Did you read the Twitter files? Everything they were doing resembled the New York Times news room vetting a story?

Users will pay instead of the FBI. At least that’s one interpretation.

The FBI paid legally required reimbursement for records requests.

Twitter has kept this policy under Musk: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-law-e...

> Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706

> a governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information

$3M out of about $5,000M worth of annual revenue, and again, it’s reimbursement.

To me, 3 million dollars worth of record requests seems like more than would be optimal given the FBI’s purview.

I mean, I’ve seen some terrible tweets, even some that I’d consider criminally bad. But 3 million dollars to police bad tweets doesn’t strike me as the optimal way to allocate citizen’s money.

And it’s fair to ask, what results were achieved with that 3 million? If it were not a misallocation, certainly they could point to a high profile criminal, cartel or gang that they’ve prosecuted as the result of those record requests.

But we don’t hear that. We hear crickets. Their response seems to be, “how dare anyone ask!”

Certainly law enforcement is important. I think so. Most citizens do.

But shouldn’t we hold law enforcement accountable? Ought not there be public oversight when millions of dollars are being spent, millions of dollars spent, supposedly, on our behalf?

Perhaps you believe in more unchecked authority. Maybe crime has gotten so out of control that we should loosen some of the strictures put in place by the constitution. These are dangerous times. There are plenty of bad guys out there.

Personally, I think the citizens deserve to know, and have some say in how millions of dollars are spent. Absolute, unconstrained authority tends towards abuse. It’s quite well documented.

I think you underestimate how many actionable threats, revenge porn, stalking etc. happen on a social network with over 100M people on it in a year.

$3M is a small team of devs, legal, and support staff - maybe ten people at California salaries. If anything, it’s less than I’d expect.

In the context of mastodon, an interesting question is, will the FBI pay the same amount, if anything? Will there be any legal “speed bumps” at all when it comes to overreach from the long arm of the law?

Presumably, a large company with high paid lawyers who are former FBI, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. would be able to pushback against quasi-constitutional requests. Clearly the FBI was able to get their way with Twitter, despite the big guns in the legal department.

Will they be paying mastodon “operators” (or whatever they’re called) the same amount?

I suspect they will not.

If an individual Mastodon instance reaches 100M users I’d expect them to be reimbursed for the thousands of FBI requests that generates.

It’s probably not worth the paperwork if you get one every three years.

Just out of curiousity, where do you get your news?

I don’t watch tv if that’s the question. I prefer reading news, and seeking out journalists and topics that interest me rather than passively consuming entertainment or ad supported “news.” Generally I prefer primary sources but there are a dozen or so journalists I like, some on sub stack some who write for wsj, nyt, wapo etc…

What’s the saying, “if you get it for free, you’re the product.”