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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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A month or so ago I remember someone here linking to the discovery documents in the Missouri Attorney General's lawsuit against Joe Biden, alleging the government is violating First Amendment rights by colluding with tech companies to censor the speech of private citzens. Those docs are here (warning: 711 page PDF).

At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.

Well, it's finally getting some press. Lee Fang at the Intercept published an article today that, among other things, references these docs: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/. The article also includes details on the organizational structures involved, including many documents out of DHS that detail their anti-misinformation operations.

A couple of choice quotes:

During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.

The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that read “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver International Airport.

“We are not sure if there’s any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration,” wrote a state official on the email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be confused with official government entities. The Twitter representative responded: “We will escalate. Thank you.”

 

“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.

Why is it a violation of the First Amendment for the government to report content to a social media company which they believe violates that social media companies terms of service and for the company to subsequently remove the reported content after finding that it does? And what do you mean by "prosecuted"? What criminal laws have been violated?

There is a kind of power dynamic that exists. In the same way that a boss asking an employee under them on a date. There is a power dynamic in place, even if it isn't explicitly stated.

'I could fire you'. or 'I could drag you before congress, make your life hell in the media, charge you with being a monopoly, etc...'

Almost no matter what if the under-powered entity says no they can be punished, with full plausible deniability by the overseeing entity. So we decided as a society that you just don't allow those sort of relationships.

Pithily, "will no one rid us of this turbulent misinformation".

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