What a bizarre story. Unidentified person drops off a damaged computer at a repair shop and never comes back. Hard drive contains lots of salacious info about Hunter Biden. Repair shop decides the correct course of action is to give it to Rudy Giuliani. That is fishy as hell.
Why is this being downvoted? As far as I can tell from reading the article, this is an accurate summary. The provided evidence that said laptop is genuinely connected with Hunter Biden is 1) a Biden sticker on the laptop, 2) the fact that it's a Delaware repair shop, and 3) a pornographic video featuring somebody who "appears to be" Hunter Biden. What about this is convincing evidence?
They're also declaring a "smoking gun" of Hunter peddling influence when the only data point is an email from a Ukrainian to Hunter saying that he was looking forward to meeting the Vice President. There doesn't seem to be any message from Hunter, and Joe has already said his official schedule is public record and no meeting ever happened.
What's amusing about this whole thing to me is that Facebook and Twitter dropping the ban hammer on this piece will Streisand the hell out of it. If they'd left it alone, it would've been lost in the news cycle with everything else going on and no one would remember it in a week. Now the story is, once again, "Big Tech censors conservatives".
Twitter is dominated by SC hearings and baseball, Google News is SC hearings and Barron Trump having covid, and other random stuff like rabid enthusiasm for early voting below the fold. I'm not seeing a single reference to this story on either of those sites headlines, and I'm also in an incognito window.
This thing didn't even survive the first half of the day.
This post has some 700 comments at the time I’m reading it, and has blown up compared to the coverage it had this morning. No doubt it will get lost eventually, but I think the ham-handed, nakedly political actions of twitter’s censors have become a story in their own right now.
I think what’s considered the smoking gun here is the direct contradiction of what Biden has publicly attested to. This, in the context of Hunter’s questionable nexus of high compensation, dearth of professional qualification, and familial connections. All of this in context of Biden’s last failed presidential run.
It is definitely not a direct contradiction. It's very indirect. We have an email thanking Hunter for a potential meeting. We have no confirmation from Hunter. We have no confirmation the meeting happened. We have no confirmation any quid pro quo was offered. We have no confirmation Hunter said anything to his father.
The laptop was supposedly dropped off a few years ago. Giuliani, Bannon and the FBI have seen the data at least months ago. The NY Post has had it in their possession. None of these details are confirmed. Which means they either failed to verify any of it or they may even know it's a scam.
I think the other points are that the laptop had pictures of Hunter Biden, the FBI allegedly confiscated the laptop, and that Hunter Biden's lawyer didn't deny that it was Hunter's.
> Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
I said I want to see the raw emails. That would be enough to determine if it’s purely made up or if _someone_ actually sent those emails. Raw emails would provide a lot of extra information for almost no effort.
Gawker ultimately settled for $31M which would be about 2% of what has been raised for Trump's reelection bid. The NY Post is still owned by the Murdoch family who would consider that a worthwhile investment.
LOL I read Sohrab pretty regularly but have not seen him advocate for a Christian Monarchy in the US (though would love to read that piece). He had a pretty big dust-up with David French over, among other things, whether conservatives should continue being nice to the left as a sort of game theoretical experiment. Other than that, he's kind of boring.
Often Twitter will lock the creation of new tweets, and require the manual deletion of the offending tweet before you can continue posting. I suspect that's what happened in this case, rather than an outright account suspension.
It's happening to me, although I heard from a friend that a few people can still post the link for some reason. I get an error message saying the link is banned when I try to tweet it myself, and an interstitial warning me it's unsafe when I click on any existing link to it.
> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.
NPR reporter:
> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
>> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
that's a huge lie. the brazilian version of the intercept got actual hacked info from federal judges/prosecutor's cellphones and twitter did absolutely nothing -- hell, it was on our trending topics for weeks (search for "vaza jato").
we know it was hacked because brazil's federal police got the hackers.
seems like twitter really loves to pick-and-choose when to apply their hacked material policy.
Yes, I agree. Twitter is clearly acting politically here; a consistent application of these rules would prohibit linking to the Trump's leaked tax-returns, among many, many other things.
Whatever your perspective, directly verifiable censorship like this is just begging for legal trouble and monopoly investigations. Tactically speaking, I would say this is a massive mistake from Twitter.
This is what I don't get. People are screaming for digital channels to not allow disinformation even though they are just a passive communication channel. Is anyone screaming at printing presses for printing the NY Post? It's a garbage publication and this information is at least suspicious, but why are we holding Twitter to such a high standard of integrity and not actually journalists?
I think new things do have the potential to vastly change the status quo in a way that well understood institutions like the news media don't. Social media and recommendation algorithms are a truly new thing. We're just starting to understand how they intersect with society. Mass media has to be widely palatable to spread. The flat earth society would struggle to pay to run national newspaper let alone a TV station, but you can find hours of "quality" flat earth videos on the intent. We now have systems that can pick out for you exactly the group that agrees with you. Where before you'd only get exposed to the opinions of your surrounding community now, it's easy to find that there are thousands of people who agree with the little bits of racism that you subscribe to.
I think I agree that this article shouldn't have been blocked partially because it don't fit perfectly into this distinction
Bonus second reason why people might feel differently. People know and treat the NY Post as suspect. People like me don't read it. Probably some advertisers won't touch it, but I do use Twitter and FB. Most people do. They are arguably natural monopolies
> why are we holding Twitter to such a high standard of integrity and not actually journalists?
Virality. Information spreads in a fundamentally different way over print [1] versus social media. It spreads faster. It spreads more insidiously. And it mutates--not per se, but in the context attached to it.
There is also social media's concentration. Before cable news, broadcast television was held to stringent standards. As competition emerged that went away. Facebook and Twitter are singular in their domains. Holding them to a higher standard while an election is underway seems reasonable.
[1] A newspaper on a website still behaves like print media. It has to be explicitly shared.
At a moment where people are scared of meeting to discuss things in person. Which makes it orders of magnitudes worse. This is the only voice people had.
Robert Graham [1] pointed out that if the emails are authentic, they can be trivially verified via DKIM.
That the email metadata was not released implies the emails are either inauthentic, or that the post did not contact someone with basic competence in computer forensics.
Either possibility seriously undercuts the article's credibility.
it's honestly irrelevant about the credibility of the emails and other data at this point, its the blanket censorship of this article that's now the real story.
Is it? Because the factuality of the story seems like a pretty big deal here. If it's completely bogus, how is it different from any of those Russian trollfarm posts that the US government was worried about?
Limiting distribution to filter out what you don't want to rise to the top has the same effect as explicitly picking winners.
Think of it like shooting the tires of all the cars you want to lose in a race. Sure you didn't push the winner across the finish line, but you made it damn near impossible for anyone else to even get there.
Yeah, but that's still not editorial control. And maybe we do actually want Twitter to pick some winners. I don't think the platform needs any more death threats, Russian-backed misinformation campaigns or other bullshit.
And this is exactly what social media does all the time, or rather their recommendation algorithms. Which, for some reason, is no problem at all. Now that the bias of these algorithms is changing, also by directly intervening, it is a big problem.
I don't think so. You could perhaps make an argument that banning all NY Post articles would be distribution control, although even then I'm skeptical. But if I picked up a physical copy of the New York Post, and found that the newsstand had snipped just this one article out with a pair of scissors, I'd call that an unambiguous act of editorial control and censorship.
It could be easily argued while they are not rewriting the story they selectively choose the facts they present as "fact checked" information. In the recent past both FB and Twitter have linked to "fact checked" articles/sources that represented only the narrative they wanted you to read. If they wanted to show neutral behavior they could have linked to articles that represented both sides of an argument which would keep their independence and educate their audience better since rarely is one side 100% correct.
Problem is that both sides see the other as exactly this. I’m sure I can argue the point on behalf of either side selected by a coin toss. In today’s example though we have the side that dominates academia, media, big labor, healthcare, public sector workers, and big tech using that dominance to censor a story harmful to their candidate with very disingenuous reasoning.
I know a dozen people who would agree with you and thirteen who would argue the opposite and cite sources. You might not be as objective as you think here.
What's even the point of this "one should be more balanced, both sides!" etc etc. From my EU/Nordic perspective the US right-wing are more or less "crazy-right" (I mean just look at the Trump administration?!). I can't see why one should need to be somewhere in-between just because there are two parties.
Democrats base their arguments on some bombshell mistruths. Like trillion dollar mistruths. The idea that America underinvests in schools and social welfare, for example, when we spend more than European countries per person on both metrics.
Democrats argue we need to spend more and pay teachers more. The argument that we need to do a better job making sure the money we spend actually benefits kids, that’s a different argument, and will get you branded a Republican.
Yes, and it might be very reasonable that some areas of those are underfunded while other are wasteful. The reasons for this discrepancy might very well be policies that are upheld by republicans, like inflated healthcare costs, who knows? You're just providing a generalization. The meager output with the same input suggests that there's too many middle men and I wouldn't just assume that Republicans are more willing to stop the siphoning of taxes into private pockets.
It's one of those papers in the strange intersection of "mainstream tabloid". It's clearly not serious, as you can see from a quick glance at their typical cover pages, but it's also not one of the papers everyone knows is untrustworthy schlock.
Is information being gated by private universities, that only the elite have access to? This may have had validity in the pre-internet era, but information is everywhere now. There's nothing wrong with "public education".
The New York Post is not a serious newspaper; it is a sensationalist tabloid. Sometimes the NYPost will report on real news, but I believe absolutely nothing they report until it is verified by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, or other major broadcast outlet with actual journalistic standards.
None of them are serious. NY Times made a big deal out of trumps taxes when everyone knows depreciation offsets revenue in real estate, its 101 stuff. You get taxed when you sell the asset which happens infrequently but in large magnitude. Most people in the industry were laughing at the gaslighting they did on that story but they fooled their little pawn readers. Just one example out of many. Every news source is full of shit even the ones that are supposed to be reputable.
You realize the real story re: Trump's asset depreciation is that he reported one valuation to the govt and one to his banks when seeking loans, right?
The story headline that was coordinated and gaslight was "trump didnt pay any tax". Everything else was anecdotal, I didnt look into this specific matter because I was rolling my eyes from the start. If they cant be honest about the main story I'm not following them for the rest of the allegations.
In my tax report I think my house is valued at 400 000 NOK.
When I talk to the bank it will probably be worth 4 200 000 NOK.
Tax authorities here know as banks update them every year.
Also in accounting it is common. I remember asking my teacher about it when we had basic accounting and it is simple: if you depreciate (?) an item to less than it is worth you just have to report a profit when you sell a "worthless" asset. (I'm not an accountant and English is not my first language but I think it should be possible to understand.)
I am fairly sure that is tax fraud lol. I don't think I could take out a loan on a property by giving one valuation and in the same year give a vastly different one for my taxes.
No, it is even the tax office who came up with the much lower number in my case.
It is like this for everyone!
Same with depreciation rules, when I learned the rules here my teacher was actually working with the tax authorities.
Depreciation in accounting is a technicality. And if you happen to sell a thing that is technically worth 0 in the books that just becomes an extra inflow of money to the company, which is taxable and so the tax authorities get their money.
Unless you have learned accounting, be careful :-)
We have no information on this except what the NYT's reports in half truth. For instance if there was a time gap between reporting that could cause a mismatch as finances change over time. You can also have retroactive amendments as almost every major company has which are reported in different years. I havent dug deep into this as its not an important topic for me but I just wouldnt take the around the edges reporting at face value from a source as biased as the times.
One way to get a more complete picture of the tax situations would be for Trump to release his tax returns, as he had promised repeatedly in 2016, and as every other president since Nixon has done.
No it is not. Inventory, for example, can have two basis values, taxable inventory, and fixed asset inventory value. One is what the IRS requires via GAAP reporting, and the other is used to secure lines of credit.
Yeah, that’s not true, though you may wish it were. Many industries operate essentially three sets of books - one for the IRS, one for regulators, and one for the street. The requirements for valuation and burdening can be different based on audience. I don’t know whether it applies in trumps case but the headlines and righteous talking points got pretty silly. “Trump offset gains by losses” - yep. Meanwhile let’s talk about how many of these senators (particularly some of the most self-righteous) after decades of only federal employment have somehow become multimillionaires.
I feel sorry for you for getting downvoted, anyone with a basic understanding of accounting and tax should know this. Also the issue picked on in later comments, yes you absolutely can report different valuations to different entities, in the US, UK, and probably everywhere else too.
Tax accounting is completely different to accounting you show to a bank for a loan. This is normal because they are used for different things, and are accounting for different things. For example - the tax rate and taxes paid have a real impact on cashflows which would impact your eligibility for a loan. In tax returns taxes paid are not included in profit and loss, because that would lower the tax paid by businesses.
> New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, or other major broadcast outlet with actual journalistic standards.
"Actual journalistic standards" yeah right! They literally carried out a fake news story about Nick Sandmann without any sort of verification. CNN settled 250 million $ lawsuit followed by Washington Post. Other publications are in the line next. They have zero credibility... especially after causing irreparable damage to a child's reputation by labelling him a racist when he was anything but. The real racists at the rally were those who accused this kid of racism. For full video of the actual altercation you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyOD8FIQk and decide for yourself.
To all those who are downvoting me for showing the actual truth and defending a child from fake accusation of racism I have just one question: is your bias towards your favorite news outlets such that you will disregard even the truth that is staring at your face? What about basic human decency where a child is being vilified and called a racist without any form of actual verification? Don't you down-voters have any shame in siding with these news outlets that are in it just for money and nothing else? They have zero moral compass and would readily use a child for their 15 seconds of viral content. Yet you down-voters support them! So blinded by ignorance! Unbelievable!
True. But I am happy the mod un-flagged and brought your comment back. At least the mod here is unbiased. It just saddens me that people are so blind. Sitting here in India I can see the fake stories for what they are but so many American citizens are unable to see it. It is unbelievable really.
The instinct some people have to preserve themselves from cognitive dissonance is extremely powerful. Rather than re-examine their own beliefs, it's easier to find reasons to dismiss that which is creating the conflict.
Calling all the downvoters assholes isn't especially productive.
I'll explain mine.
The New York Post has produced valid journalism. The Washington Post has produced bad journalism. Individual examples of these are not useful for making broad claims about the merits of these organizations because they produce such a huge volume of journalism. Continuing to complain about the Covington case until the end of time is not a productive way of arguing that all media outlets are garbage and doubling down by insisting that people who disagree are just sheep crushes any possibility of useful discussion here.
> The New York Post has produced valid journalism. The Washington Post has produced bad journalism. Individual examples of these are not useful for making broad claims about the merits of these organizations because they produce such a huge volume of journalism. Continuing to complain about the Covington case until the end of time is not a productive way of arguing that all media outlets are garbage and doubling down by insisting that people who disagree are just sheep crushes any possibility of useful discussion here.
I would 100% agree with you if the same feeling is accorded to outlets like New York Post or any other right leaning media organization. I am not saying that the right leaning organizations are epitome of journalistic credibility. I am just like you calling bullshit as bullshit. But when you start standing on a high pedestal and start claiming "journalistic credibility" as some sort of differentiating factor while at the same time peddle in blatantly false news I will call you out. No matter if it hurts sentiments. I am not saying that New York Times or Washington Post did not produce valid journalism. They perhaps did a good 60% of the time. I will give them that. But to say they follow "actual journalistic standards" is straight out false. "Actual journalistic standards" entails that you verify your source of information before putting it out. That is for every story. No exceptions. If you have some stories that are going out being fact checked and some not then where is the "journalistic standard"? You set a standard to ensure that you never waver from it nor do you apply it selectively.
You fact check any information you put out. Not pull it down after others have fact checked you. Then what is the reason for your existence? I can get unverified news from social media directly! Why do I need a media organization then? I want to rely on media because it is a publisher which verifies stuff it puts out. That is the main job for media. If media is itself indulging in propaganda then what is the need for media? Especially in this social media age?
In that all organizations have failed. Not just left wing but right wing too. Sensationalism always triumphs. But there are some who take it too far: calling a kid racist without verification of facts. This is where I draw the line. You want to do politics do so between yourselves. Fight it out as adults. Don't involve children in your fights. This is a big red line that I don't want anyone crossing. I hope we both can agree on that. Anytime I see children being used as props for propaganda it turns me the F-off. Even if the Covington case was racial in nature it should not have been shown on TV let alone live TV. This is something that must have been dealt with at the school level. This is an age where the child is still growing. And while growing you make stupid decisions too. You have to give that benefit of doubt. To make him a media spectacle for your own benefits is not the way. You are causing mental trauma to the child. And in this case it is far worse because the kid was not racist at all! I have watched the 1.5 hours video in full length and couldn't find even 1 place where the Covington kids were racist. In fact, the kid actually stops his friend from arguing with the Native American and asks his friend to shut up while the Native American speaks. And we have media which turns around and makes this innocent kid into a racist and we should all be okay with it? No effing ways! I'll speak up even if I am in the minority!
Btw, Covington case is not an isolated one. We all know too well what happened to the Russian collusion hoax. None of it could be proved conclusively and moreover it ultimately resulted in the opposite: now we have evidence being unearthed that it was literally a planted story. Look up on what is happening with the Steele Dossier. Why is no one talking about it now? Because it was complete fabricated nonsense that was peddled by the media. A proper witch-hunt not bas...
They settled the lawsuits but there is no indication it was anything like $250M (more like $25K!). And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
> And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
Because that is the settlement. To save themselves from embarrassment and having to admit they faked the entire thing. I give credit to Nick Sandmann for being the bigger man here and settling instead of taking it all the way and making sure these media houses get crippled.
Anyways, the point here is not the amount of money settled. The point is that they faked the news and labelled an innocent boy a racist. You still haven't given a reply on that. Not that you are required to, but that is what is the crux of the matter here, not the money.
Im genuinely curious what journalistic standards you think these mainstream outlets possess after all the Russia nonsense. Can you point to an example of any recent story where these outlets have displayed "actual journalistic standards"?
Do not dismiss tabloid journalism. There's a long and happy history of Democrats being undone by lurid tabloids. Think Drudge Report breaking the (Bill) Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, or National Enquirer breaking the John Edwards affair, or NYPost breaking the Anthony Weiner sexting. This is tabloid journalism at its best.
The difference is those stories had supporting details, with the reporters attempting to follow up.
The three outlets you cited lean left and regularly avoid articles inconvenient to the left (and paint much of the remainder as "Republicans pounce on reports that..."). Consider balancing with centre-right outlets like National Review.
Centre-right, National Review.... You made me spit out my tea when I read that. I'd ask you to go to the op-ed section, and tell me it's even close to "centre-right" and not fully right.
They lost an editor for posting a mainstream opinion by an elected Republican... Note that they then shared the same sentiment about supporting police cracking down on protests in Hong Kong and received no internal pushback whatsoever.
The op-ed section isn't the news section. NYT is centre-left, NR is centre-right.
Anyway it won't hurt you to read things from the other perspective. The truth is often "in the middle" or only something you can triangulate after reading both sides.
If you look at the NYT op-ed section, there are right wingers on there too, see Ross Douthat, et. al, as well as plenty of centrists, and lefties. National Review does not have the same diversity, and only features prominent right wingers.
Maybe I'm getting too bogged down in the op-ed section, like you say; but, it does make you think about the effect an op-ed section has on the news content as well.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing for. If we had ignored everyone claiming there were WMDs then a million people would still be alive, not to mention the trillions of dollars saved.
they did learn from their mistakes.
they learned that there's zero consequence in trafficking the right lies for the right people and were professionally rewarded for doing so. it should be no surprise that the exact same people latched so heavily onto the steele dossier and the cult of mueller-ism
WMD information was provided by government officials and it was official government position on it, the news were reporting what officials said and provided.
Of course the factuality is a big deal. But Twitter didn’t discover the story was false and then remove it. Rather they decided that because the information came from a hack that it couldn’t be posted on their site. If anything they confirmed it was true by doing this.
There are two possibilities: Either it's really a hack or it's a felonious attempt to manipulate an election. Or it's both -- a hack of personal private photos and also fake emails feloniously manipulating an election. Either way, a ban is appropriate.
Saying "if it's true, it's ban able for X" without out bothering to say that obviously it's bannable if it's false, isn't saying it's true. How could Twitter even know?
Both are important. Censoring something important without knowing whether it's true or not is pretty worrisome. If it does turn out to be true then it's much worse. If it turns out to be false, the censor got lucky or knows something we don't.
One thing I'm wondering is how can they censor it without getting either some evidence that it's fake or at least a clear denial? (Biden's campaign released a statement refuting it, but that's not the same as Biden himself publicly denying the claims.)
Thin evidence (someone found some damaging-looking emails) can be dismissed with thin counter-evidence (a denial). But it can't be dismissed with nothing.
The factuality is what we should be debating. When Twitter bans its dissemination that becomes as big a story and - like it or not - makes folks believe there’s more truth to the story than they perhaps would have in absence of such blatant, double-standard censorship.
twitter and the journo sphere launder misinformation every single day with no consequence. the russian bounty story had little relation to factuality but it was still widespread with no objections or even much if any in the way of post facto correction. it's entirely permissible to write complete fiction just as long as you preface it with 'intelligence sources indicate...'
Oh, i definitely agree that as a private company Twitter is well within its rights to censor what it believes is "misinformation" but an important line has been crossed today by Twitter and Facebook.
A story about potential corruption of a candidate for the US president has been censored by two of the largest information brokers in the world. Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true? lol
> Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true?
I assume most politicians at the presidential candidate level have some sort of PR team that works to come up with some official response to these sorts of controversies
"JOE BIDEN SPOKESMAN ANDREW BATES hits back at the N.Y. POST STORY, via NATASHA BERTRAND and KYLE CHENEY: “Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani - whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported - claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
I mean I don't particularly have much stake in whether its true or not, I'm just saying I'm not shocked he's not responding to it immediately for vaguely similar reasons to why people tell you not to talk to the police without a lawyer, whether you're innocent or not.
that's a fair point, just if its not true its pretty easy to say "not true, fake news" instead, what the answer that's provided is "we checked the schedule and didn't see it there" which is kinda suspicious.
Like the censorship of "misinformation" would be more persuasive then I think.
> just if its not true its pretty easy to say "not true, fake news" instead, what the answer that's provided is "we checked the schedule and didn't see it there" which is kinda suspicious.
Wait, so you're saying that providing an alibi as to why the claim is impossible is more suspicious than dismissing it as fake news without a defense? I'm not sure how else to interpret what you're saying, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but that position is mindboggling to me.
Just because it wasn't on Biden's "official" schedule, doesn't mean it didn't happen. My point is that saying "the meeting didnt happen" is less suspicious than saying "We checked the official schedule and find no record that the meeting happened"
Bc, of course, light bribery probably does not go down when you're on the official schedule
Meeting with someone isn't illegal in anyway - it's normally a good thing! And there's probably a good chance that Joe Biden did meet Pozharskyi at some point.
But they didn't have some kind of scheduled meeting, so it seems unlikely that any business was done.
The Post story included a screenshot of what the paper said was a 2015 email from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” But the email doesn’t indicate whether Pozharskyi was describing a meeting that had already occurred or one intended to occur in the future. Nevertheless, the Post reported that the existence of such a meeting undercut Biden’s long-held assertions that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory.
Notably:
Burisma’s website lists at least some of Pozharskyi’s meetings with U.S. officials, including a meeting in November 2017 with then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and a series of meetings with members of Congress, though the company lists only Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) by name. It lists no meetings with Joe Biden. Pozharskyi also reportedly met in 2018 with Kurt Volker
When a politician is ambushed with a question like "when did you stop beating your wife" the politician can't respond to the allegations because that ads to the story ("politician denies beating his wife").
Isn't some press person for Biden speaking on his behalf basically the same as Biden saying it himself?
>And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
He addressed some parts of the specific allegations (whether a meeting took place), without addressing other parts (whether the emails are real). This immediately makes people think the email is real, which is what throwawa3495 was pointing out.
> we checked the schedule and didn't see it there"
That's not what Biden said.
Biden said "and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place." That clearly is a denial that a meeting took place. It's not conditioned on a calendar entry. It's not saying "the calendar says no meeting took place", or "according to the calendar no meeting took place".
The official statement predicates the denial on their search for an official record of it. “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
There’s an implicit dependency between these two clauses - we looked at the official schedule (there was no record, so,) no meeting took place.
Sentence construction in crisis management publications like this is poured over and very deliberate. Do not imagine this is just sloppy sentence construction.
Why would they have documented illegal/potentially illegal activity in the "official schedule" anyway? The claim that the official schedule somehow supports the rebuttal is pretty flimsy.
yeah exactly, that's what I was trying to convey. Like why include this qualifying language about "checking the official schedule" but for some funny business being afoot?
It's just a kinda legalistic answer, you'd give in a deposition but is kind of besides the point now.
>Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true?
If i was Joe Biden and the yellow press came after me honestly I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
If people like Biden or Clinton responded every time someone tries to capitalise on some bullshit attached to their name they'd not be doing anything else
> I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
Joe Biden ignored the reports? The article says Joe Biden responded, saying the meeting didn't take place:
> In a Thursday afternoon statement, the Biden campaign said the paper “never asked . . . about the critical elements of this story,” and that a review of “Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time” show that “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails, though no other media outlet has confirmed the Post’s story so far.
That reply seems eerily similar to their response to Tara Reid’s allegations - “we have no official record of that in our boxes of records that we looked through”
In his official statement[0], the campaign stated that the meeting didn’t happen as the second clause of a sentence that began with the contextual announcement that they had reviewed his official schedule. There is an implicit dependency in those two halves of the same sentence. If you think that is just a casual wordsmithing mistake you have no idea how PR works. I guarantee that is carefully crafted. The release went on to say that they do not exclude the possibility that some informal meeting may have taken place.
[0] “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
In a normal situation, publication would be followed by scrutiny, possibly correction, more information. Incorrect information isn’t such a big problem then.
One major problem right now is that it’s 3 weeks from an election. Scrutiny and fact checks would risking being only after the election. I’m happy to see the requirements for credibility tightened right now, for issues related to the election.
Considering many people have already voted and probably do not care about this issue it would be unlikely to affect the outcome of the election anyway.
Can't people do their own research and choose whether or not they believe the contents of a story before they retweet it and lose their own credibility?
The problem here that this "bombshell" article did not provide enough information to do any kind of verification.
The main evidence is a PDF file of a print of an e-mail (without even providing a header information).
- we don't know if it's Hunter's laptop as claimed (kind of odd that somebody bothers with laptop repair (let's be honest, a lot people here probably buy a new one) and then leaves it there?
- we don't know if this is a real e-mail (headers could be used to prove that)
- we don't know that the sender e-mail is an e-mail connected to the person Hunter is accused talking to (the ".ukraine" in e-mail is very odd, who would put their country in an e-mail address, it's long and is not like he has a super common name)
- we don't know Hunter responded to it (since they have his laptop, you would think they would have his e-mails as well)
- we don't know the meeting actually happened
- this story is obviously an October surprise (the time is picked exactly to impact voting, there's also not enough time to prove it is false)
I agree with all of your points but why is it Twitter or Facebook's responsibility to check all of those things for every article posted to their platform? Why is the onus not on you as the reader to do your own fact checking?
Because the timing of this piece (if you look at the PDF was created a year ago, but published just in middle of October). It is clear that it is timed to affect election results.
They are not responsible, to check all things. But it's mostly ethics and self preservation. I don't think anyone will deny that they actually have real impact now (even greater than MSM now) and I believe if Democrats win, there will be some laws passed adding some checks. I also believe trump with executive order about section 230 also probably contributed.
It wouldn’t prove they were authentic. It would just prove they were sent through gmail’s servers. If you trusted gmail then it would prove the username, time and content was legitimate.
All it looks like to me is some Russian username. I don’t see how it ties to a real person. I haven’t read the article so maybe the post explains that bit.
It would be immediately obvious if they were a poor quality fake though. Like if someone typed it up in Word and exported it to PDF they wouldn’t be able to produce the DKIM signature.
It could prove it was sent through gmails servers on April 17, 2015. There aren’t many people who would know the importance of the meeting five years ago. It would narrow the list of possible senders.
That information would still be meaningless unless we could prove that this e-mail is authentic. `v.pozharskyi.ukraine@gmail.com` - why would an Ukrainian citizen have "ukraine" in their e-mail address?
There are so many other red flags (in addition whether this e-mail was really send, and the account belongs to that person) for example if Hunter responded to it (if they had his laptop surely they could get that from outbox? Why somebody who cares enough about their laptop to get it to repair (if you have plenty of money, more likely you'll get a new one) not care about getting it back?
This would prove that gmail indeed sent the e-mail, but it wouldn't prove that the e-mail wasn't created few minutes earlier.
That "something" is almost certainly "the NY Post story has profound credibility problems, to the point that it may very well be a hoax, and Jack Dorsey is still reeling from his personal moral complicity in the flawed 2016 election."
Absolutely this can be trivially verified and needs to be. Release the emails if they're real so they can be verified. But also, isn't it the same thing with Trump's tax returns? All I've found so far is that the New York Times obtained copies, but they haven't actually released them to the public to be verified. If anyone can find the actual copies I'd like to see.
We need to take all of the press releases about "leaks" with a grain of salt, because I keep seeing "leaks" without actual content or verification. It's bullshit and why places that provide the actual contents of leaks are so important. Yes, certain publications are more trustworthy than others historically, but that doesn't mean they get an indefinite pass on providing verified information.
One thing that can be verified (as at least a unique release) after looking into the NY Post article more are the pictures they released. When I reverse image search them on Google and tineye, there are no other matches. This doesn't mean that they are necessarily real (they'd have to be verified as not being fakes), but they are certainly newly released.
The political machine is more sophisticated than using a public image. If anything it looks like an iCloud hack. Last week was a top HN article about finding an XSS vulnerability in iCloud. Not unreasonable to assume Biden’s crackhead sons iCloud was owned by operatives. Especially since the subject is a main topic of Trumps impeachment.
The FBI referred questions about its seizure of the laptop and hard drive to the Delaware US Attorney’s Office, where a spokesperson said, “My office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”
I think the work of Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi and others illustrating how the media just become pawns of the intelligence community is the right way to regard many of the developments, bombshells, and similar media stories that we’ve seen for decades.
Wouldn't DKIM verification require having the public key of Gmail from 2014 on hand? I looked up some old 2014 era emails I got from gmail and it looks like they were using the "20120113" selector at the time, which is no longer available through DNS query.
There are historical DNS data vendors, as there are historical WHOIS data vendors. Also, Google would almost certainly respond to a journalistic inquiry about a cryptographic signature. Follow-up of this kind is what we should expect from journalists.
I would think the financial risk for libel would be serious if it were true that the emails are fabrications and so made with intent to harm. Similarly, I would expect attorneys or all involved would be aware of this and were not sufficiently concerned.
weird that there is actually no mention of these materials being hacked from anywhere though, or did I miss that?
It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
It's worth noting that HN flags are user-sourced, so unlike on Twitter that doesn't necessarily reflect administrators stepping in to kill the discussion.
>It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
To say this strains credulity would be be a massive understatement.
Also, people routinely abuse their privileges to snoop on others, and computer repair shops copying disks and having a looksie is no exception.
On the email remark, are you aware of any mainstream news org (wikileaks doesn't count) who has posted a full raw email with DKIMs as part of their story's evidence? I'd honestly be surprised if you can show me one, double so if it's commonplace, since it's one of those things I just sort of consider nearly impossible for the media to actually do.
I think it is crazy that twitter has gone down this path. Being the arbiter of truth makes their job much harder and doesn’t seem to have a big upside. If they have an agenda they want to push the upside might be there but otherwise it’s just a perpetual shitshow.
I mean, their previous path was "it's fine for us to profit handsomely from dishonest propaganda since we're not personally responsible for it, even if that propaganda gets implicated in the theft of an election or a genocide campaign." This turns out to have its own issues! And it's not specifically about a leftist/progressive agenda: it is plain unethical to profit off propaganda which you know to be deceitful and dangerous, regardless of what political intent.
While it is true that Twitter has cracked the whip against the right far more than the left since they started regulation of misinformation, this is reflective of Twitter being unbiased - the problem is the 21st-century Western right.
It has a clear upside. I don't think it's a secret at this point that the values of Silicon Valley are in sync with those of the right wing of the Democratic party. These companies are acting in their self interest.
We can make appeals to the ideal of free speech or point out instances of hypocrisy all we want, but it's a futile and demoralizing thing to focus on. It probably makes more sense to view Facebook and Twitter as media outlets with their own editorial agendas, just like the Washington Post, Economist, Daily Mail, etc. And then disengage if their agenda is at odds with yours.
Agreed. I can’t believe they didn’t see the writing on the wall. It doesn’t matter what their decision is (demeaning content misinformation or truth) they are going to be taking a ton of shit in perpetuity.
"If" they have an agenda? Really? Jack Dorsey admitted his bias. In the Joe Rogan interview he couldn't address any of the examples of biased censorship.
Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to Ibram Kendi, a man who wants to create an unelected and unaccountable "department of anti-racism" with the power to veto any federal bill that doesn't conform to Kendi's specific, contentious political agenda.
In other words, Jack Dorsey supports totalitarians.
To whom are they the arbiter of truth? Not to anyone with half a brain I hope. It's a private website and they can do what they like with it, same as you or I. If I go on your blog and post something dumb, you'd probably delete it too.
I'm struggling to see how this story is evidence of anything.
Steve Bannon—one of Trump's chief cronies—provided a mixed bag of allegedly stolen content from a laptop with some easily contrived "evidence" against Biden and Trump.
There don't seem to be any direct ties even to Hunter Biden, let alone his dad. Publishing this is a gift to Trump.
History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
The fact that this article is flagged is alarming. This is a relevant news story directly related to how technology companies influence public perception.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.
I can't comment on their system, and as a long-time HN user overall I find it a great place to have discussion on varied topics. That said, I'm working on a new alternative site and welcome you to check it out. It's called sqwok.im and it's a sort of hybrid between Twitter & Slack/Discord, where each post has a chatroom instead of a comment thread. In beta mode and welcome feedback.
>We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue
Seems to be long gone, to be honest. We're now at a point where people are de-humanizing those on a different side of an issue to themselves. We unfortunately know what the next step is.
When one side says it's raining and the other says it's sunny, it's not 'losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue' when you look outside and report to the public that one side is lying.
If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
The NY Post story pushes the repeatedly-debunked claim that Biden pushed for the Ukraine prosecutor to be fired in order to protect his son. It has been fact-checked to death and found to be a lie. One side (the Trump campaign) continues to push this lie. The NY Post, owned by Trump henchman Rupert Murdoch, is pushing that lie in the article.
I don't see why Twitter and Facebook have to be neutral on their platforms when it comes to spreading lies in the run-up to a major election. The NY Post is a tabloid and this story has not been verified by any reputable news site. Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians. It's a net good.
> If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
> Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians.
This is the contradiction that I'm trying to get at: To justify censorship by claiming at the same time that something is obviously wrong (like the claim that Biden is conspiring with Martians) and that the public can't understand that it's wrong (though it presumably could understand that Biden isn't conspiring with Martians).
Ok, let's try something easier to understand: Let's say that rather than conspiring with aliens, the Post was ginning up a story that Biden conspired with bin Laden and was secretly behind 9/11, and they produced some highly suspect documents to back this up. No reputable news outlets verify the story. The Biden campaign produced evidence contradicting the story. And let's say the Post did this not just any random time, but as millions of people are actively voting in an election.
That's what this is - a pretty blatantly false tabloid story being pushed by Rupert Murdoch, the closest thing the world has to a cartoon villain, during the voting process in a major election. In the time it would take to conclusively debunk the story to the public, the damage would already be done. This is straight out of the 2016 election playbook, where disinformation was pushed as voting was happening.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to clutch pearls over a disreputable tabloid being treated like a disreputable tabloid. If anything it would be good for journalism if they banned the Post from the site forever.
The inescapable premise here is that there's something that's obviously wrong to "us" (some enlightened circle of censors), so obviously wrong that we don't to discuss it further, but not obviously wrong to the masses who might fall for it. And that might well be true in any specific case, but the historical record of people with this attitude isn't great.
No platform has banned discussion of the story or the reasons for deplatforming it, so that's a moot point. The story is freely available on the internet and anyone who wishes can go read it right now.
They did the right thing in this specific case, seems a little alarmist to launch right into slippery slope prognostications about deplatforming. We're on the slippery slope right now when it comes to electioneering disinformation.
I don't know how I feel about it given how blatantly the current administration lies and the lengths they are willing to go to manufacture lies. Given that scenario, should we not just assume that everything they say is a lie until proven otherwise?
There is a lot of circumstantial evidence here. Why would Hunter biden be paid thousands of dollars a month to work at a random Ukrainian energy company other than to provide access to Joe Biden. Hunter Biden has no expertise running a energy utility.
Isn't the likeliest explanation that 1) random Ukrainian energy company paid Hunter Biden for access to Joe Biden, and 2) the payments were not useful in actually getting access to Joe Biden? "Thousands of dollars a month" doesn't seem like "get close to a former VP/future presidential candidate" money.
(Of course, this explanation isn't exactly a good look either, but at this point it's a choice between imperfection options, and one seems a lot less imperfect.)
Do companies pay princelings large sums of money without getting anything in return? I believe it's usually understood that they get something in return, even if that something is just not getting into trouble (as is the way in China, if you want no road blocks in your enterprise, you better hire some high official's kid).
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et. al. are now in Orwell's land of "Ministry of Truth" .. they are telling the people what is reliable "news" and what is not.
The Ministry of Truth and the protagonist of 1984, it’s employee, were engaged in revising the written record to make it match what the Party wanted in the present.
They were also the only source of information.
Twitter is not doing the former and isn’t the latter, so equating it with Minitrue is 100% factually incorrect.
Sure not everything matches up. The Ministry of Truth was government, but in America the same type of group exists and it's private. They don't have to rewrite history. They're rewriting the present.
That’s typically referred to, at its most specific: fact checking, less specifically: news reporting, and most generally: making a claim of fact... when one disagrees with the check, report, or claim.
> America the same type of group exists and it's private
You gotta admire the genius of it all. The state gets to control speech and the press via willing private citizens and corporations, whilst keeping its hands clean.
So I'd certainly say Reddit is at least comparable. Additionally, I see fact checks on tons of conservative posts on Facebook and Twitter (rightfully so most of the time). But the same procedure isn't followed for liberal posts.
I haven't seen any possible misinformation warnings on Facebook or Twitter for something like: people claiming the BLEXIT supporters at Trump's recent speech were paid. According to ABC News, some supporters travel and room/board were paid (but they didn't release any of the emails, just allegedly quoted them). So it would be misleading to say that BLEXIT supporters were paid to attend the speech, it should be labeled as a "possibly misleading" statement like the claims from the right typically are. I mean, the emails haven't even been released and/or verified as existing and people are just running with it because it's ABC?
Edit: would love to know why I'm getting downvotes for providing a comment with a source and a different viewpoint?
Offering to cover someone's travel expenses is different than offering to pay someone to attend the speech. For anyone who has contracted before, that's an explicit difference that is usually discussed and agreed upon before the contract is signed by both parties.
If a contracting client offered to pay for your room and board and travel expenses, but not for your time in the office to work on the project, it's a bad deal. Or they could pay for your time in the office but not travel expenses. Or they can pay for everything. Those are three separate situations. By not clarifying which one it is, it's misleading. So if the client said we'll pay you to come work on this project and you'd have to travel to it, then you get there and they only pay for room and board, you'd be pretty pissed.
The lack of specificity is the same thing happening here in the reporting. Therefore it's misleading.
That's only true if they are doing it in bad faith. And if they were controlling information at the source. You can still easily find this story on nypost.com. I agree this is dangerous territory for Twitter, but it's 100% within their rights to do so. They can censor content completely arbitrarily if they want. Consumers will vote with their feet. Either they like this or they don't.
>That's only true if they are doing it in bad faith.
Every tyrant ever thought they were doing what was good. Nobody ever does bad things just to be evil. They do them because they honestly believe the end justifies the means. We tend to give a pass to actions taken toward ends we agree with. Everybody is the hero of their own story. Nobody is acting in bad faith. They just believe that based on the information they have and their experience that the course they are choosing is correct. Those guys firing AGTMS at each other in the videos we get out of Syria are all trying to create a better world for the next generation. They just happen to disagree on the details.
There's a recurring argument on social media censorship that goes: "you wouldn't want the telephone company censoring phone conversations would you?" And the response is along the lines: "these are hardly private conversations, any tweet can go viral and be seen by millions".
This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM. If you think that's OK for Twitter on its platform, is it also OK for AT&T on its phone network? For Google on Gmail?
They do, my local politician robo-calls all his constituents with info, and T-Mobile always flags his calls as spam.
I guess in a way it's spam since it's unsolicited? But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling, and keeping people informed is part of his job.
Yeah that sounds like spam. If info needs to get sent out, try email. Robo-calls are intrusive, and generally the wrong medium for transmitting information.
Edit: Obtrusive -> intrusive. Although I guess both are technically correct.
I have been getting unsolicited e-mail from my local state rep, and I actually appreciate it. It's not campaign-type stuff, it's actual info about what's happening in this district and resources that are being provided.
Granted that feels different than a phone call, but the intent may be the same.
Although with email, you have the spam filter. It's just that those emails are not being picked up by it.
Also, usually, you can unsubscribe to email lists/sender. While you can't do that for phone calls. You might block a specific number, but those robo-calls might use many different numbers
> But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling
That's the way pretty much every spammer justifies their existence and somehow manages to sleep at night.
The only reason robocalling by politicians is not illegal is because it's them who get to make the laws. They should all get in the sea, alongside all the other spammers.
Some government call centers got mistakenly labeled ‘Spam Likely’. People were denied food stamps and other benefits for missing phone interviews from these numbers.
Nope, it's because they added caller ID spoofing capabilities that nobody asked for, and regulators didn't stop them because Republicans installed telecom lobbyists to be the regulators.
>I really hope AT&T starts censoring these damn spam calls. I've had 5 today.
I got one (Verizon) just as I started reading the comments for this post. :(
There are solutions[1], but you'll need to wait until next July[0],at least in the US. It's not a complete solution, but it should take care of the vast majority of scam calls.
Truecaller works even though the app is hard to stomach privacy-wise.
Google recently unveiled plans for its "verified calls" feature, so that might help if you're on an Android 11 device.
I personally do not answer any calls from numbers not on my contact list. If a call was urgent, I'd normally recieve a text message (if informal) or an email (if formal, like the bank, for example) from the caller eventually.
It's gone so far now that nothing can surprise me anymore. If Facebook and Twitter made a joint announcement that Zuckerberg won the 2020 election and that Jack Dorsey will be his vp, and that anyone disputing this, whether in public or private or off platform will be banned - even that would not surprise me. If people went along with it so as not to be cut off from their likes and "influence", even that would not surprise me.
The difference between the telephone company and Twitter is that the phone company was (historically) a monopoly - the only game in town. Use their wires or get lost. It required common carrier neutrality by regulation.
Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service. It's not a public utility.
This seems like an incomplete summary. Shipping companies are subject to similar common carrier regulations, even though they're not monopolies, because "just hire some random guy to drive your packages around" isn't a feasible replacement. In a country where almost everyone with any serious media presence is on Twitter, it's unreasonable to tell certain arbitrary subsets of the media that their thoughts are off limits.
It's not just Twitter, it's also Facebook. (I believe Facebook was actually the first to take action.) What if Google does it too?
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
I don't really care about Twitter or Facebook to be honest. It's not the only game in town.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
you know what, that's absolutely true. But you have a better chance of remaining online with your wrongthink than by remaining on a platform such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
that's precisely why I think journalists and the public sector ought to put their money where their mouth is. Open web standards can be adopted today with the effect of turning any of these groups into their own Twitter. That particular genie is impossible to push back into its own bottle. They had better catch up or get left behind.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
We should make sure that the media landscape contains a wide range of political thought, including ideas that you or I might individually find wrong-headed and offensive. That's how we ended up with the Fairness Doctrine from the 50s to the 80s, when broadcast media was monopolized to a comparable degree as social media today.
Sure. But that presumably does not mean requiring that The National Review carries articles providing a strong case for "cultural Marxism" or that Marxism Today carries articles supporting neoliberal trade policies. In fact, it presumably doesn't mean requiring that any particular medium or outlet carries anything in particular at all.
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
Another reply more or less had the same response I had, which is that it's entirely possible for you to start blogging about certain topics (some could be approached from a capitalism/socialism discussion starting point, even) and be shut down by AWS. I'd like to add a bit more though. Deplatforming is commonplace, by all parties with a platform, and its causes aren't just written comments but also artwork and legal commercial goods.
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
I will add one more thing, although not directly related to your comment about deplatforming being commonplace. In banking, we call it derisking ( closing customer's account due to <reason> ).
That was a completely different situation. The Wikileaks cables contain marked classified government information that is still considered classified by the US government. (I will not debate whether or not the basis for their classification is valid.)
AWS provides service to the USG, and having unsecured classified anywhere on their servers likely violates the terms of service (between the USG and AWS).
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
> In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
I was responding to "Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all."
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
(Unfortunately HN put me in the "You're replying too fast, please slow down" state last night so I was unable to reply, and so I'm not sure if anyone will see this reply now. I wonder if that should be called censorship?)
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
> As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
> The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
If they're really being collusive, then you investigate them for violations of antitrust law or otherwise figure out what they're doing that's breaking the free market, and you fix it.
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
This is not the scenario described. The scenario is that all of these web sites allow 419 scams for years, and then all of the sudden in the same week they all decide to ban 419 scams. That would be really strange, don't you think?
>How would you feel if they had banned all talk of russian conspiracies the last few years? Would you be making the property rights argument still?
Yes. Because otherwise the Russians (or anyone else) could do so on my property and I would have no recourse.
The appropriate way to handle this is to vote with your feet/wallet.
Besides, Twitter and Facebook's revenue model is so incredibly evil and exploitative, folks should leave there even if they weren't blocking whatever it is that you think is important.
I did nearly seven years ago and I'm much happier for it.
> Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service.
Not exactly. The public has the right to have all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh private company".
Yet you have no rights on a private platform. Is the New York Times forced to publish the same article? No, and they are a publisher. Their existence doesn't suddenly give you a right to use it and 'publish' what you'd like.
Every forum online has rules about what you can and cannot post; there is no law stating they have to leave whatever you post up.
actually there are rules. Clearly, a TV network with 1B viewers would not be allowed to give unlimited free airtime to one party; but somehow Twitter seems to be immune (so far) to campaign finance laws
Phone companies are natural monopolies on account of the cost of building out a physical network and network effects. Social media has similar dynamics. The only difference is there is no requisite physical layer.
> Did MySpace, Friendster, AOL, CompuServe etc have those first mover advantages as well?
They had the same first-mover advantages. They never achieved Facebook's scale and network advantage. In the early days, Ma Bell also faced competition.
I think it is bigger news that Trump operatives are trying to inject misinformation into the last few weeks of the election. They have no respect for democracy.
But these problems will still be here post-Trump, or even if he wins re-election. We need to have reasoned debate on how to deal with our new world with social media.
Twitter is a social media platform that engages in content management - they have always been moderating content, since day 1, managing identities etc..
AT&T is not in the business of content.
That's a very material distinction.
That says nothing about how/who/what Twitter should or should not be doing in this case, other than to say the moment you dip your toe into content management, it's going to get very complicated, as we now see on a daily basis in the news.
Correct. US progressives and the major tech services recently argued that it should be treated as a utility, because of precisely this sort of problem, and they were opposed by US conservatives and ISPs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#United_States I'd say it's ironic, but it isn't really if you look at what the progressive and conservative movements and "big tech" have really been advocating for (which is off-topic for this site).
That is also a matter for interpretation, I believe. This cuts to the heart of the raging platform vs publisher debate (section 230).
From my understanding, the current status quo is:
1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;
2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.
This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.
EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.
I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.
You're going to need to be a bit more specific as your article offers a very similar interpretaiton of platform vs publisher (without using those terms), to what I presented. The only thing of note I see in your article is a "deep dive" into figuring out the "original intention" behind the law.
I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
> I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.
You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)
In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.
Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.
That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.
Your understanding is the new interpretation of Section 230 being pushed by the ruling party in the US as justification for rewriting it and expanding the scope of what is actually a pretty targeted regulation. There's nothing in the actual text of Section 230 (which you can read in about a minute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 sections C and F are the relevant bits) about fairness or equality of enforcement.
It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.
Thank you for the link. It had been a while since I had read the specifics of section 230, and the Overton Window certainly has shifted since then, when it comes to this topic.
The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.
Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.
Your summary of the "current status quo" is a reasonably accurate summary of the legal situation BEFORE S230 was passed, and is exactly what S230 was designed to remedy.
The current status quo, as I understand it, is:
1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles).
2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition.
3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.
Yeah, I think it's necessary and honestly overdue. The problem with these attempted defenses of the race to the bottom we are witnessing in online communication is they step back from the direct examination of specific harms to the abstraction of "speech."
Once the subject is switched, we can comfortably speak in generalities about the abstract value of speech. It reminds me of what Keats said about a certain way of thinking about economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
We're dealing with something that most reasonable people agree is a genuine crisis of democracy, and it's sheltered by a naiive conception of speech that doesn't have anything specific to say directly about Qanon, Covid, the 2020 election. It's a view from 10,000 feet generality that works when the ocean is flat again.
I think it's absolutely okay for AT&T to censor what it wants on its phone network, provided I have the freedom to use a competitor. Back in the day, we broke up AT&T for precisely the reason that people didn't have that freedom. And then we let them merge back together, for some reason.
I also think that not only is it legally permissible for Gmail to censor links, they do so already. Try reliably delivering a newsletter from a brand-new domain name (I have). Censorship isn't any better when it's the emergent effects of unknowable spam filtering and abuse algorithms than a decision by a human. (I'd say it's worse, because at least you can ask the human what they were thinking.) But the solution there is for consumers to stop using products that don't do what they want, not for big government to tell companies how to implement technical systems.
Actually, that's a great idea, there should be a spam folder or something similar on facebook and twitter as well, and instead of blocking, it should just all go there. Then it be similar to Gmail and Phone Carrier. Users who would like to go check the spam themselves in case something that isn't spam made it there by accident could, and normal people who just don't want to see garbage posts at the cost of a few false positives would have a much better experience.
> This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM.
This isn't a new behaviour.
I've experienced it personally: Back in 2011, when I published the big archive of paywalled but copyright expired Jstor documents with attached manifesto facebook silently vanished any message containing a link to it or the title of it, even in private messages.
One reason you haven't heard more about this behaviour is because the fact of the matter is that its extremely effective.
Google already censors tons of inbound messages, rendering them invisible in your spam folder simply because you didn't pay the deliverability cartel (Mailgun et al) to ensure that you don't get spam-flagged, even if your message isn't spam.
I kept the headline from one of the previous articles because it seemed the most neutral. If anyone wants to suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
I also felt more comfortable with yahoo.com than with a politicized site like NR. The intention here is simply to be accurate and neutral to the extent possible.
But it's the same article, so it doesn't make sense to pretend that it comes from a different source, besides which the HN guidelines say "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If there's a more neutral and accurate article we can change it again.
I understand the moderation decisions made today, but I'm alienated by them.
A political article like this one would ordinarily get flagged off the HN front page. The subject matter of Twitter and Facebook imposing constraints on distribution is germane, but this article goes way beyond that by propagating the suspect email content.
Obviously HN readers are going to want to see the emails and decide for themselves. There's zero implication of authenticity (or inauthenticity for that matter). The only thing we care about at our end is having an accurate article (and headline) for the story.
Politics isn't completely off-topic for HN—there's overlap and it depends. There's lots of previous explanation about that at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
We turn off user flags sometimes when a story contains interesting (in HN's sense) new information and the probability of a substantive discussion clears a certain threshold.
It goes much before that. Isikoff met Steele on Sept 22, 2016, and published a story about Carter Page the next day. He didn’t verify a thing. All he did was get an anon government official to say FBI had the dossier. And that kind of journalism happens all the time and never gets called out. The double standards are amazing.
It's hard to find a non-right-wing source promoting extraordinary right-wing campaign claims that are not accompanied by evidence or a credible background story.
The story from an HN point of view is not the campaign claim—that would probably be off topic—but the actions taken by Twitter and Facebook, which are significant new information [1] about an interesting new phenomenon [2].
Much like the HN thread that applauded FB getting rid of some thousands of accounts related to “right wingers”, QAnon, et cetera, I equally applaud this admirable move.
I hope that FB, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare and others continue to block and close accounts to prevent the intervention of democracy as much as possible.
A similar case to this may have been the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016. So these are all parties who are trying to right the wrongs here done by destructive state actors from abroad.
These are all companies who own the servers that this content sits on, and it’s well within their rights to get rid of it if and when they wish to.
If you don’t want your content removed from there, then don’t post there and don’t use their services. Simple as that.
Right, but what if the story is 100% legit, and the people interfering in democracy are actually FB, Twitter, Google and Cloudflare? All of which are heavy lobbyists, and have their own interests at heart. Shouldn't they just be elevating journalists that are casting doubts on it, or going in to try to confirm or refute the story...instead of just outright blocking something that isn't verifiably false? This isn't remotely the same as QAnon or antivaxxing, as that are verifiably false.
I've wondered if it might be strategic, if there is any truth to it, to withhold proof and get the opposition busy denying it entirely... then present the proof and shoot their credibility completely and cause a bigger backlash.
Works for me on the desktop version, i.e. it isn't censored, I haven't checked though in their direct Facebook Messenger app. Also, am not from the US, have sent the joebiden.info link for testing to my gf who's also not from the US.
The ActivityPub standard and network exists. Nothing (absolutely nothing) is stopping the tabloid from running its own instance on nypost.com
edit: and I wanted to reply to a comment here referring to section 230 but their comment got flagged and I am unable to reply to them. Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
My reply to that commenter would be that there is nothing stopping Congress-critters from standing up their own ActivityPub infra as well. A 'congress.gov' presence on the Fediverse would look pretty spiffy.
> Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
If you truly beleive the comment didn't deserve to be flagged (this does unfortunately happen sometimes, especially on threads like this) you can vouch for it if you have showdead on
I don't pay for twitter, I don't have any reasonable expectations for a SLA regarding anything including DMs. Just like I have no responsibility to listen to people on soapboxes on street corners, and soap companies have no responsibility to provide soapboxes to anyone to shout from.
Yes you do. You pay with your attention and with your ability to understand the world around you.
Twitter is an extremely powerful bit of technology that can basically make you believe anything. As a trade for entertainment/dopamine: you are allowing it to.
The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption. In human history, we've never before had individual companies like Facebook and Twitter that are so enormous and have so much control over our public speech. (2.7 billion and 330 million monthly active users, respectively.) They have become "the town square of the world", so to speak. Facebook and Twitter are not literally governments, but they're actually larger than many governments, with a larger population and more wealth than many nations. There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech. That assumption is no longer true. Indeed, the whole motivation behind this particular act of censorship is the idea that these platforms are so powerful that they can change the outcome of the election of one of the largest nations on Earth. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's clear in any case that Facebook and Twitter are not just normal "private companies". They're not little moderated discussion forums. They have effectively (unfortunately) become the public sphere.
Twitter once locked me out of my account because I made a joke about bitcoin. Their stupid "algorithms" got me. And the only reason I was able to get my account unlocked was that I personally knew a Twitter engineer. I don't trust Jack or Zuck even one tiny bit to exercise the vast power they have to silence millions of people. It's not even a question of whether I agree with the NY Post article: the story is probably bullshit. But so were the news stories about Iraq having WMD. How about suspending the NY Times account too? How about suspending every news outlet that has published a debunked story? "Anonymous sources tell us that yadda yadda."
By design, Facebook and Twitter allow everyone in the world to post anything they want. That includes lies. If they can't accept the consequences of the platform they created, then they should shut down. But as long as they exist, with the size of their user base, they are simply too big and too powerful to be allowed to restrict our freedom of speech.
>The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption.
>There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech.
The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property. The government can. It's an extraordinary power wielded exclusively by the government.
Consider this: If you think Twitter should be restrained from censoring their platform because the extent of their power is on par with the government, who will enforce any violations of that restraint?
> The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property.
I specifically said I was talking about freedom of speech. There are many different kinds of freedom, and these aren't specifically free speech issues.
The power to imprison and seize property is the core free speech issue. If the government can't enforce the law by putting you in prison or seizing your property, the entire issue is moot.
> The power to imprison and seize property is the core free speech issue.
There are more ways to control participation in public discourse than imprisonment and seizures of printing presses. Times have moved on. Instead of imprisonment, we have banning and filtering, with no independent oversight or appeal process. Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies can do more to restrict the spread of certain information than most governments in the world have ever been able, so why shouldn't at least the same standard apply to them?
Their virtual town squares are nowadays larger than any square ever under government control, and they have absolute control over who can and cannot participate. They are the absolute monarchies of 21st century, more powerful than ever.
The freedom of speech means that government can't prosecute you for having an opinion. It doesn't require anyone too listen to you. It also only applies to the government.
Regardless of how good you believe your argument is philosophically there is no law that supposes they are limited to choosing supporting unrestricted speech or shutting down and any attempt to create such a law would in fact be a violation of their legally defined rights.
The change you desire would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment to allow the government to compel the speech of a corporation in order to protect the speech of their customers. It would be complex, challenging, hard to predict, and almost certainly impossible even if people on average agreed it was needed.
You would have an easier time forcing payment processors, cdns, hosts, not to discriminate against alternative social networks. They at least ARE infrastructure. The challenge with those alternative networks is the only content that absolutely must use it is often odious leaving such networks with little of the desirable often uncontroversional content produced by the rest of the population of users and lots of the bullcrap nobody else wanted.
For example technically voat is more "free" than reddit but a brief look at the frontpage suggests that this freedom is mostly used to be the kind of offensive jerks nobody else wants to be around.
Jack and Zuck have zero incentive to discourage anything that limits communication or discourages both sides from buying as many ads as possible.
I would go so far as to say that Trump could not have been elected without misinformation promoted on Facebook and Twitter and the net result has been a massive probably irreparable rift in our nation and will ultimately when the dust settled have aided in killing addition hundreds of thousands of people that didn't have to die.
An trivially manipulable echo chamber designed to magnify lies and hate is not a matter of minor import without clear real world consequences.
It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later. Is this a trend you see reversing soon?
> It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later.
Whose heavy hand do you mean? It appears to me that the 2 major parties have very different ideas about what Facebook and Twitter should and shouldn't do.
Can you prove algorithmic based information from a Twitter feed does not influence your behavior or opinions?
Twitter itself as a organization is not making you believe anything specifically. However the information presented to you may influence your ideas and potentially your behavior.
everything influences your behaviors or options, do you sue your childhood neighbour for setting a bad example? Ultimately it's you who's responsible for your behaviors and if there's something wrong with you the only way to fix it is you learning to discern truth from lie, NOT everyone else shielding you from lies.
I'm not sure what the analogy is between DMs and soapboxes on street corners.
In any case, I have to say censoring DMs is just too far for me to accept.
I've put in a decent amount of effort to curate my Twitter feed so that it's useful to me, but I can't keep using a service that will arbitrarily decide what private communications I'm allowed to have on their service. I guess I'm out, as much as I hate to do it.
If you don't like the rules, you are free to make your own platform. Like it or not, twitter can do whatever the hell they like with their website that they pay to host. That being said, if you posted something heinous here on HN and a moderator removed it, as they do every day, would you leave? Why haven't you left hacker news since that is what they do, just like twitter? Why haven't you left the internet entirely since any website owner can do whatever they like on their website?
The idea that social media is some sort of public service beholden to the expectation of not ever touching their platform is just nuts to me, yet it's pervasive here on hackernews. The irony.
To think that your personal transactionality with Twitter, whether you pay for your SLAs or DMs etc, is what matters here is myopic at best. Because this soapbox found itself to be used at planet scale, 24/7 available and proven to be increasingly influential, even consequential, on our institutions that depend on healthy public discourse. Not only your analogy doesn’t follow, trying to apply market based normativities on problems of democratic processes is very misleading.
'planet-scale soapbox' is an even better argument for them to be limited in what they allow... just because they found themselves popular doesn't suddenly make them a public utility
If it turns out monopolies of market-based high-throughput public communication channels put societies in a tailspin and render democratic processes highly vulnerable to information warfare, I don’t care whether we call it a public utility or a soapbox, it is a collective liability and we would ignore it at our own peril.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 470 ms ] threadhttps://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-post-hunter-joe-bid...
This thing didn't even survive the first half of the day.
Must be true if Joe says so huh
The laptop was supposedly dropped off a few years ago. Giuliani, Bannon and the FBI have seen the data at least months ago. The NY Post has had it in their possession. None of these details are confirmed. Which means they either failed to verify any of it or they may even know it's a scam.
I want to see the raw emails.
I didn’t see the video. Was it published?
If they don't actually have the video in their possession they are subject to a massive libel suit that they will lose.
They'd also be stupid to release a Hunter Biden sex tape in its entirety. Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media into oblivion for doing the same.
At least the cost of the entire campaign.
Why was the pdf created in 2019? If the emails were supposedly found now and turned into a pdf for distribution.
It’s almost as if Rudy Giuliani is terrible at committing crimes like he’s been doing for the past 4 years.
https://twitter.com/noahmanskar/status/1316459416414302208?s...
Edit: Politics entirely aside. We need the truth on Twitter’s actions before we lose the chance.
> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.
NPR reporter:
> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
https://twitter.com/shannonpareil/status/1316452038465724417
Which is completely nonsense as a reason; you can, to use just one of a million examples, freely post this story on twitter:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
Facebook is also suppressing the story.
Quite remarkable.
that's a huge lie. the brazilian version of the intercept got actual hacked info from federal judges/prosecutor's cellphones and twitter did absolutely nothing -- hell, it was on our trending topics for weeks (search for "vaza jato").
we know it was hacked because brazil's federal police got the hackers.
seems like twitter really loves to pick-and-choose when to apply their hacked material policy.
I thought this was a Hunter Biden story?
You...you mean screaming at the NY post for printing itself? Yes, people do that constantly.
I think I agree that this article shouldn't have been blocked partially because it don't fit perfectly into this distinction
Bonus second reason why people might feel differently. People know and treat the NY Post as suspect. People like me don't read it. Probably some advertisers won't touch it, but I do use Twitter and FB. Most people do. They are arguably natural monopolies
Virality. Information spreads in a fundamentally different way over print [1] versus social media. It spreads faster. It spreads more insidiously. And it mutates--not per se, but in the context attached to it.
There is also social media's concentration. Before cable news, broadcast television was held to stringent standards. As competition emerged that went away. Facebook and Twitter are singular in their domains. Holding them to a higher standard while an election is underway seems reasonable.
[1] A newspaper on a website still behaves like print media. It has to be explicitly shared.
NY Post has always been trash and will always remain trash
If Biden loses. If he wins, it might very well do the opposite.
Fingers crossed.
Did everyone suddenly turn into a free speech nut this morning?
That the email metadata was not released implies the emails are either inauthentic, or that the post did not contact someone with basic competence in computer forensics.
Either possibility seriously undercuts the article's credibility.
[1] https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1316407424648179717
Think of it like shooting the tires of all the cars you want to lose in a race. Sure you didn't push the winner across the finish line, but you made it damn near impossible for anyone else to even get there.
How about a straight forward algorithm for the feed instead of some hugely adbiased mess.
I've seen hypocrisy on both sides for sure but the intellectual dishonesty is only coming from one.
Let me guess: "The Other One!"
But it is known to use sans serif fonts and hire people that went to public schools.
You say this like it's an insult.
In my tax report I think my house is valued at 400 000 NOK.
When I talk to the bank it will probably be worth 4 200 000 NOK.
Tax authorities here know as banks update them every year.
Also in accounting it is common. I remember asking my teacher about it when we had basic accounting and it is simple: if you depreciate (?) an item to less than it is worth you just have to report a profit when you sell a "worthless" asset. (I'm not an accountant and English is not my first language but I think it should be possible to understand.)
It is like this for everyone!
Same with depreciation rules, when I learned the rules here my teacher was actually working with the tax authorities.
Depreciation in accounting is a technicality. And if you happen to sell a thing that is technically worth 0 in the books that just becomes an extra inflow of money to the company, which is taxable and so the tax authorities get their money.
Unless you have learned accounting, be careful :-)
Tax accounting is completely different to accounting you show to a bank for a loan. This is normal because they are used for different things, and are accounting for different things. For example - the tax rate and taxes paid have a real impact on cashflows which would impact your eligibility for a loan. In tax returns taxes paid are not included in profit and loss, because that would lower the tax paid by businesses.
So yes, NYT was absolutely gaslighting.
"Actual journalistic standards" yeah right! They literally carried out a fake news story about Nick Sandmann without any sort of verification. CNN settled 250 million $ lawsuit followed by Washington Post. Other publications are in the line next. They have zero credibility... especially after causing irreparable damage to a child's reputation by labelling him a racist when he was anything but. The real racists at the rally were those who accused this kid of racism. For full video of the actual altercation you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyOD8FIQk and decide for yourself.
Demonstration 1 of so called "Journalistic Standard": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/business/media/washington...
and
Demonstration 2 of so called "Journalistic Standard": https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-new-york-times-rollin...
I'll explain mine.
The New York Post has produced valid journalism. The Washington Post has produced bad journalism. Individual examples of these are not useful for making broad claims about the merits of these organizations because they produce such a huge volume of journalism. Continuing to complain about the Covington case until the end of time is not a productive way of arguing that all media outlets are garbage and doubling down by insisting that people who disagree are just sheep crushes any possibility of useful discussion here.
I would 100% agree with you if the same feeling is accorded to outlets like New York Post or any other right leaning media organization. I am not saying that the right leaning organizations are epitome of journalistic credibility. I am just like you calling bullshit as bullshit. But when you start standing on a high pedestal and start claiming "journalistic credibility" as some sort of differentiating factor while at the same time peddle in blatantly false news I will call you out. No matter if it hurts sentiments. I am not saying that New York Times or Washington Post did not produce valid journalism. They perhaps did a good 60% of the time. I will give them that. But to say they follow "actual journalistic standards" is straight out false. "Actual journalistic standards" entails that you verify your source of information before putting it out. That is for every story. No exceptions. If you have some stories that are going out being fact checked and some not then where is the "journalistic standard"? You set a standard to ensure that you never waver from it nor do you apply it selectively.
You fact check any information you put out. Not pull it down after others have fact checked you. Then what is the reason for your existence? I can get unverified news from social media directly! Why do I need a media organization then? I want to rely on media because it is a publisher which verifies stuff it puts out. That is the main job for media. If media is itself indulging in propaganda then what is the need for media? Especially in this social media age?
In that all organizations have failed. Not just left wing but right wing too. Sensationalism always triumphs. But there are some who take it too far: calling a kid racist without verification of facts. This is where I draw the line. You want to do politics do so between yourselves. Fight it out as adults. Don't involve children in your fights. This is a big red line that I don't want anyone crossing. I hope we both can agree on that. Anytime I see children being used as props for propaganda it turns me the F-off. Even if the Covington case was racial in nature it should not have been shown on TV let alone live TV. This is something that must have been dealt with at the school level. This is an age where the child is still growing. And while growing you make stupid decisions too. You have to give that benefit of doubt. To make him a media spectacle for your own benefits is not the way. You are causing mental trauma to the child. And in this case it is far worse because the kid was not racist at all! I have watched the 1.5 hours video in full length and couldn't find even 1 place where the Covington kids were racist. In fact, the kid actually stops his friend from arguing with the Native American and asks his friend to shut up while the Native American speaks. And we have media which turns around and makes this innocent kid into a racist and we should all be okay with it? No effing ways! I'll speak up even if I am in the minority!
Btw, Covington case is not an isolated one. We all know too well what happened to the Russian collusion hoax. None of it could be proved conclusively and moreover it ultimately resulted in the opposite: now we have evidence being unearthed that it was literally a planted story. Look up on what is happening with the Steele Dossier. Why is no one talking about it now? Because it was complete fabricated nonsense that was peddled by the media. A proper witch-hunt not bas...
These things are in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you'd read those and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Source or I call bullshit on this one.
> And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
Because that is the settlement. To save themselves from embarrassment and having to admit they faked the entire thing. I give credit to Nick Sandmann for being the bigger man here and settling instead of taking it all the way and making sure these media houses get crippled.
Anyways, the point here is not the amount of money settled. The point is that they faked the news and labelled an innocent boy a racist. You still haven't given a reply on that. Not that you are required to, but that is what is the crux of the matter here, not the money.
The difference is those stories had supporting details, with the reporters attempting to follow up.
They lost an editor for posting a mainstream opinion by an elected Republican... Note that they then shared the same sentiment about supporting police cracking down on protests in Hong Kong and received no internal pushback whatsoever.
The op-ed section isn't the news section. NYT is centre-left, NR is centre-right.
Anyway it won't hurt you to read things from the other perspective. The truth is often "in the middle" or only something you can triangulate after reading both sides.
Maybe I'm getting too bogged down in the op-ed section, like you say; but, it does make you think about the effect an op-ed section has on the news content as well.
The fist sentence has a word "tabloid" in it. It's not reputable source of news by any stretch.
also: c-f "russia"
WMD were non-factual, but even so nobody got censored back then (worse, nobody went to prison for going to war on non-factual information).
This is not even remotely close.
Magine if they had applied this to WikiLeaks.
Saying "if it's true, it's ban able for X" without out bothering to say that obviously it's bannable if it's false, isn't saying it's true. How could Twitter even know?
Misinformation and misdirection aren't good for humanity
One thing I'm wondering is how can they censor it without getting either some evidence that it's fake or at least a clear denial? (Biden's campaign released a statement refuting it, but that's not the same as Biden himself publicly denying the claims.)
Thin evidence (someone found some damaging-looking emails) can be dismissed with thin counter-evidence (a denial). But it can't be dismissed with nothing.
Not really sure since when Twitter is required to host and aid in the spread of garbage
A story about potential corruption of a candidate for the US president has been censored by two of the largest information brokers in the world. Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true? lol
I assume most politicians at the presidential candidate level have some sort of PR team that works to come up with some official response to these sorts of controversies
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani - whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported - claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
idk, read for yourself
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2020/10/14/...
Like the censorship of "misinformation" would be more persuasive then I think.
Wait, so you're saying that providing an alibi as to why the claim is impossible is more suspicious than dismissing it as fake news without a defense? I'm not sure how else to interpret what you're saying, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but that position is mindboggling to me.
Bc, of course, light bribery probably does not go down when you're on the official schedule
But they didn't have some kind of scheduled meeting, so it seems unlikely that any business was done.
The Post story included a screenshot of what the paper said was a 2015 email from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” But the email doesn’t indicate whether Pozharskyi was describing a meeting that had already occurred or one intended to occur in the future. Nevertheless, the Post reported that the existence of such a meeting undercut Biden’s long-held assertions that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory.
Notably:
Burisma’s website lists at least some of Pozharskyi’s meetings with U.S. officials, including a meeting in November 2017 with then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and a series of meetings with members of Congress, though the company lists only Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) by name. It lists no meetings with Joe Biden. Pozharskyi also reportedly met in 2018 with Kurt Volker
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
This is politics 101.
And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
>And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
He addressed some parts of the specific allegations (whether a meeting took place), without addressing other parts (whether the emails are real). This immediately makes people think the email is real, which is what throwawa3495 was pointing out.
That's not what Biden said.
Biden said "and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place." That clearly is a denial that a meeting took place. It's not conditioned on a calendar entry. It's not saying "the calendar says no meeting took place", or "according to the calendar no meeting took place".
There’s an implicit dependency between these two clauses - we looked at the official schedule (there was no record, so,) no meeting took place.
Sentence construction in crisis management publications like this is poured over and very deliberate. Do not imagine this is just sloppy sentence construction.
It's just a kinda legalistic answer, you'd give in a deposition but is kind of besides the point now.
If i was Joe Biden and the yellow press came after me honestly I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
If people like Biden or Clinton responded every time someone tries to capitalise on some bullshit attached to their name they'd not be doing anything else
Joe Biden ignored the reports? The article says Joe Biden responded, saying the meeting didn't take place:
> In a Thursday afternoon statement, the Biden campaign said the paper “never asked . . . about the critical elements of this story,” and that a review of “Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time” show that “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails, though no other media outlet has confirmed the Post’s story so far.
Yep.
[0] “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
One major problem right now is that it’s 3 weeks from an election. Scrutiny and fact checks would risking being only after the election. I’m happy to see the requirements for credibility tightened right now, for issues related to the election.
Not that it has stopped Pompeo from teasing more Hillary emails in recent weeks, of course.
The main evidence is a PDF file of a print of an e-mail (without even providing a header information).
- we don't know if it's Hunter's laptop as claimed (kind of odd that somebody bothers with laptop repair (let's be honest, a lot people here probably buy a new one) and then leaves it there?
- we don't know if this is a real e-mail (headers could be used to prove that)
- we don't know that the sender e-mail is an e-mail connected to the person Hunter is accused talking to (the ".ukraine" in e-mail is very odd, who would put their country in an e-mail address, it's long and is not like he has a super common name)
- we don't know Hunter responded to it (since they have his laptop, you would think they would have his e-mails as well)
- we don't know the meeting actually happened
- this story is obviously an October surprise (the time is picked exactly to impact voting, there's also not enough time to prove it is false)
They are not responsible, to check all things. But it's mostly ethics and self preservation. I don't think anyone will deny that they actually have real impact now (even greater than MSM now) and I believe if Democrats win, there will be some laws passed adding some checks. I also believe trump with executive order about section 230 also probably contributed.
All it looks like to me is some Russian username. I don’t see how it ties to a real person. I haven’t read the article so maybe the post explains that bit.
There are so many other red flags (in addition whether this e-mail was really send, and the account belongs to that person) for example if Hunter responded to it (if they had his laptop surely they could get that from outbox? Why somebody who cares enough about their laptop to get it to repair (if you have plenty of money, more likely you'll get a new one) not care about getting it back?
This would prove that gmail indeed sent the e-mail, but it wouldn't prove that the e-mail wasn't created few minutes earlier.
If Twitter is censoring DMs of it though, then there must be something to it.
That "something" is almost certainly "the NY Post story has profound credibility problems, to the point that it may very well be a hoax, and Jack Dorsey is still reeling from his personal moral complicity in the flawed 2016 election."
Source I went to journalism school and worked in PR for years before I became a software developer.
revealing the dkim signatures at a later point would be twice as effective from a political and public opinion standpoint.
We need to take all of the press releases about "leaks" with a grain of salt, because I keep seeing "leaks" without actual content or verification. It's bullshit and why places that provide the actual contents of leaks are so important. Yes, certain publications are more trustworthy than others historically, but that doesn't mean they get an indefinite pass on providing verified information.
A couple searches: https://tineye.com/search/85ed99ec3e5397597a1100ce7d54c0bf99... https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZiu3ByKtFe0xCIg4gz... (The Google one weirdly searches for fun when entering this URL)
"That subpoena never existed"
or
"We issued it and didn't find anything credible to forward to the DOJ"
or
"We don't comment on ongoing cases."
... I'm not sure what silence means.
edit: Seems to be an old test vector for dnslib: https://github.com/paulc/dnslib/blob/d806cfc828d6bbae45c9b4c...
It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
LOL now this post has been flagged wtfff
To say this strains credulity would be be a massive understatement.
who has been hacked?
> The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails
There are other red flags in the NY Post article (like, why wouldn't they just post e-mails with DKIMs), but this part is totally believable to me.
On the email remark, are you aware of any mainstream news org (wikileaks doesn't count) who has posted a full raw email with DKIMs as part of their story's evidence? I'd honestly be surprised if you can show me one, double so if it's commonplace, since it's one of those things I just sort of consider nearly impossible for the media to actually do.
While it is true that Twitter has cracked the whip against the right far more than the left since they started regulation of misinformation, this is reflective of Twitter being unbiased - the problem is the 21st-century Western right.
We can make appeals to the ideal of free speech or point out instances of hypocrisy all we want, but it's a futile and demoralizing thing to focus on. It probably makes more sense to view Facebook and Twitter as media outlets with their own editorial agendas, just like the Washington Post, Economist, Daily Mail, etc. And then disengage if their agenda is at odds with yours.
In other words, Jack Dorsey supports totalitarians.
Streisand Effect
Steve Bannon—one of Trump's chief cronies—provided a mixed bag of allegedly stolen content from a laptop with some easily contrived "evidence" against Biden and Trump.
There don't seem to be any direct ties even to Hunter Biden, let alone his dad. Publishing this is a gift to Trump.
History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.
I don't know why you are being downvoted, I think HN's flagging system is another way we are being censored.
Just this summer, I remember multiple articles with important, true contributions to our understanding of covid that got flagged.
We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue.
The link says Facebook did censor it.
Seems to be long gone, to be honest. We're now at a point where people are de-humanizing those on a different side of an issue to themselves. We unfortunately know what the next step is.
The NY Post story pushes the repeatedly-debunked claim that Biden pushed for the Ukraine prosecutor to be fired in order to protect his son. It has been fact-checked to death and found to be a lie. One side (the Trump campaign) continues to push this lie. The NY Post, owned by Trump henchman Rupert Murdoch, is pushing that lie in the article.
I don't see why Twitter and Facebook have to be neutral on their platforms when it comes to spreading lies in the run-up to a major election. The NY Post is a tabloid and this story has not been verified by any reputable news site. Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians. It's a net good.
> Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians.
This is the contradiction that I'm trying to get at: To justify censorship by claiming at the same time that something is obviously wrong (like the claim that Biden is conspiring with Martians) and that the public can't understand that it's wrong (though it presumably could understand that Biden isn't conspiring with Martians).
That's what this is - a pretty blatantly false tabloid story being pushed by Rupert Murdoch, the closest thing the world has to a cartoon villain, during the voting process in a major election. In the time it would take to conclusively debunk the story to the public, the damage would already be done. This is straight out of the 2016 election playbook, where disinformation was pushed as voting was happening.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to clutch pearls over a disreputable tabloid being treated like a disreputable tabloid. If anything it would be good for journalism if they banned the Post from the site forever.
They did the right thing in this specific case, seems a little alarmist to launch right into slippery slope prognostications about deplatforming. We're on the slippery slope right now when it comes to electioneering disinformation.
(Of course, this explanation isn't exactly a good look either, but at this point it's a choice between imperfection options, and one seems a lot less imperfect.)
It's getting pretty insane out there.
The Ministry of Truth and the protagonist of 1984, it’s employee, were engaged in revising the written record to make it match what the Party wanted in the present.
They were also the only source of information.
Twitter is not doing the former and isn’t the latter, so equating it with Minitrue is 100% factually incorrect.
That’s typically referred to, at its most specific: fact checking, less specifically: news reporting, and most generally: making a claim of fact... when one disagrees with the check, report, or claim.
You gotta admire the genius of it all. The state gets to control speech and the press via willing private citizens and corporations, whilst keeping its hands clean.
So I'd certainly say Reddit is at least comparable. Additionally, I see fact checks on tons of conservative posts on Facebook and Twitter (rightfully so most of the time). But the same procedure isn't followed for liberal posts.
I haven't seen any possible misinformation warnings on Facebook or Twitter for something like: people claiming the BLEXIT supporters at Trump's recent speech were paid. According to ABC News, some supporters travel and room/board were paid (but they didn't release any of the emails, just allegedly quoted them). So it would be misleading to say that BLEXIT supporters were paid to attend the speech, it should be labeled as a "possibly misleading" statement like the claims from the right typically are. I mean, the emails haven't even been released and/or verified as existing and people are just running with it because it's ABC?
Edit: would love to know why I'm getting downvotes for providing a comment with a source and a different viewpoint?
If a contracting client offered to pay for your room and board and travel expenses, but not for your time in the office to work on the project, it's a bad deal. Or they could pay for your time in the office but not travel expenses. Or they can pay for everything. Those are three separate situations. By not clarifying which one it is, it's misleading. So if the client said we'll pay you to come work on this project and you'd have to travel to it, then you get there and they only pay for room and board, you'd be pretty pissed.
The lack of specificity is the same thing happening here in the reporting. Therefore it's misleading.
Every tyrant ever thought they were doing what was good. Nobody ever does bad things just to be evil. They do them because they honestly believe the end justifies the means. We tend to give a pass to actions taken toward ends we agree with. Everybody is the hero of their own story. Nobody is acting in bad faith. They just believe that based on the information they have and their experience that the course they are choosing is correct. Those guys firing AGTMS at each other in the videos we get out of Syria are all trying to create a better world for the next generation. They just happen to disagree on the details.
This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM. If you think that's OK for Twitter on its platform, is it also OK for AT&T on its phone network? For Google on Gmail?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
T-mobile already classifies these calls as 'Scam likely' and they've never seemed to misclassify any, so obviously it can be done.
They do, my local politician robo-calls all his constituents with info, and T-Mobile always flags his calls as spam.
I guess in a way it's spam since it's unsolicited? But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling, and keeping people informed is part of his job.
> robo-calls
Yeah that sounds like spam. If info needs to get sent out, try email. Robo-calls are intrusive, and generally the wrong medium for transmitting information.
Edit: Obtrusive -> intrusive. Although I guess both are technically correct.
Granted that feels different than a phone call, but the intent may be the same.
Also, usually, you can unsubscribe to email lists/sender. While you can't do that for phone calls. You might block a specific number, but those robo-calls might use many different numbers
That's the way pretty much every spammer justifies their existence and somehow manages to sleep at night.
The only reason robocalling by politicians is not illegal is because it's them who get to make the laws. They should all get in the sea, alongside all the other spammers.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Took a long time to clear up in California.
I got one (Verizon) just as I started reading the comments for this post. :(
There are solutions[1], but you'll need to wait until next July[0],at least in the US. It's not a complete solution, but it should take care of the vast majority of scam calls.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
[1] https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/stir-and-shaken-overview/
Google recently unveiled plans for its "verified calls" feature, so that might help if you're on an Android 11 device.
I personally do not answer any calls from numbers not on my contact list. If a call was urgent, I'd normally recieve a text message (if informal) or an email (if formal, like the bank, for example) from the caller eventually.
That was 5 years ago. Maybe they've changed?
I do. Then take the time to get an actual human on the phone. Then I verbally abuse them until they hang up.
It's not effective in stopping them, but while I'm spewing vulgar stuff at them, they're not trying to rip anyone else off.
Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service. It's not a public utility.
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
Why use social media?
>You should have done that
In a way, the New York Post can do exactly this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781812
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
In our current world, they haven't, and you're responding here on a corporate social platform. Because that's where the people are.
What if it were your ox being gored?
See: stormer, 8chan, etc.
Your political leaders and journalists are tuned in.
Thus your life is still affected.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
Many pols actually prefer single points of, ah, influence, so they're going to fight you.
Thus your life is still affected. Ergo, we should .... ???
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
The Holocaust happened 75 years ago. Twitter's decision came 2 days after Facebook's.
Q.E.D.
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, would you think they're colluding?
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
How would you feel if they had banned all talk of russian conspiracies the last few years? Would you be making the property rights argument still?
Yes. Because otherwise the Russians (or anyone else) could do so on my property and I would have no recourse.
The appropriate way to handle this is to vote with your feet/wallet.
Besides, Twitter and Facebook's revenue model is so incredibly evil and exploitative, folks should leave there even if they weren't blocking whatever it is that you think is important.
I did nearly seven years ago and I'm much happier for it.
Not exactly. The public has the right to have all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh private company".
Every forum online has rules about what you can and cannot post; there is no law stating they have to leave whatever you post up.
Phone companies are natural monopolies on account of the cost of building out a physical network and network effects. Social media has similar dynamics. The only difference is there is no requisite physical layer.
Is there a network effect? Sure. Did MySpace, Friendster, AOL, CompuServe etc have those first mover advantages as well? Where are they now?
They had the same first-mover advantages. They never achieved Facebook's scale and network advantage. In the early days, Ma Bell also faced competition.
But these problems will still be here post-Trump, or even if he wins re-election. We need to have reasoned debate on how to deal with our new world with social media.
AT&T is not in the business of content.
That's a very material distinction.
That says nothing about how/who/what Twitter should or should not be doing in this case, other than to say the moment you dip your toe into content management, it's going to get very complicated, as we now see on a daily basis in the news.
Twitter is a closed-system and not a utility, and I guess that makes all the difference.
From my understanding, the current status quo is:
1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;
2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.
This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.
EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.
I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.
You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)
In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.
Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.
The cases you're citing predate the law, so they aren't precedent on how the law should be handled.
If you want actual precendent, here's some:
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/perfect-10-inc-v-ccb...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/parker-v-google-inc
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/ma-v-village-voice-m...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/jurin-v-google-inc
That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.
Here's matching precedent from 2018/19: https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...
It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.
The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.
Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.
The current status quo, as I understand it, is:
1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles). 2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition. 3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.
Once the subject is switched, we can comfortably speak in generalities about the abstract value of speech. It reminds me of what Keats said about a certain way of thinking about economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
We're dealing with something that most reasonable people agree is a genuine crisis of democracy, and it's sheltered by a naiive conception of speech that doesn't have anything specific to say directly about Qanon, Covid, the 2020 election. It's a view from 10,000 feet generality that works when the ocean is flat again.
I also think that not only is it legally permissible for Gmail to censor links, they do so already. Try reliably delivering a newsletter from a brand-new domain name (I have). Censorship isn't any better when it's the emergent effects of unknowable spam filtering and abuse algorithms than a decision by a human. (I'd say it's worse, because at least you can ask the human what they were thinking.) But the solution there is for consumers to stop using products that don't do what they want, not for big government to tell companies how to implement technical systems.
This isn't a new behaviour.
I've experienced it personally: Back in 2011, when I published the big archive of paywalled but copyright expired Jstor documents with attached manifesto facebook silently vanished any message containing a link to it or the title of it, even in private messages.
One reason you haven't heard more about this behaviour is because the fact of the matter is that its extremely effective.
Edit: I've changed it from https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/facebook-twitter-block-the-pos... to what looks like it may be a more neutral source. Other users have supplied these related links:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-post-hunter-joe-bid...
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
But it's the same article, so it doesn't make sense to pretend that it comes from a different source, besides which the HN guidelines say "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If there's a more neutral and accurate article we can change it again.
>[Facebook And Twitter Limit Sharing New York Post Story About Joe Biden](https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/923766097/facebook-and-twitte...)
In comparison, there's Bloomberg:
>[Facebook Slows Spread of N.Y. Post Biden Story to Fact-Check](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/facebook-...)
Or CNBC:
>[Facebook, Twitter make editorial decisions to limit distribution of story claiming to show ‘smoking gun’ emails related to Biden and his son](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/facebook-makes-editorial-dec...)
A political article like this one would ordinarily get flagged off the HN front page. The subject matter of Twitter and Facebook imposing constraints on distribution is germane, but this article goes way beyond that by propagating the suspect email content.
Politics isn't completely off-topic for HN—there's overlap and it depends. There's lots of previous explanation about that at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
We turn off user flags sometimes when a story contains interesting (in HN's sense) new information and the probability of a substantive discussion clears a certain threshold.
Using information or skills uniquely possessed by HN readers?
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I hope that FB, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare and others continue to block and close accounts to prevent the intervention of democracy as much as possible.
A similar case to this may have been the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016. So these are all parties who are trying to right the wrongs here done by destructive state actors from abroad.
These are all companies who own the servers that this content sits on, and it’s well within their rights to get rid of it if and when they wish to.
If you don’t want your content removed from there, then don’t post there and don’t use their services. Simple as that.
edit: and I wanted to reply to a comment here referring to section 230 but their comment got flagged and I am unable to reply to them. Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
My reply to that commenter would be that there is nothing stopping Congress-critters from standing up their own ActivityPub infra as well. A 'congress.gov' presence on the Fediverse would look pretty spiffy.
If you truly beleive the comment didn't deserve to be flagged (this does unfortunately happen sometimes, especially on threads like this) you can vouch for it if you have showdead on
Twitter is an extremely powerful bit of technology that can basically make you believe anything. As a trade for entertainment/dopamine: you are allowing it to.
I don't believe this.
The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption. In human history, we've never before had individual companies like Facebook and Twitter that are so enormous and have so much control over our public speech. (2.7 billion and 330 million monthly active users, respectively.) They have become "the town square of the world", so to speak. Facebook and Twitter are not literally governments, but they're actually larger than many governments, with a larger population and more wealth than many nations. There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech. That assumption is no longer true. Indeed, the whole motivation behind this particular act of censorship is the idea that these platforms are so powerful that they can change the outcome of the election of one of the largest nations on Earth. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's clear in any case that Facebook and Twitter are not just normal "private companies". They're not little moderated discussion forums. They have effectively (unfortunately) become the public sphere.
Twitter once locked me out of my account because I made a joke about bitcoin. Their stupid "algorithms" got me. And the only reason I was able to get my account unlocked was that I personally knew a Twitter engineer. I don't trust Jack or Zuck even one tiny bit to exercise the vast power they have to silence millions of people. It's not even a question of whether I agree with the NY Post article: the story is probably bullshit. But so were the news stories about Iraq having WMD. How about suspending the NY Times account too? How about suspending every news outlet that has published a debunked story? "Anonymous sources tell us that yadda yadda."
By design, Facebook and Twitter allow everyone in the world to post anything they want. That includes lies. If they can't accept the consequences of the platform they created, then they should shut down. But as long as they exist, with the size of their user base, they are simply too big and too powerful to be allowed to restrict our freedom of speech.
>There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech.
The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property. The government can. It's an extraordinary power wielded exclusively by the government.
Consider this: If you think Twitter should be restrained from censoring their platform because the extent of their power is on par with the government, who will enforce any violations of that restraint?
I specifically said I was talking about freedom of speech. There are many different kinds of freedom, and these aren't specifically free speech issues.
There are more ways to control participation in public discourse than imprisonment and seizures of printing presses. Times have moved on. Instead of imprisonment, we have banning and filtering, with no independent oversight or appeal process. Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies can do more to restrict the spread of certain information than most governments in the world have ever been able, so why shouldn't at least the same standard apply to them?
Their virtual town squares are nowadays larger than any square ever under government control, and they have absolute control over who can and cannot participate. They are the absolute monarchies of 21st century, more powerful than ever.
The change you desire would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment to allow the government to compel the speech of a corporation in order to protect the speech of their customers. It would be complex, challenging, hard to predict, and almost certainly impossible even if people on average agreed it was needed.
You would have an easier time forcing payment processors, cdns, hosts, not to discriminate against alternative social networks. They at least ARE infrastructure. The challenge with those alternative networks is the only content that absolutely must use it is often odious leaving such networks with little of the desirable often uncontroversional content produced by the rest of the population of users and lots of the bullcrap nobody else wanted.
For example technically voat is more "free" than reddit but a brief look at the frontpage suggests that this freedom is mostly used to be the kind of offensive jerks nobody else wants to be around.
No, it would only require a change of mind (or at least a change of policy) by Jack and Zuck.
I would go so far as to say that Trump could not have been elected without misinformation promoted on Facebook and Twitter and the net result has been a massive probably irreparable rift in our nation and will ultimately when the dust settled have aided in killing addition hundreds of thousands of people that didn't have to die.
An trivially manipulable echo chamber designed to magnify lies and hate is not a matter of minor import without clear real world consequences.
It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later. Is this a trend you see reversing soon?
Whose heavy hand do you mean? It appears to me that the 2 major parties have very different ideas about what Facebook and Twitter should and shouldn't do.
Twitter itself as a organization is not making you believe anything specifically. However the information presented to you may influence your ideas and potentially your behavior.
In any case, I have to say censoring DMs is just too far for me to accept.
I've put in a decent amount of effort to curate my Twitter feed so that it's useful to me, but I can't keep using a service that will arbitrarily decide what private communications I'm allowed to have on their service. I guess I'm out, as much as I hate to do it.
The idea that social media is some sort of public service beholden to the expectation of not ever touching their platform is just nuts to me, yet it's pervasive here on hackernews. The irony.