That doesn’t seem so bad in context, does it? It actually kinda seems like the sort of thing people would want the FBI to do to support election integrity. Given all that, to date, the only “evidence” that people can look at regarding “the FBI sent a list to censor” is that the FBI flagged (just as your or I could flag) accounts that were pretty clearly violating Twitter policies in a way that could undermine the US election, and left it entirely up to Twitter to decide what to do about it - and Twitter chose to listen to some requests and ignore others. ![]() So, under that context, a flat “do not suggest people vote the day after Election Day” rule seems reasonable. It does appear that a number of those tweets were meant as jokes, but as is the nature of content moderation, it’s difficult to tell what’s a joke from what’s not a joke, and quite frequently malicious actors will try to hide behind “but I was only joking…” when fighting back against an enforcement action. Twitter had announced long before the election that any such tweets would violate policy. But, to date, there remains none (at least in the US).Īs for the accounts that were flagged, from everything revealed to date in the Twitter Files, it mostly appears to be accounts that were telling a certain segment of the population (sometimes Republicans, sometimes Democrats) to vote on Wednesday, the day after Election Day, rather than Tuesday. If there were evidence that there was some pressure, coercion, or compulsion for the company to comply with the government requests, that would be a different story. That opens up an interesting question in general: should government officials and entities also be allowed to do the same type of flagging? Considering that anyone else can do it, and the company still reviews against its own terms of service and (importantly) feels free to reject those requests when they do not appear to violate the terms, I’m hard pressed to see the problem here on its own. ![]() ![]() Twitter than will review the content and determine whether or not it’s violative, and then decide what the remedy should be if it is. You or I can go on Twitter and if we see something that we think violates a content policy, we can flag it for Twitter to review. Now, we could have an interesting discussion (and I actually do think it’s an interesting discussion) about whether or not the government should be flagging accounts to review as terms of service violations. In fact, they are explicit in their email that the accounts “may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service” and that Twitter can take “any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” When the FBI did so, it was pretty clear that it was just flagging these accounts for Twitter to review, and had no expectation that the company would or would not do anything about it. What the files show is that the FBI would occasionally (not very often, frankly) use reporting tools to alert Twitter to accounts that potentially violated Twitter’s rules. But… there’s literally no scandal here (or if there is one, it’s something entirely different, which we’ll get to at the end of the article). I’m no fan of the FBI, and have spent much of the two and a half decades here at Techdirt criticizing it. ![]() The problem is that, once again, that’s not what “the Twitter Files” show, even as the reporters working on it - Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger - either don’t understand what they’re looking at or are deliberately misrepresenting it. Most of the people who believed that have either ignored that there was no evidence to support it, or have simply moved on to this new lie, suggesting that “the FBI” was “sending lists” to Twitter of people to censor. It’s just flat out wrong.Īs with pretty much every one of these misleading statements regarding the very Twitter that he runs, where people (I guess maybe just former people) could explain to him why he’s wrong, it takes way more time and details to explain why he’s wrong than for him to push out these misleading lines that will now be taken as fact.īut, since at least some of us still believe in facts and truth, let’s walk through this.įirst up, we already did a huge, long debunker on the idea that the FBI (or any government entity) was in any way involved in the Twitter decision to block links to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
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