It does not show or allege a crime was ignored - can you be precise in what you’re insinuating?
Neat trick, but it doesn't work anymore.
It may be within Twitters terms of service to ban people and censor people, and that may be fine for Twitter, but for a sworn officer to use Twitter to censor people - that is an abuse of power.
Of course, the files also show that Twitter personnel acted in bad faith and didn't follow their own ToS.
The FBI contacted trust and safety and said 'Hey we have concerns about these tweets'. Twitter decided to take them down in some cases.
Who is corrupted here? Twitter for taking reports and then deciding how to react to them? The FBI for finding misinformation that might lead to crazies creating mass casualty events?
The FBI at no time FORCED twitter to do anything. So it's not violating the first amendment.
This is just an optimization and a way to save everybody a lot of time and headaches, as well as a way to ensure that the genie gets put back into the bottle before something can grow legs and do a lot of damage. And with the degree to which social media has been weaponized that is a good thing.
The Babylon Bee is a satire site that was banned for doing satire.
There are many many examples.
If you have allegations of illegality, who determined that? Are you saying FBI should just say "Trust us, it's illegal - we don't need a jury or a judge"?
Since when does the FBI just get to accuse people of things and take their rights away?
The Babylon Bee was told that 1 Tweet violated Twitter's policy, and that they needed to delete it to unlock their account. They chose not to.
Are you referring to calling a trans person by their biological sex?
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"
The alternative may well have been a dead VP, or worse, so be happy that these channels exist(ed). With that whole department axed we are now in much more dangerous territory. That said I'm pretty sure that Elon Musk knows which side his bread is buttered on and that given an appropriately worded request Twitter will comply just like it did in the past. Or do you think they'll give the FBI the finger now?
Strong disagree. I've been on the receiving side of many such requests and all of them came with reasons and citations to back up the request. I've never had a single LE request (including some from the FBI even though we were located in Toronto, Canada and in IJmuiden, NL meaning that we could have refused them simply on account of not being in their jurisdiction) that did not make perfect sense to me.
That analogy should help you understand the difference between a random guy writing to Twitter "hey, I think these tweets violate your ToS" and the FBI doing the same thing.
Maybe one could make a case that the FBI requesting Twitter to enforce its own policies is reasonable, but if the Feds are making judgments on what to complain about based on content or viewpoint rather than time / place / manner, that really starts to conflict with First Amendment jurisprudence.
However if you think about it for a minute, if the FBI were this bold in written, subpoena-able communication, what do you think the offline conversations looked like?
2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
You could. But that's not what happened here, judging by the evidence on display.
All I see is what I expected to see: law enforcement engaging in a careful manner with a company that is dealing with an extremely large flow of communications. And if some of those communications are of a society destabilizing nature it is well within the mandate of the FBI to stick their noses in and make requests. You then have the option to refuse those requests, in which case you may either end up in court, they could forget about the whole thing or you are served with a piece of paper signed off by a judge.
What is illegal and what isn't is ultimately for a judge to decide but not every two-bit issue needs to go by a judge if all parties agree that the world is better off with moderating it out of existence.
First amendment? What is that?
Next time you receive a request from the police that you think is reasonable try stonewalling them and see what happens. I guarantee you won't like it.
And as far as the secrecy is concerned: records were kept, that's why you are reading about this.
The context was quite comparable: live conversations, messages both public and private.
> 2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.
Twitter had an extensive legal team before Musk fired them all, I'm pretty sure they were well capable of determining which requests were legal and which were not.
All these installments have done is confirm over-and-over again that this was pretty much the normal and expected kind of interaction.
Twitter as a private company can moderate content as it sees fit. But the government is supposed to be constrained by the First Amendment. And here, they technically are, because they're not forcing Twitter to take action. But there's always the background threat of regulation if Twitter doesn't play nice, so it's not as black and white as this.
I’m not sure how institutions can say “no” to the FBI without feeling fear of retribution, nor do I want the FBI putting pressure on corporations to be something that’s “normal and expected”.
Having been on the receiving end of such requests I was pretty happy all of them were made in a confidential manner, it saved everybody a ton of headaches and reduce the amount of grip the various miscreants had on our community. Doing that in the open would have caused massive issues, some of these people were downright dangerous and others simply needed help, keeping their data and our interaction around that data confidential was - in my opinion - a good thing all around.
I'm sure there was some give-and-take but on the whole what I've seen so far is absolutely par for the course, if you were to look into Facebook, Google, Microsoft and any of the ISPs and email providers you would find the exact same thing.
Both Twitter and the FBI were pretty open about the FBI having limited access to Twitters' firehose and that there was constant interaction between the two parties. You can add to that that if you were to look at this internationally and at the state level that such contacts can be expected to exist as well. Any assumption to the contrary is hopelessly naive.
You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity. What you could do is to come up with a set of workable rules for which requests would have to be made public and which not, but I don't think I would be capable of coming up with such a set of rules that would not in the future lead to issues. So to default to secrecy seems prudent.
In that light, the sale of Twitter and the subsequent exposure of all these interactions presumably has the effect of such communications becoming more opaque rather than less resulting in the opposite effect of what you desire.
FBI is not Congress.
That includes the Executive.
That's just obviously false. It was pretty clearly just a suggestion that Twitter investigate violations of its rules, not a demand.
Just look at COINTELPRO for the most egregious example.
Then there's Waco, Ruby Ridge, the campaign finance corruption, infiltration of latin American governments, and modern operations similar to COINTELPRO to take down various movements like occupy wall street.
They are a mafia, not some benign group that can be blindly trusted with secret carte blanche powers.
And these are just the big ones. They've pushed for back doors into iPhones for instance.
I don't care how trustworthy anyone thinks they are. No one should be able to just arbitrarily transcend the law because they are "clean".
Nobody has a problem with the FBI doing takedown requests for that kind of content. It's about political content (labelled "civic misinformation") on accounts like @RSBNetwork. The FBI isn't supposed to be taking sides and potentially influencing elections by encouraging social media companies to ban accounts of political actors.
Personally I'm of two minds about this whole thing. While I have concerns, the right-wing in the US at the moment are an authoritarian movement and social media companies are doing not nearly enough in the way of moderation. Ideally the FBI would have stayed out of it and Twitter would have upped their game.
> You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.
I'd put the burden on the FBI. If they want to exclude all clearly non-political content (e.g. suicide videos) from the transparency report that's ok by me.
When a stranger is yelling at a trans person about their biological sex, it's done to inflict emotional harm on the trans person. They transitioned away from that gender to reduce harm (that is the definition of a trans person), and the stranger is intentionally trying to bring that harm back.
Imagine shouting at a woman about her "biological breast size" because she is wearing a push-up bra, or had surgery to enlarge or reduce her breast size. Would that seem like a normal, harm-free way to interact with another person you don't know? Obviously not.
> Who is saying that people should be harmed?
The rights actions speak so loud no one can hear their words.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/briefing/right-wing-mass-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-3...
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/25/filling-the-trump-void-righ...
But none of that seems to have any bearing on what happened here at Twitter, which is so far - to put it mildly, given the amount of noise made by Musk et al - underwhelming.
If you feel differently then that's fine but personally I think there are far bigger transgressions by the FBI than requesting that Twitter take down objectionable content and rabble rousers.
In NL Twitter was successfully weaponized by our most despicable - outright pro-Nazi - political party and the aftereffects are still felt today. Compared to what happened in the US it obviously pales but you have to wonder how the 6th of January 2020 would have ended if it weren't for the good contacts between the FBI and Twitter.
Not all such contacts are bad.
If we're going to discuss the FBI in a larger setting I would consider that to be out of scope, to me the discussion is limited to the interaction between social media companies and law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular.
It reminds of an old joke:
Conservative: "I keep getting banned for my views"
Rando: "Oh, small government?"
C: "No, not that one"
R: "Oh, so fiscal responsibility?"
C: "Not that either"
R: "So which ones?"
C: "Oh, uh... You know."
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 TOS violations for a private company?
Why is the FBI spending time looking into _anything_ that's not illegal, period?
When there are mass ransomware attacks from foreign states, the FBI does help private companies.
I think that is probably the charitable perspective. Either that or the FBI led by James Comey at the time (who arguably single handed sunk Clinton in 2016 by going against FBI policy to re-open the "emails" case), was corrupt and at a rate of one email a week was attempting to control the national discourse thru twitter.
Not sure if that is credible given the FBI could have done far worse to the trump campaign.
Though, without primary source material, I'm not sure how one could tell the difference (Occams razor seemingly might come into play)
I don't know. Seems like there's a difference.
Government thugs don't need to give explicit orders to have their wishes followed, especially if the thugs in question make it sound like they share your ideological goals.
Nice little company you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.
Meghan Murphy is a left-wing feminist, she was banned for expressing gender critical views.
"Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account you hold and change them regularly. Using the same passphrase across several accounts makes you more vulnerable if one account is breached."
This is an ask from the FBI. But they obviously aren't coercing you not to use abc123 as your password.
https://i0.wp.com/www.techdirt.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/1...
As I've said, Taibbi has been very clear that he has no evidence of government involvement in any response to the Hunter Biden story.
LEO are 90%+ on the right. We are talking about the famously conservative FBI here.
If someone drops an n-word at a state rep, does it become not hate speech? The answer is (obviously) that hate speech is still hate speech.
That’s just watering down what hate speech is.
Meghan Murphy in particular is a left-wing, socialist, radical feminist, who was raised in a Marxist household. This is no secret, you can search her work online to confirm all this, she's pro-unions, pro-socialism, and speaks against the right on numerous political matters.
Her ban from Twitter was caused by referring to a male (Johnathan/Jessica Yaniv), who was suing female beauticians for refusing to wax his bollocks, as "him".
Now I don't know about you, but I would think if you're going around flashing your testicles to women and demanding they touch them, that is very much a proof of being a man. I mean, you don't find women popping their hairy balls out to be plucked, and haranguing women who politely demur, do you?
Nonetheless, Twitter moderators disagreed. To them, this was the bushy scrotum of a woman. So Murphy was canned.
The whole point is that these cases aren't going in front of a judge or jury to decide. Without that system of checks and balances, "all parties agree" is meaningless because it can't be challenged. "All parties agreed" that the civil rights or anti-war movement were destabilizing and needed to be suppressed...you seem to support that kind of unchecked power. I don't know why people are so quick to forget our very recent history.
You can say no to these requests. Possibly, twitter did.
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.
It's the tweet that got the Bee suspended from twitter because they refused to delete it.
This isn't hate speech, just social commentary on organizations giving awards and accolades reserved for women to men who want to be women.
It's very silly to claim that this is some type of hate.
E: Removed the troll feeding bits.
> neither causes harm
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/transphobia#effect...
> Nor dehumanizes
Intentionally causing harm (see above) and pushing for it to be acceptable for others to cause harm is in fact dehumanizing.
I note you still fail to present any argument other than "I feel like you're wrong"
How does that actually harm him?
He's in an incredibly privileged position, and indeed has enjoyed male privilege for pretty much all of his life.
Should we avoid saying any truth that might slightly upset a public figure, or anyone really, just in case they feel a bit sad if they happen to hear it?
> just in case they feel a bit sad if they happen to hear it
I recommend you read that source I provided again.
E: And a couple others -
https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/resource/transgender-peopl...
https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/ Good paper, but here's a sentence from the conclusion. > Findings underscore the importance of risk factors such as emotional neglect within the family, interpersonal microaggressions, and internalized self-stigma
In addition, what reason do you have to not respect a trans persons identity? Biological sex is already much _much_ more complex than just the XY we're taught in middle school. Klinefelter's and intersex people both exist, as do other blurred lines.
There's also nothing inherent about 'sex == gender' - transgender people have existed throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
Now then, unless you provide actually interesting input we're done here until you come back with your main :).
As a more concrete counterpoint, here's a news article from last year which includes a lesbian woman describing her rape by a man who calls himself a woman: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57853385
The editors decided to replace the male pronouns she used to describe him with "they" and "them":
> Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.
> "[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."
How do you think she must have felt reading this truthful quote of hers mangled into a lie? A rape victim who isn't permitted to have her rape accurately reported, after she had already been shamed into getting into bed with this man by him weaponising the same ideology that censors her now.
Was she guilty of hate speech by describing her own rape?
I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
A) Doesn't make her not a woman
B) Doesn't make all trans people scumbags.
I understand the position of the lesbian woman in that story - she is justified in anger, hate and fear, as sad as it is to say.
You're allowed to not be attracted to someone, and trans individuals have to accept that sometimes relationships may not work out as a result of their being trans - it's just a sad but true fact.
> Push down their own beliefs and feelings in case someone who thinks they are the opposite sex reads anything that may be critical of this?
Isn't the quote "facts don't care about your feelings"? All serious modern research points to trans individuals being valid.
> I read your source by the way, it's very one-sided, and mostly irrelevant to the conversation about speech.
You asked how speech leads to harm, I provided an example. I've also uploaded more since then.
Even a rape victim isn't allowed to say that a man raped her, despite him forcing his penis inside of her. Is she supposed to pretend that this is a "woman's penis" or something?
That was an extreme example used to illustrate. The other examples elsewhere in this thread include a man taking an accolade that would usually be reserved for women, and a man going around being creepy to women who provide genital waxing services to other women.
If critics aren't allowed to push aside the gender ideology for a minute and discuss these males as men, it entirely undermines any point they're making about women's boundaries being encroached upon - which is also a harm, and a significant one.
The reason that I responded to your previous post was the importance of this extreme example.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women.
The research supports this.
Scumbags are scumbags, regardless of gender or trans status. Some of the people you listed are scumbags, and one was a woman receiving an award for women.
If you're going to dissolve into whataboutisms, we're done here.
This is an ideological belief. We can also accurately describe them as women who want to be men, and men who want to be women.
Of the three examples we're discussing:
* one raped a woman using his penis - this is what men do, not women
* one tried to get women to touch his male genitals - again, the behavior of a man
* one received an accolade as if he's a woman - but spent most of his life making a highly successful career as a man, using his male privilege to its fullest extent
Can you see why people may prefer to refer to these three as men, not women?
See? :)
More probably it's just a man bringing his fetish to work and expecting everyone to comply, as is the zeitgeist of today.
Come on, do you really believe this is anything other than the usual trolling that goes on over there: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FdXO_XkXgAsIMFy?format=jpg&name=...
By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace.
Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?
It goes against the essence of socialism and communism.
I know who TERF non-socialist Meghan Murphy is. You can see here that she is not a leftist: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/08/why-i-left-the-left...
She keeps saying she is. She doesn't understand (I mean I'm sure she does, but she's a lying bigot) that socialism and all the wonders of it don't work if youre being a SWERF and TERF. Things don't work that way. You have to want better conditions for every one. Otherwise...how are we giving people equal chances to succeed?
I think the problem is the vast majority of people have no clue what socialism is. Most people have read no socialist texts, but are inundated with right wing and capitalistic propaganda all the time.
tldr: SWERFs and TERFs are not leftists. Like how people like Jordan Peterson (before), Tim Pool, Dave Rubin are all right wingers through and through, but keep pretending they are centrists. You have to act the act. Not just talk. This applies to Meghan Murphy too.
I have spent dozens and dozens and dozens of hours getting into TERFs. Radical feminism didn't originate on the political right, but at this point trans people are dying and in danger. This is abundantly clear to any dyed-in-the-wool socialists in the 2020s. Even if it wasn't clear decades ago. Or even a decade ago.
Unfortunately you showed your true colors deadnaming Jessica and using the incorrect pronouns.
Here's an insightful article she wrote some years ago that dives further into this problem much of "the left" has, framed around their celebration of the prostitution of women: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2011/11/07/why-does-the-left....
She writes:
"While I have long been a supporter of labour rights, of unions, and have counted myself as a fighting member of the working class who has waivered somewhere between socialism and Marxism from the moment I understood the concept of class struggle, I've found myself suddenly misaligned with some of those with whom I share my end of the political spectrum."
"These are the people I vote for. They represent my interests and ideologies and yet, when it comes to the issue of prostitution, it feels as though we've been pitted against one another."
"On one hand there seems to be a distinct lack of class analysis – we forget that there are reasons that some women are prostituted while others are not, that some women have a 'choice' while others do not. On the other, because decriminalization has, in part, been framed as a labour issue (i.e. that this is a job like any other and, therefore, should be treated in the same way any other service sector job is, in terms of laws), the gender and race factors fall to the wayside and we forget that prostitution impacts women and, in particular, racialized women in an inordinate way."
And:
"The reason for a man to buy sex from a woman is, without a doubt, because he desires pleasure without having to give anything in return. This is a male-centered purchase. If we are to define sex as something pleasurable for both parties then how on earth can we define prostitution as sex work? There is something decidedly unprogressive about calling something 'sex' when the act is, in fact, solely about providing pleasure for one party (the male party) without any regard for the woman with whom you are engaging in this supposed 'sex' with. Doesn't this defy the whole enthusiastic consent model?"
"While I certainly support human rights and worker rights, I also support women's rights and believe that, as a feminist, I cannot and will not work towards normalizing the idea that women can and should be bought and sold. I certainly will not promote this as part of my progressive politics."
And much more - the whole article is very much worth reading. Do you not agree that she makes many thoughtful and well-considered points?
The fundamental problem is that within many leftist groups, there is a huge blind spot when it comes to women's issues. It should not be too much to ask that women be spared from male sexual violence, and women be permitted female-only safe spaces away from men.
Like how Tim Pool and his sycophants say he’s a [classic] liberal. As if that means anything to Americans besides code for right-wing. Obviously right wingers can be liberals. Many are. Any one with a nuanced understanding of politics knows that.
Edit: Hilarious. You responded the way you did completely ignoring me having already done the Tim Pool analogy. You’re still going at it Again, have you personally read any socialist or communist or leftist texts? If so, what? It would be embarrassing and shameful for me to be an adult and spout off about different political ideologies without having read up on them.
Please cite some left and right wing texts you have read and understood. Please explain why class solidarity excluding trans and sex workers is still leftist. Write in your own words so I know you understand in-depth nuanced politics and can accept you’re right and I’m wrong.
I wrote my comments to help people reading see the truth. I’m sure with your swagger you will respond in good faith.
Evidence Meghan identifies with ERFs: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2022/12/27/2022-the-year-ter....
