The strawman of using the date of breach here is asserting that the breach was in response to another event.
Timeline of releasing the breached data can be correlated with another event, but the date that they obtained the loot is irrelevant. They could have simply purchased this from an unknown 3rd party themselves. We simply don't know.
It does matter, because it represents the difference between two different scenarios that don't have the same chance of occurring:
1. The FBI/CIA hacked Twitter and leaked their database in retaliation for the "Twitter files"
2. The FBI/CIA hacked Twitter (or someone else did and they obtained the data) back in early 2022 (for an unknown reason), and are now leaking the data in retaliation for the "Twitter files"
It’s moot anyway, since they can always filter their stolen databases by potential methods of exfiltration, so the dump looks like it only used a certain vulnerability.
All we know for sure is that someone is attacking Twitter via blackmail via hacking just after Twitter released bad PR for some of the worlds most powerful hacking organisations.
All the skeptic comments in this thread seem to worry about the veracity of the claims, but that’s irrelevant to the question of would FBI/CIA retaliate.
The “Twitter Files” showed Twitter was actually doing a better job at being balanced and fair than I thought they were. It’s embarrassing that anyone who read those threads came away thinking this was proof Twitter was doing evil things.
The irony of the Twitter Files, which showed Twitter leadership going through a painstaking process of determining what sort of actions they would take and the impacts in both directions of taking vs not taking an action, before coming with a decision, being released at the same time as ElonJet was banned, with a post-hoc made up BS policy of banning “doxxing” (which ElonJet wasn’t, by any definition of the word), followed by an arbitrary decision to ban certain 3rd party links with that arbitrary decision then being arbitrarily partially rolled back (?), was way too ridiculous.
The FBI and CIA were driving the removal or soft-censoring of speech that the US government didn't like. People spent a lot of the last decade saying that this never happened and that Twitter was just a private company operating on their own, instead of being the censorship arm of the government and in many cases staffed by ex-government...
Also, I wouldn't call Twitter's original moderation fair or balanced. There were clearly voices within who thought they were trying to fit policy to decisions they'd already made post-hoc. (Unfortunately if anything it's even worse now.)
> The FBI and CIA were driving the removal or soft-censoring of speech that the US government didn't like.
There’s no right to post CSAM or revenge porn on the internet, so of course the FBI “drives the removal” of that, it is their job.
I’ve done legal compliance for this elsewhere, I have turned down government requests without being persecuted in return, and I know for a fact Twitter’s previous administration was one of the most aggressive at fighting back here and put a great deal of legal effort into it. Example of a more cooperative response would maybe be Amazon Ring.
There’s also no right for foreign intelligence ops to post on US social media so of course the CIA has opinions on that, it’s their job. Etc.
(Current example of this one: a Chinese group is flooding Twitter search for different Chinese city names with ads for sex workers, to block people searching covid news.)
All these things happen under the rule of law, not random emails. If you don’t like it, change the law. I don’t know why you’d want to do that though.
I agree people might’ve said something other than this, but those people are amateurs and are wrong; talk to the EFF if you actually need advice here.
Why are you bringing up CSAM or revenge porn when the material and accounts referenced by the Twitter Files were ones that post content that was misaligned with the geopolitical goals of various US government organisations?
No, Taibbi is just lying. You can look up the deleted posts on archive.org and they’re pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, which I will not link.
Some of them aren’t; these are mistakes. law enforcement can report posts the same way anyone else can, and if they report the wrong ones you can ignore them. They don’t have special powers. It’s fine.
(Also, Taibbi moved to Russia in the 90s, assaulted underage women, and publicly wrote about it in his publication the Exile. This is also a kind of bias.)
I think Elon literally hiring a Russian sex criminal to release his news for him is a considerably more notable thing than an ad hominem attack! It’s not like he was the most natural choice. (Not intended as an ad hominem on Elon, who has more than enough problems. Literally I don’t know why he did it.)
He could’ve just had Bari Weiss release everything. (Weiss has, in the meantime, been unfollowed and presumably fired as Elon’s journalist because she tried to mildly criticize him once.)
I did some additional research into this Taibbi person, and in addition to being a Russian sex criminal, it turns out he's done some work as a journalist. I think that might have something to do with why Elon chose him to release the news.
I promise in the real world it is perfectly sensible to not trust a person on any topic if that person is a Russian sex criminal. Journalists interpret events and are not beep-boop robots printing out emotionless lists of facts. You can find a different journalist!
There are a group of people releasing the Twitter Files. Are we going to name call them all as sex criminals? Were any even found to be guilty by a court or are you simply applying dirty tricks? And how is that relevant to the truth of the content? Are you going to respond to me telling me that at the root of this is Hunter Biden's penis?
No, only Taibbi is. I think there’s a third guy but can’t say I know anything about him.
But this is something in the real world, not a logic puzzle, and unfortunately in the real world you actually do need to consider the context of everything using all available information. I mean, you going “this guy is just coincidentally a sex offender” is not the common man on the street’s response, and most journalists are literally not sex offenders.
I don’t know what Elon is doing. He’s of course extremely compromised by multiple governments, I mean he owns SpaceX and a Chinese Tesla factory, and Saudi Arabia (who’s planted spies at Twitter before) is a major investor now. I also suspect Elon doesn’t know what he’s doing, though.
I think you should apply the same criticism and context to your own posts, which literally consist of trying to link information to sex crime in order to attempt to change the conversation.
You have effectively moved the conversation from 'the FBI requesting removal of illegal content' is completely different from'the FBI is acting to enforce censorship of protected speech with twitters willing compliance' to 'is the journalist being an alleged sex criminal relevant'. So lets all stop that line and go back to 'regardless of anyone's past activity raping peoples, you are wrong.' Retort?
The context and text within the emails doesn't match what you just wrote and from what I've seen there were 1000s of deletions -- not only of Hunter Biden's penis as you imply...
It makes zero sense to me that this email (https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701482308669440?s=46&...) would have anything to do with Hunter Biden's penis. The Twitter employee is clearly talking about feeling unable to not act on a pro-russian tweet even though they hadn't been able to support any action on it using Twitter's own policies.
The point is, the US government partially infiltrated Twitter, and then applied regular external pressure on it to applying badly defined policies against their targets.
Btw, I endorse all US influence operations run on any websites and think all of them are awesome. America #1, after all.
If you want Twitter to be upset about that one, you may have to get them to move to some non-aligned country. Maybe there’s some kind of Yandex Twitter? In the meantime, it’s probably against TOS insofar as it’s a spambot, but state media like VOA seem okay.
Well, how soon will it be until non-US aligned social media like TikTok is banned in the US anyway? The popular alternatives that you speak of may end up banned.
Also I don't understand why non-US citizens should be allowed to have their speech rights crushed by the US government. Many people of different nationalities live in the US and should be free to speak -- they shouldn't be censored by the US government wearing a glove ("US Tech Organisations") but effectively calling the shots.
If TikTok was banned that’d be disappointing. I don’t expect it to be; the plan where Oracle bought it was better. It is a problem that China influences it.
I don’t think the EU is capable of making a popular social media site either unfortunately. They don’t have the culture.
Twitter does have blatant Chinese propaganda up, like their wolf warrior diplomats and Chen Weihua, which is another good sign for what they’re allowing elsewhere. Maybe that’s just because Chen is so incompetent it’s funny to let him post…
Why would they do that? It’s normal for Chinese export and domestic businesses to be completely different too - you can get all the Winnie the Pooh merch you want made there.
Not being hypocritical isn’t even a universal virtue.
There are a few responses people have found useful to misdirect and shut down conversation around this topic. Nothing burger, and the claim that it was about revenge porn, are strong signals that this is one such stock response.
It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.
It’s not not their job to be informed about state crimes.
I don’t think it’s a crime to literally leave it up in the same way distributing CSAM is, but it’s evidence someone is committing a crime, which is a TOS violation most places as most sites don’t want to encourage that. And Twitter’s TOS is what Twitter cares about. Whether reports come in as emails or their annoying inefficient report form is not important.
Slight correction: alleging Donald Trump's government was doing unconstitutional acts.
Which we know they did, in spades, in other contexts; but I've seen no evidence in the "Twitter files" to indicate anything illegal was going on in this context. The government briefed Twitter that they expected disinformation campaigns and to be on the lookout for them. The government also flagged a bunch of tweets as "hey, these are sus and might violate your rules, you ought to take a look" like anyone else can do.
Whatever Musk and Taibbi are trying to cook up, they seem to have forgotten who was running the federal government at the time. It wasn't Joe Biden or tHe LiBeRaLs. The whole thing is stupid.
Thanks for the correction, it’s an interesting point. In terms of CIA and FBI involvement, why didn’t he put a stop to it if he could? How would the censorship have benefitted him?
One thing I can’t get my head around is Twitter censoring joke accounts. Do you think it was because they were under so much time pressure that they erred on the side of trusting the Government suggestions?
>One thing I can’t get my head around is Twitter censoring joke accounts. Do you think it was because they were under so much time pressure that they erred on the side of trusting the Government suggestions?
If a joke account specifies it's a joke account in it's profile information, great. But that content doesn't get displayed when someone shares a tweet made by that account.
Now, think about how many times you may have come across something on the internet that was a joke, but also easy to misread as a serious comment. Such is the nature of a lot of online dialogue.
You've now got a tweet that can easily be (mis)read as truthful, being shared by people on their accounts who could insist to their own followers (who might not do their own due diligence and look at the joke account's profile to see that it's fake) that it's real, and voila, suddenly you've got a joke being used to spread misinformation.
I'm not defending Twitter or taking a side here, nor am I saying that's what happened. But it's a possibility that that's one perspective taken.
