4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
How is this constant? This is just 1 request every 7 days . I figured it would be more. Also, it's called the FBI. Their job is to investigate federal matters, which includes content on social social media. They do with with all major social networks. It's not just politics or the media, but things related to safety, terrorism, kidnaping, child exploitation, etc.
It seems like these files are becoming more and more underwhelming.
It's weird that it's turned into some sort of naive left vs right issue.
I'd be asking what the goal is, but apparently it's that. Point fingers, suggest no solutions beyond vote for us.
This sort of activity is what the government 100% shouldn't be involved in. Having a department of What is Allowed To Be Said is one of those ideas that gets tried regularly and has a terrible track record that - inevitably - ranges between a source of mild shame in hindsight to a nightmare influence on society.
There are nearly no scenarios where it is acceptable for the FBI to be in regular contact with Twitter asking for Tweets to be taken down, and if there are it should be transparent and documented - in public, in real time. It shouldn't take Elon Musk spending too much money to get details on the FBI's censorship programs (similarly it should have taken Assange-Manning-Snowden to get details on the pervasive spying).
There's a fundamental contradiction in the narrative presented in the Twitter Files, apparently we're supposed to believe that Twitter is this overwhelmingly liberal place where employees were highly biased against conservatives in their content moderation and also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution, coerced Twitter in a highly biased way to get them to silence conservative narratives. If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion. If Twitter was being forced, it remains to be shown exactly how. And to the extent that Twitter is institutionally biased towards liberals, then it's those that sit on the opposite political spectrum that are most suspicious. After all, if Twitter was going out of their way to help the Democrats, why would they need to be coerced in that same direction?
There's plenty of public evidence that Republican politicians including the sitting President threatened Twitter and other social media companies in order to influence their moderation policies. Where's the outrage among the "FBI asking Twitter nicely is a First Amendment issue" crowd?
If he's asking for something completely reasonable that ~80+% of people think is a good idea, sure. The appropriate thing for Twitter to do would still probably be to ignore him.
Giving Trump influence of Twitter's moderation policies is one of those obviously bad ideas (much like giving the FBI influence, in fact, for similar reasons).
> If Twitter and FBI were aligned, there's no coercion.
Yeah it isn't really a question of coercion, obviously if Twitter wants to support the FBI in political causes they are free to do that. The issue is that the FBI is being funded by taxpayers, not leftists, and shouldn't be deployed in a political capacity to support partisan management policies like what Twitter turned out to have. The easy way to achieve that is a blanket rule - something like "the government doesn't police what people say" which is fair and reasonably objective.
> ...also the FBI, of course that famously leftist institution...
There was the institutional support for the Trump-Russia hoax and the FBI's help in suppression of the Hunter Biden story. While I agree the FBI probably isn't leftist (I'm arguing it is authoritarian and status-quo biased, for what it is worth - they'd pull all the same tricks on someone like Bernie Sanders if he had made it through the primary), it is politically active and spreading a lot of this "misinformation" stuff to try and keep Trump out of office. That is corrupt, and it shouldn't be working with Twitter like it is.