What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly…

There's a bunch of these analytics platforms available. Government isn't the only one using them, and twitter isn't the only platform being used. Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools. Spreading the conversation elsewhere doesn't change the ability of these analytics platforms to cover them, although it does introduce more noise into the signal; the smaller t…

> Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.

I suspect that these tools are all looking at the world's largest social networks with 9-10 figure user bases. The same argument applies to them: they're too big. None of them should exist. Once you break it down to thousands or millions of different platforms, each with much smaller user bases, it becomes prohibitively expensive to surveil them all.

> We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.

Has this ever prevented a shooting? They always find these posts after the fact.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#698

Post by api »

beebmam wrote: post #596
partiallypro wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good, and I am not a fan of Elon's latest moves toward Twitter (banning some journalists and sources of freely available information on other platforms), but the FBI has absolutely no right to try to get a private company to stop free speech. That's a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. This is a story because the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. There is no "framing" in that, the FBI…

Here's the 1st amendment for reference: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?

AFAIK if the FBI asked, Twitter resisted, and the FBI strong armed them that would be a first amendment issue.

I don’t see any sign they resisted or even wanted to resist. That’s not a first amendment issue.

You can make an argument that the FBI should not be doing that, but no laws were broken. Also most of this was under the Trump administration.

Lastly.. Twitter is a private walled garden. It is not a free speech zone. It wasn’t before Musk bought it and it isn’t now and it never will be.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#699

Post by TOMDM »

naasking wrote: post #689
TOMDM wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting weekly meetings from? This set of tweets details 150 emails total over a period of over two and a half years (jan 2020 to nov 2022). It even specifically quotes their mention of their quarterly meeting. My biggest problem with people who think the Twitter files are A Big Deal, is their seeming inability to accurately describe the contents.

> My biggest problem with people who think the Twitter files are A Big Deal, is their seeming inability to accurately describe the contents. Or maybe you're just ignorant of the contents: https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-executive-met-fbi-weekly-0150...

Ah, I was reading this dump for the proof of a weekly mention, my mistake.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#700

Post by api »

angelbreakfree wrote: post #395

The wildest part of the Twitter files is the unhinged framing that they are presented under. 1. Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language" 2. Based on the emails he posts, the agencies give links to review based on tips they receive or their own intel and twitter then decides if it violates ToS or n…

It’s Matt Taibbi. Unhinged framing designed to inflame populist rage is something he’s been doing since the 2008 financial crisis when he made his career on it.

He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.

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