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The Twitter Files, Part Six

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Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#751

Post by roflyear »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #373
ceejayoz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was illegal about the NYPost breaking a story about content found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop? Who said it was illegal? The FBI? Twitter? Can you highlight a quote here? Look at the sort of wording used in the examples in the thread. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1603857573219819529 - "notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service "

That sort of wording makes it worse, IMO. It's one thing for the FBI to contact twitter to say "hey there's this account that's posting instructions on how to make and plant pipe bombs so you should remove it" but a completely different thing for the FBI to say "hey there's thing thing that violates one your arbitrary terms of service so you should take it down". Why is the FBI spending time and resources looking for…

I think it's perfectly fine for any agency to ask any platform to remove content. Keyword: ASK.

You can say no to these requests. Possibly, twitter did.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#752

Post by tehwebguy »

rayiner wrote: post #731
nverno wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same type of reasoning that gave us the Patriot Act/Homeland security etc., though. I'm sure there is some truth to it, I just hope people push back against giving the FBI, or whatever agency arises, free reign. Tilting in favor of extreme safety measures sounds pretty bad to me, but I guess this is largely a matter of personal risk tolerance. Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this th…

Quoted post unavailable.

The Patriot act and it’s reauthorizations under different names are the worst federal legislation in decades.

Comparing Twitter getting reports about ToS violations from FBI via email instead of from users via the report button isn’t in the same galaxy.

I am struggling to think of a more bad faith argument than comparing this to the Patriot act.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#753

Post by starkd »

nickthegreek wrote: post #328
starkd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is a partisan. The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. These accounts he cited were low-follower accounts that were doing nothing illegal or immoral. This is a threat to everyone, no matter what side of the fence you are on. How is that so difficult to understand?

Some of them were posting the wrong election date. I personally think that crosses into immoral territory.

So, you're saying someone is going to try to vote on the day some random low-follower account told them was the correct date? Despite consistent messaging from a variety of other sources telling them the correct date? You really don't have a high estimation of the average voter.

It was clearly a joke. Anyone getting fooled here is clearly the most uninformed voterimaginable. Not even low-informed, but completely uninformed.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#754

Post by PonySoldier »

meepmorp wrote: post #659
deadpannini wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm merely pointing out a fact. "The Hunter Biden story is insignificant" is a judgement, not a fact, it's a judgement. I'd say that calling it "misinformation" is bizarre, except that most prominent allegations of misinformation boil down to judgements too.

It's actually a fact, though.

It's absolutely not a fact.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#755

Post by NelsonMinar »

jacquesm wrote: post #248
NelsonMinar wrote: post #236

There's an odd new risk for startups: someone buys your company and then releases all the internal documents with hostile intent. The Twitter stuff that's come out now has been pretty uninteresting, surprising and often basically telling a story of people doing the best job they could in difficult circumstances. But if you are at a small company consider what all could be acquired and used to defame your employees an…

The thing to really worry about is that someone like Musk has direct access to all of your DMs, including those of politicians the world over.

I worry about this risk a lot. There is no way to delete DMs on Twitter; even if you delete them they stay in the system so the other side of the conversation has them. To folks below saying "that was always true", yes, but I trusted the previous management of Twitter to not snoop on my private DMs. I do not trust the current owner the same way.

(I had a typo in my original comment btw; I said "surprising" but meant "unsurprising".)

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#756

Post by starkd »

Apocryphon wrote: post #44
starkd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is a partisan. The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. These accounts he cited were low-follower accounts that were doing nothing illegal or immoral. This is a threat to everyone, no matter what side of the fence you are on. How is that so difficult to understand?

The point is you alleged that the apathy in this was due to partisan selfishness. It’s clearly not if even the “winning side” is ambivalent about the feds cracking down on their partisans.

That's because the winning side won. It's very short sided. That may be fine for now, but just imagine future elections, when those FBI agents have a different narrative they wish to enforce. It really is not that hard to imagine.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#757

Post by snowwrestler »

partiallypro wrote: post #586
snowwrestler wrote: post #358

In a system of free speech, the government may also speak. I think that is where a lot of people are getting confused or hung up. They think the First Amendment means the government is not allowed to speak at all. That is incorrect. It prohibits "abridging the freedom of speech," in other words, forcibly restraining other people from speaking. So: it is legal for the FBI to call up a company and say what they think.…

You have a fundamental lack of understanding about coercion, you don't have to make a direct threat of physical force to stop free speech and be in violation of the 1st Amendment.

Coercive speech is a point of concern, but that does not mean that all speech by people at the FBI is coercive.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#758

Post by fallingknife »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #592
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 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.

Even if that's all they are doing, it is too much. The FBI is not the enforcement arm for Twitter's TOS. Their job is to investigate and prosecute crimes. If the FBI is attempting, in any way, to remove legal speech it doesn't like (even if the removal process is itself also completely legal) that is overstepping its authority as a government law enforcement agency.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#759

Post by starkd »

divided wrote: post #335
starkd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is a partisan. The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. These accounts he cited were low-follower accounts that were doing nothing illegal or immoral. This is a threat to everyone, no matter what side of the fence you are on. How is that so difficult to understand?

> The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period. Have you considered the real consequences of this? If the FBI for example finds accounts linked to child exploitation, drug trafficking, or terrorism; should they not ask Twitter to take down those accounts? If they find accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian farms who are using it to amplify certain messages in order to try to destabilize…

Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation. It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.

The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have. It is not the governments job to protect people's rights. The gov't violates rights all the time. It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#760

Post by cactusplant7374 »

hgdhgfdhgfdh wrote: post #481
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

policing "misinformation" is not the role of the United States government.

What part of the H. Biden laptop was "misinformation"?

Why should a laptop repair shop be allowed to publish the contents of a customer's hard drive? Especially explicit content intended to aid harassment of the owner?

Can you imagine the reaction of Elon Musk if this happened? Musk can't even handle public information being published (i.e. elon jet). He would go nuclear if nude pictures were leaked.

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