[starkd]

Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation. It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.

The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have. It is not the governments job to protect people's rights. The gov't violates rights all the time. It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.

[Apocryphon]

The OP is about FBI policing of federal election misinformation, which is both part of the federal government’s purview:

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

And as shady or problematic as their relationship with Twitter is, is borne out of legal precedence:

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/19/when-government-urges-p...

Not to mention, in the last decade, by the process of jawboning:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/informal-government-coercion-and...

So really, your complaints go up further than you think. This is something that has been happening for decades based on judicial decisions, you just weren’t aware of it.

[divided]

> Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation.

Your original statement conveys the FBI should never ask Twitter to take down accounts. My response was such that there _are_ good reasons for the FBI to ask Twitter to take down accounts.

If we now agree on that, the issue is no longer requesting to ban accounts vs not requesting to ban accounts, but instead where the line on account bans exist. This is a much more gray debate, wouldn’t you agree?

> It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.

I agree these were intended as jokes, and parody and satire are given wide interpretations in court. But they do have limits. Presumably you wouldn’t want someone to lose their right to vote because someone else intentionally misinformed them, even if its intention was satire. I do think instead of an account ban it could be resolved with a misinformation notice, but we might be presuming the FBI official has more knowledge of online platforms than they do. It did seem from the emails Twitter was ultimately the one to decide the correct handling, so I don’t blame the FBI for just alerting Twitter of potential violations.

> The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have.

Having worked for the federal government, I can inform you it is a huge hassle to get anything published. If they publish it, every line would be analyzed for compliance and in this case probably put in front of lawyers. They can still make mistakes, but it’s overly paranoid to believe a government website would advertise unconstitutional violations of rights for years.

> It is not the governments job to protect people's rights.

Objectively false.

> The gov't violates rights all the time.

True! But these violations are failures in the government for doing its job properly. Violations often lead to punishment or scandal. It wouldn’t be a scandal if people held the belief the government wasn’t supposed to protect your rights.

> It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.

…the courts are part of the government…