The latest on Twitter:
The special counsel served Twitter with a warrant for Trump's account information in January. Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000, an appeals court ruling reveals.
— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) August 9, 2023
This is fairly misleading. Twitter had no problem producing the information but objected to a nondisclosure order that prevented them from informing Trump about the warrant. They duked it out in court for a while, and eventually produced everything the special counsel wanted—but were three days late. That's all the $350,000 fine is about. It seems kind of excessive, no?
UPDATE: I originally said that Twitter won its battle over the nondisclosure, but it turns out this was only much later. I'm not clear about precisely what happened, so I've removed everything about it.
fining a billionaire a few hundy (thousands) actually seems too small. we need fines that are relative to your net worth so they have bite.
Exactly. A fine that starts at $50 million and doubles each day would have gotten Elon's attention. $350K isn't even couch change for him.
Should be based on revenue. 1 days revenue for twitter in 2022 was $12,054,800
Numbers get adjusted on this blog all the time to provide context. Why not now?
Musk: $231,000,000,000 net worth
Fine: $350,000
Fine is 0.00015% of Musk's worth.
For a person with a net worth of $1 million, the equivalent fine would be $1.50.
Of all the damned things to take the trouble to write a blog post about, I'll never understand why any normal person should worry that a fine to a company owned by one of the richest people in the world for failing to comply with the terms of a warrant related to investigation of an attempt to overthrow the government of the US might be excessive. A buck-fifty. I'm sure Elon appreciates your concern.
Fines like this are designed to try and force future compliance so it for a company of twitter's size it had to be big. If this were Joe Schmoe off the street of Joes Dry Cleaner it would have been less.
NO!!! Show me one thing that Twitter (X) or Elon Musk himself has done to justify leniency.
I give Kevin a pass on this one because I think he is just trying to be controversial. At least I hope so.
Seems they would have had plenty of time with the delays related to non-disclosure, which never had anything to do with whether the material would be delivered or not, so no I don't feel bad for them.
What was it that needed to be subpoenaed? Can't you just search Twitter and turn up every tweet?
Their internal data would have location and device information, as well as DMs.
Had not thought of that. If he's using someone else's phone they can assume that person is present.
DM's.
I think Kevin is being sarcastic. It does not seem excessive to me. It seems like barely enough to get corporate attention. For all but a very small number of persons, it would be a lot, but not for any company, even a small-potatoes (financially) one like Twitter.
"UPDATE: I originally said that Twitter won its battle over the nondisclosure, but it turns out this was only much later. I'm not clear about precisely what happened, so I've removed everything about it."
Was about to comment about this. Twitter lost the legal battle. The court sided with the DOJ, however sometime into the process the DOJ amended the disclosure prohibition to allow some details to be disclosed not because Twitter had won the argument, but because by then it was already public knowledge that the DOJ was looking into these matters so it became moot not to let Trump be notified by Twitter.
Xitter didn't think the fines were excessive, I don't know why Kevin would think so.
Read it yourself -
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.39513/gov.uscourts.cadc.39513.1208541751.0.pdf
Page 8: "Twitter did not object to the sanctions formula."
Page 9: "Notably, Twitter still did not object to the sanctions formula."
I mean, they still tried to weasel out of it, but not on the grounds that they were excessive.
Personally, I think Elon Musk fighting to inform a criminal that he's being watched is right on brand for Shitter.
Meanwhile, when fascists demanded compliance, Elmo was all-too-eager to lick their boots.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html
I don't find it misleading at all. They resisted the order (in its original form). How is that misleading?
I guess maybe because their fine wasn't really tied to their resisting the order - and in fact their resistance to it should have made their response more timely because it essentially gave them extra time to respond? But it's such a whatever.
Have you seen Credit Card late fees? Compared to them and the size of my income, $350,000 is peanuts.
Stop losing the forest for the trees. We're not talking about some ho-hum intellectual property case; this case is literally one on which the future of US democracy rests.
Every minute that Elon gets to delay things helps Donald Trump get closer to running out the clock on Jack Smith. Given those stakes, a fine in the hundreds of millions to billions for failing to deliver things promptly would be more appropriate.
By my read, Twitter was ordered to comply with the warrant by the last week of January, which they missed, and filed a motion to challenge the nondisclosure order on Feb 2 (claiming would not otherwise comply with warrant until matter decided), and prosecution sought contempt order on same day (Feb 2), and Twitter didn't comply until Feb 9, with apparently no one caring about their assertion would not comply with warrant until nondisclosure matter decided.
So the nondisclosure issue was only raised four days after Twitter has already missed the warrant deadline, according to Politico story I read at least.
Absolutely not, shut the fuck up.