ChiGoose

There is no evidence they were discussing the laptop. I also answered this earlier but you may have missed it. Good: 1. The FBI warns companies that there may be cyberattacks and/or release of hacked materials prior to the election. Fine: 2. The FBI tells companies that the laptop does belong to Hunter, some of its contents are real but not all of it has been verified Bad: 3. The FBI tells companies that they shouldn’t post anything about the laptop 4. The FBI somehow forces companies not to post anything about the laptop. All of the evidence points to scenario 1 as the one that played out. In which case, I believe the FBI acted appropriately. Scenario 4 is basically impossible and there’s no evidence that scenarios 2, 3, or 4 happened.

Then stop reading between the lines and just read the actual lines. I even answered the morality question. It would be bad for the FBI to force Twitter to censor legal content. But that never happened so why are people even talking about it?

Actually it’s because people here just pretend I believe whatever evil liberal fantasy they want me to regardless of the words I use. In this specific example, someone with a history of making ***** up claimed I believed something I have never espoused or even implied. I clarified that I did not believe that totally made up fantasy he claimed I believed in and explained what I did actually believe in regards to that particular situation. Apparently that’s not enough for people. So I guess everyone can just go ahead and believe I said whatever they want regardless of the text of the actual words I wrote.

If Elon had come in, replaced the content moderation policy and/or staff with something more akin to what Twitter’s conservative critics wanted, that would have been fine and likely wouldn’t have resulted in a ton of actual blowback. Instead, he came in like a bull in a china shop, making decisions on a whim with little thought to downstream implications and likely exposing himself to hundreds of millions of dollars in legal liabilities (on top of the $1 billion per year debt service cost his overpriced purchase requires). For a business that relies almost entirely on ad revenue, his chaotic and fickle actions fostered an environment hostile to advertisers who quickly began suspending their ad buys. He changed his mind on a content moderation committee before it could even get off the ground and decided to make moderation policies on a whim. Even reportedly applying them retroactively to posts that were not in violation of the rules at the time they were posted. At some points, he left moderation decisions to unscientific twitter polls, which is crazy considering how much he complains about the bots on Twitter. Because he slashed the legal department and moderation team, the new policies appear to be written by amateurs with little consideration to vagueness or how they will be interpreted. And even then, he declares the new rules mean something they don’t actually say, leading to more confusion about what the actual policy is. It’s a maddeningly dumb way to run a business. Which is reflected in how his mismanagement of Twitter is currently contributing to the destruction of the value of Tesla. ”But it’s a private company, he can do what he wants” is a pointless retort. Of course it’s a private business and he can do what he wants. But we’re still free to point out how bad those decisions are for the company. All of this could have been avoided with a thoughtful approach to the challenges Twitter was facing, including the moderation policy. And despite the obviousness of it all, people just reflexively defend whatever decision he makes because they were so mad at the old regime and they prefer “owning the libs” to basically anything else.

A lot of Dems were pissed at him giving MBS immunity. As I stated, it’s in accordance with precedent and the law but I would have made an exception for MBS and not done it. I don’t expect to agree with everything the president I voted for does because I’m not in a personality cult. Twitter’s moderation policy had problems before Musk but at least Twitter had a policy. Musk decides by fiat and applies new rules retroactively. And all the people who were originally cheering because he was going to do free speech suddenly forgot all of that and now fall in line with whatever decision he makes because it upsets people they don’t like, regardless of how stupid the decision is.

Nice deflection. The State Department felt that precedent required it. Which is true but I would say there is a case for breaking with precedent when the person is made head of state almost certainly solely to be granted immunity to avoid being prosecuted. Twitter moderation wasn’t good before Musk. And now it’s worse. Pretending that Musk buying twitter and then seemingly making decisions by throwing darts at a board isn’t newsworthy is just sad.

Well, obviously. Doesn’t mean we can’t point out that the rules are basically just Calvinball at this point.

Twitter is now Free Speech* *Free Speech does not include certain types of publicly available information, anything criticizing the Chief Twit, or any companies owned or operated by the Chief Twit; nor promotion of any competitors to companies owned and operated by the Chief Twit; or acknowledgment of the existence of said competitors or companies; or platforms that may be deemed to be competitors or future potential competitors. Content that is not considered free speech and may constitute a bannable offense may change at any moment at the whim of the Chief Twit and/or Royal House of Saud and apply retroactively to content that was not a violation when originally posted. Anyone found criticizing or even questioning the Free Speech policy should be told that the Chief Twit can do whatever they want and nobody has a right to criticize him for it and anyone doing so is a big whiny baby. Free speech void were prohibited. No purchase necessary. If your free speech lasts longer than four hours, please consult your local journalist.

I’m not saying that. We don’t know what the FBI knows about it. There is an ongoing investigation into Hunter so we shouldn’t expect them to say anything about it. In fact, we have zero evidence that the FBI said the laptop might be misinformation and good evidence that it didn’t.

50 former intelligence officials wrote a note stating that the Hunter story had all the marks of a disinformation op. Because given what was known at the time, it did. Completely unrelated to that, the FBI warned that there might be a release of hacked materials to influence the election because it had happened before. The media was free to take any action they wanted in regard to any of this. Nobody forced them to do anything. The most likely and simplest explanation is pretty banal and yet we still have people here with Very Online Brain who will just believe anything from anyone if it makes the media, the Dems, or any other perceived enemies look bad. The net-net of all of this is that the laptop story got far more coverage because of all of this than it would have otherwise.

I’m saying that there isn’t evidence that the FBI told social media companies not to post about the laptop or specifically talked about Hunter. There is in fact evidence to the contrary. In addition to that, while some of the laptop files have been verified, others haven’t. Doesn’t mean they are not real but does mean we cannot definitely say they are at this time. In looking at the appropriateness of the FBI’s actions, here’s how I would evaluate different scenarios what they potentially did: Good: 1. Warn companies of potential cybersecurity and/or hacked materials during the election Fine: 2. Tell companies about the laptop but state that they cannot verify all of its contents Bad: 3. Tell companies not to allow anything about the laptop 4. Force companies to not allow anything about the laptop All of the evidence points to scenario one as the most likely. Scenario four is literally impossible. People here seem to think it’s 3 or 4 without evidence to support it.

Did they? All of the reporting I’ve seen says that the FBI warned of the potential for hacked materials in the lead up to the election but nothing specifically about Hunter Biden. Mark Zuckerberg even went in the Joe Rogan show and said as much. Additionally, one of the FBI agents involved was deposed about this and stated that they didn’t specifically mention Hunter. And that seems not only fine, but the proper thing to do. We had just witnessed a large cyber operation to influence the previous presidential election, it would make sense that it might happen again. As to the laptop story itself, it was sketchy as hell and really looked like a misinfo op. Some blind computer repair guy says Hunter Biden dropped off a computer and never returned to pick it up and it has sketchy stuff on it all right before the election? We wouldn’t believe the same story about Trump’s kids because it seems ludicrous on its face. Turns out, Hunter really is a sleazeball but it was reasonable to be skeptical of the story when it dropped. I think this is a pretty good summary; “The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani’s hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata). The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.”

It’s not pedantic, it’s the entire point. If the FBI suddenly went rogue and requested Twitter review every pro-Trump or pro-Biden post, that would be bad. But from a 1A / user experience, there wouldn’t be much change because Twitter can just decline to do anything about the posts and tell the FBI that it can go pound sand. Let’s look at the Hunter Biden story everyone here loves. If the FBI wanted to keep it from the public, they’d tell the NY Post to take down the actual article. And the NY Post would tell them to eff right off. If the FBI was stupid enough to file charges against them for it, the Post’s lawyers would be laughing their way to the bank as they embarrassed the FBI in every court filing and proceeding. Instead, the FBI warned companies to be on the lookout for election misinformation. Then the NY Post story drops. Twitter and Facebook think it looks suspicious and so they enact their different moderation policies: Facebook allows the link to get posted but they don’t boost it through their algorithm while it’s under review. Twitter straight up blocks it while it’s being reviewed. If the FBI was really in control and acting like everyone here seems to think they act, they would have nuked the NY Post story itself so nobody could see it. That didn’t happen. It literally couldn’t happen even if they tried. The story stayed up and different companies treated it differently. Because, for the 1,000,000th time, the FBI isn’t forcing anyone to do anything here. Ultimately, the actions by Twitter and Facebook had the opposite effect than they intended. The traffic to the story took off not when it dropped, but when these sites enacted their moderation policies on it. Classic Streisand Effect. It would be bad for the FBI to flag things for purely political reasons, but as I’ve pointed out, it ultimately wouldn’t do much. Some of the things it flagged seem dumb, like the person who was obviously joking saying they were an election official who would add more Dem ballots to the count. I saw that the FBI flagged it and that seems kinda dumb. Then again, maybe the FBI was worried that people who were dumb enough to believe the 2020 election was stolen would be dumb enough to believe that the post wasn’t a joke. Of course, it was ultimately up to Twitter, not the FBI, to decide what to do with it.

Just so it’s clear: these takes are factually incorrect. It is perfectly legal for the FBI to flag potential issues to private companies and it’s done routinely. The companies themselves can decide what to do about it.

Several people have been posting that the FBI coerced Twitter to act. That is factually not true and I have simply been trying to point that out.

Just to state the obvious here: the fact that Twitter employed former FBI people at senior levels means that it almost assuredly knew that the FBI could not force it to remove posts that did not include illegal content.

I draw the line at PII. Plane tail numbers are not PII. The FBI flagging the Hunter Biden laptop was obviously not coercion. Facebook never took the link down. Twitter did. Each company was free to take it as they felt appropriate (did the NY Post ever hide the story?). Coercion is forcing the company to do something by creating a penalty if they don’t. Like shutting the site down or filing charges if it doesn’t remove illegal content. Merely flagging something or requesting it to be taken down is not coercion if the company is free to ignore it. This was reaffirmed in New York Times v. The United States The thing is, I haven’t really weighed in on whether or not the FBI flagging specific items was wrong because we’re still at step one: explaining what coercion actually is. If Twitter thought they had to censor stuff because the FBI asked them to review it, then they had terrible lawyers who weren’t aware of a landmark case on this exact topic.

All I’ve been trying to do is point out that the FBI flagging something is not the same as coercion. If the FBI is flagging things in a way that is inappropriate, Twitter is free to look at that and then take no action. If Twitter removes mundane content that doesn’t violate its TOS then that’s a failure of Twitter’s moderation. If Twitter feels that they have to take something down if the FBI flags it, then Twitter has terrible lawyers. There are good debates to have about how content moderation should work (there’s no one-size-fits-all solution), but saying that Twitter is a subsidiary of the FBI just isn’t backed by any of the facts that have been made public.

The China bot thing was real. Not a straw man. It’s not my fault if people can’t read or fail basic comprehension. I’m just going to continue to point out that nobody has yet to show that the FBI coerced Twitter into doing anything. Not that it’ll matter because the narrative is already set and so they go marching forth with more nonsense.

There has been zero evidence presented that the FBI coerced Twitter into censoring posts. People are looking at very standard interactions between the FBI during the Trump administration asking Twitter to review things and jumping to conclusions that it’s a nefarious censorship plot. It’s the same thing every day here. Someone dies: must have been either the vaccine or Hillary. FBI does literally anything: must be a giant conspiracy by the deep state against my side. Someone loses an election: must have been stolen by the other side. I guess it’s just more fun to believe in baseless evil master plans than to admit that things rarely are that exciting.

So let’s say the FBI identifies a network of nearly 200,000 bots controlled by China to push their propaganda about Taiwan. You are saying it is bad for them to flag that to private companies. I am saying it’s good for them to notify private companies so long as the private companies are free to do with it as they will.

I must have missed where you showed that the FBI coerced Twitter to censor things instead of just flagging items for review.

Hey, if you want to shill for China, that’s on you, buddy. Just don’t expect everyone else to buy it.

I love that this admits that Musk doesn’t care about free speech. I mean, it was obvious form the start, but some Muskateers actually believed it.

1. The Epoch Times is a known fraudulent site. 2. Seth Rich was not killed as part of some big conspiracy. 3. This thread has absolutely nothing to do with Seth Rich. 4. If you’re on this site and ever find yourself agreeing with Big Blitz, are you embarrassed? Or do you just pretend that the fact that they are a moron is inconvenient to the fact that you agree with them when it’s convenient to you?