But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS? That sounds as tame as it could possibly be. The same option is open to me as an ordinary user.
What more transparency do you want? Their right to request moderation actions and Twitter’s right to refuse those requests is extremely well documented in court cases. You want a published list of every request FBI made? So that way FBI can become the primary curator of information that FBI doesn’t like?
> But aren’t they just flagging Tweets as potential violations of TOS?
How benevolent of the fbi to be making sure twitters users are compliant with twitters TOS! What a nice federal agency, making twitters moderation so much easier!
What bothers me most about the FBI's behaviour here is that it is unnecessary. Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?
I'd prefer to see the FBI acting in a passive role, here, rather than a proactive one. Meaning, they act more in response to people reporting social media behavior, instead of creating their own missions, so to speak.
One of the problems with this sort of governmental creep, is once it happens it's nearly impossible to take it back - look at the Patriot act/Homeland security, for example, or the god-awful and useless TSA. It's very easy to imagine this social media task force growing into another branch, and, as with all of these agencies, the Big Brother potential is a scary one.
I think using social media to gather intel is entirely reasonable. Given the number of people who have committed mass shootings and other acts of domestic terrorism after being radicalized online, they would be negligent to not be proactively looking at the internet.
Your whole argument is just "sure this is reasonable now but what if there were 8000 agents online and they could extraordinary rendition you". 80 agents for the whole country is not absurd. That's less than 2 per state.
Social media products have been critical to the exponential growth of domestic terrorism and CSAM. So I definitely want the FBI being proactive on these platforms and to have a much, much, bigger team than 80. It should be 80 per state.
People with poor information diets hear the FBI is involved with Twitter and immediately think it has something to do with red team blue team politics. These are the people the Twitter Files content is produced for. It's written vaguely enough to give potato chip peddlers creative license, so they can monetize attention.
This is the same type of reasoning that gave us the Patriot Act/Homeland security etc., though. I'm sure there is some truth to it, I just hope people push back against giving the FBI, or whatever agency arises, free reign. Tilting in favor of extreme safety measures sounds pretty bad to me, but I guess this is largely a matter of personal risk tolerance.
Notably, none of the content the FBI was monitoring in this thread had anything to do with terrorism, but that fear is still guiding many people's responses.
> Because at least that was directed at a foreign terrorist threat that
And even with that prerogative, we all saw how the NSA's 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' expanded quickly, in breach of law, to encompass American citizens.
Government surveillance is going to be a hot button issue for the forseeable future, and if every time somebody does something bad is an excuse to expand its reach, there won't be anything beyond its reach before long.
I’m not talking about the overall scope of the program. Obviously the Patriot Act is much broader. I’m talking about the double standard of those supporting the FBI. The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam. The same people justifying Twitter working with the FBI to respond to supposed “radicalization” and “domestic terrorism” were against the FBI when the target was foreign terrorists.
> The same people cheering on the FBI now would have flipped out if the FBI was engaged in the same communications with Twitter about imams preaching radical Islam
Citation needed. The vast majority of the complaints during that era were due to portraying all Muslims as radical or focusing the efforts on Muslims without applying the same standards to the far more numerous (in the U.S., anyway) Christian extremists making anti-gay, anti-black, etc. messages. Clear rules which are fairly applied are a very different level.
> Clear rules which are fairly applied are a very different level.
The disclosure here is that Twitter didn’t have “clear rules which are fairly applied.” It was filtered through people who believed wacky things—for example, ones so blinded by anti-Christian bias they think there is any comparison between Christian “extremism” and the global problem of Islamic radicalism.
Which disclosure was that, specifically? I haven’t seen any evidence of “anti-Christian bias”. If you’re referring to my comment, note that my position is that all radicals should be treated with concern, but their coreligionists shouldn’t be assumed to share their beliefs. In the United States the most common religion is Christianity so we have lots of people making various hate crimes using language derived from that tradition or expressing fears about Islamic immigrants seen as dangerous outsiders, so I’m only talking about risks to the country where the FBI is focused. The Mossad no doubt has a different perspective.
The Twitter internal discussions we are talking about.
> I haven’t seen any evidence of “anti-Christian bias”. If you’re referring to my comment, note that my position is that all radicals should be treated with concern
The anti-Christian bias is in creating a false equivalency between Christian “extremists” and Islamic radicals. You responded to my comment by bringing up “anti-gay anti-Black” statements from “Christian extremists.” That’s an absurd comparison. What you’re talking about is the average person in my Muslim home country: https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2.... The FBI shouldn’t be investigating those people. What I’m talking about is a different level entirely: https://time.com/4365890/bangladesh-arrests-5000-crackdown-r...
The bias reflected in your comment is exactly the sort of biases through which Twitter moderation decisions are filtered. Your average Twitter moderator is the kind of sheltered person who thinks his racist uncle back home in Indiana bears mention in the same breath as Islamic radicalism. These are the same people who flipped out when the FBI was investigating Islamic fundamentalism, but now cheers in the FBI now that the target is white Christians.
> The Twitter internal discussions we are talking about.
Can you point to a specific detail supporting this claim? I have read the thread and don’t know what this is based on.
> You responded to my comment by bringing up “anti-gay anti-Black” statements from “Christian extremists.” That’s an absurd comparison.
Not if you’re looking at who’s threatening or committing crimes here in the US. School children aren’t doing active shooter drills because of Muslims, public events aren’t being cancelled because of bomb threats made by Muslims, etc. This is exactly what I’d expect based on demographics, so again my point is simply that I’m not surprised that the FBI is finding more crimes committed by nominal Christians in a majority Christian country.
I don’t support or cheer on the FBI but I also don’t care at all about them sending these emails.
Doesn’t seem like a great use of FBI resources though — maybe they could put some focus on the crypto scams on Twitter that people keep falling for, or better yet the threads of thousands of videos of police brutality on Twitter from the last 2.5 years alone.
This is seriously some hitleresque reichstag fire stuff. The FBi manufactures a fake domestic terrorism crisis and uses it to justify their further expansion of power.
Your concern for CSAM would be more meaningful to me if I wasn't aware that one FBI whistleblower said he was pulled off his very successful sex trafficking cases because January 6 witch hunting was a higher priority to the FBI: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/child-sex-abuse-cases-no...
Instead it feels like vapid virtue signaling, especially as Musk is doing far more to fight CSAM than the previous owners. Also, all the FBI censorship in the Twitter files dump had nothing to do with CSAM.
Anyways, no, your CSIS link doesn't even support the notion of super linear growth. And, if the FBI is inflating domestic terrorism numbers, what other agencies are doing the same?
"The FBI leadership’s “demand for [w]hite supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of [w]hite supremacy,” one agent told the Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate [w]hite supremacists than we can actually find.”
The FBI brass has directed the bureau’s investigative efforts primarily toward domestic extremism cases, especially those with racial components, the agent said. The agent suggested that the push is so forceful that otherwise legal activities are sometimes swept up in the FBI’s scrutiny of certain actions for a potential extremist link.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”"
These reports really should disturb you and other readers, that law enforcement agents are being incentivized to act deceitfully on behalf of Partisan politics and as an excuse to broaden their power and influence.
I think it’s clear, by implication, that this is where a lot of the expunged headcount at Twitter spent their time: policing accounts, according to both internal and external machinations.
> Do we really want the FBI manning a task force of 80+(according to Taibbi) agents to monitor social media threads, and if so, what's to stop that number from just growing and growing?
They have a limited budget. If the FBI reckons their mission is best accomplished this way, who are we to second-guess it?
They do both, with considerable other effort in the federal government on infrastructure protection as well as election integrity. You might not hear about it as much because there isn’t a big lobby opposed to infosec but it’s definitely there.
What do think the FBI does? They monitor threats. Just following media (social and traditional) is pretty mandatory first step in collecting intel. A lot of Jan 6 insurrections were organizing on digital platforms. Foreign adversaries are using it too.
Amazing, a government agency paid by the taxpayers, voluntary combing through twitter and report users that violate twitter's TOS. Is FBI doing pro-bono work for other companies as well?
Even if that's all they are doing, it is too much. The FBI is not the enforcement arm for Twitter's TOS. Their job is to investigate and prosecute crimes. If the FBI is attempting, in any way, to remove legal speech it doesn't like (even if the removal process is itself also completely legal) that is overstepping its authority as a government law enforcement agency.
Prioritisation of requests. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter wasn't already prioritising standard requests too. If you get at the same time 1 request each: from FBI, from someone with multiple actioned past reports, and from an account created 10 sec ago, it makes complete business and community safety sense to handle them in a specific order. (But not with different rules)
And if FBI provides such requests often enough, it makes sense to ingest them in the most efficient way that works for both sides.
reply