| Cox is only 50, hundreds of millions of people use Discord per Klippenstein, and Discord has existed for over a decade. Contra Klippenstein, I see no reason to believe that Cox (never mind "types like" him, whatever that's supposed to mean) is unfamiliar with it. Having a police officer call you to explain why something you said aroused suspicion is not a violation of freedom of speech. The anonymous man was not imprisoned, arrested, threatened or approached physically, and the call served to indicate that he had been cleared of further suspicion. Spying on Discord is wrong; that's what the Fourth Amendment is for. Cox has said nothing to oppose this. Klippenstein's apparent main point is to call Cox a hypocrite for maintaining social media accounts on Twitter etc. This is commonly recognized as the "we live in a society" fallacy. Cox's job requires having these accounts; it would be bad for national security if someone else could pose as a government official on social media without any clear way to correct the record. Cox is clearly doing his best on Twitter to de-escalate and make it a better place. Believing an environment to be bad does not morally compel leaving it, especially when there is no clear escape. It does not at all follow that Cox "means “bad” social media like Discord". Per Klippenstein's numbers and a bit of arithmetic, Discord apparently complies with EDRs at a rate of about three per million user-years. For perspective, Wikipedia cites an estimate of 24,000 annual global deaths from lightning strikes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_injury); since the world population is on the order of 8 billion, this is about the same rate. Klippenstein claims he "is told" that the current incident did not involve responding to an EDR, but he can't evidence this. He also can't show that this actually resulted from surveillance; maybe someone in the group decided to squeal (misguidedly) or pull a prank (terrible idea). Klippenstein criticizes Patel for "in effect saying that anything, even just the purchase of a T-shirt, is a lead." Patel didn't say anything about what a "lead" is. What he did say depends on considering things reported to the FBI to be leads. But this is simply following the definition, so there is nothing wrong here. |