Big Tech/Social Media Censorship. Musk: Blackmailing Advertisers Can ***** Off.

[ChiGoose]

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. 

[B-Man]

 

 

Yep.

 

The more ex-FBI employees hired as Twitter employees only proves that they would have to follow the letter of the law.

 

Said nobody with 3 digits in their IQ.

 

 

[B-Man]

 

 

 

 

[Orlando Tim]

41 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

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 find it odd that you would argue about the definition of word rather than rather or not it is an appropriate action, but since you can't defend the action you have to be pedantic. 

[nedboy7]

So Jan 6th was a non issue but the Twitter files are.  Can’t make this crap up. 

[ChiGoose]

10 minutes ago, Orlando Tim said:

I find it odd that you would argue about the definition of word rather than rather or not it is an appropriate action, but since you can't defend the action you have to be pedantic. 

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. 

[B-Man]

 

For our local 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JaCrispy]

40 minutes ago, nedboy7 said:

So Jan 6th was a non issue but the Twitter files are.  Can’t make this crap up. 

No, they are both issues- just like the 2020 riots were as well…👍

 

 

Edited December 17, 2022 by JaCrispy

[ChiGoose]

45 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

For our local 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

[nedboy7]

40 minutes ago, JaCrispy said:

No, they are both issues- just like the 2020 riots were as well…👍

 

 

 

Have you read Matt Taibbi's 2017 book "Insane Clown President"?  Pretty good read. 

Twitter, like all media, being biased is not really shocking news.  To me at least.  Matt talks about media across the board being in contact with the feds.  He doesn't suggest twitter is corrupt while foxnews is real. 

[unbillievable]

A single social media platform moves towards the middle from the far left and the internet goes crazy.

 

 

[Orlando Tim]

4 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

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. 

And once again your pedantic argument about whether it is coercion vs whether it ethical and moral is telling. 

[ChiGoose]

5 hours ago, Orlando Tim said:

And once again your pedantic argument about whether it is coercion vs whether it ethical and moral is telling. 

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. 

Edited December 18, 2022 by ChiGoose

[Orlando Tim]

7 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

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. 

A few simple questions that I am hoping you will answer directly and not like a lawyer who wants to avoid the issue at hand- was the FBI correct to state that Hunters laptop was Russian Disinformation? And should it be "flagging" social media posts that they disagree with? 

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

19 hours ago, B-Man said:

 

 

Yep.

 

The more ex-FBI employees hired as Twitter employees only proves that they would have to follow the letter of the law.

 

Said nobody with 3 digits in their IQ.

 

 

B, I’d be much more comfortable if the FBI involvement in guiding social media platforms was widely reported upon prior to all this hand-wringing on journos earning suspensions.  It seems at least as big a story, if not more, that would be a matter of public interest. 

[All_Pro_Bills]

17 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

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.

I don't disagree.  But IMO that's not what's happening here.  And what business of the FBI or any other government agency to determine for me and everyone else what is information and what is disinformation?  And how do they really know?  You suggest the process of letting the companies decide.  I'll take it a step further.  Why not let the users decide?  

 

Let's be real.  The goal of these operations isn't to protect the public from consuming or being influenced by "bad" information.  The goal of all these functionaries embedded in companies like Twitter is to protect the ability of official sources to communicate whatever they want and protect them from scrutiny.  That's the task all these former FBI guys were assigned.   

[Doc]

The FBI lied about the laptop being Russian disinformation when they knew it wasn't.  That's corruption and needs to be investigated fully by the House. 

[ChiGoose]

53 minutes ago, Orlando Tim said:

A few simple questions that I am hoping you will answer directly and not like a lawyer who wants to avoid the issue at hand- was the FBI correct to state that Hunters laptop was Russian Disinformation? And should it be "flagging" social media posts that they disagree with? 

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.”

[Orlando Tim]

10 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

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.”

are you actually arguing the FBI did not know in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was legit?  That the FBI is so incompetent that they went through it and literally thought it was russian disinformation? You seem to fixate on the author putting his name on the article, if I am breaking the news that a man who has a great chance to be president is extraordinarily corrupt I am not rushing to put my name to it. 

[aristocrat]