Judge Orders Twitter to Unmask FBI Impersonator Who Set Off Seth Rich Conspiracy

Not talking about Twitter here - the individual may not be American (America - the new Rome.)

1) The Twitter user isn't charged with anything, so no one is trying to restrict their speech.

2) Anonymous speech isn't the same as free speech

3) This is a civil suit. Civil suits have always been able to compel the disclosure of some private information in some circumstances.

People seriously need to get this pounded into their heads. Read the bill of rights. You do not have a right to free speech on private platforms.

Twitter is the equivalent of you arguing with me in my house. I can tell you to be quiet or I’ll kick you out of my house. You have no free speech rights in private spaces. Twitter is a private company. You have no free speech rights on their platform.

You should probably look at the historical cases about harm and speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

>The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's criminal conviction was constitutional. The statute only applied to successful obstructions of the draft, but common-law precedents allowed prosecution for attempts that were dangerously close to success. Attempts made by speech or writing could be punished like other attempted crimes; the First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging men to resist induction, because, "when a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."[7] In other words, the court held, the circumstances of wartime allow greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowed during peacetime, if only because new and greater dangers are present.

Reminder that the US has been at war since 2001.

The harm caused by whoever is the perpetrator of the moral panic of the moment always pales in comparison to the harm caused by the response to it.

Let a thousand Russian bots post on facebook, it will cause less damage to society than a single deleted post.

Fundamental rights are very different from (for example) contract law where duties are often somewhat connected to each other.

No. You are operating under an extremely confused and muddled understanding of the law and its purpose. The First Amendment and associated case law is an actual specific legal thing, and is not necessarily the same as broader subjective feelings "free speech". Specifically, it applies exclusively to the government, not the people. From a legal point of view, the purpose of freedom of speech and freedom of association is to allow the public at large to sort out what ideas and information is useful within extremely loose boundaries rather then the government using its monopoly on physical force to impose it. Part of that freedom is naturally social and economic consequences (as opposed to physical consequences): you have the "right to generally say what you wish" but other people by the same token have the right to have nothing to do with you, and to refuse to help you if they think you are wrong.

So no, like most of the times people use "hypocrisy" on the internet you've gotten it wrong. There is nothing hypocritical in the stance you describe, because the United States Government and private actors are not legally equivalent. The USG is both empowered to do things private actors may not, and forbidden from doing things that private actors can. Twitter may assert its rights to associate with whom it pleases. Under different law (the same that protects Hacker News and every other US-based user content site in existence), Section 230 of the CDA, Twitter is also empowered to moderate as it wishes to the best of its abilities without having to be 100% perfect without incurring liability rather then being forced to choose between full common carrier or full publisher. It could also voluntarily cooperate, within its various contracts and law. But the USG doesn't get to do the same.

And rightfully so.

I don't think that's a common interpretation of how the law works. The First Amendment is generally held to protect you from government restraint or retaliation, but not private restraint or retaliation, and having retaliated against someone for speech you find objectionable is not generally held to remove your Constitutional rights.

Even ignoring the other arguments made about companies versus the government, I don't think the right to be anonymous is from the First Amendment. Most often the Fourth Amendment is cited as the basis; although it's not as explicit as the First Amendment is about the protection of speech, the Ninth Amendment does say that rights don't have to be explicitly enumerated.

Key elements of it were false, though. The conspiracy theory largely focused on his “assassination” by being shot in the head, when in reality he was shot twice in the back. There was also physical evidence of an altercation, suggesting robbery. The idea that a trained assassin would first try to fistfight the target and then shoot is pretty absurd.

Later, the public found out that hackers tied to Russian intelligence hacked the DNC, which further refuted the conspiracy theory. There’s a lot out there that fundamentally contradicts the conspiracy theory.

"...we rate Zero Hedge an extreme right biased conspiracy website based on the promotion of false/misleading/debunked information that routinely denigrates the left." https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/zero-hedge/

This conclusion is supported by the most highly paid experts including Bill Gates, his wife Melinda and Mr Fuzzballs; their trusted family cat. The evidence is absolutely overwhelming and undeniable.

It should also be pointed out that self-strangulation inside a prison cell using a piece of clothing which bears no trace of DNA and resulting in 2 broken neck bones while the security cameras are off and all the guards are asleep just as you're about to testify in an important high-profile case is the preferred suicide method for would-be whistle-blowers.

I used to drive late at night and occasionally would catch an episode of Coast to Coast (a conspiracy radio show). It felt like a kind of performance art where callers would world-build together, each adding or changing or clarifying another bit. The end result was a complicated parallel world of psychics and aliens and illuminati woven together into a kind of cohesive narrative.

This 'FBI Impersonator' was just one individual adding to the existing conspiratorial narrative that Seth Rich was killed by Democrats because he knew too much.

The news source (Fox) had a fair idea it wasn't real.

To quote the Judge's order[1], quoting the reporters on the story: "It's a fake for sure.[...] wondering why he's passed a fake document"

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7223134-ORDER-RICH.h...

The Twitter account may be the only way to identify him ... assuming he didn’t take basic precautions.

Well, first of all, that's not what's happening here. But, er, why do you think it shouldn't prosecuted? Much more minor fraud than this is routinely prosecuted.

Regardless of whether in actual fact the murder has anything to do with the leaks, the claims that an absence of evidence is evidence of absence serve only to promote an evil purpose. We will likely never know the truth, and the narrative that this couldn't possibly be related to the leaks is a major part of why. The answer to cui bono [from the narrative] is therefore "the murderer, whoever that is, regardless of whether there is in fact a conspiracy". Why then do so many support the narrative?! Why has the murderer been deemed "part of our tribe" and thus worthy of plot armor, as it were?!

It doesn't matter if conspiracy theorists get upset, many of them were convinced that there was a child sex dungeon in a pizza shop. If everybody started basing their actions on trying not to upset conspiracy theorists, society would completely stop functioning.

You can't win with conspiracy theorists.

I don't know how to cope with the knowledge that the system is so fundamentally broken that even simple facts are no longer able to be agreed upon. How can complex problems be addressed when truth is perceived to be entirely subjective?

And, it goes to Fox being a non-journalist non-news agency which should be de-listed in any structural sense, since they are incapable of displaying what true journalism is.

You seem to want to address the second. No problem, but I don't think that invalidates the first. I want to know who this is. I want to know who Q is. I want to know who the White House Deep Throat is. I am tired of anonymous sources.

"Learning the identity of @whysprtech is necessary in order to confirm that @whysprtech was not in fact a FBI 'insider' or otherwise someone who had access to non-public FBI material," Benedict Hu wrote in a filing."