zlacker

When people become a sworn officer of the FBI or any other federal LEO officer, they take an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. When instead of upholding the Constitution, they ask a private company to violate people's first ammendment rights, that is an abuse of power.

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.

>>tomoha+(OP)
At no point did the FBI order that tweets be taken down.

>>tomoha+(OP)
Not a violation of free speech to tell Twitter to take down illegal content.

>>roflye+81
What was illegal about the NYPost breaking a story about content found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop?

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?

>>tomoha+G1
> What was illegal about the NYPost breaking a story about content found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop?

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"

>>sleepy+G
Yeah, so it seems looking at the emails, which is the only piece of information we are allowed to see.

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?

>>oceanp+M3
If they had better they would definitely be showing it. So this is what there is.

>>roflye+81
Twitter took stuff down at the government's request even though they couldn't find a violation of their own ToS, let alone determine that things were illegal.

>>ceejay+z2
They were replying to a comment that the FBI asked twitter to remove illegal content. So to answer your question, the parent post said it was illegal.

>>tomoha+(OP)
People don't have a constitutional right to post on Twitter.

>>oceanp+M3
"The evidence doesn't show malfeasance, but if you imagine other evidence that does show malfeasance, that would be bad" is not a compelling argument in any situation.

>>kodyo+H5
Can you cite an example of that? I've read all of the threads so far and none of them demonstrate an account being taken down at the government's request.

>>tomoha+G1
Taibbi explicitly said that the FBI did not request action be taken on the Hunter Biden story.

>>kQq9oH+ab
Did the fbi ask Twitter to ban the by post story? I haven’t seen that evidence.

>>ceejay+z2
That sort of wording makes it worse, IMO.

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?

>>djur+6e
The document dump contains evidence of government agents telling Twitter to "look into" things and Twitter responding that they "handled" it.

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.

>>djur+6e
I mean, Twitter was so accomodating of warrantless government requests that they built a friggin portal for government agents to submit them. Does that not set off any alarm bells?

>>kodyo+Ph
This is incorrect. The "handled" response you're referring to was regarding a list of links to leaked nudes of Hunter Biden reported by the Biden campaign:

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.

>>kodyo+H5
Not that I saw... where did you see that?

>>lp0_on+Hg
I think it's perfectly fine for any agency to ask any platform to remove content. Keyword: ASK.

You can say no to these requests. Possibly, twitter did.