For what's worth, I've actually changed my mind about this. I was originally fine with the government encouraging Twitter to take down pandemic related stuff, but after seeing what Trump has done... well, in hindsight, I think the Biden administration should have stayed out of Twitter moderation, just as the Trump administration should stay out of Facebook moderation.
I still think there is a difference in severity between what Biden did and what Trump is doing, but that's beside the point. The current administration has really demonstrated for me why free speech is so important. We should not compromise on that principle, even when it seems logical in the short term.
No one (at least no one of note) ever claimed that government coercion of social media was a "good thing". The controversy around the "Twitter Files" was (and remains) whether any such coercion[1] actually happened. Do remember the smoking gun request for a takedown turned out to have been penis photos.
But for the record, since consistent propriety is the subject of the subthread: as a left-leaning liberal, I hereby declare that I think coercing Twitter to remove content for political reasons is equally as bad as doing the same to Facebook.
[1] Not least because the entity doing the coercing was not the government, which was run by Biden's opponent.
I know that's how it works on the internet: All it takes to negate thousands of people with one opinion is for someone to come out and identify with them and say the opposite. Just one person!
Likewise, if thousands of people believe something, as long as they say "nobody ever claimed THAT!" then, it's as though they never believed it (despite it being obvious from every other indicator that they DO, in fact, believe that).
Unfortunately, it's all just silly internet sophistry and the real world happily ignores it.
> All it takes to negate thousands of people with one opinion
... thousands? You haven't cited even one! Which, as I eagerly point out, is exactly one fewer example than I provided. So even accepting your dismissal as framed, I win. By a lot.
Seems to me that it's the person asserting the existence of a conspiracy that needs to be the one coming to the table with evidence.
ICE are not police. That's part of the problem with your post. Revealing the public location of where masked federal agents are in unmarked cars kidnapping random citizens and non-citzens alike is not doxing nor harassment nor obstruction.
...so you'd hope the people upset about what happened at Twitter would be even more upset when the speech being suppressed has higher political salience.
One was banning deadly misinformation (e.g. injecting bleach) about a deadly global pandemic, as well as stopping the “doxing, threatening, harassment and obstruction of” public health workers.
This is preventing citizens from monitoring taxpayer-funded police activity - not all that dissimilar from listening to a police scanner.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,”
"I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he said, without elaborating. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
We have always enforced laws selectively. Cops can let you off with a warning or ignore you going five miles an hour over the limit. Prosecutors decline to prosecute. Marijuana dispensaries are everywhere.
Which ones we pick to be super hardline about says much about us.
I’ve seen a lot of protestors in silly suits and dancing. The pastor who was shot from a rooftop the other day wasn’t being violent. The delivery guy on his push bike who they started chasing wasn’t being violent. One of the people in an inflatable suit was so incredibly dangerous that they sprayed tear gas into the suit vent. I'm guessing your news feeds are all Fox News?
I have seen footage of ICE agents shooting up cars and smashing windows.
Maybe you should show what you are seeing, because the subway sandwich guy in a chicken suit that Kristi Noem was looking at from a rooftop the other day didn’t look very dangerous or violent.
The coward traitor once again needs to pipe up to defend other traitors lol. I think you just troll these threads like a Russian bot to rile people up . Last reply to me it's like you didn't even read my comment and just had anti usa LLM reply to me. Going off about the 1950s even tho my first sentence said civil rights act. And the 1800s even tho I quoted Patrick Henry 1776.... At least that comment got flagged and killed before I could be baited into engagement with a bot ..... But here we are.
They, law enforcement personnel, do. Who says they are taking illegal actions? Are you suggesting it is illegal to arrest and deport people who entered or stayed in the U.S. illegally?
Many of these people are targetted because of their skin color and appearance. That's just out and out racism. They have detained citizens. They don't identify themselves and actively wear masks so they can't be indentified. They wear vests with "police", but they are not police. They are jackbooted thugs and use unnecessary violence.
I can go on, it's not hard to find.
America used to be the model for progressively dealing with racism. No more.
How do you know that people are being targeted on the basis of skin color? Would we not expect that if the vast majority of people who entered or stayed in the U.S. illegally come from central and South America, so too would the deportees?
Is detaining citizens with probable cause illegal?
Given the violence and threats made against ICE employees, is wearing a mask not a reasonable response? Is the wearing of masks by law enforcement personnel illegal?
> “jackbooted thugs”
What does this even mean? Seriously. What is a jackboot? Why are you saying they wear them? To what imagery are you trying to allude?
You’ve yet to identify any illegality so far as I can tell.
How do I know? Because a Federal Court case found they had been targetted and it was illegal, and then your Supreme Court said this was quite fine. And no, a huge amount of people are citizens in America who aren't white - why are they getting accused of being non-citzens? Or is ICE only for white people?
Wearing a mask is not a reasonable response. And what violence and threats are you referring to? In Chicago people were dancing and wearing silly suits to protest them.
In terms of what a jackboot is, Google is your friend and you have a non-existent grasp of history if you have no idea what this means. Try also looking up "brown shirts".
So, by your own words, it's not illegal. But, in reality, the SC temporarily issued a stay of an injunction issued by a lower court. That case is still active. Again, I ask, if the majority of illegal immigrants hail from countries in the Americas that are South of the U.S., would we not expect the majority of deportees to also be from those same countries? As far as I know, there are not millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. who originated from Western Europe. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
> your Supreme Court
Are they not also your supreme court? If not, why are you so concerned about the enforcement of U.S. laws?
> And what violence and threats are you referring to?
Here's a smattering: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]
> Wearing a mask is not a reasonable response
...in your opinion. But, to return to your original claim: is it illegal?
> In terms of what a jackboot is...
I know what a jackboot is. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to explicate your implication. I think most readers are desensitized to the comparison of the enforcement of laws long on the books with Nazism.
It's not my Supreme Court, I'm not an American. It is my concern because you lot have been telling the rest of the world that you are the Freest Country On Earth And Everyone Else Is Inferior for quite some time now. As I say, for a while there many of us kind of thought that might actually be the case, but not any more. And I live in a country that is a staunch ally.
We've been watching your country for some time now tear itself apart, and watch as you all get sicker, weaker and poorer. You all think you live in the Greatest Nation On Earth, but you can't even afford to pay for your own health care.
I'm assuming you've never been pulled aside to prove you are an American by an ICE agent.
I'm watching your country slide into totalitarianism and cruelty. And I'm watching your economy slowly get hollowed out.
Your ICE agents are unaccountable, immoral and racist, and you are going the way of Germany in the the late 1930s. Good luck with that.
Wow, that's a bit of a straw-man argument. ICE agents should be able to enforce the law, within reason, and within their authority.
But they aren't enforcing the law, they are often taking highly illegal actions. If you've been only listening to Fox News, you wouldn't know it otherwise. But it's well documented what they've been up to. And it has caused widespread misery and none of these agents are accountable.
I mean, you clearly don't want law enforcement to be accountable for their actions. That's quite the take you've got there.
No platform can be considered a useful and valid source of info if data about power structures is rendered unavailable as a routine matter.
The entire value prop of the internet as a human endeavor is in the "inter" part - connecting networks without regard to orthodox boundaries or power structures. An internet that yields to legacy state censorship is just a net.
I really need to take some time get into mastadon or lens or bluesky or whatever.
One presumes the folks covering the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files will be deeply concerned with this.
And hopefully the people who think that was a good thing will think the same about this.
And the reverse!
For what's worth, I've actually changed my mind about this. I was originally fine with the government encouraging Twitter to take down pandemic related stuff, but after seeing what Trump has done... well, in hindsight, I think the Biden administration should have stayed out of Twitter moderation, just as the Trump administration should stay out of Facebook moderation.
I still think there is a difference in severity between what Biden did and what Trump is doing, but that's beside the point. The current administration has really demonstrated for me why free speech is so important. We should not compromise on that principle, even when it seems logical in the short term.
Well, Trump had his Facebook and Twitter accounts suspended. That’s pretty severe.
Biden wasn’t president then, so it’s hard to blame his administration for it. And inciting Jan 6 was pretty severe.
Facebook and Twitter not being allowed to ban the sitting President would be a major First Amendment violation, in fact.
No one (at least no one of note) ever claimed that government coercion of social media was a "good thing". The controversy around the "Twitter Files" was (and remains) whether any such coercion[1] actually happened. Do remember the smoking gun request for a takedown turned out to have been penis photos.
But for the record, since consistent propriety is the subject of the subthread: as a left-leaning liberal, I hereby declare that I think coercing Twitter to remove content for political reasons is equally as bad as doing the same to Facebook.
[1] Not least because the entity doing the coercing was not the government, which was run by Biden's opponent.
> as a left-leaning liberal, I hereby declare
I know that's how it works on the internet: All it takes to negate thousands of people with one opinion is for someone to come out and identify with them and say the opposite. Just one person!
Likewise, if thousands of people believe something, as long as they say "nobody ever claimed THAT!" then, it's as though they never believed it (despite it being obvious from every other indicator that they DO, in fact, believe that).
Unfortunately, it's all just silly internet sophistry and the real world happily ignores it.
> All it takes to negate thousands of people with one opinion
... thousands? You haven't cited even one! Which, as I eagerly point out, is exactly one fewer example than I provided. So even accepting your dismissal as framed, I win. By a lot.
Seems to me that it's the person asserting the existence of a conspiracy that needs to be the one coming to the table with evidence.
[flagged]
> police workers
ICE are not police. That's part of the problem with your post. Revealing the public location of where masked federal agents are in unmarked cars kidnapping random citizens and non-citzens alike is not doxing nor harassment nor obstruction.
...so you'd hope the people upset about what happened at Twitter would be even more upset when the speech being suppressed has higher political salience.
[flagged]
“I saw law enforcement out in public” is neither doxxing nor violent.
Holy historical revisionism Batman!
One was banning deadly misinformation (e.g. injecting bleach) about a deadly global pandemic, as well as stopping the “doxing, threatening, harassment and obstruction of” public health workers.
This is preventing citizens from monitoring taxpayer-funded police activity - not all that dissimilar from listening to a police scanner.
[dead]
Not surprised
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,”
"I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he said, without elaborating. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
were lies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...
If the ICE apps do a PWA will the US government go after hosting providers?
If it is hosted outside USA, then it might be much harder than expected.
It's unfortunate I can only delete my Facebook account (which I'd had since 2005) once.
One day, I hope these ICE agents become accountable for the sheer misery they have caused.
If we decide that we should selectively enforce laws, who should make that decision?
We have always enforced laws selectively. Cops can let you off with a warning or ignore you going five miles an hour over the limit. Prosecutors decline to prosecute. Marijuana dispensaries are everywhere.
Which ones we pick to be super hardline about says much about us.
Who says they are enforcing laws? A lot of their activity looks to be illegal.
Please provide sources.
My media feeds are showing protesters that are too aggressive, drawing legal responses from ICE. Show what you’re seeing, please.
I’ve seen a lot of protestors in silly suits and dancing. The pastor who was shot from a rooftop the other day wasn’t being violent. The delivery guy on his push bike who they started chasing wasn’t being violent. One of the people in an inflatable suit was so incredibly dangerous that they sprayed tear gas into the suit vent. I'm guessing your news feeds are all Fox News?
I have seen footage of ICE agents shooting up cars and smashing windows.
Maybe you should show what you are seeing, because the subway sandwich guy in a chicken suit that Kristi Noem was looking at from a rooftop the other day didn’t look very dangerous or violent.
The coward traitor once again needs to pipe up to defend other traitors lol. I think you just troll these threads like a Russian bot to rile people up . Last reply to me it's like you didn't even read my comment and just had anti usa LLM reply to me. Going off about the 1950s even tho my first sentence said civil rights act. And the 1800s even tho I quoted Patrick Henry 1776.... At least that comment got flagged and killed before I could be baited into engagement with a bot ..... But here we are.
They, law enforcement personnel, do. Who says they are taking illegal actions? Are you suggesting it is illegal to arrest and deport people who entered or stayed in the U.S. illegally?
Many of these people are targetted because of their skin color and appearance. That's just out and out racism. They have detained citizens. They don't identify themselves and actively wear masks so they can't be indentified. They wear vests with "police", but they are not police. They are jackbooted thugs and use unnecessary violence.
I can go on, it's not hard to find.
America used to be the model for progressively dealing with racism. No more.
How do you know that people are being targeted on the basis of skin color? Would we not expect that if the vast majority of people who entered or stayed in the U.S. illegally come from central and South America, so too would the deportees?
Is detaining citizens with probable cause illegal?
Given the violence and threats made against ICE employees, is wearing a mask not a reasonable response? Is the wearing of masks by law enforcement personnel illegal?
> “jackbooted thugs”
What does this even mean? Seriously. What is a jackboot? Why are you saying they wear them? To what imagery are you trying to allude?
You’ve yet to identify any illegality so far as I can tell.
> How do you know that people are being targeted on the basis of skin color?
SCOTUS explicitly permitted it in Noem v. Perdomo.
ICE also claims they don’t need probable cause. Here’s a video of Tom Homan proving both points: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3ltoyyfr5vt2m
Bovino, the commanding officer for "Operation Midway Blitz" also said as much https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/30/transcript-audio...
How do I know? Because a Federal Court case found they had been targetted and it was illegal, and then your Supreme Court said this was quite fine. And no, a huge amount of people are citizens in America who aren't white - why are they getting accused of being non-citzens? Or is ICE only for white people?
Wearing a mask is not a reasonable response. And what violence and threats are you referring to? In Chicago people were dancing and wearing silly suits to protest them.
In terms of what a jackboot is, Google is your friend and you have a non-existent grasp of history if you have no idea what this means. Try also looking up "brown shirts".
> Supreme Court said this was quite fine
So, by your own words, it's not illegal. But, in reality, the SC temporarily issued a stay of an injunction issued by a lower court. That case is still active. Again, I ask, if the majority of illegal immigrants hail from countries in the Americas that are South of the U.S., would we not expect the majority of deportees to also be from those same countries? As far as I know, there are not millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. who originated from Western Europe. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
> your Supreme Court
Are they not also your supreme court? If not, why are you so concerned about the enforcement of U.S. laws?
> And what violence and threats are you referring to?
Here's a smattering: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]
> Wearing a mask is not a reasonable response
...in your opinion. But, to return to your original claim: is it illegal?
> In terms of what a jackboot is...
I know what a jackboot is. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to explicate your implication. I think most readers are desensitized to the comparison of the enforcement of laws long on the books with Nazism.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09/24/dhs-issues-statement-tar...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/grand-jury-marimar-mart...
[3] https://www.fox4news.com/news/alvarado-ice-attack-6-women-ar...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/facebook-takes-down-page-th...
[5] https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/federal-grand-jury-char...
[6] https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/21/san-jose-man-facing-d...
It's not my Supreme Court, I'm not an American. It is my concern because you lot have been telling the rest of the world that you are the Freest Country On Earth And Everyone Else Is Inferior for quite some time now. As I say, for a while there many of us kind of thought that might actually be the case, but not any more. And I live in a country that is a staunch ally.
We've been watching your country for some time now tear itself apart, and watch as you all get sicker, weaker and poorer. You all think you live in the Greatest Nation On Earth, but you can't even afford to pay for your own health care.
I'm assuming you've never been pulled aside to prove you are an American by an ICE agent.
I'm watching your country slide into totalitarianism and cruelty. And I'm watching your economy slowly get hollowed out.
Your ICE agents are unaccountable, immoral and racist, and you are going the way of Germany in the the late 1930s. Good luck with that.
You're right, law enforcement shouldn't enforce laws anymore because it causes misery on those breaking them and their families.
Won't the police think of my poor child if they take me away in handcuffs for my DUI? Such evil people.
Wow, that's a bit of a straw-man argument. ICE agents should be able to enforce the law, within reason, and within their authority.
But they aren't enforcing the law, they are often taking highly illegal actions. If you've been only listening to Fox News, you wouldn't know it otherwise. But it's well documented what they've been up to. And it has caused widespread misery and none of these agents are accountable.
I mean, you clearly don't want law enforcement to be accountable for their actions. That's quite the take you've got there.
...crazy.
No platform can be considered a useful and valid source of info if data about power structures is rendered unavailable as a routine matter.
The entire value prop of the internet as a human endeavor is in the "inter" part - connecting networks without regard to orthodox boundaries or power structures. An internet that yields to legacy state censorship is just a net.
I really need to take some time get into mastadon or lens or bluesky or whatever.