ChiGoose

Did they? All of the reporting I’ve seen says that the FBI warned of the potential for hacked materials in the lead up to the election but nothing specifically about Hunter Biden. Mark Zuckerberg even went in the Joe Rogan show and said as much. Additionally, one of the FBI agents involved was deposed about this and stated that they didn’t specifically mention Hunter. And that seems not only fine, but the proper thing to do. We had just witnessed a large cyber operation to influence the previous presidential election, it would make sense that it might happen again. As to the laptop story itself, it was sketchy as hell and really looked like a misinfo op. Some blind computer repair guy says Hunter Biden dropped off a computer and never returned to pick it up and it has sketchy stuff on it all right before the election? We wouldn’t believe the same story about Trump’s kids because it seems ludicrous on its face. Turns out, Hunter really is a sleazeball but it was reasonable to be skeptical of the story when it dropped. I think this is a pretty good summary; “The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani’s hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata). The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.”

It’s not pedantic, it’s the entire point. If the FBI suddenly went rogue and requested Twitter review every pro-Trump or pro-Biden post, that would be bad. But from a 1A / user experience, there wouldn’t be much change because Twitter can just decline to do anything about the posts and tell the FBI that it can go pound sand. Let’s look at the Hunter Biden story everyone here loves. If the FBI wanted to keep it from the public, they’d tell the NY Post to take down the actual article. And the NY Post would tell them to eff right off. If the FBI was stupid enough to file charges against them for it, the Post’s lawyers would be laughing their way to the bank as they embarrassed the FBI in every court filing and proceeding. Instead, the FBI warned companies to be on the lookout for election misinformation. Then the NY Post story drops. Twitter and Facebook think it looks suspicious and so they enact their different moderation policies: Facebook allows the link to get posted but they don’t boost it through their algorithm while it’s under review. Twitter straight up blocks it while it’s being reviewed. If the FBI was really in control and acting like everyone here seems to think they act, they would have nuked the NY Post story itself so nobody could see it. That didn’t happen. It literally couldn’t happen even if they tried. The story stayed up and different companies treated it differently. Because, for the 1,000,000th time, the FBI isn’t forcing anyone to do anything here. Ultimately, the actions by Twitter and Facebook had the opposite effect than they intended. The traffic to the story took off not when it dropped, but when these sites enacted their moderation policies on it. Classic Streisand Effect. It would be bad for the FBI to flag things for purely political reasons, but as I’ve pointed out, it ultimately wouldn’t do much. Some of the things it flagged seem dumb, like the person who was obviously joking saying they were an election official who would add more Dem ballots to the count. I saw that the FBI flagged it and that seems kinda dumb. Then again, maybe the FBI was worried that people who were dumb enough to believe the 2020 election was stolen would be dumb enough to believe that the post wasn’t a joke. Of course, it was ultimately up to Twitter, not the FBI, to decide what to do with it.

Just so it’s clear: these takes are factually incorrect. It is perfectly legal for the FBI to flag potential issues to private companies and it’s done routinely. The companies themselves can decide what to do about it.

Several people have been posting that the FBI coerced Twitter to act. That is factually not true and I have simply been trying to point that out.

Just to state the obvious here: the fact that Twitter employed former FBI people at senior levels means that it almost assuredly knew that the FBI could not force it to remove posts that did not include illegal content.

I draw the line at PII. Plane tail numbers are not PII. The FBI flagging the Hunter Biden laptop was obviously not coercion. Facebook never took the link down. Twitter did. Each company was free to take it as they felt appropriate (did the NY Post ever hide the story?). Coercion is forcing the company to do something by creating a penalty if they don’t. Like shutting the site down or filing charges if it doesn’t remove illegal content. Merely flagging something or requesting it to be taken down is not coercion if the company is free to ignore it. This was reaffirmed in New York Times v. The United States The thing is, I haven’t really weighed in on whether or not the FBI flagging specific items was wrong because we’re still at step one: explaining what coercion actually is. If Twitter thought they had to censor stuff because the FBI asked them to review it, then they had terrible lawyers who weren’t aware of a landmark case on this exact topic.

All I’ve been trying to do is point out that the FBI flagging something is not the same as coercion. If the FBI is flagging things in a way that is inappropriate, Twitter is free to look at that and then take no action. If Twitter removes mundane content that doesn’t violate its TOS then that’s a failure of Twitter’s moderation. If Twitter feels that they have to take something down if the FBI flags it, then Twitter has terrible lawyers. There are good debates to have about how content moderation should work (there’s no one-size-fits-all solution), but saying that Twitter is a subsidiary of the FBI just isn’t backed by any of the facts that have been made public.

The China bot thing was real. Not a straw man. It’s not my fault if people can’t read or fail basic comprehension. I’m just going to continue to point out that nobody has yet to show that the FBI coerced Twitter into doing anything. Not that it’ll matter because the narrative is already set and so they go marching forth with more nonsense.

There has been zero evidence presented that the FBI coerced Twitter into censoring posts. People are looking at very standard interactions between the FBI during the Trump administration asking Twitter to review things and jumping to conclusions that it’s a nefarious censorship plot. It’s the same thing every day here. Someone dies: must have been either the vaccine or Hillary. FBI does literally anything: must be a giant conspiracy by the deep state against my side. Someone loses an election: must have been stolen by the other side. I guess it’s just more fun to believe in baseless evil master plans than to admit that things rarely are that exciting.

So let’s say the FBI identifies a network of nearly 200,000 bots controlled by China to push their propaganda about Taiwan. You are saying it is bad for them to flag that to private companies. I am saying it’s good for them to notify private companies so long as the private companies are free to do with it as they will.

I must have missed where you showed that the FBI coerced Twitter to censor things instead of just flagging items for review.

Hey, if you want to shill for China, that’s on you, buddy. Just don’t expect everyone else to buy it.

I love that this admits that Musk doesn’t care about free speech. I mean, it was obvious form the start, but some Muskateers actually believed it.

1. The Epoch Times is a known fraudulent site. 2. Seth Rich was not killed as part of some big conspiracy. 3. This thread has absolutely nothing to do with Seth Rich. 4. If you’re on this site and ever find yourself agreeing with Big Blitz, are you embarrassed? Or do you just pretend that the fact that they are a moron is inconvenient to the fact that you agree with them when it’s convenient to you?

Honestly, I think Twitter ultimately ends up somewhere near where it was before Musk bought it. It relies on ads for revenue and ad buyers want boring, non-controversial platforms for their ads.

I think you're going out on a bit of limb there. There are very justifiable and even good reasons the FBI, even Trump's FBI, would reach out to a social media company to request they review something. What about when China was using almost 200,000 bot accounts to spread propaganda about Taiwan? Should the FBI have just sat on its hands instead of alerting private companies? The crucial point is: was the social media company coerced by the government to act? As in, if they reviewed the item and left it up, would they be punished? So far, I haven't seen anything that says the answer is "yes". It looks like they flag stuff and Twitter reviews it and comes to their own determination. I fail to see how that is a first amendment issue. It's completely fair to criticize the actions Twitter took, but it's a tremendous leap to say that they are just following the orders of the FBI. I did get a chance to watch the video tonight, thank you for sending it. I independently found Elon's tail number in about 1 minute of googling, none of which involved the guy from ElonJets. But that doesn't matter, because plane tail numbers aren't PII. I am against doxxing. We shouldn't allow the public posting of PII. I'm glad that important people like SCOTUS have security and the guy who threatened Kavanaugh was arrested. But this isn't that, no matter how much people want it to be. It's not the same as posting where his car is. It's not the same as posting where his house is. Planes are heavily regulated airport-to-airport vehicles and the owner of a plane might not be on it for any particular flight. Trying to say it's the same as putting a tracker in their car or posting their home address just isn't convincing. The guy who went after Elon's son (thinking it was Elon) was wrong, but Elon's overreaction to it just proves that one person shouldn't be making these decisions on a whim. @BillStime should be banned for posting this. Jordan Poyer could have intercepted that plane if he had seen this post.

It was a Republican government doing it. A lot of this happened under Trump’s administration. I have not had a chance to watch the video. I’ll get around to it if I can but I’ll stand by drawing a line between PII and non-PII where doxxing is concerned. Especially when that non-PII is easily available elsewhere.

The government flagging items for a social media to review is not censorship if the social media company is free to act on the content as they want with no government coercion (see: the Pentagon Papers). The example of a singular individual having an emotional reaction and using that to change major policies on a whim is maybe a good example of why companies like Twitter tend to have trust and safety departments to handle moderation policies. Tracking of plane tail numbers, even in real time, is not PII and is therefore, not doxxing. That’s why there are several sites that allow you to do it for free.

This is a gross mischaracterization of my position, but that’s par for the course for you. The government coercing a social media company to censor legal content is wrong. The government flagging potential issues to a social media company, with the social media company having the ability to determine if the content warrants action being taken is fine. In fact, in the example I cite previously, it would be a good thing.

So if the FBI identifies bot accounts under the control of China spamming pro-China anti-Taiwan propaganda, they should… do nothing? Just hope that every social media site has the sophistication to identify and deal with it?

Some context if anyone is interested:

The government flagging things for review is fine, and even probably good. Is there evidence that the government coerced Twitter into making a decision against its own policy?

I find it interesting because his purchase of Twitter was both newsworthy and an obviously terrible financial decision from the jump. He promises to be pro-free speech but then just starts banning accounts critical of him. He makes up policy rules on the fly and then punishes those who aren’t immediately compliant, even if the policy is vague or confusing. People applauding him went from this being about free speech, to it being about treating everyone fairly, to it being about showing lefties how they were treated by the previous ownership of Twitter. All in all, my personal experience on Twitter hasn’t changed much. My wife mentioned she’s seeing more right wing accounts on her timeline than she did before but whatever. I just find the whole thing interesting and a bit bizarre. I don’t have a personal vendetta against Musk. I think Teslas are great. SpaceX is cool. I just don’t think he’s some infallible genius at everything and I believe his overpaying for Twitter and actions since becoming the owner support that idea.

Would love to know how many of these were purchased in Riyadh versus the US. Weird that the people screaming about inflation will spend $99 on a JPEG.

I was very skeptical of JB Pritzker originally because super wealthy businessmen don’t have the best track record. But he seemed focused on surrounding himself with the smartest and most talented people he could get and actually listening to them. When he was sworn in as Governor of Illinois, our credit rating was one level above junk status and there were rumors the ratings agencies were mulling putting us through that threshold. Our bill backlog was over $16 billion and the debt service was absolutely out of control because of the high rates that come with such poor credit. Since JB took over, we’ve received the first credit upgrade for the state in 20 years, and then got five more subsequent upgrades. Additionally, the bill backlog has shrunk dramatically (was down to just $3.5 billion at one point), reducing debt servicing costs. I also really like our comptroller, Susana Mendoza, who has been a big part of reducing the backlog and getting our fiscal house back in order. Her ill-fated mayoral run aside (I did some phone banking for her), she’s been an excellent comptroller. Illinois still has a long way to go to fully recover from decades of mismanagement, but it seems like we’re finally headed in the right direction. As a side note, during the recent election there was a joke twitter account proclaiming JB as the heir to Genghis Khan who would unite the Great Lakes under a khanate. It was mostly just silly but it was fun and not only did JB reference it in his acceptance speech, but he personally called the guy behind the account to thank him, saying that the humor was very much enjoyed by him and the campaign staff.