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The Twitter Files, Part Six

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Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#841

Post by simpleblend »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #712
refurb wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty routine that they get in contact with newspapers Nothing says they can't contact papers.

But they can't contact Twitter and express their opinions? The government routinely speaks to news papers about the government opinion on articles and how they are wrong. That's not censorship. Holding a figurative pistol to someones head and say "change this line" is censoring and supressing free speech.

Right, so instead of exposing themselves legally they do an end run of telling Twitter to ban and writing smear campaigns. Which is they did to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#842

Post by bennies4grojnd »

Shared404 wrote: post #826
roflyear wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said it was?

They're referring to a Babylon Bee article where they misgender a trans public figure repeatedly. It's the tweet that got the Bee suspended from twitter because they refused to delete it.

It was a satire on USA Today naming Levine as one of their Women Of The Year.

This isn't hate speech, just social commentary on organizations giving awards and accolades reserved for women to men who want to be women.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#843

Post by dang »

GavCo wrote: post #593
dang wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote about this earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34020263 . Does it answer your question? I think Part One and Part Two had significant frontpage time on HN, then not so much until now. That raises the question (at least in my mind) what's different about Part Six? I think part of the answer is random fluctuation (you can think of HN's frontpage as a slot machine with 30 slots—it's not random, b…

Really appreciate that you take the time to weigh in with these explanations. The moderation can feel heavy handed and arbitrary at times so these comments help to shine a light on the difficult balance you're trying to maintain. The explanation about SNI especially helped me understand some of the tough judgement calls that the mods need to make. Is there a manifesto of some sort that defines the philosophy and appr…

It's kind of in between. There's no manifesto other than the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which leave out a ton of information—we keep them brief in the hope that people will actually read them. But there's a trove of knowledge about all of this embedded in past moderation comments, which is why I constantly post HN Search links. I realize it's not a convenient format at all, but you can learn a lot if you start with those links and then tweak the searches either by adding terms or excluding them (as in "-foo"). If you (or anyone) do that and still have questions which I haven't answered in the past, I'd be interested in hearing the questions.

It's my intention to distill a bunch of those explanations into a set of loose commentaries on how HN and HN moderation work. But it's the sort of thing that never rises above the middle of the todo list. Maybe one day.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#844

Post by cactusplant7374 »

gfodor wrote: post #735
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe free speech applies to foreign governments spreading propaganda and hate? https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...

It doesn’t matter what I believe - but I do think SCOTUS will have something interesting to say here.

It looks like they may get a chance.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/15/tech-groups-supreme...

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#845

Post by acdha »

rayiner wrote: post #840
acdha wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam Citation needed. The vast majority of the complaints during that era were due to portraying all Muslims as radical or focusing the efforts on Muslims without applying the same standards to the far more numerous (in the U.S., anyway) Christian extremists ma…

> Clear rules which are fairly applied are a very different level. The disclosure here is that Twitter didn’t have “clear rules which are fairly applied.” It was filtered through people who believed wacky things—for example, ones so blinded by anti-Christian bias they think there is any comparison between Christian “extremism” and the global problem of Islamic radicalism.

Which disclosure was that, specifically? I haven’t seen any evidence of “anti-Christian bias”. If you’re referring to my comment, note that my position is that all radicals should be treated with concern, but their coreligionists shouldn’t be assumed to share their beliefs. In the United States the most common religion is Christianity so we have lots of people making various hate crimes using language derived from that tradition or expressing fears about Islamic immigrants seen as dangerous outsiders, so I’m only talking about risks to the country where the FBI is focused. The Mossad no doubt has a different perspective.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#846

Post by PathOfEclipse »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #744
PathOfEclipse wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have that domestic terrorism has experienced "exponential growth", whatever that means, as I'm pretty sure you're not using "exponential" in the mathematical sense? https://www.dailywire.com/news/whistleblowers-accuse-fbi-of-... This is seriously some hitleresque reichstag fire stuff. The FBi manufactures a fake domestic terrorism crisis and uses it to justify their further expansion of power.

CSIS has published data on the rise of domestic terrorism. [1] NYT has published data about the growth of CSAM due to tech companies. [2] Would you engage with the point of my comment if I called the domestic terrorism non-linear growth, and the CSAM growth exponential? edit: politeness [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... […

Your concern for CSAM would be more meaningful to me if I wasn't aware that one FBI whistleblower said he was pulled off his very successful sex trafficking cases because January 6 witch hunting was a higher priority to the FBI: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/child-sex-abuse-cases-no...

Instead it feels like vapid virtue signaling, especially as Musk is doing far more to fight CSAM than the previous owners. Also, all the FBI censorship in the Twitter files dump had nothing to do with CSAM.

Anyways, no, your CSIS link doesn't even support the notion of super linear growth. And, if the FBI is inflating domestic terrorism numbers, what other agencies are doing the same?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-fbi-agents-pushed-to-f...

"The FBI leadership’s “demand for [w]hite supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of [w]hite supremacy,” one agent told the Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate [w]hite supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI brass has directed the bureau’s investigative efforts primarily toward domestic extremism cases, especially those with racial components, the agent said. The agent suggested that the push is so forceful that otherwise legal activities are sometimes swept up in the FBI’s scrutiny of certain actions for a potential extremist link.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”"

These reports really should disturb you and other readers, that law enforcement agents are being incentivized to act deceitfully on behalf of Partisan politics and as an excuse to broaden their power and influence.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#847

Post by divided »

starkd wrote: post #759
divided wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation.

Your original statement conveys the FBI should never ask Twitter to take down accounts. My response was such that there _are_ good reasons for the FBI to ask Twitter to take down accounts.

If we now agree on that, the issue is no longer requesting to ban accounts vs not requesting to ban accounts, but instead where the line on account bans exist. This is a much more gray debate, wouldn’t you agree?

> 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.

I agree these were intended as jokes, and parody and satire are given wide interpretations in court. But they do have limits. Presumably you wouldn’t want someone to lose their right to vote because someone else intentionally misinformed them, even if its intention was satire. I do think instead of an account ban it could be resolved with a misinformation notice, but we might be presuming the FBI official has more knowledge of online platforms than they do. It did seem from the emails Twitter was ultimately the one to decide the correct handling, so I don’t blame the FBI for just alerting Twitter of potential violations.

> 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.

Having worked for the federal government, I can inform you it is a huge hassle to get anything published. If they publish it, every line would be analyzed for compliance and in this case probably put in front of lawyers. They can still make mistakes, but it’s overly paranoid to believe a government website would advertise unconstitutional violations of rights for years.

> It is not the governments job to protect people's rights.

Objectively false.

> The gov't violates rights all the time.

True! But these violations are failures in the government for doing its job properly. Violations often lead to punishment or scandal. It wouldn’t be a scandal if people held the belief the government wasn’t supposed to protect your rights.

> It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.

…the courts are part of the government…

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#849

Post by bennies4grojnd »

Shared404 wrote: post #824
Khaine wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. Referring to a trans person by the wrong pronouns repeatedly is just rude. It isn’t hate speech That’s just watering down what hate speech is.

Speech designed to A) Harm the target, who has gone out of their way to avoid that harm already (by transitioning/changing pronouns) B) Dehumanize the target in the eyes of others (this person doesn't matter, their wishes are to be entirely disrespected) seems like a reasonable candidate for hate speech to me.

Pointing out that a man who desires to be a woman is still really a man, is an act of speech that neither causes him harm nor dehumanizes him.

It's very silly to claim that this is some type of hate.

Re: The Twitter Files, Part Six

#850

Post by Shared404 »

bennies4grojnd wrote: post #849
Shared404 wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speech designed to A) Harm the target, who has gone out of their way to avoid that harm already (by transitioning/changing pronouns) B) Dehumanize the target in the eyes of others (this person doesn't matter, their wishes are to be entirely disrespected) seems like a reasonable candidate for hate speech to me.

Pointing out that a man who desires to be a woman is still really a man, is an act of speech that neither causes him harm nor dehumanizes him. It's very silly to claim that this is some type of hate.

Aww, look at you making a throwaway to respond to my comments, it's cute :3

E: Removed the troll feeding bits.

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