I've seen people here say, "this is normal" and "the FBI is making no threats, so no big deal." That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding. I've seen other comments "it didn't happen that often, only once a week," it should have never happened at all. Unless there is something that is a threat to an investigation, jury identity, literally against federal law, etc...the FBI has absolutely no business doing this. I'm baffled it has any sort of support.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
How exactly does the FBI asking a private sector company to take down posts violate this amendment?
Edit: Here’s a link with some relevant case law. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Disagree with the established precedent if you want, but if you do, I’d recommend picking a different battleground than whatever this Twitter Files fiasco is. This stuff isn’t even on the questionable end of the spectrum.
Do you believe freedom of speech applies to foreign governments?
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/160385966043116748...
How benevolent of the fbi to be making sure twitters users are compliant with twitters TOS! What a nice federal agency, making twitters moderation so much easier!
"They could sue if they don't want to do it" does not make the request legal.
https://twitter.com/aclu/status/1587198479608303622
What's shocking is that people's perceptions of what's legal have changed so dramatically in just a few years. I can't imagine anyone making these arguments in 2005. It seems some powerful interests have been able to successfully co-opt SV companies and change the entire public conversation about what the First Amendment means. I would like to know a lot more about what's going on here. I don't think the same tired arguments about "disinformation" and "social harmony" that have been trotted out for centuries against free speech have suddenly gained all this credence by accident.
In our system, law including the Constitution is interpreted by the judiciary. You could as well ask "where is the Miranda warning in the Bill of Rights?"
The actual precedents around "jawboning" are murky and contradictory, but it's well-established that the government can step over the line in violating constitutionally protected rights via informal coercion.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...
It seems to me rather that all these folks shocked to hear this stuff just haven’t been paying attention to either their high school civics course or to current events of the last 20 years.
You actually think the FBI doesn’t report content? Obviously they do.
You don’t think the FBI gets a privileged reporting line over newuser1848391? Obviously they do.
You don’t think Twitter regularly gets content moderation requests, from governments or elsewhere, that they simply decline? Obviously they do.
And you don’t think they sometimes get content moderation requests from governments or elsewhere that they oblige? Obviously they do.
Here’s a good overview of relevant case law: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
Will you also be surprised to hear that almost all private companies can (and many will) simply choose to hand over your private data to the government upon warrantless request?
Nor is it news to me that companies are increasingly voluntarily sharing vast amounts of data with the government, to the point that the surveillance state we feared has come to pass as a corporate-state partnership.
What I’m surprised about is the increasing number of people who see it as normal and acceptable, or choose to dismiss it as “oh, this has been happening.” Yeah, that doesn’t make it okay.
So long as there’s no coercion it’s completely legal. Not considered a controversial topic.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...
There are lots of dangers with this pattern but this is simply an extremely extremely poor case to try to take up the fight on.
I'd prefer to see the FBI acting in a passive role, here, rather than a proactive one. Meaning, they act more in response to people reporting social media behavior, instead of creating their own missions, so to speak.
One of the problems with this sort of governmental creep, is once it happens it's nearly impossible to take it back - look at the Patriot act/Homeland security, for example, or the god-awful and useless TSA. It's very easy to imagine this social media task force growing into another branch, and, as with all of these agencies, the Big Brother potential is a scary one.
Your whole argument is just "sure this is reasonable now but what if there were 8000 agents online and they could extraordinary rendition you". 80 agents for the whole country is not absurd. That's less than 2 per state.
I'm inclined to think that anything that went from the FBI to Twitter went through Twitter's Legal Department, and at least one person signed off—which, given the rebuffs of more public attempts, seems like anything signed off on was done in good faith. So in my mind the problem isn't Twitter, it's the FBI. To me it's the framing (which was always going to be problematic, it's Matt Taibbi).
And to be clear, I think one isn't paying attention if they try to lay blame at the feet of any one administration for this, this is a long-standing issue originating inside the FBI.
Of course they do, if that speech would likely incite or produce imminent lawless action. IDK if what they were flagging all meets that standard (some of the examples in the thread seem like a stretch to me, but then again they're obviously supposed to), but I think if we're gonna discuss 1A we should actually understand it.
People with poor information diets hear the FBI is involved with Twitter and immediately think it has something to do with red team blue team politics. These are the people the Twitter Files content is produced for. It's written vaguely enough to give potato chip peddlers creative license, so they can monetize attention.
Why would we be wasting government resources alerting private companies of their terms of service anyway?
Also don’t think it’s a waste to try to prevent ISIS recruiting material from reaching more confused and angry young men.
Both are legal though!
Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this thread had anything to do with terrorism, but that fear is still guiding many people's responses.
Imagine if the FBI came to your house and asked you to take down a sign in your front yard.
The 14th amendment significantly expanded the reach of constitutional protections, primarily to require all government to comply.
2:
Did Congress pass a law authorizing the FBI to snoop on social media and use private companies to censor speach? No? Then by what authority was the FBI doing this?
The root of the FBIs authority is in law passed by Congress.
So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
I don’t see any sign they resisted or even wanted to resist. That’s not a first amendment issue.
You can make an argument that the FBI should not be doing that, but no laws were broken. Also most of this was under the Trump administration.
Lastly.. Twitter is a private walled garden. It is not a free speech zone. It wasn’t before Musk bought it and it isn’t now and it never will be.
Let met assure you that in St. Petersburg they are working hard and those in Moscow don't complain about the price of steering elections. I invite you to look up the cost of a MiG vs some click farms, alt right bots and blogs.
When I say weapons, you think about rockets. The advantage of the Kremlin is they can use weapons you don't recognize as such. You are even pleading to give them free reign to overthrow democracy.
The fact that the government has to plead with an american corporate to not let other nations fuck things up even more than where you are collectively now, might give you a second thought.
FWIW, to appease the cowardly-downvote brigade, I personally believe the concept of a penumbra is valid and important. But the world doesn't always bend to my will. Merely invoking the concept without considering current context is weak because it won't convince anyone of anything. If you want to make an argument based on that, you'll have to put in a bit more effort than just pasting a link.
People are ghost banned for poor language and insults. You have to imagine that Twitter is generally not very permissive based on how they treat average users. Many of the #NAFO folks are shadow banned.
This whole spectacle seems like a giant straw man in the making. The people that ran Twitter set it up based on their own belief of what is acceptable and there is nothing wrong with that.
There is no real oversight at an investigation or agent level since the FBI does not police itself. Few other agencies have the ability to review the FBI and the DOJ often fails to do this as well, they are all part of the same family.
Congress has oversight but that is more of an institutional oversight and not down to the agents themselves.
And it's basically a fact that all law enforcement is slow or almost never holds itself accountable for anything. This is even more true with a quasi international intelligence agency that the FBI has become.
The FBI has always had a unique role in the U.S., and it is disturbing to see corruption hiding behind the political division.
The left historically had many problems with the FBI. The history there is clear. The FBI had historically been a conservative type of institution and was often well regarded by the right. This seems to have flipped lately and I wish people could put all of that to the side and take a rational view of information released even in the Twitter files and things like the MLK Tapes podcast.
If you think that men in black suits who can put you in jail for simply lying to them or obstructing them then you are vey naive.
And that's not even considering all the trouble the DOJ can put organisations through even though they committed no crime.
Just their reputation and power is enough to apply pressure.
Its comical that people believe Musk is promoting free speech or anything of the sort. Most of everything he does online is antics to draw attention in some way that benefits him, go look at the SEC for details around that with Musk.
I would make a bet one of his next options is to saddle Twitter with more debt as it approaches bankruptcy. Or give insider info to his investors ahead of his next Tesla sell-off so they can recoup their losses with Twitter.
Do we know this for a fact? The only way to find this out is to test it in courts. There could be executive orders involved, the Patriot Act or related acts, or simply a "state of emergency" or two declarations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Open:
"Now, Therefore, I, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code."
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD...
Also, please read the guidelines about low-effort comments.
If the police ask you to do something, do you usually feel generally obligated to comply?
What about an even more powerful organization that can and do prosecute people for simply lying or obstructing?
This is seriously some hitleresque reichstag fire stuff. The FBi manufactures a fake domestic terrorism crisis and uses it to justify their further expansion of power.
Uh, no? I'm pretty sure every American schoolchild is educated on his or her rights under the Constitution. It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights.
So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
NYT has published data about the growth of CSAM due to tech companies. [2]
Would you engage with the point of my comment if I called the domestic terrorism non-linear growth, and the CSAM growth exponential?
edit: politeness
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/evolution-domestic-terrorism
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
The citizens of a democracy who have full political rights and whose government is not allowed to do anything at all without our approval.
Really? I thought you were restricted to voting for your representatives?
Russian disinformation operations are exactly as effective and competent as the rest of the Russian government, which can't even win a war against Ukraine. Its not remotely scary.
This comment also totally ignores the fact that the “Twitter files” have also contributed to the realization that these companies are riddled with ex-FBI and other government employees who were partly responsible for responding to these requests, let alone the idea of corporate employees toadying up to the government security state is incompatible with democracy whether or not someone could hypothetically sue.
Also, it’s great to hear my duty is to sue the government if it does wrong. That’s true. That also works out very badly for people all the time and entails spending a lot of money and years of your life on an uncertain outcome.
These stories are additional proof the FBI needs huge reforms and mass layoffs. It’s still the agency of J Edgar Hoover, who to this day was in charge for nearly half its existence. But the culture of these tech companies is also extremely concerning.
And even moreso, as I said in my original comment (and which you misunderstood even in your response), the shocking part is that people think this is fine, and nobody is asking who and what has caused such a massive shift in American beliefs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/trump-t...
To the extent that "informal coercion" could be problematic. This is pretty standard practice for most politicians of course and I think we all know where all those "Free Speech" proponents that are worried that Twitter was "informally coerced by FBI's emails" stood on this, when Trump was constantly threatening Twitter.
What evidence do you have of “a massive shift?” Because on my side there’s 200 years of case law that all pretty much concurs on every single instance of this happening.
Yes I do think it’s fine that our security apparatus attempts to maintain security within the confines of legislated and adjudicated law and that private corporations are able - both in theory and in practice - to resist unlawful pressure to control information. “Checks and balances” is a state of tension. Party X requests, Party Y denies, Party Z adjudicates. That’s how it works.
This is factually not true at all: https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/politics/poll-constitution/in... https://thenewamerican.com/poll-most-americans-dont-know-bil...
People talk to the police and incriminate themselves all the time. This has been a front-line of civil rights activists for decades now. What are you even talking about?
> It's not unusual at all for police to pull people over for minor infractions and assert they have the ability to search their cars, and for people who know their rights to decline said search, and for everyone to go on their merry way. If the cop chooses to force a search anyway, it's not unusual at all for them to get sued and for all evidence collected to be deemed inadmissible. This is all, again, extremely well established.
"Not unusual" is a very subjective term and doesn't mean anything at all. And it is now confirmed that Twitter had daily meetings and contacts with the FBI/DHS, which means they did talk to federal law enforcement. There is no reason to make this statement is absurd knowing that they did talk...
> Twitter surely has an army of extremely capable and well-paid lawyers who know very well which requests they have a right to decline. They've got to be more legally equipped than your average 9th grader.
See the links above. Also Twitter is not a person and this does not apply to most employees and moderators. And the execs who knew what they were doing and wouldn't have done it if it weren't in their interest of those of the company. That's where the de facto coercion comes in. The DOJ coming for the Twitter "asking" or "indicating" that they do not approve some content is an undue pressure in and of itself.
>This is why it's important for people to have an accurate understanding of their rights and their relationship with their government. The position you're taking weakens people's understanding of their rights. So let it be known for any future operators of social media networks: the US government cannot coerce you – even implicitly – to remove legal content from your website. If they do, decline and let them bring you to court, hit up the ACLU to represent you, and sue the fucking daylights out of the US Government. It's your right and your duty!
Okay Mr. Goodman, at this point you're just grandstanding.
https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-offenders-united...
Yes, they did talk of their own volition. As they are free (under their 1st Amendment rights) to do. We have no reason to suspect that they’ve been coerced except for the fact that you disagree with the choice they made! They on the other hand were surely aware of their rights when they chose to talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Since then, Apple has stepped up their end to end encryption stance, which seems like the opposite of what you’re implying.
And yes, this definitional/access tension always exists when taking political stances that go against the entrenched power structure. Try to get an antiwar opinion broadcast in 2003 - music DJ's weren't even allowed to play songs whose lyrics might hint that war in general might be a bad thing. Dealing with this is just a completely new experience for those on the right that have gone from being conservative (ie generally supportive of the incumbent power structure and institutions) to revolutionary/reactionary and directly against the status quo power structure.
Social mass media, like all mass media, is now controlled by big capital (as was inevitable), with varying degrees of the individual employees adding some grassroots slant. Focusing on the slight individual flavor and ignoring the overriding power dynamic is just falling into the same old disempowering partisan trap.
This is only confusing starting from your own incorrect premise.
Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
Note however the government is free to ask Twitter to carry people’s speech, as Trump did almost daily for 4+ years whining about so and so getting banned or de-boosted etc.
> Or put another way: the government cannot coerce Twitter or any other platform to carry someone else’s speech.
You're making a straw man that's not what I said...
The government can't ask or suggest or apply undue pressure to Twitter to ban content. Social media has been sued for this successfully to get people unbanned.
The Twitter files are not even about Twitter being coerced to put things on their site. What are you even talking about?
At least that’s how it works under US law. I get the impression you’re not so familiar with American law though?
Yes they can ask and suggest removal. They cannot coerce but we have no reason to believe they did. I already linked to a long list of case law establishing this. Have a good rest of your weekend!
Honestly it’s not very fruitful arguing this stuff with someone who clearly doesn’t understand the basics of the American system. There are plenty of resources online to learn about all this stuff if you’re interested.
But it doesn't outrage you because you're in agreement with the shit they're shoveling.
Instead it feels like vapid virtue signaling, especially as Musk is doing far more to fight CSAM than the previous owners. Also, all the FBI censorship in the Twitter files dump had nothing to do with CSAM.
Anyways, no, your CSIS link doesn't even support the notion of super linear growth. And, if the FBI is inflating domestic terrorism numbers, what other agencies are doing the same?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-fbi-agents-pushed-to-f...
"The FBI leadership’s “demand for [w]hite supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of [w]hite supremacy,” one agent told the Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate [w]hite supremacists than we can actually find.”
The FBI brass has directed the bureau’s investigative efforts primarily toward domestic extremism cases, especially those with racial components, the agent said. The agent suggested that the push is so forceful that otherwise legal activities are sometimes swept up in the FBI’s scrutiny of certain actions for a potential extremist link.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”"
These reports really should disturb you and other readers, that law enforcement agents are being incentivized to act deceitfully on behalf of Partisan politics and as an excuse to broaden their power and influence.
I think what the comment above is saying is that it's not about whether or not speech on Twitter is protected. It's that the government isn't supposed to act to restrict speech in any manner that doesn't cross the lines he listed.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was a big court case because Trump was hiding critical responses to his tweets on Twitter. The judge ruled that Trump violated the 1st amendment even though Twitter is a private company ("private property"?).
This is because the 1st amendment not only protects speech, it restricts government attempts to control speech (or at least that's the argument that would be made).
Though having the FBI and Twitter policy people being in such close communication must be eyebrow raising at least. And it a little bizarre honestly.
I have no idea why people like yourself try to twist the argument. Also, there is a thing like "principles" which aren't encoded into law but are encoded into society and makes it work quite well, which includes free speech. So, I can believe a platform should have the maximum amount of free speech possible...and that is not the same as saying it has or needs 1st Amendment protections.
For the amount of backlash HN gives to private companies for harvesting private data and handing it over to government...there are SUPRISING amounts of people here defending the government in coercing on this. Baffling.
Why would your theory about this be at all relevant when we have direct evidence (original emails, etc.) that the opposite is true, that there was no intermediation or oversight by Twitter legal in takedown requests?
I'm quite suspicious of the large amount of anti Elon propaganda going around. Especially on this platform where comments are usually more measured. It just looks different to normal and it has my Spidey senses tingling.
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.
I am a former Tesla fan and remain a SpaceX fan. I hold Tesla stock and I would buy SpaceX stock in a hot minute if I could. And I credit Musk in no small part with making both companies what they are today, the good and the bad, although not nearly as much as Musk credits Musk.
And yet with all of that, I still think he's gone off the deep end. I've voted against him as CEO in the past several shareholders' votes. Defending his recent actions and attitudes at this point is an increasingly untenable position.
If you want to stand in his corner, I suppose that's your choice, but being critical of him is the far more defensible position. Claiming that those who do are all sock puppets is frankly disingenuous.
Yes, yes they do.
"That viewpoint is very problematic and has a fundamental lack of understanding about how federal agencies coerce private companies to do their bidding."
What evidence of coercion is there?
Yeah there’s plenty to critique of FBI, but this is a profoundly weak case.
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16048884298162094...
In fact, most of the comments in support of Twitter and the FBI throughout these threads are pretty decisively debunked in the continued reports.
