zlacker

For the amount that a police department would try talking to a major social media platform? That's shockingly low to me.

>>jcranm+(OP)
Especially one the size of Twitter, if anything it seems so low that I think they missed whole raft of such communications.

>>jacque+p
Another possibility I considered is if Twitter had been so uncooperative with prior requests that the government stopped bothering sending so many.

>>jcranm+i2
That's a possibility, but unlikely. Twitter execs were probably well aware of the long arm of the law and that their ability to stay in business to a large extent depended on staying on the right side of the line legally. That's precisely why you see them arguing about this to such a degree in these articles, they are well aware of their position vis-a-vis the law.

I've had some contact with the FBI over the years regarding stuff happening on one of my sites and they were - it has to be said - polite and arguing their case quite well, in no way did I feel like figuring out whether if I refused them what the next step would be, it felt like I would be the unreasonable party. But if they had made an unreasonable request I would have told them to fuck off.

>>jacque+p
Not only have they missed a lot, but what they have presented is laughably devoid of context. So a user tweeted "mostly jokes"? What about the exceptions? Ten jokes and a death threat is still a problem. What about the DMs? What about the follow rings, building up social capital (including with jokes) for the accounts that did much worse? What about steganography? It's not like these are obscure tactics in modern disinformation campaigns. They're standard tools of the trade.

It's absurdly easy for Musk and his cronies to cherry-pick which pieces of context they do or do not include, to make any user's behavior seem more benign or nefarious than it really was. Every time they reveal something, we should ask what they're leaving out. Anyone who fails to do so, whether they're a journalist or an HN commenter, is effectively doing Musk's dirty work for free.