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Comment by antiterra | Hacker News Reader

I am someone who didn’t see anything seriously objectionable in the Twitter files, but I do think it raised some questions worth thinking about.

If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.

Could anything be done to reduce the ability of a large organization to extort an online platform into censoring content that complies with their guidelines? Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?

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> I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.

This is possible but I would expect people to look for evidence of it before presenting it as a fact. Something like that would show up in internal communications either directly or as people talking like they didn’t really have a choice, or as a trend of tweets being taken down for reasons which don’t seem warranted when you look at them. The closest we’ve seen to that were things like the guy who was telling Republicans to vote on Wednesday, which is clearly a dumb joke but also something most people aren’t going to shed tears about when made a couple days beforehand.

The US is a limited govt.

No govt agency can do anything for which it isn’t explicitly authorized.

The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies.

If a agent is being paid — with taxpayer dollars - to check on Twitter and give it ‘advice’ on how to run itself, that agent is acting outside the scope of his authority.

It’s an abuse and misuse of power.

It doesn’t matter what the ‘greater good’ is. The FBI’s purpose isn’t to generally look out for the greater good. Rather, it’s to investigate federal crimes. There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’

So, cops are not allowed to do welfare checks because there is no crime of 'dying alone in your house' and there is no explicit authorization for police to enforce wellbeing? Don't be adsurd.

Under the above theory, Federal agents shouldnt. Local/state police have that power (the general police power) Not the federal government.

Cops are agents of their states, and a welfare check on an individual is a very different situation than a check on the welfare of society as a whole. The government doesn't get to decide when society is well, that's for the people to do as a whole.

Yourreasoning is just as arbitrary as just as nonsensical. What is a democracy if not the will of society as a whole? Do you have a different way for society to determine and enforce its needs?

The US Federal Government has only the limited powers granted it by the federal constitution. The States, on the other hand, have general authority… their powers are not limited (except by the specific restrictions set forth in the US Const.) In short, there is a very real and legal and intended difference between FedGov and StateGov. If you don’t like it, change the constitution. But, it’s not matter of opinion… it’s simply the way the USA government is set up. States have ‘general police power’ while the Fed does not.

Excuse me but you did not address my comment, you addressed what you wanted to address and ignored what I said.

Which specific actions do you think the FBI took which aren’t part of their mandate? Please link to the sources for those claims.

You have it backwards.

The Federal Statutes grant specific authority to the FBI. The burden is in the FBI to point to a specific grant of statutory authority to justify any particular action. What federal statute gives the FBI (or any agency) the right to advise, suggest, or even comment on a particular company’s policies? What statute gives the FBI the power to ‘suggest’ certain accounts be blocked?

I note you’re continuing to present vague claims. Can you point to a specific example of something you think they don’t have legal authority for being involved in?

For example, the Twitter Files had a lot of stuff under election misinformation. Since that’s an entire mission, you can argue about effectiveness but it’s not like it’s a stretch:

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...

I would like the FBI to stop school shooters, would-be terrorists, and foreign influence campaigns.

If Elon Musk’s Twitter refuses to help and as a result people die, I want Elon Musk held responsible.

It's not an abuse of power unless the FBI threatens repercussions.

It seems like Twitter was more or less happy to oblige.

I don't see what the hubbub is about.

For all we know it could be "you can play nicely and remove it when we tell you to "look into it", or we will look further into your company"

That's passing into "ignore your lying eyes and read between the lines" territory, which isn't an argument from evidence but an argument from political ideology.

That’s possible but you’d expect to see some sign of it: internal emails or messages, legal advice, etc. when those threats were made or guidelines from the legal department about what things the regular trust and safety people can’t ignore.

What’s telling is that Musk’s people can’t find anything like that. If this was happening you’d think there’d be at least one example where someone is saying they have to yank something even though it’s not in violation of the rules. Instead, what we see is bending over backwards to keep people like Trump or Raichik from having the rules applied to them, with no mention of government pressure to yank them.

No, you wouldn't expect anything like that at all. Nobody passing kindergarten would write down something so blatantly illegal.

First, you’d think the same thing about almost any crime but there’s a long history of that happening.

More importantly, however, as I explained you’d see the presence of that policy even if they managed to keep the conspiracy perfectly. There’d have been cases where something didn’t meet the rules for being banned but someone overruled them to do it anyway, unexplained policy changes following a private meeting, someone setting out hard lines for the moderators, etc. Twitter had a ton of people doing moderation and there’s no way you get that many people to work on a daily basis without stated policies or someone accidentally saying something they knew, or that not a single one of them wouldn’t have gone public or talked to Musk.

Just reaching out in the name of FBI, tacitly threatens repercussions. The government can certainly make life difficult for the most law-abiding company or citizen if you get on the wrong side of it. And everyone knows this.

You have constructed a theory of how government works from whole cloth having nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Limited government means what powers not explicitly granted to government belong to the people. This is to say government can only acquire new powers via legislation or amendment of the constitution it doesn't mean that they are for forbidden from acting beyond the most limited mandate you imagine. No law is therein broken because you feel it's out of scope because the limitation is your invention.

So please tell, by what statute or mandate is FBI helping to enforce twitter's terms of service?

28 USC 531, et seq. sets out the limited authority and mission of the FBI. Ensuring social media platforms adhere to their own policies is outside the scope.

Government officials — at the federal level - have extremely well-defined scopes of authority. They have no general power to do things. If they exceed the scope, they are abusing the power given to them. A govt agency has no authority outside the scope of its enacting statute. That I what I meant by limited. It’s not a ‘made up’ concept. If an agent engages in ANY action outside its authority, it is exceeding its limited authority and acting outside the law. It as an abuse as the agent (or agency as a whole) is doing something ‘under color of law’ that Congress did not permit.

At the local level, there is a concept of ‘general’ police power where the limits of what your local deputy, for instance, can do is a bit more nebulous. But, not at the federal level.

Can you give an example of where it has been found in a court of law that a government agency has exceeded its mandate and been ordered to alter their behavior entirely on that basis and not for instance because its actions violate someone's rights or harm their interests?

”The FBI is not authorized to be ensuring private companies adhere to their policies.”

This is not their goal. It is part of their method.

But not, in the way that it has been done, a legally sanctioned part of their method.

If so, there would be lawsuits. There are none, so let's consider that you are wrong.

> There is no crime in telling people to ‘vote this Wednesday.’ There is no crime of ‘misinformation.’

The Department of Justice would disagree with you:

“Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign” [1]

Some guy tweeted in 2016 encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to ‘Vote from Home’ by sending an SMS to a certain number. For this and other tweets, he was charged with violating 18 USC 241, which prohibits “conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, [..] any person [..] in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States”, where the right in question was the right to vote. With the justice system being as slow as it is, the indictment only happened in 2021 and the case is still pending at the district court level. [2]

His lawyers argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment; this is a novel legal question with no Supreme Court precedent on point. [3]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charg...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59249282/united-states-...

[3] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/douglass-ma...

It's the slightest whiff of a hint of abuse or intimidation but there's no evidence to suggest they ever even threatened retribution for non-compliance. US intelligence agencies have gone after media a handful of times but the courts have been appropriately skeptical of their claims.

And everytime I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.

> I see a slippery slope argument about law enforcement sneaking into quiet corners of private enterprise, I like to remind people that local police shoot people pretty frequently.

Indeed - from the perspective of civil liberties there are many issues which seem more pressing.

> If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.

I've seen this hypothetical raised a lot but I don't find it very compelling. If the post isn't in violation of twitter's TOS then twitter has strong legal protections to deny the request and both sides understand this. Without evidence that the FBI actually pressured twitter to take down non-violating content after it was deemed ok, I don't see the issue.

I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.

"Joseph P. Nacchio (born June 22, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American executive... Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.[1]

He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[2] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.[3] This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion,[4] which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible.[5] " [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

The government proved insider trading.

>I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act.

This is nonsense. In your example the court said "nope" to the defendant trying to push a conspiracy theory which could not possibly have exonerated him.

Here's a decent read on the Nacchio case without weird conspiracy theory bullshit https://truthonthemarket.com/2008/03/31/some-thoughts-on-the...

is it a conspiracy theory because they said it was? you don't know and neither do I, it does sound like he thought that asking the NSA for what he has a right to ask for, a warrant to give up data, wouldn't impact his chances of renewing government contracts, but it seems it did and they were dropped and the stock plummeted. Could be the other way around and he expected it and did commit fraud, I don't know and won't pretend to not be biased against the NSA, but the retaliation from them is pretty convenient in either case. The concept of being able to exclude evidence just because "natsec might be at risk" is also absurd to me, instead of taking the trial to a judge with clearance or something.

The uncertainty of the sentence aside we can zoom out and see that asking to follow legal processes that every single one of those companies should be following in the first place can very well cause retaliation from the NSA, so all else aside invoking legal protections sure does seem to be bad for companies.

It's a conspiracy theory because Nacchio was actually guilty of insider trading regardless of what the NSA may have done.

From the court decision which you didn't bother to read:

>Even if the classified information were presented and established what he said it would, it could not exonerate Mr. Nacchio as he claims. Essentially, Mr. Nacchio argued that undisclosed positive information can be used as a defense to a charge of trading on undisclosed negative information. We disagree. … If an insider trades on the basis of his perception of the net effect of two bits of material undisclosed information, he has violated the law in two respects, not none.

It's also an anthromorphization fallacy argument. "Twitter" is a company, not a private individual.

If the FBI contacts "Twitter" then they're not talking to any one individual, in fact there's no requirement that be the same person at all.

So Twitter cannot be threatened or threatened with implied threats - it's a limited liability corporation, there's no individual who can be overly inconvenienced or have any emotional reaction to the request.

Threats of regulations or hefty fines can definitely inconvenience the company’s owners, who have a stake in the company’s future.

And importantly, if the individuals using the platform are (hypothetically) being silenced by government agencies levelling threats against the company unless it complies, this could be seen as tantamount to censorship.

The imagery you and others are trying to invoke is one of burly men in black suits turning up on your doorstep at the family home.

Twitter doesn't have that. The employee handling the request doesn't own Twitter. If something happens to Twitter it doesn't happen to them except in a very abstract way (and the person who did fire them was Elon Musk in the end).

Governments absolutely have a means to intimidate company owners: it's subpoenaing them to testify before Congress. Not emailing a mid-level content moderation supervisor who has no way to directly talk to the board of executives or shareholders.

You are very naive. Of course the FBI could target an individual at the company to do their bidding if they wanted. Hell, even law enforcement does similar stuff chasing drug dealers. In such cases the govt has no regard for the individuals safety or financial well being.

At the corporate level its also threatening because of the actions the govt could take against the corporation. Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.

You have to be naive and only see the happy path and think the govt always has your best interests in mind to think otherwise.

> Look at all Musks companies now undergoing heavy auditing since he messed with the FBIs twitter.

Can you point to examples of this? I hope you’re not referring to things like the earlier investigation of Tesla’s FSD claims when that’s been underway for years and so widely predicted.

You really think an AG or similar can’t have a little brunch with a C level executive resulting in a mandate on operational guidelines in response?

Yes, I absolutely think that. Because how the heck are you going to keep that going as a company wide mandate? Where's the directives that things are now this way? Where's the weirdly timed corporate memorandums?

Corporations are not people: you can't "tell" a corporation to do something, because the people who make it up are a mercurial, constantly varying group. Even if the owners know something, the employees don't: training materials have to be updated, policies modified etc. You can't "imply" a threat to a corporation, because how do you "imply" the threat to all the people who have to actually implement the desired action? How do you replace staff who are not in on "the implication"? You can't: somewhere and somehow you would have to have internal emails, training and onboarding materials.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/foreign-...

they aren't exactly quiet about it.

> Private sector partnerships: The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combating foreign influence actors.

>If the FBI messages you and says ‘hey… review this content and see if it’s violating your own policies,’ is that inherently an innocent request? I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.

Sounds like "hey, review it and find any half-assed reason to ban it according to your TOS" to me.

Loose and wide reaching TOS makes it hard for bad actors to get around it, but it also makes it easy for moderators to remove anything they don't want while hiding behind TOS

> Should the requests be public unless part of an active investigation, or is that sort of thing too easily gamed?

All moderation should be, and with exact violation breached, not generic "it broke something in our TOS", else there is zero accountability. I'd also say that unless it is outright illegal or abhorrent the original should also be viewable so there can be no doubt the moderation is legit. People will save the spicy tweets to archive or screenshot it anyway so there is no real point completely hiding it.

While this is true, it is not necessary for twitter to resist requests from the government in order for this kind of contact to be effective state censorship. Twitter has seemed to be eager to do whatever the government says. Why wouldn't they be? It's a favor that the government owes them now, and additionally, they were charging the government for their time. It's a completely profitable interaction. With media consolidation, there are only a few dozen people who ultimately own all western media, and they got that way through good relationships with governments.

The real troubling question is why the FBI has a department of 80 people combing through tweets and tweeting in order to push or suppress policy. Thinking of Twitter as the victim entirely misses the point.

Chances are, they probably really did violate the TOS. Or most of them did, at least. So then you, as the employee receiving it, probably do feel some real pressure to remove the tweets when the FBI has correctly pointed out that, yes, these tweets are against the site's terms of service. Many tweets likely are against TOS, but nobody would give them any real thought.

Yeah, and some of the tweets reported by the FBI didn't violate TOS and were allowed to stand by Twitter.

I would argue that selectively recommending political comments which may be censored has a chilling effect on political speech — and therefore is illegal.

I also think it’s interesting how many people I know who “protested” things like COINTELPRO, but cheer this.

Did they do that though? Selectively recommend political comments?

The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning.

It seems internal employee activism played a large role. That’s not good.

While Twitter has a right as a private company to moderate based on internal popularity, it doesn’t build confidence.

It seemed the professional moderators were saying “Trump is pushing the limits, but not crossing them” - the other employees were lobbying to get him banned.

And they won.

The message is, if you want to run for office on a controversial platform, make sure you have supporters among the rank and file at Twitter, FB, Reddit, etc, The parts about the FBI are less concerning.

Good content moderation creates a firewall between (say) the software development team and the moderation team. While Twitter had such a wall, it didn’t withstand pressure.

> The process by which Trump was pushed off is concerning.

Trump tried to destroy our democracy. I’m not being hyperbolic. The evidence is all there and all from Trump’s mouth.

> tried to destroy our democracy

He is still trying; that fact hangs over these conversations like Damocles' sword.

By censoring data, so did Twitter.

and hopefully he'll get prosecuted for it if it is really the case, but that didn't stop even european leaders from saying the ban was a mistake and concerning[0].

[0]:https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/01/11/problemat...

Your link doesn’t make any sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung

Germany has laws against incitement.

> 2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.

I fail to see how having a law against incitement in germany - that doesn't even sound like would apply to jan 6th if it was done there- makes the article of merkel and several other EU leaders condemning twitter's action not make any sense.

It appears Merkel did not intervene in this case of incitement to violence.

https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/vermischtes/article231416...

I still stand confused as to what relation it has to the topic

False, you are most definitely being hyperbolic.

Destroying democracy isn’t against Twitters rules.

The Taliban destroyed a democracy. They have Twitter accounts.

The leader of Egypt destroyed a democracy. He has a Twitter account.

The leaders of Myanmar don’t seem to have Twitter accounts, but they outlawed Twitter.

I doubt these people have supporters inside Twitter, but I doubt there’s any Resistance either.

I could have worded it better.

>I could see a world where ‘see if it violates your own policies’ is a code for extortion with plausible deniability.

That's not the world we live in. If you reply with "Blow me", the FBI will do nothing.

You think.

Senator Markey: “Fix your companies or Congress will.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/senator-ed-markey-tell...

The Congress is obviously a completely different entity than the FBI.

If the Congress wants to force companies work with the FBI, they have the absolute power to do so.

It's not obvious. The Beltway networks are in place.

The thing about this kind of vague insinuations is that they're impossible to refute, but not necessarily impossible to show examples of. Do you have any?

In the same way that the Beltway connections are somewhat hard to pin down.

I don't have much ready to hand - and it may be hard to come up with hard proof.

There is Greenwald[0] and the infamous Homeland Security Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee - here are the bios[1]. Note how interlinked these people are. They don't need to document their interactions, because they basically think alike and know what to do without specific instructions. The FBI acts as the primary point of contact from the letter agencies, as per the title if the article we are discussing. The Beltway revolving door takes care of the rest of the interactions, including providing experts to the media, so the rest of the Beltway can just listen and act.

[0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/HSAC%20Disin... [pdf]

The executive branch essentially works for the congress, what's the issue here?

The Congress is obviously a completely different entity than the FBI.

Please make up your mind!

The FBI is a completely different entity which exists below the congress, the FBI can't really threaten you with the congress.

Correct the FBI may do nothing.

The IRS however might just suddenly out of nowhere complete coincidence want to crawl into all your accounts, and financial records and tax filings.

Do you have evidence of this being a thing, or is this just a baseless conspiracy theory?

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