The Tweets the FBI were asking to be removed were speech protected under the first amendment. It is very likely that this is unconstitutional but at a minimum this violates a strong norm in the US that the State does not interfere with people’s speech. When it comes to twitter a court had previously found that Trump could not even block people from his personal Twitter account (a final ruling was never made because trump left office: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitte... )and now people are going to seriously argue that it’s ok for government officials to advise that Tweets or people should be banned.
The government’s right to request information control and private entities’ right to decline those requests is well established and non-controversial. They cannot coerce or threaten, but there’s no evidence of that happening, and if Twitter felt otherwise they could go ahead and sue the government and win. Well established.
There is no issue with the FBI investigating crimes using the Twitter platform. I would hope that Twitter tells the FBI to “come back with a warrant” if they want non-public information.
But the FBI flagging content for removal. Including “disinformation”?
That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech.
A good analogy would be a debate club being held in a private bar and the police coming by and saying "yeah, that guy you invited to debate, you think you can "handle" that for us?".
It’s frankly shocking how many people on HN are like “meh…what’s the big deal?”
> Intentionally deceiving qualified voters to prevent them from voting is voter suppression—and it is a federal crime.
> Bad actors use various methods to spread disinformation about voting, such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any jurisdiction.
If that debate club guy was spreading voter misinformation, the FBI would come by and investigate him, too.
Right, investigate them for committing a crime. That’s the FBI’s job. If they see voter suppression on Twitter they can get a warrant forcing Twitter to turn over the account identity (and prosecute them) and take down the tweet.
But that’s not what’s happening here is it? The FBI is asking Twitter to take down tweets (some of them obvious jokes) without a warrant or evidence of any crime being committed.
That’s what’s happening.
No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
> [A.] Generally speaking, courts have said "yes, that's fine," so long as the government speech doesn't coerce the intermediaries by threatening prosecution, lawsuit, or various forms of retaliation. (Indeed, I understand that government officials not uncommonly ask newspapers, for instance, not to publish certain information that they say would harm national security or interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.) Here's a sample of appellate cases so holding:
> [B.] On the other hand, where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional.
> [C.] Does it matter whether the government acts systematically, setting up a pipeline for requests to the media? One can imagine courts being influenced by this, as they are in some other areas of the law; but I know of no First Amendment cases so holding.
> [D.] Now in some other areas of constitutional law, this question of government requests to private actors is treated differently, at least by some courts. Say that you rummage through a roommate's papers, find evidence that he's committing a crime, and send it to the police. You haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because you're a private actor. (Whether you might have committed some tort or crime is a separate question.) And the police haven't violated the Fourth Amendment, because they didn't perform the search. The evidence can be used against the roommate.
> But say that the police ask you to rummage through the roommate's papers. That rummaging may become a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, at least in the eyes of some courts: "the government might violate a defendant's rights by 'instigat[ing]' or 'encourag[ing]' a private party to search a defendant on its behalf."
> Likewise, "In the Fifth Amendment context, courts have held that the government might violate a defendant's rights by coercing or encouraging a private party to extract a confession from a criminal defendant." More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
> So maybe there's room for courts to shift to a model where the government's mere encouragement of private speech restrictions is enough to constitute a First Amendment violation on the government's part.
So basically it sounds like this could be the makings of a very fascinating case, if it holds up in court, but there is ample legal precedent of the government doing pretty much what happened on Twitter, already.
> No different than your local cops coming to the bar you like and asking for you to be kicked out.
Would that be ok?
I may not like it, and it may not be morally okay, but I am almost certain cops are able to do that, because that is the system we have created.
It comes down to coercion, which can sometimes be hard to prove. In the earlier Twitter Files, a Congressperson mentioned how banning the Hunter Biden Laptop story was going down poorly and the Congressional hearings “would be a blood bath”.
Is that coercion? For the courts to decide I guess.
But I’m in the same camp as you. I have no idea if it’s legal or not, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
> An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
> “I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
Sounds like Twitter just went along with it, without coercion. Which you may choose to criticize as weakness or cowardice, but maybe that's just how they chose to do business.
> I don’t disagree with what you posted at all.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
> And what makes me more uncomfortable is when people read the story and say “so what? It’s a nothingburger”.
For the record, my stance is that it's not a nothingburger, but it is so insignificant so as to provide a convenient distraction for actual malicious acts that are going on, like the Z-Library shutdown. And that all of this is underwhelming, much like this other poster's opinion:
"A whole bunch of mildly unsatisfactory situations" seems to be an adequate summation of this whole situation. Which this thread, like all culture wars, has made a mountain out of.
Then you agree that your earlier statement "That goes well beyond the remit of the FBI and violates numerous norms of law enforcement influence over public speech" is wrong and baseless, given the legal context that I have provided.
No I don’t agree. “Norms” are separate from the legal context you gave.
If no coercion took place, that doesn’t make what the FBI did “ok” even if no laws were broken.
Like my earlier analogy, if my local cops started asking businesses to kick people out (and the businesses agreed) that’s a major problem, even if not illegal.
Law enforcement’s job is to identify crimes and arrest people.
When their scope starts expanding into working with willing private companies to silence individuals who have committed no crime, that should worry everyone, whether it happens with Twitter or your local bar.
It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
> It’s amazing to see a normally anti-law enforcement HN suddenly rally to the FBI’s defense.
The problem is that people are getting at the FBI for the wrong things. They should be getting mad at the shutting down of Z-Library instead, which holds far more impact for far more people than the two dozen accounts discussed in the OP (who weren’t even all suspended). When people are concerned about petty crimes, the big ones get unnoticed.
