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Contemporaneously, the defenses of 'FBI misinformation teams', not just in the last few months but even eg the Jankowicz controversies well before that often involved some combination of :
the FBI had a valid role in combating fraud or other federal crimes related to false statements, and it wasn't going far outside of that here,
the majority of stricken content involved Bad Actors, either likely foreign governments, foreign-government-inspired 'third parties', and/or domestic near-criminals, and/or
the government's requests were 'just like anyone else', in that they were not prioritized, and did not result in takedowns that were unlikely if reported by normal people.
Note even in your Intercept link -- in addition to the low trust a lot of people have with the Intercept specifically -- mentions that "the extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear." The lawsuit the Intercept links is impressively limited in its references to the FBI (consisting almost solely of mentioning the FBI-Zuckerberg meeting mentioned in a Rogan interview), but more generally spends little focus on blocking of specific content, almost purely limited to the CDC's use of example posts. Those are controversial enough, but they were highly limited in both scope and topic. And while part of that reflects poor competence from the lawsuit's filers, more of it reflects that simply not being known anywhere. Because it was never known if any given censorship action was driven from state actors, it has been trivial to avoid object-level claims. People still pretend the Hunter Biden laptop was organically blocked!
This seems kinda like a pretty major revelations for all three of these things!
A number of posts are clearly protected political speech, satire, or rarely even plausible (if wrong) beliefs. The accounts do not show signs of domestic terrorism, nor of "boosting" or other signs of foreign intervention. And while Twitter didn't suspend 100% of posters the FBI gave, they are clearly willing to err far further on the side of moderating anyone brought through these formats than any posts brought forward through normal reports would be.
The strong case that it doesn't matter goes like: the removed content doesn't really have any strong political affiliation, and removing it is perfectly in like with twitter's retarded moderation policies generally. There were all sorts of people suspended for making election-fraud-related obvious jokes in 2016, but that isn't exactly out of the norm from people being suspended for entirely benign uses of 'kill' or 'die'.
The accusations were like "the FBI ordered twitter to suppress conservatives", and this isn't that, none of the FBI's actions here had large-scale 'suppress conservative' effects.
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That's entirely fair. I keep assuming that people would conclude, like me, that "the government is trying to tell private actors what to censor" to be a maximally red flag and all following evidence just icing on said flag, but I shouldn't doubt that there are people who unironically would say that there isn't anything inherently wrong with that.
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