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Comment by ksniwmidjd | Hacker News Reader

We recently learned that Twitter was receiving money from the FBI that enabled the US government to censor users and suppress certain hashtags, etc. But TikTok is seemingly the only one the media is trying to push to get banned. Seems strange. Wish we had an honest media.

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The way that Twitter/FBI relationship has been portrayed by certain people has been dangerously misleading -- don't fall for it. Twitter was compensated for assisting with investigations (e.g. collecting information), which is entirely normal, and has nothing to do with censorship. Don't be a sucker, the people pushing this conspiracy theory are depending on us to not investigate the matter for ourselves and to instead get angry.

Its no conspiracy that the FBI acted to try and delegitimize the Hunter Biden laptop story by warning tech companies (Twitter, Facebook, etc) about a ‘Russian disinformation campaign’. This, of course, was entirely false and no one knew that better than the FBI, as it was the laptop repair shop owner who (legally) possessed the laptop who had directly contacted the FBI first.

And the FBI 100% knew the laptop was genuine. They publicly lied to support an election outcome.

Not only is this not remotely a conspiracy theory, its something that needs to be taken incredibly seriously.

> Twitter was compensated for assisting with investigations (e.g. collecting information), which is entirely normal, and has nothing to do with censorship.

Collecting information about random people _is not_ entirely normal.

Now, if you live in a totalitarian state, it might be.

Really?

Are you suggesting that you would be surprised to find that companies are collecting information about you?

We can need to ban TikTok due to Chinese influence AND can need to fix the fact that the FBI was doing shitty things with Twitter at the same time.

You are not arguing in good faith by framing that as either/or.

The difference between the two problems is quite stark. The ONLY effective hammer that the US has against TikTok is a ban. Against Twitter, there are a range of options that various municipalities, states, etc. can bring to bear.

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