6 ms·

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 censo

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."

vundercind 3y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > how the same primary source Very few people looked at the primary source.
zachmu 3y ago
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 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 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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  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.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  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.
  - zachmu 3y ago
    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.
    - zachmu 3y ago
      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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri
      - jcranmer 3y ago

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."

vundercind 3y ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> how the same primary source Very few people looked at the primary source.

zachmu 3y ago

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 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 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.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
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.
jcranmer 3y ago
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.
- zachmu 3y ago
  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.
  - zachmu 3y ago
    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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri
    - jcranmer 3y ago