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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> euphemism for federal intelligence agencies strong-arming social media companies to censor American citizens

Specifics matter.

If a hurricane is coming and a meme is countering FEMA’s advice, I’d want them to be able to pick up the phone and let Facebook know. They shouldn’t be allowed to compel anyone, explicitly or implicitly. But the notion that any communication between the government and social media platforms is censorship is as extreme as arguing that the government should have takedown powers.

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I agree that specifics matter, but we don't need to argue about semantics. Thanks to the twitter files we know how this played out in practice. And it wasn't how you're describing: it was federal agencies acting as de facto censors of Americans posting information they didn't like. This happened at scale, to hundreds of thousands of posts. That's what "contacting social media companies" is referring to here, and it's a disgusting euphemism on the part of NYT.

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607378386338340867

> Thanks to the twitter files we know how this played out in practice. And it wasn't how you're describing: it was federal agencies acting as de facto censors

Sorry, where in the Twitter files did it show this?

What I saw was campaigns on both sides giving Twitter feedback, and then Twitter employees independently deliberating.

I’ve seen a few cases from that and they absolutely looked like agencies pointing things out and sometimes Twitter’d go “oh yeah, that’s bad and against our TOS” and take action, and other times they’d go “nah, it’s ok” and… not take action. Also curious to see if there’s evidence that what I’ve seen were outliers rather than the norm, and in fact Twitter was normally just doing whatever was asked of them even if it wasn’t actually a clear violation of Twitter’s rules being pointed out.

There seemed to be a lot of confusion between "govt brought something to companies attention" and "Jack Booted Thugs neck squeezed social media company to censor for them."

Everything I’ve seen from the Twitter Files makes it look like nothing bad was going on. It’s done the opposite of making me believe there’s a scandal being exposed. “Oh, that’s the worst that was ‘uncovered’? Cool, glad everything was actually fine.”

Wild how the same primary source can be taken so completely differently by different sets of people.

> how the same primary source

Very few people looked at the primary source.

The federal government just pointedly asked why certain users haven't been kicked off the platform, what's the big deal

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607383214452080647

They're just angrily berating tech companies that aren't aggressive enough in their censorship, what's the big deal

https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607383819287515137

I'm sorry, I object in the strongest possible terms to characterizing the USG's involvement with social media to be "bringing something to their attention". They are not some friendly internet anon or third-party researchers, they are state agencies with the power to make life very difficult for any company they decide isn't compliant enough.

Thank you for the link. That does strike me as inappropriate (if not quite coercive).

> power to make life very difficult for any company they decide isn't compliant enough

This is what I don’t see evidence of. (Take Twitter/X in its current form.)

Reading those messages, I see employees at Twitter who are ideologically aligned with the President acting a little too chummily in restricting someone’s speech. Twitter wasn’t doing anything it didn’t want to do.

In First Amendment jurisprudence, there is a very specific bar as to when government involvement becomes unconstitutional coercive state action. That bar requires direction from the government and a (potentially implicit) threat of government action or retaliation if compliance is not met. Bellyaching about what a company or individual doing doesn't meet that bar, otherwise pretty much every single congressional hearing would be illegal.

As far as I'm aware, no one has yet produced any evidence that the US government reached that bar with respect to Twitter. There's definitely been several lawsuits that have attempted to allege this--and some where the judges tried to push the plaintiffs to actually properly allege this--but nothing has ever stuck, primarily because everyone filing these suits seem to think that the government looking in a social media company's direction somehow makes it automatically a First Amendment violation.

Whether or not the involvement documented rises to the level of a 1A violation is an interesting legal question but ultimately not the one that I'm primarily concerned with.

The question I care about is: is the government taking a direct and active role in censoring online speech? The answer is a clear yes, and nobody is really disputing it. I find the arguments here ("well twitter helped", "it wasn't technically illegal") to be very weak defenses. Paid employees of federal agencies should not be involved in the moderation processes of social media companies.

And as far as the legal question is concerned, so far federal courts have ruled that the government's actions do in fact violate the first amendment:

> he court found that some of the communications between the federal government and the social media companies to try to fight alleged COVID-19 misinformation "coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content", which violated the First Amendment.[21]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

So I do stand corrected there, although I will note that the Fifth Circus is a poor guide to understanding the First Amendment. Indeed, if you take two of its relevant decisions that are currently being appealed before SCOTUS, it believes that it is a First Amendment violation for the US government to talk to you about your moderation policies, but it is not a First Amendment violation for Texas to talk to you about your moderation policies (or we'll sue you if you don't want to listen to us).

> the notion that any communication between the government and social media platforms is censorship is as extreme as arguing that the government should have takedown powers.

Do you feel the responsibility to argue this, or is it just a bare ass appeal to the moderation fallacy? Is not killing your wife just as extreme as killing her? Are we required to come up with a way to half-kill her in order to sound like serious, nuanced thinkers?

> is it just a bare ass appeal to the moderation fallacy

Both ends of that extreme happened.

Doughty’s preliminary injunction effectively banned the government from communicating with social media platforms [1]. And the appeals courts found that the government had given itself de facto takedown powers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

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