You're right; I really hate to think about what the fallout would be if the FBI inappropriately swayed an election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
I'm the former owner/operator of ww.com, in its day a pretty large video streaming community, think 'twitch' but many years earlier. We had fairly regular contact with the police to ensure that our members were operating within the law, and some of them repeatedly decided to test where the line was. As responsible operator of a large web property you are an extension of society and society has - fairly universally - come to the conclusion that having a police force is both useful and necessary. As a forum operator you can choose to go head-to-head with the authorities or you can choose to work with them, we - just like Twitter - chose to do the latter because we believed that this was in everybody's best interest.
On occasion it wasn't the authorities initiating the request but us because we came upon acts and or proof of crimes to despicable to relate here and they were uniformly courteous and acted with surprising speed against the perpetrators. Law enforcement and corporations have regular contact, anybody that believes that this is not the case at the level of a Twitter or a Facebook is utterly naive.
The First Amendment says "shall make no law", not "shall never ask politely".
I have huge respect for the former legal department of Twitter, being under pressure from so many sides including many state level actors must have been extremely difficult. And to see it all squandered like this must be extremely painful.
But just take a step back for a second. Are you arguing that the FBI headed by a Trump appointee strong armed a very liberal silicon valley tech company into rigging the election for Biden? What?
I'm pretty sure all of those have happened over the course of Twitter's life span, but obviously those do not make for sexy releases so I doubt we'll hear from them.
Key words: "the law". That's not what was going on here.
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 the US, should they just say hey that’s fine?
Further, from what I read of the tweets, it appears what those accounts wrote may have been illegal after all.
Here’s a quote from an FBI website:
> Report potential election crimes—such as disinformation about the manner, time, or place of voting—to the FBI.
I’m not sure exactly what laws those are referring to, but it appears deceiving people about voting may be illegal. So although you and I and other smart people might read their tweets and think “haha!”, not everyone may read it as a joke.
It is the government’s job to protect the rights of its citizens. Freedom of speech is not absolute (slander, libel, threats, yelling fire in a crowded theatre, etc.), and in this case I think it’s reasonable that one’s right to freedom of speech shouldn’t supersede another’s right to vote.
A Twitter ban is certainly less damaging than criminal charges over whatever statute it violates.
It was clearly a joke. Anyone getting fooled here is clearly the most uninformed voterimaginable. Not even low-informed, but completely uninformed.
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.
A lot of people get strong armed by the FBI. They hold a lot of power. This is not conspiracy territory either. There are congressional oversight committees, but their ability to use classified information gives them a lot of leverage.
At any rate, I am just pointing out the humorous irony involved in appealing to that party to watch the FBI lest “they might lose a future election”… they already believe themselves the losers of one because of FBI involvement!
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
And as shady or problematic as their relationship with Twitter is, is borne out of legal precedence:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Not to mention, in the last decade, by the process of jawboning:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
So really, your complaints go up further than you think. This is something that has been happening for decades based on judicial decisions, you just weren’t aware of it.
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…