To add to this Trump's official campaign Twitter had it's account locked this morning and a video Trump uploaded was promptly deleted. This is new information from today. The thread yesterday was about the initial wave of censorship. I posted about the new actions this morning but it got flagged as a dupe of yesterday's discussion. It was not a duplicate, Twitter has taken new action and decided to go further this morning than they did yesterday.
Is the story demonstrably false? I don't know if that is the case. It's certainly a smear story. In the past they've fact-checked Tweets from the President and his party but, I've not yet seen them straight up delete them and lock their accounts until now.
I mean knowing what we know about Rudy and his technology abilities, it's not that difficult for me to dismiss anything he or related cronies suggest out of hand.
I agree, Rudy Giuliani has spread quite a bit of disinfo over the past 4 years. The claim here that is supposedly supported by a receipt is that Hunter left the computer at a repair shop and never paid the bill. In adherence with the store contract they took ownership of the laptop after some time. When they looked at the hard drive they thought they saw illegal activity and turned it into the FBI after making a clone of the drives which is what Rudy claims he has.
Did Rudy fake the Hunter Biden with a crack pipe photos too?
Its ridiculous since they impeached Trump over asking Ukraine to investigate this corruption. When it was probably true all along.
No, they impeached Trump for withholding aid illegally if they didn’t help him by investigating if there might be something there to aid Trumps campaign.
This is blatant disinformation meant to destabilize the election and disenfranchise voters with blatant lies. This action is exactly the kind of thing everyone blamed social media for not taking last time and they're finally doing the right thing.
This is exactly what they tried to do in the 2016 election by getting Comey to announce a new investigation that, surprise, turned up absolutely nothing. There is no substance to these allegations. At all.
Before you get up in arms about a slippery slope about arbiters of truth keep in mind that these sources have burned any credibility they have. Their ideas do not have a right to a fair trail in the public discourse because they are all acting in bad faith.
To preface my comment, I think using Hunter's drug problem for political gain is tasteless. Despite that I find it abhorrent that Twitter is not allowing users to post the photo instead it is instantly causing accounts to get locked. https://twitter.com/search?q=hunter%20locked%20pipe&src=type...
A core assertion in the article is demonstrably fake. Biden did not pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma. It's something Trump has repeated countless times and something that's been proven false countless times, but the Post still stated it as fact in the article.
Besides, the burden of proof applies here. "You can't prove it's not fake" is not a sensible approach. The burden is on the accuser to prove that the story is true, and the Post story does not do that.
No. Biden did push for a prosecutor to be fired, something that the administration and other governments agreed on (the prosecutor was corrupt). But the prosecutor was not investigating Burisma.
Well, he was definitely investigating Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky. The prosecutor's office seized several of his houses and other property in February 2016 [1]. Ten days later, Biden urged Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor. Another four days later, the prosecutor was asked to resign.
People claim Biden didn’t pressure to fire the prosecutor (even Twitter lied about this yesterday).
When presented with the video of Biden admitting to it in his own words; he pressured to fire the prosecutor, but the prosecutor wasn’t investigating Burisma.
When shown that the prosecutor was actively investigating Burisma; well he pressured to get the prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma, but it was in the national interest!
I’m not sure if there’s another round in the typical exchange. Best to just skip to the last phase to move the conversation forward.
> A core assertion in the article is demonstrably fake. Biden did not pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma.
Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, that's not in dispute, he's on video saying he did it. What is in dispute is whether he did it out of a corrupt motivation to benefit his son and the business he was working for. That's not asserted in the article. It merely lays out the timeline of events -- granted, in an order which is meant to point the reader in a given direction. They even include a section with the Biden campaign's take on the prosecutor's firing.
Is this really the first you are hearing about it? Intelligence agencies have been trying to tell people for multiple years now that russia is actively doing things like this.
“Glow in the dark McCarthy CIA types said Russia was doing something bad one time, therefore every single piece of news that is politically inconvenient for me is Russian propaganda”
Actively doing what? Hacking U.S. officials and their contacts and releasing the information they obtain? You can argue that's dirty pool but I fail to see how it's "disinformation."
The meta-story about how Giuliani got the emails aside, what portion of the actual story (related to Hunter's dealings) do you consider disinformation?
What do you mean by disenfranchise, while we're at it? Even if we were to stipulate it's a lie, is it your position that to lie during campaign season is literally the same as taking away the right to vote?
So far, there doesn't seem to be much that hasn't already been confirmed. One new piece of information is the email that implies a Burisma exec. was at least introduced to Joe Biden. The Biden hasn't issued a categorical denail of this, only to say that such a meeting "wasn't scheduled."
What substantive allegation against Hunter Biden are you disputing, exactly?
News orgs do that to protect the anonymity of sources.
In this case, NY Post threw their source to the wolves when they couldn't verify any of the information, so this story is not congruent with "sources say".
> Throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”
He can’t get something as simple as who initiated contact over the device straight? If I was a small fish about to source a story of this size, I’d have every single detail rehearsed and committed to memory. This guy doesn’t come across as legit at all.
This is often the nature of stories in the public interest. No one ever proved a single portion of Christine DeBlasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh but the fact that she was making the accusations were newsworthy enough.
In this case, the following are true: (1) Hunter Biden was a highly paid board member of Burisma while his father handled Ukraine policy for the U.S. (2) A computer repair store owner claims to have his data and to have given it to Rudy Giuliani (3) There was a Grand Jury summons to seize the computer as evidence in an unknown investigation.
This is far more than is usually needed to cover a story.
It seems that the Biden campaign isn't denying that the emails are authentic. That would be strong evidence that they are, assuming this hasn't changed in the last 24 hours: https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1316461339842289664
To be clear, this is a separate question from how the emails were obtained. That story is beyond weird and surely bogus.
To be fair, it also seems to me an indication that Biden is more honest than Trump. Trump would just say the emails were fake whether they were or not.
Of course you're right in a logical or philosophical sense, but in a political sense it certainly does. If the emails were fake, it would be politically insane not to say so. The Biden campaign can easily find this out from Hunter, so the fact that they haven't said it means either that (1) the emails are authentic (though they may still have been altered), or (2) something else is going on that we don't know about and is unusual.
But they are refuting it, just more weakly. In any case, not to refute it would be gross political malpractice and I'm sure Biden has better advisors than that.
They haven't denied it yet because they have to ask his son, who is not involved with the campaign, what happened. They probably want to get all their facts straight before denying anything.
They would have done this immediately upon seeing the story; checking the veracity of a single highly significant fact which purports to originate from a known source doesn't take a week. Anything more than a half-day delay in responding is significant; they could have produced a repudiation video by now.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the story is true, just that the campaign has made a deliberate choice.
Not to mention that the source for the story gave a follow-up interview with several contradictory details[0]:
> He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it.
He owns a computer repair shop and doesn't keep basic records of the devices he services? The moment he knew what he had, he didn't start taking any kind of notes?
> Throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”
How does he not remember who contacted who regarding the device? Also, how would the FBI know that he had to device to reach out to him first? This inconsistency is absolutely damning.
> Social media postings indicate that Mac Isaac is an avid Trump supporter and voted for him in the 2016 election.
> Mac Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post article’s publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”
Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah, shit.”
So Rudy was your lifeguard? the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.
He wasn't comfortable admitting he had been in contact with Giuliani, even though it's pretty obvious at this point that he was? That doesn't sound like a citizen fulfilling their civic duty if he was in contact with a political operative.
Actually sounds exactly like a regular person would sound in this situation, being interviewed by national media about a story that could be pivotal to the election.
Completely disagree. He fails to answer basic questions about why he chose to also communicate directly with a presidential advisor instead of just talking to the authorities, he changes his story throughout the interview, and he fails to confirm critically important details about the device, who gave it to him, and how it wound up in the hands of the authorities and a presidential campaign advisor.
Being nervous in an interview is one thing, trying and failing to wing it through basic questions is entirely different. His comment about the lifeboat particularly stood out to me because he very obviously didn't want to explicitly talk about Giuliani, but he was comfortable speaking in hyperbole about it. If you're so uncomfortable to answer a question, how would you then be comfortable enough to "say it" without saying it? If I was concerned that a question could threaten my safety or legal standing, I'd stay as far away from it as possible. This guy clearly wanted the reporters to know that he had been talking to Giuliani, and once that's out there, the context of the entire story changes.
If it's a legit scandal, there's no reason that a whistleblower should reach out to a political operative in addition to the authorities. The very fact that he did this says so much about his state of mind, that he was acting in support of a candidate.
Refusing to comment on something is also about ignoring things of no substance and not letting an opponent control the conversation. If you read "The Ass Is A Poor Receptacle For The Head: Why Democrats Suck At Communication, And How They Could Improve" by Barry Eisler, he actually talks about how traditionally Democrats fail heavily at this. They respond to every distraction their foes throw at them, no matter how nonsensical. This let's the people on the other side control where the conversation is.
Instead of responding, I would hope the Biden campaign talks about policy.
There seem to be a genre of books by Democratic party partisans which talk about how their main failure is that of communication. I personally doubt that either side really controls much; some narratives are just more convincing to certain groups than to others.
Surely Biden's strategy is to wait it out and deny it if there appears to be no further evidence and the veracity of the existing evidence can be attacked, otherwise give a cover story. I don't think that's more honest than blustering a denial no matter what: it's just more calculating.
The story makes no sense and falls apart under even the most cursory inspection; most of the news is around how bogus the story is and social media's reaction to the bogus story.
Slinging unsubstantiated mud at your opponent is an old trick in politics and relies on the idea that you can make your opponent look bad just by having them address it at all.
The fact that Biden isn't addressing it is strong evidence that the story isn't getting the traction the hacks that put it out there wanted. It is not strong evidence of its truth.
>"We have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place," it said.
>"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 US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr Biden.
>"Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath."
The Biden campaign has admitted that the meeting described in the NY Post article "might" have taken place even though it wasn't on the official schedules. This was the most newsworthy part of the article because Biden has been strenuously insisting throughout the impeachment and his presidential campaign that he never helped his son in his business dealings.
Political communications like that must be parsed extremely precisely if you don't want to be tricked. The phrase "as alleged" is a huge loophole. The thread that the sibling comment linked to goes into this: https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1316442180358213632
Have you read the story about this laptop? While I agree it's not possible from here to prove it's false, it's borderline lunacy and is clearly a fraudulently created attempt to firebomb Biden's campaign at the last minute just like what worked with Hillary last time. The Republicans wouldn't care nearly as much about this story that the FBI itself dropped if they weren't so panicked about losing the election and reaching for yet another vote manipulation tactic.
The FBI has the hard drive and they have not denied any of the allegations. Biden’s lawyers haven’t denied the allegations. Biden’s campaign has not denied the authenticity of the emails.
Your argument is “I don’t believe it, so it must be false”
I think it's not correct. I also think it wasn't correct to deliberately spread a false story about President Trump disrespecting marines, but social media sites didn't take the same precautions with that story.
Indeed. If the NYP allows other organizations to review and fact check the primary documents themselves, I'll start to think there's something to this. Otherwise, all I see is that known Trump associates provided info of unknown providence and accuracy to a former Fox News employee now working as a journalist at a Murdoch owned known unreliable news source.
I think the NY Post is probably getting played. But the media has gotten behind plenty of stories about Trump that turned out to be false: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/h.... This sloppiness is a general symptom of the need for media organizations to beat the Twitter cycle.
The question is whether this standard of reliability is one that they can actually apply evenly. This is a far higher standard that what was pitched. This content moderation was pitched as being limited to Russian bots and “vaccines cause cancer” and the like. Moderating articles from a publicly listed brick and mortar news organization, even if it’s a tabloid, based on the perceived credibility of the underlying facts, is a whole new level. It’s dramatically raising the bar. And maybe that’s where the bar should be, but I absolutely do not believe that Facebook and Twitter have the resources or integrity to apply that high standard fairly.
I think they have the resources but that the corporate model may prevent the resources from being properly distributed (eaten up by executives before getting where they are needed, for example, and who's to say the executives are operating in good faith...)
The posts should be allowed particularly if they're false. If people are allowed to say true things, then that's not particularly valuable information. However, the content's of someone's lies usually says more than the truth (which can often be obtained elsewhere).
Why should Twitter be forced to take actions based on your preferences? Make a distributed messaging/publication system and use your power to say what ever you like. Twitter has a lot of power and they are free to use it. The internet wasn’t designed with a winner take all philosophy and the technical infrastructure still supports end user as publisher model.
Are you saying publishers can’t arbitrarily decide what to publish or not? I think you will find that publishers have a lot more say so over their content than e.g. phone companies.
Publishers can be as arbitrary as they want, but they are held liable for what they publish. Section 230 gives civil immunity to "information service providers". If someone libels you on Twitter, you can't sue Twitter. But if Twitter starts making editorial decisions as to what is fit to publish and what isn't, then they could lose their section 230 protections and open themselves to tons of lawsuits.
I've read that before and I've discussed it with a lawyer (among other related articles & topics). He rolled his eyes at much of it, but he also rolled his eyes at the "platform vs publisher" distinction that so many naive people make. Still, he agrees that social media companies are tickling the dragon's tail when it comes to Section 230 protection.
Before you dismiss my anecdote as one mistaken lawyer, note that the chairman of the FCC (who is a lawyer) and Justice Clarence Thomas both think that Section 230 doesn't offer nearly as much protection as social media companies seem to think it does. In response to recent events, the FCC plans to issue statements clarifying the meaning of Section 230.[1]
1. https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC/status/1316808733805236226 "Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech. But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters."
I think what he said is if twitter wishes to be a publisher they should be treated as such. What they want to be is NOT a publisher but a platform since different rules apply to platforms than are applied to publishers.
Section 230 will NOT get removed. ISPs and email service providers, and blog platforms, will still be able to use it.
But companies that add/remove/replace/gray-out/delete/hide/push-to-bottom content that they claim they did not editorialize -- will be called Publishers.
So these businesses will not be able to use statutory protections that are available for non-publishers under section 45.230.
An analogy might be: a for-profit-business cannot claim tax benefits available for a non-for-profit organizations.
So the tax-code does not get removed, just because somebody was actively abusing it. It stays the same, but the abuser would face criminal investigation.
And if the abuser was found to systemically and purposefully avoiding to be recognized as 'Publisher' (or as a for-profit business in this analogy), then the criminal penalties would be more severe, then otherwise.
This platform/publisher dichotomy is made-up bullshit. You have to write and publish something yourself to be called a publisher. Moderation on an internet forum doesn't make you a publisher. Is HN a publisher too? dang pretty actively moderates the conversations here.
But editing, rearranging, and deleting someones words can make entirely new meanings of it. In music they call that sampling. In social media they call that 'feed'. In politics they call that propoganda. In reality we call it bias.
The Biden campaign explicitly did not dispute that the emails are real when asked (only that the meeting mentioned in the emails took place, which is... an odd distinction). Twitter does not claim that the emails aren't real. In short, the emails are real and everyone admits this... except the people who have fallen for social media giants' propaganda in this case.
Twitter claims that the justification is that the emails are "hacked" and/or "leaked" (they're inconsistent), even though (1) this is patently false since they were found on a hard drive which became property of the repair shop; and (2) Twitter has no problem with, say, Trump's tax returns and other "hacked"/"leaked" materials.
Hunter smoking crack is 1) not news and 2) not relevant to the current election. If that was all that was released, we wouldn't be talking about this right now.
Everything else in the release is 1) far more damaging than the above and 2) far harder to verify as accurate with what we've been given thus far.
I'm trying to say that right now, as far as I'm concerned, there are only a few confirmed facts. One of those facts is that there are newly released pictures of Hunter smoking crack, which isn't particularly interesting. All the other stuff about emails, provenance of said emails, etc., has not been verified by anyone but the NYP, who, contrary to typical reporting practices, are not sharing their info so other venues can confirm the accuracy. So, as far as I am concerned, that is unverified and quite likely inaccurate info and Twitter and Facebook has no responsibility to disseminate unverified and quite likely inaccurate info.
They have no responsibility yes, but why choose this particular thing to censor when theres and endless stream of millions of other tweets that are also not related to the election and less fact based than this?
Perhaps we're talking past each other. In my opinion, they are not censoring this to prevent incriminating pictures of Hunter Biden from spreading, they are censoring this to prevent unverified emails that could potentially sway the election from spreading
I think we get stuck with him making more deals, if Biden Senior wins. Oh well. I'm looking forward to a crackhead's version of "Art of the Deal" from junior.
I would be surprised if he was in the administration at all. Most administrations don't appoint a bunch of their family members to positions in the government. That itself is corruption.
The provenance of the documents is fishy. They could have easily been hacked. But, what portions of the actual story are false?
The Biden campaign's refutation was not to say that the emails were doctored. They only said that they have checked the official schedule of Joe Biden from the day in question and there is no mention of a meeting with the Burisma executive (they don't say categorically that he did not meet with him, just that it is not present on the official schedule).
Other then the meeting w/ Biden, I'm not sure there's a detail that has been specfically contested.
Your priors are wrong - the evidence and the people presenting it have the burden of proof not the people saying this is more bullshit from a desperate group of people who have consistently lied for years.
What burden of proof are you talking about? You're saying that a burden of proof needs to be met before what, exactly?
I am not saying they have met a burden of proof, I'm saying that we don't censor news articles (even sensational or thinly sourced ones) because they haven't yet met a burden of proof.
A group well known for lying is pushing a story with poor provenance and you are engaging it as if it has a decent probability of being true. That is a sign your prior belief of the lying people is off - with the more realistic prior belief that liars keep lying the question is why this made up story now? Or how did they execute this lie?
And yes, the key to using the internet effectively is to filter things out that are garbage. I individually try not waste my time on bullshit, truth based organizations filter out a lot of crackpots: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2019020... and Twitter itself is free to try to do this filtering as well. I applaud them for trying to remove BS rather than trying to push addictive content but whatever. This very news site is interesting because they spend a lot of time trying to filter BS in favor of productive and informative conversations.
So basically exactly the same as the whole Russia influencing Trump theory cooked up by Hillary's campaign that the media ran with hook, line and sinker? It also had poor provenance and an unreliable source yet the media ran with it unrestrained for years.
Huh? The Mueller Report, Deutsche Bank, Trump Tower meetings, Russian influence in the NRA, Paul Manafort's lobbying, Trump Jr's claim of Russian funding, Trump's push for G7 membership.
I don't doubt some things have been exaggerated, but I feel were pretty far past a theory right now. The question is just how much their influence affected policy.
The average HNer doesn't think those things constitute proof. In fact, the mainstream thought here (always upvoted) is that Trump is unfairly hated by the Left due to their Agenda.
SV is full of .. something. idk what to call these people, but reading this forum makes it clear they are all around me in my career domain.
On the contrary, the story of Russia contacts with the Trump campaign had excellent journalistic provenance - multiple sources from within intelligence agencies as well as a former MI6 agent willing to vouch for information he had collected.
The story received additional sources as it ran, and eventually grew into an investigation that yielded multiple criminal convictions.
Are there names of people from any of these agencies that said this in public? What was with the "All 17 agencies claimed Russia interference" line? It was clearly not true and used as propaganda.
The coordinating body of all 17 agencies did say there was Russian interference in the election, but not all agencies would have been relevant to such a statement. Politifact rates the 17 agencies line as true - they go into some detail as to why. At the worst, the line is a slight exaggeration/misspeak during a live event.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jul/06/17-intelligen...
The DNI publicly put out a report. I recall statements by the FBI Director, CIA Director, and NSA Director referring and promoting the conclusions drawn in the report (those 3 agencies were principally involved, in addition to being the three most important and largest intelligence agencies).
The Senate Intelligence Committee (which is GOP controlled) has also put out several reports concurring with Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The initial news cycle would have been from highly valued and proven anonymous sources, which is typical for national security matters. If you are expecting a bunch of CIA analysts doxxing themselves on the front page of the NYT, you will be disappointed. That’s not how national security reporting (or reporting in general) works.
To be of excellent provenance doesn’t necessarily require a named source - if the paper and journalist have a good track record with unnamed sources in an area of expertise.
The guy has a crack pipe in his mouth and emails pertaining to foreign influence peddling. Before some of your heads explode please replace the name hunter Biden in the m headline with someone like Jared Cushner?
How can you say its false. The FBI took it seriously. If we said the same about wikileaks or trump taxes we'd all flip out. Twitter shouldn't be the people who get to say whats false or not.
and the FBI dropped it. This stunt is so obviously an attempt to manipulate the election at the last minute. Just like they did in 2016. That's really what the media companies are internally considering here: attempts at election fraud.
I can imagine a dystopian future in which three weeks before every election there's an explosion of insane bombshell claims about the candidates, with ever increasing effort put into them and no time to refute them before the vote. A misinformation arms war will ensue.
What you talking about thats been a thing since before the internet was a thing is called the October surpise. Its allowed. It's legal. Youre not allowed to suppress your political opponent in the last moment cause that could escalate to poisoning like in other countries or worse.
Actually, the title refers to it as "bias" rather than "censorship". "free market" is a larger concept than "bias", although you can be biased while still operating within the context of a free market. Still, censorship doesn't have anything to do with the government, although the U.S. explicitly forbids government censorship.
If we really start considering media, a lot of taxpayer money worldwide went to broadband Internet infrastructure, so Twitter and friends do not play on a completely private field either.
Understood, its your prerogative and your choice. I feel that inference is not derogatory nor offensive, and I would rather be banned that be required to coddle those who are incapable of receiving or digesting criticism or engaging in difficult dialog.
I come here for the intelligent and interesting discussions. Often times these are the types of discussions that are difficult for people as they contain ideas that challenge one's sense of self and place are the most uncomfortable. But without those challenges, people will never grow. Trees are strongest where the forces of nature are not buffered. People are as well.
> Trees are strongest where the forces of nature are not buffered. People are as well.
That may be true of trees and people but it is not true of internet communities. I think you're making a category error. The confrontational style you're talking about requires smaller, more cohesive environments to generate interesting outcomes. On a large, anonymous, open internet forum like HN, it just produces repetitive flamewar, then brain death, then heat death. Since the idea of HN is to be interesting (to the extent possible), we have no choice but to moderate this. I wish it were different—it would be a lot less work.
Usually when someone posts the sort of argument that you did, I have found that it's possible to persuade them to follow the site guidelines once they understand that everything we do follows from trying to optimize for interestingness (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It's not about enforcing some tedious moral code. If you decide you buy that and want to use HN as intended in the future, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and let us know.
And the idea that criticizing censorship when private organizations do it is “whining” is quite odd. Not everything bad is illegal. Lots of people criticized the Hollywood Production Codes as bad censorship, even though it was voluntary. Except back then it was liberals complaining that the Hollywood companies that controlled distribution were using their power to entrench conservative ideas and suppress liberal ones: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/17/cens-m17.html
They obviously can choose what content they choose to host and display. That is their right as long as it is not discriminatory or in violation of US law. While that is the literal definition of censorship, the issue is not about a free market is it? Nope. Is about the Right whining that their hate is not allowed to be amplified, hence they call it censorship. They, not me, are the ones stating that this is a free speech issue. I state it is not. Explicitly not.
Its a really simple concept. I am surprised you dont understand.
No one ever stopped people from making the films, they only disallowed the distribution and showings via their operations. The Gov, banning a film (porn)was censorship by the Gov and thus was struck down by the Warren court. But you know that right?
I see there is a lot of work to do in educating people... No wonder the whiners are always crying, they are ignorant and willfully so... How sad. Downvote all you want
Anyone remember how Twitter was giving Trump a pass for gross and flagrant violations of it's overt rules, then responded to the ongoing outcry over that by changing the rules to officially give a pass to any user it deemed sufficiently politically connected?
In the first post about this, people were like, how come they didn't do this to the Democrats in 2016.. Uhhh because they were not taking ANY aggressive actions in 2016 against anyone, that's why we are here. They are trying to correct a wrong. I applaud them for trying.
Also it's unfair to say they are doing this for political favoritism. Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.
Reading this story without understanding the entire political landscape is as dangerous as the misinformation itself.
If the populace as a whole thinks large corporations have too much power and want to spread the power out more, that’s certainly a coherent position. Run your email servers and lobby for anti-trust suits. The internet can certainly support a distributed model.
Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.
I have yet to see a clear decisive causation link between the Russian interference (e.g. bot farms) and the outcome of the election. Of course there was interference, nobody denies it. But show me that these trolls swayed the election. There is none.
Is there a word for the typical arguments that you see where there are 100 false premises and to even make your case you have to dismantle each one?
The Russia conspiracy theory is laden with these. So many conversations are very tedious because of the number of falsehoods you have to break down before you make any progress. Many folks seem to accept it as a given that troll farms were successful. The posts themselves are laughable.
> Instead of blaming fake news and misinformation for the 2016 elections outcome, maybe the Democrats should look themselves in the mirror.
Uh, that's not what left-leaning people are blaming the election results on. That's what right-leaning people claim left-leaning people blamed it on.
Left-leaning people blame the election result on racism, sexism, xenophobia, and intolerance. Donald J. "Grab 'em by the pussy" / "look at my large hands" / "birther in chief" / "interrupting cow" Trump is the direct result of the hatred that has been pouring out of talk radio and Fox News for the last several decades.
> Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.
Censoring Bernie's/AOC's political rivals (carrot) could be a better move to avoid being broken up than punching back directly (stick) which may only motive them further.
That or "anonymous sources" wouldn't have helped. That works with papers that have a long earned reputation of mostly reporting facts. They may have biases in their selection of which stories to run, or what angles to approach those stores from, but what they report as a fact is in fact a fact far far far far more often than not.
(Pause for people to jump in to cite examples of such papers getting it wrong. This will be the small set of examples that is always cited).
Papers with long-earned reputations do themselves tremendous discredit when they hire full blown political activists with no regard for the truth, as the WP, NYT etc have done for at least a decade.
Twitter allows all sorts of garbage claims about Trump from mainstream media sources which simply cite "anonymous sources". Most recently the NYTimes claimed to have Trumps tax returns - without evidence verifying the authenticity. Over the last few years, Russiagate relied almost entirely on "anonymous sources" - and we all know how that turned out.
Oh, looks like you know better than the investigators attempting to prove something illegal happened! You better go let Nancy know you have evidence to finally impeach Trump! Quick! I bet Rachel Maddow can get you on air.
The conclusion of the investigation was that it wasn't reasonable to indict a sitting President not that nothing illegal happened. In fact, the wording danced right up to the fact that something illegal did happen but the President can't be charged while in office.
"Morally corrupt president" ... sounds like you go to bed watching Rachel Maddow on MSDNC. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, I'm sorry you suffer from it.
These anonymous sources you mention are only anonymous to the readers. Typically a story from an anonymous source will be verified with multiple other sources, perhaps also anonymous, to make sure that the media source is not getting played. Here we have Hannity's former assistant writing a "sensational" story in a tabloid rated as the least credible news outlet in NY. Also, they apparently tried to keep their source anonymous but messed up. Really going to fall for this? Again?
I've long-since stopped listening to anonymous intelligence officials. Any time you get their quotes, you've got to flip a coin to decide whether it's a legitimate leak,or an attempt to direct the media narrative without putting the organization's reputation on the line.
Anonymous officials ready to support any given narrative seem to be a dime a dozen anymore.
Unless the leaked information is accompanied by an insurmountably huge collection of documents outlining a complex tapestry of affiliations, interests, and events such as the alphabet agencies are want to produce, I typically assume it's the latter.
The NYT doesn't get a pass from me just because it used to be great, and do the work requisite to earn its sterling reputation.
I honestly wish I could provide citations where they've fallen here, but most of them come from The Intercept's podcast (Intercepted, I recommend it), where Scahill's opening rants regularly take aim at publications across the spectrum's use of anonymous officials, and the questionability of the claims they cite, and it would be far too exhausting and disheartening to record them all. As petty as some of them have been, it's just background noise, anymore.
European here, but I can definitively see how someone would come to that conclusion.
Both platforms bans anyone mentioning the supposed "whistleblower" (whom actually only had newspaper articles as 'evidence'), bans anyone mentioning Bidens kid, bans anyone mentioning the death of Clintons ex-staffers, Wikileaks content related to Dems is blacklisted, and they remove videos of Bidens gaffes for being "manipulative" when it's just clips from livestreams.
While no action is taken if you post conspiracies about Reps, fabricated videos of Trump (for humour or propaganda), discredited 'leaks' such as the infamous dossier, that ICE is running concentration-camps and engaging in genocide, or pictures of you vandalising Trump-supporters property.
EDIT: Even on HN, a site that usually is for free speech and discussing alternative theories, the posts about bias in tech are near instantly flagged and users praising media companies for removing "bad information" while people not following political narratives get downvoted; seems to indicate larger issues.
1. Elite class does exist in the society, and they exert tight control on the flow of information in traditional media, e.g. TV, newspapaer etc. Their control is loosened in the Internet age initially, which led to the rise of Trump. Trying to correct this, a narrative of blaming "fake news" was used to pressure leading companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to toe the elite line.
2. Censorship of "effective" speech, which is speech that can reach vast audience, always exists in any society. Just think back about the "mask is useless" than "everyone should wear mask" media campaigns in the in the past few months, on traditional media. Internet weakened the traditional guardians of "effective" speech. With the multiple challenges faced by the elites today, e.g. COVID, class and racial conflicts, disruption to internal orders, the elites are trying harder to take control of important nodes of Internet, so they can build consensus and move the society to a direction they desire.
Trump is just a middle finger to the Democrats woke policies coming from social science university labs and generally more artistic people, which indeed tends to be over representated in the entertainment industry.
>Both platforms bans anyone mentioning the supposed "whistleblower" (whom actually only had newspaper articles as 'evidence'), bans anyone mentioning Bidens kid, bans anyone mentioning the death of Clintons ex-staffers, Wikileaks content related to Dems is blacklisted, and they remove videos of Bidens gaffes for being "manipulative" when it's just clips from livestreams.
This is just plainly false. I've seen much of that discussed on both platforms.
You're just making stuff up to support a narrative.
> Even on HN, a site that usually is for free speech and discussing alternative theories,
Big Tech employees are the largely the same demographic as HN readers, which are a large proportion of would-be white knights, most making $150k or above, thinking they're gonna save the world from itself "because they know better".
Most people are pragmatic. Simple, axiomatic principles can be very intellectually appealing (probably more so amongst the STEM-crowd than the general population), if they don't produce good outcomes, they will and should be discarded.
In our field we constantly see languages with stronger intellectual foundations (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Perl6) constantly lose out market share to pragmatic, practical, messy and oftentimes ugly languages/libraries/tookits etc. We often knowingly choose the latter set knowing full well what their downsides are, because we still come out ahead.
If you're wondering why someone would support Facebook/Twitter/YouTube's recent moves, it really is that simple. Their foundations don't have to be perfect, or even particularly good or fair. They just have to be better the deluge of toxic sludge that's currently overwhelming these systems. That is to say, there is no answer to the Paradox of Tolerance and you don't need an answer. If you feel people are taking advantage of you, you will (and should) crack down, and if you crack down too much eventually people will (and should) rebel.
Haskell loses because it takes 2000 lines just to write a logging statement. Scala loses because you can’t even write a fast for loop. Lisp loses because it disrespects 100 years of math.
Instead of writing 1 + 2 as in mathematics, in Lisp you write (+ 1 2). I'm not sure I get the second statement of yours, but personally I find Clojure in particular very inspiring and amazing, if only it had a better syntax...
The story reeks from top to bottom. The owner of the repair shop that allegedly received the laptop from Biden is a super far right conspiracy theorist. To the point where he literally believes that the Clintons are out to kill him for the information he has [1].
The whole story is that this is Hunter Biden's laptop, but in reality some random dude dropped it off and the owner said that "he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it." [1].
Then, it gets passed off to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani back at the start of the year when Guiliani is already trying to get Ukraine to stir up a story on Hunter Biden. They then sit on it for most of the year and release it 20 days before the election.
Something like this, even as absurd as it is, will take weeks to thoroughly debunk. Meanwhile, people are literally in lines voting and stuff like this has an effect. That's probably why it was released right now, because even though it's most likely false, by the time it has flown around the internet unimpeded the damage will have already been done.
Doesn't matter if the story reeks or not. This is about censorship and even application of "community standards."
Twitter has never once censored any of smears or leaks against the Trump campaign.
Also, your criteria for this story to reek shows your bias. It's not like Joe Biden himself bragged about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired with the threat of holding back a billion dollars. It's on video, just Google it. And Hunter Biden is an admitted drug addict. So nothing that has been exposed from that laptop reeks too much.
You want to say Hunter was set up? Okay, I'll go down that rabbit hole, but to say this is all false? Well, again, your bias is showing.
> Twitter has never once censored any of smears or leaks against the Trump campaign.
Of course not. It's selective interference. They're just getting more brazen about it as we get closer to election day.
Also telling is that they have a pinned story at the top of the empty search page with the link titled, "Joe Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor for investigating his son, The Washington Post reports"
You don't get to jump up and down and claim that corporations should have the same rights as citizens and then turn around and say they don't have a right to control what they own.
Literally the same thing that happened with the FBI announcing that they were "reopening" the Clinton investigation right before the election and then promptly deciding that they found nothing afterwards.
So? Other fake stories are certainly not censored in this manner. To demand the White House press secretary delete a tweet? To censor the U.S. House Judiciary Committee? I mean all parties hold their hot stories to close to the election for the greatest impact, but Twitter is certainly not even trying to appear partisan at this moment. It's quite clear this is not "hacked information", and if it wore, then it would be also an admission of guilt from Hunter Biden.
> So? Other fake stories are certainly not censored in this manner. To demand the White House press secretary delete a tweet?
Frankly, they should do this much more when officials lie (which the current administration has demonstrably done ad infinitum for four years). There's no reason at all for them to help officials lie about important matters.
As a private platform, it's certainly a matter of whether or not they are helping you do something rather than whether or not they are preventing you from doing something. If we want a reliable avenue for public communication, Silicon Valley ain't gonna give it to us, and they shouldn't.
It would be another thing to prevent people from stating that someone else had said something (given that the statement did actually happen). Sometimes, Twitter does block all posts that even mention a topic. This is definitely a bad approach, and I think they do tend to rectify it when this happens, but they still screw it up pretty often.
I think we're seeing Twitter and Facebook draw a line in the sand about behaviors that cause damage. Note that Twitter and Facebook removed comments hoping for the worst when the president was diagnosed with Covid which they hadn't done for AOC or other liberals who were receiving death threats.
Things are changing, I don't think we can point to prior behavior of these companies as the line they're going to hold in the future.
The media has been pedaling the Russian collusion story for 4 years and you don't seem to care because it fits your priors and political agenda. The bigger lesson here is that everybody is ready to accept censorship as long as they are not bearing the (immediate) costs of it.
Well, multiple members of the Trump campaign have literally pleaded guilty to lying about involvement with Russia; that story does have that going for it :)
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You'd think that after 4 years of intense scrutiny by the media, with a 2-year Special Counsel Investigation, people would finally let this go. If you don't see the parallel between this pipe dream and the QAnons of the world, I can't help you.
Well, it doesn’t help that the “infamous dossier” literally states that a sitting President can’t be charged for the crimes that were investigated. And the author explicitly stated that he did not find Trump or his campaign innocent of the described crimes.
Note: this opinion is independent of the current president, and I'm not stating any opinion on President Trump's conduct.
This seems like a really bad standard to apply to the president. I'd argue that morally there are two relevant factors when it comes to finding someone guilty: the damage that would be done to others by failing to punish the perpetrator, and the damage that would be done to the alleged perpetrator by punishing them. We choose different standards depending on those two factors. For example, in civil cases, someone specific has lost something and someone else has gained at their expense. And you're not seeking to imprison someone, but to take away some of their wealth. So we pick a standard of evidence (preponderance of the evidence) that's lower than in criminal cases (with a very high injury to the perpetrator and typically lower injury to the community).
In contrast, an impeachment is not a prison sentence. It would injure a president only insofar as that president would no longer keep the most prestigious title and position of power in American society. And failing to impeach for serious corruption or crimes (say, if a president were conspiring with China to weaken America's standing overseas) could be catastrophic. So I think a much weaker presumption of innocence is in order.
If you're talking about Flynn, he was entrapped by the FBI, his lies weren't material, his lawyer had a conflict of interest, when his new lawyer uncovered all of that in discovery, the prosecutor moved to dismiss (because they had committed misconduct), Sullivan, in AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, appointed his own Amicus to say they couldn't dismiss the case.
Flynn was then charged for lying when he plead guilty, because ht wasn't actually guilty. Seriously. This is a Kafka trap.
On top of that, it's now clear Sullivan was getting e-mail, exparte, and ENTERING THEM into evidence!!!
Exactly all the sheep follow and believe what their side says.
To me from pizzaGate to RussiaGate to the impeachment to this Hunter Biden thing is all junk ... arbitrary distractions to the issues that are important ... the economy, healthcare, equality, etc.
Each side will do whatever it takes/strategy to try and win and too many sheep follow along/get soaked up in the soap opera drama.
I'm not American, but the same thing is happening in many countries. A stable country where the citizens trust the government and judicial systems is resistant to corruption. If you can destabilize those countries by spreading lies, hate, disinformation, etc. there's an opportunity for the most corrupt morally bankrupt scumbags on the planet to come in and seize control of important assets and infrastructure.
Just watch closely for a while and you'll see it happening everywhere. There are lies and misinformation and hate and fear directed _everywhere_ no matter what "side" you're on and the volume of it is massive. Then the media and influencers and regular people amplify it and spread it and debate it until they all hate each other and don't trust anyone.
It's working too. America is imploding. The UK got duped into Brexit. Several countries have a growing following of citizens that think immigrants and minorities are the cause of their misfortune even though those tend to be vulnerable groups that are exploited the most. Cancel culture is dialed up to 11. It's crazy and scary.
There's a conflation of issues whenever someone comes along claiming the "Russia collusion" story is fake news. Russia did meddle in the election and did hack the DNC. Russia also had close ties to high level members of the Trump campaign. It is not reasonable to dispute these facts. The question of whether Trump personally colluded with Russia is in doubt. But I don't see this specific claim made much at all from legitimate news organizations. The dishonesty is how people want to cast doubt on Russia's efforts to elect Trump by conflating it with the issue of whether Trump personally colluded with Russia.
> But I don't see this specific claim made much at all from legitimate news organizations.
You really missed all of 2017-2018. My wife is a never-Trumper and this issue got her to tune into Rachel Maddow and all the podcasts and the idea that the collusion was two-sided and went to the highest levels in the Trump campaign was pervasive.
The evidence that there was some kind of attempted coordination between the Trump campaign and various Russian individuals is actually stronger than you give credit for. I feel like you didn't actually read the Special Counsel report.
"The media has...", really? There's no coordinated media, there are several media corporations (like Twitter, BBC, News Corp (NY Post owner)) with their own bias and their own audience.
A modern macbook pro has a T2 security chip and disk encryption on by default. It's possible that a random repair shop owner could read your emails if you turn off disk encryption or disable password auth, but that's even more far fetched.
edited
It seems this particular mac doesn't have the T2 chip. It would still have disk encryption on by default.
I thought of this. The serial number of the laptop is included in the grand jury summons docs released by the New York Post. The serial number can be used to lookup the model. It was a mid-2017 macbook pro, the T2 chip started shipping in 2018 models.
Probably an FBI agent that dropped it off. Could even be a copy of the one they have. There's a lot of people that would be motivated to leak something like this, especially since Trump got impeached over this.
Anyway, would not invalidate the story, just because of the way it was leaked.
1. That the FBI subpoenaed the laptop is sort of interesting. That usually requires a grand jury, doesn't it? But this is really weird:
>During the subsequent summer and fall, Mac Isaac said he became alarmed after browsing through the computer's files. He claims he then spoke with an associate more versed than him in the law and in current events.
>That unnamed person then contacted the FBI, Mac Isaac said.
>Federal investigators from Wilmington and Baltimore then subpoenaed the laptop in December, Mac Isaac said.
>Shortly after, they called Mac Isaac asking him to assist them, technically, in viewing the files on the damaged hard drive, he said.
>Mac Isaac admitted that the request raised his own suspicion, given that the FBI has its own technical staff.
2. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing a reputable shop would be doing with someone's property (poking around inside, sending it to Giuliani). Could it have violated the law?
3. The stories tell what we already knew: Hunter tried to cash in on his dad, while living the loser life of an addict. Won't change my vote.
>Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Giuliani said the computer shop guy was a fan of his and given he saw the Biden sticker on the laptop, probably led him to be interested in what was stored on the computer.
An "October surprise". A time-honored tradition in US presidential elections. Done by both sides. In the past, covered by all major news outlets.
Now if Twitter wants to not allow tweeting of October surprises, I suppose that's their business. But if so, block it for both sides.
I also think it's totally counterproductive for them to (try to) do so. Block links to the NY Post article? Great, but then what? Block links to the BBC article? To the HN discussion? To every random blogger who writes up a post about it, with links to the BBC article, the NY Post article, and the HN discussion? Twitter might be able to stay on top of that, but it's going to be hard, it's going to leak, and it's going to look really bad. It's going to give the story far more legs than it otherwise would have had (Streisand effect). It's going to spawn a whole bunch of new conspiracy theories, with Twitter as part of the bad guys. The net effect of all this is not going to be what Twitter wants...
A US government website put the details on their website. Twitter is now blocking the US government webpage hosting the details. They are blocking actual politicians linking these details. https://twitter.com/CongressmanHice/status/13167418079595724...
Worse yet, they have highlighted the exact opposite story. They are featuring washington post who are calling it false.
Well, if it is false, then they are performing the stated goal of stopping the spread of “fake news”, which need not discriminate on whether the entity pushing it is associated with a government or not. Whether or not I want Twitter to be an arbiter of truth, some very basic research does seem to make it seem this story is a bit on the order of a conspiracy theory.
Just out of curiosity, what is your political persuasion? Do you tend to lean more democrat or republican?
>which need not discriminate on whether the entity pushing it is associated with a government or not.
I was ignoring the NYPost, to judge action taken by Twitter. Twitter should never ever censor a government website regardless for what it says.
>Whether or not I want Twitter to be an arbiter of truth, some very basic research does seem to make it seem this story is a bit on the order of a conspiracy theory.
Do you want Twitter to be the arbiter of truth?
My usual source of Democrat/Left news is Msnbc. For whatever reason they are not covering the story at all.
Can enlighten me on why it seems to be a conspiracy theory?
The "arbiter of truth" argument is weak. I want the people at Twitter and other platforms to be able to make decisions about whether something is a fact or misinformation.
If they get it wrong, fine. We can use other platforms if we don't like the decisions one makes. But I'm tired of the idea that they should NEVER be able to even try to recognize the difference between truth and lies.
> But I'm tired of the idea that they should NEVER be able to even try to recognize the difference between truth and lies.
But that's not what they are doing, is it? They are recognizing the difference between potential truths that would benefit whomever they are politically aligned with from potential truths that would benefit whomever they aren't politically aligned with.
They don't ask for truth, proof or anything similar, they ask for consequences, and whether those consequences appear to be good for their political agenda.
There’s a photo of Hunter Biden with a crack pipe in his mouth, and emails discussing his father while he was vice president and the exchange of money. That’s not a conspiracy theory.
Which is odd, since they've also made definitive claims that they blocked it because it's "hacked" and yet more definitive claims that they blocked it because it's "leaked". They can't even get their story straight; and with their audience who will support their every move, they don't need to.
If they are blocking it because it was "leaked" why did they not have as similar stand on Trump's taxes? That one was actually illegal to leak. They don't have a good excuse for what appears to be a wholly partisan action.
I know the actors who advanced the theory into the public sphere, and I'm familiar with their past work. I'm content drawing my own assumptions about their bad faith.
Note that the link you posted does not support your claim that twitter is blocking it - it shows a warning before posting but allows one to continue and post the link.
I have been pretty vocal about being against censorship from social media companies. But with the stakes being as high as they are this close to an election (not just this particular election, but any election in general), I see no problem with social media companies deciding they will not be a party to the spread of misinformation intended to sway the election.
These companies are not neutral communication platforms; they have no duty to neutrality. Although I agree they should remain neutral as much as reasonable, drawing the line at election manipulation is perfectly reasonable and consistent.
With the stakes being as high as they are, wouldn’t we want to know if there’s a crumb of truth to the allegations? A President beholden to shady foreign actors doesn’t sound like a good idea. Likewise if it’s false then let that come out.
The bigger problem is that journalists/newspapers are no longer the arbiters of truth, and instead the distributors are.
>With the stakes being as high as they are, wouldn’t we want to know if there’s a crumb of truth to the allegations?
Sure, but this will not be adjudicated on twitter. Letting the unverified and extremely suspicious story spread on twitter does nothing to bring us closer to the truth. On the contrary, the truth is harmed by the unchecked spread of misinformation because the truth doesn't have the same viral quality as lies.
> Sure, but this will not be adjudicated on twitter.
I agree with this, but I think Facebook & Twitter shot themselves in the foot by allowing rampant & salacious accusatory headlines to run across their platform unhindered during the past 4 years. There are numerous examples from alleged pee tapes to collusion, and general he said she said.
I agree with that. But the issue is how do you stop people from talking about an alleged pee tape compared to stopping the spread of a specific story from a handful of sources. These are two very different problems. So I have sympathy for the position they are in and the difficulty in being consistent with their policies given the vast range of ways manipulative information can be spread.
Super weird, was suddenly downvoted on both comments twice, but anyways
> So I have sympathy for the position they are in and the difficulty in being consistent with their policies given the vast range of ways manipulative information can be spread.
I think the true test will be how this is held up in the future. Of course we're in the middle of an insane political divide, but eventually we'll be past it, and next time there will be new candidates, and each time beyond that. So the litmus test will be whether the rules are fair and applied equally as time goes on.
Is it meaningful whether the story is true or not? The existence of Trump's presidency says Americans don't care about corruption or whether the president is beholden to shady foreign actors. Maybe that's a good argument for the natural born citizen ship requirement to be removed from the presidency?
If there was a crumb of truth you'd get to see the raw emails with DKIM signatures that a novice sysadmin could confirm in 15 minutes. At least that would prove they aren't a total fabrication that was typed up in Word.
The entire purpose of a campaign is to manipulate the outcome of an election. A rally manipulates the outcome, as does a debate. As does a news article that raises question about one of the candidate's integrity.
No. "Manipulate" in this context carries the connotation of unscrupulous control. The purpose of a campaign is to demonstrate to voters that you're the best person for the job. There is no need for "manipulation" to accomplish this. Manipulation is used to convince people to vote for you despite the truth.
That's also inaccurate. The purpose of a campaign is to ensure that more people vote for you than anyone else.
Convincing people you're the best person for the job is only one approach. Another approach is to convince people that don't like you to not vote, or to split their vote across multiple candidates.
If agree that the manipulation happens outside of the campaign. Once you've won, you can choose who gets to vote in the next election, whether they are allowed to vote at all, or if their vote counts in your next campaign vs somebody elses'
Eg. Gerrymandering, allowing/disallowing felons votes (and moving more people in/out of felon status), adding/removing rules on how voting is done etc
If the US government wants to they could host their own ActivityPub[0] compliant application and do whatever it wants from its server infrastructure.
The technology exists for the public sector to disentangle itself from these commercial platforms. I don't know why pols and journos are so blind to this.
[0] This is a W3C Recommendation -- a protocol, by the words of Wikipedia that is in "the most mature stage of development. At this point, the standard has undergone extensive review and testing, under both theoretical and practical conditions. The standard is now endorsed by the W3C, indicating its readiness for deployment to the public, and encouraging more widespread support among implementors and authors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#W3C_...
Keep aside the accuracy of the NYPost story for a moment. With this move, Facebook and Twitter have effectively backed one political side over the other. Even if in the nitty-gritty they might not have, this is the perception that is sent out and is the perception that will be played to the hilt by the Trump camp. And timing of this is damning as well, with distrust of big tech and social media rising even before this on all ends of the political spectrum.
If by any chance Trump wins next month, this will be the end not only for Facebook and Twitter, but for the wider Internet in general and Social Media in particular. Because if Trump wins, he is not going to let it slide. The destruction of Facebook and Twitter will most certainly done by removing the safe harbors by citing this incident in particular. That will be a bloodbath with a lot casualties of innocent bystanders in Silicon Valley.
And the knock-off effects of this will be even more damning. Even if Trump loses, many other countries will take a big, hard look at the possibility of regime change and political interference being done by a bunch of Western Activists. Especially in Asia and Africa, where the memories of Western Imperialism have not yet faded and the wounds are still raw.
I am really surprised by the fact that the shareholders, investors and the board of Facebook and Twitter haven't stepped in to stop this or at-least deescalate this, considering they will be loosing a whole lot in this scenario. Or is everyone in Silicon Valley just too drugged out with activism to care about even themselves?
I think this is one of the damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations. Twitter and Facebook were largely blamed by traditional media for being a vector of misinformation that harmed the American public in 2016, and suffered a lost of trust then. When they try to combat that, whoever would have benefited from the material being censored will cry fowl, and it was a doomed venture from the start.
> And the knock-off effects of this will be even more damning. Even if Trump loses, many other countries will take a big, hard look at the possibility of regime change and political interference being done by a bunch of Western Activists. Especially in Asia and Africa, where the memories of Western Imperialism have not yet faded and the wounds are still raw.
> And the knock-off effects of this will be even more damning. Even if Trump loses, many other countries will take a big, hard look at the possibility of regime change and political interference being done by a bunch of Western Activists. Especially in Asia and Africa, where the memories of Western Imperialism have not yet faded and the wounds are still raw.
Political interference isn't new or particularly hard. We decades of playbooks dedicated to that courtesy of the CIA, KBG/FSB, etc. In more modern times, we have the Obama State Department (led by Secretary Clinton) working with Twitter to support the protests and overall idea of regime change: https://www.mic.com/articles/10642/twitter-revolution-how-th...
The goals and tactics aren't different, just the target.
Pre- political cults, white nationalism, weakness, incompetence, immorality, corruption, laziness, and pettiness were not a "political side". If you want to call the Republican party a "side", then you need to disentangle these things first. Otherwise opposition to Republicans by any decent/educated person is easily explained.
You are probably aware then, that conservatives think of the Democrats as the global Cartel, consisting of
- bribe takers and money launders
- protege of sexual predators
- systemic racists
And that claiming that this is a party, and they have a paritcular platform -- is like claiming that Mexican Mafia is a party with platform.
So you can imagine how suprised a conservative is, to learn of how many people lack even mediocre critical thinking, that is meant as immunity against manipulative and conniving propaganda machine.
Removing safe harbor will increase this sort of thing, because Twitter would be exposed to more law suits for not taking down harmful speech. (And yes, harmful speech is a legal concept in the US). And the internet is not social media - the internet and decentralized digital technologies don’t need Twitter to link people together.
It depends what happens in congress. Trump might win the whitehouse, but lose congress. congress makes the rules around social media and breaking up big tech.
I just don’t get it, what is Twitter so afraid of? It’s already a cesspool of flame wars and misinformation, I’m growing deeply concerned about their need to interject themselves into news stories like this.
I wonder if FB and Twitter are in contact with some of the national intelligence agencies. US intelligence officials talking to NYT suggest that this "leak" is a forgery by the GRU.
I don't take anything the three letter agencies say at face value. But if I were Twitter leadership and legal and I got a call from the CIA or NSC saying my platform is being used right now for a massive GRU disinformation campaign, I would panic and attempt to shut it down.
No, the Republicans have definitely lost credibility. I think it’s a safe prior that anything a Republican says about weird convoluted plots this close to an election should be discounted.
Why would a well thought out plot be more credible? Is it inconceivable that a crack addict forgets his laptop at a repair store and that the staff recognize him?
If I made up stories they would be mundane and logical to not make people regard it as improbable.
You're saying that the more outlandish a story is the less likely it is made up, because anyone making up a story would just make it boring so as to be believable. Have you never talked to someone who was making up a story?
One example of an outlandish information story is how the passport(s) of 911 hijackers was found on the ground in NY. I mean you can't make this stuff up.
It should mostly be the information on the HD that indicates the validity, not the fantastic way it was recovered.
This is incorrect. The 3 letter agencies refused to say this, which is why Paul Wolfowitz had to create the Office of Special Plans inside the Pentagon so that there was an intelligence agency that produced the sort of analysis results that the White House wanted.
The agencies have vast powers over tech companies, and tech companies do not want to cross them. Tech companies are also regularly legally barred from disclosing the mere existence of national security investigations.
> The Times reported last January that Burisma had been hacked by the same Russian GRU unit that was one of two groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Last month, United States intelligence analysts contacted several people with knowledge of the Burisma hack for further information after they had picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an “October surprise.”
> Among their chief concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions, was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy — as Russian hackers did when they dumped real emails alongside forgeries ahead of the 2017 French elections — a slight twist on Russia’s 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked D.N.C. emails through fake personas on Twitter and WikiLeaks.
The article says that US intelligence believes that the GRU was planning on releasing something relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden. Something relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden with very sketchy provenance was just released by someone with known affiliations to people working for GRU. The inference is that this is the disinformation campaign that US intelligence agencies have been worried about.
This is a fair concern, and it is a tricky issue because if true Twitter might not be able to disclose this fact.
But if it were true, wouldn't Joe Biden have come out already and said "These emails are fake and I never met with that person"? Instead, all we get is the campaign saying that those meetings do not appear on his calendar.
I could imagine national security reasons for not saying specifically where one believes the laptop to have come from, but why would the campaign be prevented from simply saying that the emails are fake and that the meeting definitively did not happen?
Well, hypothetically, it could be that the CIA or NSA was spreading misinformation, then tracking its spread, to detect where leaks/spies were. That seems highly unlikely in this case.
Saying the emails are fake would be a direct acknowledgment of the incident that the agency is trying to investigate. This is similar to the “Glomar Response”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response.
Could be a mix of real and fake emails, or real but slightly altered. They could not have any copies of the originals so they can't say which are real or not.
Plus oh my god if we go into 'but his emails!' and Trump is elected again I will leave this country. Keep 'hacked' 'email' ten thousand miles away from Biden campaign's mouth
Biden was the Vice President; what if he did meet this person in passing and the GRU has a photo of the brief head to head encounter, or there is a doctored photo ready for him to deny a meeting.
This must be it. Facebook has been hand wringing about censorship for the past few years and all of a sudden, Facebook and Twitter immediately act in lockstep? It might explain why the Biden campaign can’t deny it as well.
I don't understand why this is so controversial.
You cannot reveal personal details of someone on Twitter (email, phone number etc.) The article contained unreacted personal info so should be blocked.
You also cannot link directly to hacked/obtained without consent material on twitter. The article contained screenshot of the material so should be blocked.
You CAN link to material that discusses hacked/obtained without consent material on Twitter as long as it does not contain the material. eg. Trump Tax Return story by NYT.
The Biden campaign have hired a Twitter exec and a Facebook exec recently. There’s a reason for this. This gives the Biden campaign access to people inside those companies.
This story, with its --ahem-- questionable provenance and its utter lack of any actual dirt on Joe Biden (as opposed to on Hunter Biden, whom no one already has any illusions about), would be a nothingburger, forgotten after 2 weeks, if not for Twitter and Facebook choosing to die on that hill. And now I guess it won't die down until spring, because even if 90% of media hate Trump, enough of them hate Facebook and/or are worried they're next on the black^H^H^Hocklist. Well played!
We as consumers should be valuing real journalism and actually paying money for it. Otherwise this carries on going downhill. Journalism, at least some of it, should not be about clicks and sound bites.
The idea of free journalism sounds great until it's all ad driven and click bait-y. A digital news subscription cost less than $1 daily and it's still a challenge to convince people to commit to one. I'm glad some long form journalists are moving to substack.
I have subscribed to like seven newspapers this year and i have to say their use of technology is awful. They should get a revenue sharing system like ASCAP for music - I pay so much per year and then they distribute it amongst the sites I view. I only want to check Houston papers when they have flooding but I don’t want them to die out. I only want to read Wilmington paper when they get a hurricane or a spike in Covid cases in the nursing homes, but I can’t see paying $1000 per year for all of the places I click in on from time to time.
having watched the media landscape over the past two decades, the market for real journalism is apparently small and shrinking. there's not enough such money available to support it at its desired size.
"real news" loses to social media because it can't compete on the novelty dopamine feedback loop (otherwise known as popularity): being the first to bring up new info or make a novel comment about it, getting a dopamine hit (esteem), then going back to the trough for more. old journalism is comparatively too slow and sparse at this.
so traditional news, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to join the fray instead of being crowded out. this won't change until good journalism can compete for (enough) attention without being subsumed by the social novelty feedback loop.
it's not so much about value or even actualizing journalists' activist stances (as others seem to be arguing), but the competitive dynamics of the market they're in.
We need to consider that some things are a public good that must be paid for as such, not as merely a commodity. Public broadcasting is the model that works best and achieves the correct balance between public good and market forces.It can be neither entirely one (state controlled media) nor the other (click bait drivel).
I tried paying money for it. I fought with one newspaper's website for an hour to figure out how to buy one year of access without recurring charges to my credit card. When I finally figured out that I needed to buy a gift subscription for myself it turns out their credit card form only has the next four years as expiration date options (my credit card expires six years from now).
The media isn't interested in financial support from their readership. Too many of us to deal with. They prefer a few powerful interests and a small number of big checks written.
The “professional journalists” aren’t that great either. The field has been overtaken by 20 year olds. Even Matt Yglesias, who has spent most of his career to the left of Democrats as a whole, has been grumbling on his podcast about journalists these days failing to respect the difference between journalism and advocacy. Matt Taibbi (who I don’t like as a person but who is at least a real journalist) has written an entire book about it: https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/02/19/review-matt-taibbi-s-...
The field being taken over by 20 year olds is a consequence of the field's revenue being eaten by tech. There's not enough money to make a decent living on now, so those filling the void will be more ideologically motivated.
Many journalists today come from wealthy families and have went to schools like Harvard and Princeton. They don’t need the shitty pay (although many are well paid) and are driven by the desire to be influential (i.e. power) more than any coherent ideology.
It's about hiring people that will blindly follow orders, hence young and impressionable 20 year olds. Same thing that's been happening in Silicon Valley for years now.
It is super weird to read a comment about the difference between advocates and journalists holding Matt Taibbi out as a "real journalist". Taibbi is the apotheosis of the journaladvocate you're talking about. He's also a lot of other things that you don't like about journalism; for instance, see his coverage of financial engineering topics during the "sucking blood funnel days" of the 2008 crisis, for some Crichton Amnesia Effect fodder.
As always I'll point out that the real controlling law for all this stuff --- the quality of journalism, the quality of advocacy, the quality of software engineering, law, medicine, whatever --- is Sturgeon's.
Completely disagree. You just don’t like like Taibbi because you wear your politics on your sleeve and you just don’t like some of the things he’s uncovered in recent years. He’s just part of the prior generation of journalists with the old goals and a great writer with a great sense of humor. The “blood funnel” line about Goldman Sachs was both creative and hilarious.
Sturgeon’s law (most stuff is crap) does little to shed light on the massive CHANGES to journalism in recent years. Of course 90%+ don’t even realized it like you.
This response shows the quality of your discourse: quickly declare victory and walk away. Would have been great to know even a single specific issue you have with Taibbi.
I'll just add that Rayiner's politics are extremely similar to mine (we identify with different parties but have an almost identical set of positions), so your "politics" rebuttal is not the persuasive mic drop you're hoping for.
I'm not debating Taibbi with you because we don't share premises, so there's no point. You can feel free to declare victory to those who share your own premises!
That’s fair. I was going to add in a comment about how Taibbi presaged the phenomenon that he’s now complaining about but that seemed like an unnecessary dig.
The change in journalism is one of the most important developments in recent decades. While always a business the economic incentives have completely changed and thus the product has been reshaped to best profit from the new environment. Things like accuracy and objectivity are now counterproductive both increasing costs and losing revenue.
Taibbi’s book does a good job of explaining these changes but the situation is still evolving and the definitive analysis has yet to be written. Much like the news today the story has to be pieced together from multiple sources with varying biases including outright misinformation.
I’m starting to think that this is the actual “normal” information situation. It’s everyone’s responsibility to determine the truth for themselves by comparing multiple sources, getting primary information and thinking hard about what’s going on.
Another part of the problem of journalism/advocacy is cancel culture. Some people want to deny that it exists, or that it's problem, even if it does. But it's precisely the reason that you felt the need to virtue-signal that you didn't like Taibbi (whoever he/she is; I don't know). Everyone feels the need to "take sides" in whatever is being discussed. All of this tribalism is part and parcel to the problem you're decrying. It's the thing that's blurring the line. The twenty-somethings have been raised in this culture, and it is a normal function of society to them. Only people in middle age or better can readily remember what the world looked like before the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, and opened the gates for pure advocacy. We're all living in Rush Limbaugh's media world now, and Twitter just gives everyone a platform, and takes it to the extreme.
That is why we are in this mess. Social media was fun before "professional journalism" started getting involved.
Think about it. The toxicity on social media is entirely driven by the news media. The culture wars and everything from smollet to "culture of rape on campus". The news blames social media but it's actually the news traveling within social media that is the problem.
Everyone thinks they're Galileo. Who would ever stay with the side they think is wrong and cruel? History (i.e. future opinions) will assign the labels.
Really, very few people are Galileo in modern America for the reason you listed. There are two massive groups of people against each other much more than there are individuals who almost everyone is against. Much more Red vs White army than Galileo against the Church.
everyone at twitter or FB content moderation roles, or execs -- think they are ethics luminaries and moral compases of the 21st century. Sort of the Supreme Court of ethics and moral judgment.
Really the problem is not with liars, it is with liars that wield lots of influence, power -- and try to actively and systemically circumvent existing law.
Yes. And unlike the Government, I an individual have no say in how Twitter operates. I have have no say in how Facebook operates. I have no say in how Google operates. Those three combine account for the overwhelming majority of the public square that is the internet.
I cannot vote out the CEO of Twitter, Facebook, or Google because I think they are doing the wrong thing. This is worse, because individuals are powerless.
And before you argue that people can go to their own websites, how is meaningfully different from Chinese citizens who use VPN's. After all they can still access information.
In both cases it is near impossible for a message, movement, or anything else to grow without the use of the core popular platforms. And any message which could grow in other spaces would have the counter narrative pushed on the core platforms.
Ummm the early web is a counter example. Any one can publish a website. And a lot of the content that makes these monoliths popular is user generated - it could easily be captured by decentralized system. Put an Insta UI on email and make it cool.
The whole American system says it is ok for successful companies to grow large and powerful. I personally wouldn’t mind some anti-trust actions, but even better would be for people to prefer non-mass media. Visit my website and listen to the guitarist at the local bar and watch indie films and read good books rather than popular books. But others have other preferences.
Making real change is society is not the same as propagating memes or conspiracy theories - it takes time and effort and a lot of eyeball to eyeball persuasion. If you don’t like what Twitter is doing you can create a competitor, and make it popular. The difference is competition - if you persuade enough people, you can replace Twitter. If Twitter is anti-competitive then there is a legal recourse. If you fail to persuade people that twitters method of trying to encourage truth and virtue are bad, that is a fact of your social world. Try again or give up.
> And before you argue that people can go to their own websites, how is meaningfully different from Chinese citizens who use VPN's. After all they can still access information.
If you're going to write out a response centered on "anyone [being able to] publish a website", at least respond to OP's point. How is that a solution that's in any way better than telling CCP citizens that censorship is totally fine because they can use a VPN?
Distinction without difference. Twitter has the capability to whip up a sizable mob and inflict violence anywhere in the world, on a spectrum from cancel culture to corporate cowering to violent riots to color revolutions.
The principle of free speech is enshrined in the constitution at a time when the only thing powerful enough to constrain speech to this degree was the government.
The "news" being censored is political misinformation being pushed by the NY Post of all places. I'd be alarmed if they were preventing anyone from posting about Donald Trump's sudden NBC townhall, not some obvious con thrown out by Giuliani to a tabloid of ill repute.
Unhinged entertainers is one thing, but it gets pretty scary when similar language is coming elected officials.
"A county prosecutor has again denigrated constituents, this time with the alarming claim that we must “cleanse society” of the “diseased thinking” of Trump supporters."
Out of curiosity, where do you think the line SHOULD be?
No, seriously. You have to draw the line somewhere, right? If your answer is "no, these platforms should be perfectly neutral", then are you okay with child pornography and terrorist beheadings in your feed?
If you say no to this, and the answer is based on the law, what happens if the law is unethical and for example the Trump/Republican administration passes a law saying "Acknowledgement of the gay lifestyle is illegal" (a la Russia).
Regardless of any political division there is a general humanistic "ethical line". It varies from person to person, but if you discount outright nazis and child pornographers generally we can find where that is.
Why should a private corporation not choose where that ethical line is for it?
Cuomo is a center-left Democrat, how does that compare to Trump's alternative in 2016?
Really it sounds like tens or hundreds of thousands of people could die during a pandemic, regardless of what effort goes into paving a politician's way into office with censorship.
Why is the percentage important? The principle is the same - bad decision, preventable. If the 15% was everyone you cared about perhaps you would not see it that way.
I think maybe you are reading something into my statement that wasn't there, as people I do care about were in that 15%.The point is that this is a problem across the entire country - in red states and blue states, in states with Republican governors and with Democratic governors. America as a whole is experiencing this problem in a way no other country is, and I don't think it's Andrew Cuomo's fault.
It's actually more valid unfortunately because I live in a highly populated state. If hundreds of thousands of people dying needlessly aligns with anyone's goals I want them out of the country. The reality is they got tricked because they're too stupid to make rational decisions and too entitled to realize it.
Oh wow, i get it there are loads of frustrated office workers spewing alt right drama in here...but now child abuse should not be ...”censored”? Dude this forum needs media attention asap.
And now we're at the flip side where the Clinton News Network, The Washington Compost and MSNBSee are all blatantly partition and have gone so far off the rails, they have news anchors who are saying that a protest is peaceful, while buildings and car dealerships are literally burning behind them .. on multiple occasions.
Hot take: they should do more of this, not less. As a medium it’s fundamentally distortionary, what is popular on Twitter is as much a function of the peculiarities of its ranking algorithm as it is of the material significance of the information. The less people trust twitter popularity as an indication of importance, the better off society is, and the more diverse the online media ecosystem can be.
Mandating something to be unimportant probably won't have the effect you desire. But allowing them to dig their own hole is probably the best outcome, allowing people to see the consequences for themselves. Hopefully the side effects are not too disastrous in the process.
The idea that Twitter and Facebook can do this in a “non-distortionary” way is unrealistic. Peoples’ personal biases are too strong.
The “fact check” websites used to be great. Now, they wander way over “fact checking.” The worst abuses are when they provide “context” or challenge assumptions. Conservatives and liberals are not working from the same assumptions, and have a different set of contextual facts top of mind on different issues. The fact check organizations are pretty good about checking the actual assertion, but reveal bias through what contextual facts they provide and what assumptions they do or do not challenge. Another way they cross the line is “fact checking” obvious rhetoric: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trumps-exaggerated-claims-...
> At a rally in Sanford, Florida, President Donald Trump made the exaggerated claim that his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, “voted to obliterate” Puerto Rico’s pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.
As Biden would say, “c’mon man.” How many times has a politician said stuff like “they sent your jobs to China?” Did anyone fact check Biden’s assertion that Romney would “put [Black people] back in chains?” They explain the vote by saying things like: “at the time, eliminating the provision was seen as striking a blow against “corporate welfare.” Seen by who? They also note that the bill “also raised the minimum wage.” This isn’t “fact checking,” it’s the counter-narrative from the Biden campaign.
I don't think it's the sites wandering that's the problem; it's that they're all inexorably pulled from being color commenters to being refs, and once they become refs, people start to work them. It's hard to think of a way you could run a fact checking site without this dynamic playing out, because the better you are, the more people will depend on you as a referee.
The Puerto Rico bill had good support from both parties.
The vote in the House to send the bill to the Senate was 227-0 among Republicans and 186-10 among Democrats.
When the Senate's modified version came back to the House, the R vote was 160-70 and the D voter was 192-2.
When it got back to the Senate in final form, the Senate vote was 76-22. The stupid senate.gov site does not tabulate vote by party and I'm too lazy to do it by hand, but the Senate at the time was 55 R to 45 D. I do see that all 22 Nay votes were from R, and two D did not vote, so that would give the R vote as 33-22 and the D vote as 43-0.
Among the Yea votes in the Senate I see several current R Senators: Grassley, McConnell, Shelby, and Murkowski. I think Inhofe is the only current R Senator who was in the Nays.
I bet someone running against whichever of those first four Senators are up for re-election this year could put together a pretty good ad featuring Trump's talk of the bill "obliterating" Puerto Rico's pharmaceuticals and then calling out that Senator for doing so. How is the Senator going to respond? Say it was a bipartisan bill that was widely supported by both parties, which risks highlighting Trump's misleading use of it?
If 22 Senators voted against it, it’s fair to argue that Biden was in the wrong side of that vote. The fact that the parties might agree on something doesn’t immunize a Senator who voted for that thing of responsibility for the vote. NAFTA was bipartisan too (61-38 with 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats) and Trump strongly opposed that. The Iraq war was nearly unanimous and it would be totally fair to criticize Biden for that.
I actually have no idea whether this was a good bill or not. But who else voted along with Biden doesn’t really tell you anything. And that’s why it shouldn’t be the province of fact checking. It’s political defense of Biden’s vote.
> The less people trust twitter popularity as an indication of importance, the better off society is
How exactly will Twitter doing "more of this" result in "less people trust[ing] twitter popularity as an indication of importance"?
If anything, I think Twitter should just wear their bias on their sleave and stop pretending to be an open platform. Same goes for all social media.
There is no such thing as an unbiased disinformation watchdog. These are not public spaces with rights to freedom of expression. Distributed social media networks are the future.
I think the issue with social networks like Twitter and other, claiming legal benefits of 'platforms' while acting as publishers and crowdsourced-publishers.
It is like having a for-profit business that claims tax umbrella of a charitable organization.
All we have to do is simply recongize, that these social networks are publishers of political content.
So they can choose to continue editorialization by crowdourcing, but comittees, by AI, by whatever they want.
And they can live happily but as publishers.
The ISPs (for which section 230 really was meant) -- can continue to be impartial and claim the protection benefits of that section.
This list seems like strong proof that the we cannot trust these social media companies to be neutral actors. They shouldn't be given controlling power to the digital public square.
so many stories about trump are later proven to be fake or unsubstantiated such as the russian bounties, that he owes money to russia, the steele dossier etc... and his tax returns were also stolen or hacked
I hate trump and can't wait for him to disappear but I can still admit that he was unfairly smeared and severely attacked by the media. It just backfires and leads to people not trusting both sides
ffggvv says >"so many stories about trump are later proven to be fake or unsubstantiated such as the russian bounties, that he owes money to russia, the steele dossier etc... and his tax returns were also stolen or hacked"<
By now you should understand the Democratic Party's news cycle:
a) Make up a message (something, anything bad) and present it to the press as a Presidential abomination,
b) Get Democratically-favored media to repeat/embellish the rumour,
c) Get Democratic - favoring prosecutors, government spokesmen, bureaucrats, college professors, or outside "experts" to repeat the rumor and to fabricate supporting "evidence",
d) Call for investigations in the House of representatives [which the Democrats currently control],
e) Ask representatives to go on record to news media concerning the fabricated messages,
f) Invoke every right under the sun in support of the false message: e.g., "free speech is being violated", "trial w/o
jury", "conspiracy", etc.
g)When a new fabrication is concocted, drop the current claims or say they were a Russian or Republican conspiracy, and go to the new fabrication. Never follow-up or complete investigations into past false messages.
Rinse, repeat;
IOW lie, lie, lie and lie again.
Recently Democrats have added to this recipe the following:
Bring out the mob,
shout and scream,
burn down the police station!
Every Democrat, from the lowliest Antifa street slug to Nancy Pelosi follows the same formula. They're political thugs who give the Thuggees:
I think I captured the essential steps of the process. Yes, parts of it (in particular, mob/group behavior) I would characterise as manifestations of insanity, but most of the steps are very rationally planned and executed. You could add Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" if you want more detail on the "how it is done" part:
Here's a list of various hoaxes/leaks/etc. that the big tech social media companies allowed and did not censor, even though they took action in this instance: https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax...
This list seems like strong proof that the we cannot trust these social media companies to be neutral actors. They shouldn't be given controlling power to the digital public square.
Who thinks any corporation is a neutral actor? And did the government make Twitter popular? The people that use Twitter granted that power as is their right. The people are free to setup decentralized publication systems if that is better. Twitter doesn’t really owe you an explanation of the different standard they use at different times.
For the 500 millionth time, section 230 says absolutely nothing about impartiality. And about moderation all it says is "Do as much as you like, even more than the government requires. You won't be liable."
Seriously, actually go read section 230 instead of relying on Internet commenters to tell you what it is.
To me, "It is the policy of the United States ... to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services" implies impartiality, as does the description of the internet as, among other things, "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
Companies that control what information users can receive in order to allow only one side of a political discourse are in opposition to the policies being implemented in section 230.
A provider of information services is not liable for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"
You asked people to read section 230 and you claimed that section 230 says absolutely nothing about impartiality.
I read section 230 and mentioned parts of it that I think are relevant to impartiality. In particular, I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party. And I don't see how you have forums for a true diversity of political discourse if forums are going to be partial to one political party.
If you can tell me, I would love to know, how do Twitter's actions in this case maximize user control over the information they receive? I don't think they do, I think it is quite the opposite of that, but go ahead and make a case if you have one.
Now it is true that the implementation of section 230 lacks an enforcement mechanism to enforce the policies that it advocates. That's a problem with the law, and it is what some people are advocating that we fix. I agree with those proposals, I would like to see section 230 amended so that companies that don't maximize user control over the information they receive lost section 230 protections. And the same thing for companies that don't allow a true diversity of political discourse.
> I read section 230 and mentioned parts of it that I think are relevant to impartiality.
I don't think the part you highlighted is relevant to impartiality. It sets an aspirational goal of Section 230 and the safe harbor is the means to promote that goal. Without the safe harbor, providers would be forced to strictly police what users post. Smaller providers who aren't able to bear the burden of strict moderation would be forced to shut down entirely. This would have the consequence of reducing overall user access to information.
> I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party.
By using a different information provider.
> description of the internet as, among other things, "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
You said it yourself. The Internet is neutral, according to Section 230. Not individual information providers. If you don't like what one information provider does, go make your own. It's all based on free tools and open standards. No one's stopping you.
Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes. That also reduces "user control over the information they receive", since the garbage will drown out anything useful and platforms will have no power to remove it.
That doesn't work when network effects are involved. Just like there aren't going to be hundreds of cell phone networks, there aren't going to be hundreds of networks with the reach of Twitter or Facebook.
Any time Twitter or Facebook don't allow certain information to be sent, users have less control over the information they receive.
>> Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes
The question is where the moderation happens, at the corporate level or at the user level. If a user who creates a space on a discussion board gets to moderate it, and anyone can create a space on that discussion board, that's perfectly usable and it puts the control in the user's hands.
So now you're demanding companies build specific features (user moderated boards) to accommodate what you think the law should be, regardless of how those companies' products already work?
If the companies actions aren't advancing the stated policies for which the law was enacted, then the law should be strengthened so that it promotes those policies.
Companies currently are acting in ways that are in direct opposition of those policies, so if you believe in those policies, you should want their actions to change.
you can be neutral about this political party or that party and still seeks to encourage truth and goodness and discourage lies and badness, as you see it.
Politically neutral but not neutral on truth or virtue. Also why don’t more of the people not agreeing with Twitter’s use of power push for more decentralized networks?
While I agree that the liberal-run tech firms are biased against conservative news sources, I think it is only fair to point out that the list you link is compiled and presented by a conservative organisation that has apparently been under criticism for its own approach to covid reporting (see the wiki page; and yes, I think wikipedia seems often liberal-biased), and can not be considered a neutral voice in this particular discussion.
That doesn't mean the list isn't valid; but it can't be assumed it is balanced.
I would encourage folks to resist the urge to put up blinders based on the URL. Particularly where, as here, the source is just collecting publicly-available documents and links. You’re not being asked to trust the author’s synthesis of a bunch of facts. You can check the underlying links yourself. Obviously conservative organizations have more of an incentive to compile this sort of thing. That doesn’t make it in and of itself unreliable.
Also, “conservative” and “liberal” are relative terms. Journalists are vastly more liberal than the public as a whole, so any news outlet that covers things from a middle ground perspective is labeled “conservative.”
In an ASU study of financial journalists, people who labeled themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” outnumbered those who labeled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” 13:1.
I’m not saying that this makes liberal reporters bad, or biased in the sense of willful prejudice. But liberals and conservatives have different assumptions, have different sets of facts they consider salient to different issues, etc. When a liberal reporter covers Sanders’ suggestion of $60,000 minimum teacher pay, the facts that come to mind might be things like how the income gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals is bigger in the US than in other countries. To a conservative, the first thing that might come to mind is that US teachers are already paid well above the OECD average. Both facts are true (American teachers are paid more than British teachers, but American programmers are paid a lot more). These differences inevitably come out in the reporting. Just because an outlet is writing from a conservative point of view doesn’t mean it’s trying to manipulate or deceive people.
>Twitter's technicality is a fig leaf to enable continued control of public discourse by an unelected private industry that is 9-to-1 in the tank for Democrats and can decide what Americans are allowed to know.
in the headline. Yes, thank you, I reject this authors "fact synthesis".
The Federalist is like a conservative version of Mother Jones or HuffPo. Not what I’d consider reliable but it can collect together facts that can be verified that other organizations won’t necessarily put together. For example, there’s an article right now observing that, while we’ve had a Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees for 50 years, for a lot of that time it’s been appointees confirmed by a Democratic Senate. (Democrats held the Senate almost without any gap from 1936-1982.) So candidates that ended up getting wobbly like Souter and Stevens were compromise candidates. The NYT just isn’t going to highlight facts like that.
You can look at the source for each link included in the list sure, but how to I find the content they haven't included in the list? The unreliable part is verifying whether the sample provided is an accurate representation of the population
I don't understand why this is so controversial.
You cannot reveal personal details of someone on Twitter (email, phone number etc.) The article contained unreacted personal info so should be blocked.
You also cannot link directly to hacked/obtained without consent material on twitter. The article contained screenshot of the material so should be blocked.
You CAN link to material that discusses hacked/obtained without consent material on Twitter as long as it does not contain the material. eg. Trump Tax Return story by NYT.
I don't know if you know this or not, but the technology exists for anyone to participate in a "digital public square" without use of the incumbent services (Facebook, Twitter, et cetera).
These services are not the digital public square. They are private spaces (like a shopping mall.) it would be wholly incorrect to make that assumption.
The technology may well exist, but is it being used by a sufficient amount of people?
Just like if all people happen to congregate in a private mall for one reason or another, if someone's excluded from that mall it doesn't matter all that much that there are public parks where anyone can go if no one actually goes there.
> but is it being used by a sufficient amount of people?
yes, it is. It's a pretty healthy and vibrant ecosystem (I'm referring to the W3C ActivityPub ecosystem here because I didn't mention it in the grandparent comment)
While I think that it would be great for people to use decentralized alternatives to FB and Twitter, I think that at least as of today they are very, very far from having the same kind of reach, despite the ecosystem being healthy and vibrant.
So again, even though I think that we as a society would gain a lot from using these technologies, in the year 2020 they really don't have the same "public square" effect that FB and Twitter have, simply because most "regular" people (as in "not in tech") have probably never even heard of them, whereas everybody and their grandma is on Facebook.
Also, the fact that FB and Twitter aggressively attempt to bring people to their platforms likely blurs the line between them being a private venue or a public square.
At the shopping mall they dont hand out as much Dopamine, as FB and Twitter have.
People don't even realize what is going on. The addicts are getting cut of from their favorite drug. A drug that has conditioned their behavior for 10-15 years.
FB and Twitter, every time they make these moves all over the world, need to check out how good ol Alex Jones is doing. Cause thats where a lot of ppl who get cut off will be in a year or two.
i remember during the BLM Riots, we had stories going around that jacob blake was just "breaking up a fight" between two women. when it turns out he had just finished robbing someone he'd previously sexually assaulted with her kids in the house. and twitter let it trend
i remember they had a video of gunshot sounds trending with a description saying that an innocent 16 year old girl was shot by police when in reality it was an armed 30 year old man who had just killed someone else.
You might as well delete most liberal media as well since anytime they mention a crime being committed and they omit the race of the perp you can assume they aren’t white. If they are white they will shout it from the rooftops.
I watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and I’d assume that for some reason these journalists thought that they can fix racism just not mentioning the race of the perpetrators.
I haven’t seen what you’ve seen, so I’m not going to deny your experience/impression, but my opinion is that the only case where the races of those involved in a crime matter are when the crime is racially motivated. And that’s the standard I’ve seen major media adhere to, but obviously there’s grey areas.
If you want every crime tallied up against the race of the perpetrator, I’ve got bad news for you; that’s what the kids are talking about when they take to the streets against good ol’ racism, my friend.
Well I am not going to deny your experience/impression, but my opinion is that news is valuable to the degree it has actionable information that is accurate.
e.g. Knowing which areas are more likely to be dangerous means I can avoid those areas. If an area is regularly the site of dangerous altercations, I know to be more careful around it. But if the news white-washes that actual factual information it becomes much less useful as actual actionable information.
Pretending the problem doesn’t exist isn’t solving the problem.
Maybe fixing the crime and poverty is more important than calling it racist.
> There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved ~ Jesse Jackson
Maybe the crime and poverty are direct results of centuries of racist oppressions. Slavery, segregation, denial of voting rights, economic opportunities... and maybe, the solution to racism isn’t more racism? How do you think we got here? And how do you propose we address the issues? You yell “look at the crime” and smugly pretend that the other side is blind to it; well, what’s your solution?
If your conscience hasn’t been forcing you to face the fact that you thought “my kids can’t go to yale, and I blame minorities” was a badge of victimhood you can hold up against slavery and segregation... fellow human, you’ve got some reckoning to do.
But it proves my point that you either have no solution to contribute, or you yourself know that your solution is wrong and are afraid to say it out loud. When I find myself in that fork, I take it as a signal that I should question my assumptions and values, before getting in the way of those who’ve come out with and committed to theirs.
This is a harmful characterization of an important movement. No protests on that scale are going to go without a hitch. That shouldn't minimize their importance.
> Researchers at the US Crisis Monitor analyzed over 10,600 nationwide protests between May 24 (the day before George Floyd was killed by police) and Aug. 22, and found that nearly 95 percent were peaceful [1]
Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back children while his children watched. He was unarmed. Even if the alleged sexual assault charges are found to be true, this is not how justice should be carried out.
Also. He is charged with sexual assault and trespassing. I can't find any source that he's been charged with robbery. These are serious charges. But it should be up to the courts to determine his guilt. Not the police or the court of public opinion.
Can you provide a source for this? The best I can find is that he had a knife on the floor of the truck. But was otherwise unarmed. This is consistent across all the main sources I've checked.
From the USA Today article in regards to the paragraph:
> The DOJ has not clarified whether the knife was on the floorboard throughout the confrontation, or if Blake may have held it at some point. Spokeswoman Gillian Drummond declined to answer that question when asked by USA TODAY on Aug. 27.
We can discuss what kind of armed he was, but the fact that he was armed is not controversial, and that it the one and only point I am making.
I'm also making it in good faith, because it's entirely possible that all of the bad reporting on it would lead someone to believe that he was unarmed. That's the only reason for any of these replies.
That’s just it. I don’t think it can be stated that he was armed at this point. We know a knife was in the car. That’s about it.
Personally, I wouldn’t consider him to be armed unless he was actively brandishing it. Which the USA Today article says he was not.
Regardless. They shot a man in the back seven times while his children watched. The standard for that kind of force should be much, much higher than “he may or may not have had a knife in his possession”.
The fact that you thought otherwise illustrates the problem precisely. Social and traditional media companies had no issue allowing this misconception to spread unfettered because aligned with their political beliefs.
> Researchers at the US Crisis Monitor analyzed over 10,600 nationwide protests between May 24 (the day before George Floyd was killed by police) and Aug. 22, and found that nearly 95 percent were peaceful [1]
> When destructive protests by demonstrators did take place, the "victims" were often statues of slave owners, Confederate leaders, and colonial figures.
I agree. We have no reason to give our data and power of speech to these shit companies. We need a decentralized authority in charge of social networks. Nothing these companies provide is of any substantial value that cannot be open sourced and decentralized.
my question is how we decentralize it without allowing child exploitation etc. it seems like you need moderation at some level but the second you add it, they have the leeway to abuse that authority for political reasons
That question could be rephrased as "how much entropy should a system have?"
Specifically, I refer to "chaos/evil" as a type of entropy. It's a perversion of virtue. We live in a world system that always seems to have self-interest in there somewhere, but self-interest taken to extremes becomes evil.
So, "Freedom v2.2" is a system that allows for some entropy to motivate independent decisions that affect the public good (e.g., an entrepreneur), but are also punitive toward the public bad (e.g., child porn).
The real battle here that becomes political is the quantity and scope of controls. Generally, in the USA, the Republicans are presently leaning away from more controls and the Democrats toward it. The voter decides based on whether they think the system is self-correcting.
Or, to put another way, the entire essence of free information is either a self-correcting negative feedback loop (like the stock market) or a holy-crap-let's-stop-this-train-before-we-all-die positive feedback loop (like a horrifically dysfunctional family).
I don't understand why this is so controversial.
You cannot reveal personal details of someone on Twitter (email, phone number etc.) The article contained unreacted personal info so should be blocked.
You also cannot link directly to hacked/obtained without consent material on twitter. The article contained screenshot of the material so should be blocked.
You CAN link to material that discusses hacked/obtained without consent material on Twitter as long as it does not contain the material. eg. Trump Tax Return story by NYT.
Tax returns are an interesting case, because even revealing that information could constitute a federal crime. You also can't reveal someone's protected medical information (HIPPA)
It's frustrating Twitter and Facebook won't just say the truth:
"This is a blatant attempt at disinformation by politicians who have repeatedly attacked our employees, and we don't want it. It's our web site, stop trying to tell us what our own rules are. Go spread your nonsense somewhere else.
Reading through these HN comments, it is amazing to me how many people have already concluded the NY Post story is either obviously true or false.
But I agree with the gist of your point. Social media platforms should stop pretending to be unbiased disinformation watchmen. It's their platform and they don't have to justify squat. If people want free speech, they can go somewhere else.
On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.
The contradictory statements by the so-called shop owner, who provided the emails, and the past behavior of Guiliani all points towards it very likely being false. And them holding this information until 3 weeks before the election points, after having it for over a year, further points it to being false informations.
And the nail in the coffin is the simple fact that they decided to release a PDF-image of the emails instead of simply giving the raw email with its metadata which would allow us to instantaneously confirm it. Literally all they have to do is post the metadata.
> And them holding this information until 3 weeks before the election points, after having it for over a year, further points it to being false informations.
While I'm not arguing whether the allegations are true or not, I don't think timing your most valuable opposition research findings makes things automatically false.
And in my opinion, these huge platforms that are basically monopolies should not be censoring things based on whether they think something is true or false. It's tempting to believe that every issue is either clearly true or clearly false, in most fields that is not the case and I don't want @jack deciding what's "safe" for me to see.
The go somewhere else thing doesnt end well. If half the country has to recreate their own social networks, web hosting, payment processing, banking, and even retail locations you end up with two separate societies competing for the same physical space and thats not going to end well for anyone. This is the very thing we should be trying the hardest to avoid but we are already moving down this road.
Half the country isn't going to out looking for conspiracy theory garbage. They just want to see pictures of their grandkids. But if you expose them to the conspiracies they can get drawn in.
> On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.
I think they could be the future, but any social media platform is only as strong as its underlying social graph. A flawless platform which checks every box will still fail unless you can convince a significant amount of users to join. Or, more to the point, a certain amount of graph edges need to be formed.
How do you do that? That’s the question floating over the graves of dozens of Facebook clones.
Sure, but all we have to do is wait. Once a distributed platform finally takes off, I doubt we'll ever go back to centralized ones. I don't know how long it will take or how many platforms will rise and fall in the mean time, but it's just a matter of time.
You cannot reveal personal details of someone on Twitter (email, phone number etc.) The article contained unreacted personal info so should be blocked.
You also cannot link directly to hacked/obtained without consent material on twitter. The article contained screenshot of the material so should be blocked.
You CAN link to material that discusses hacked/obtained without consent material on Twitter as long as it does not contain the material. eg. Trump Tax Return story by NYT.
Having a bunch of replies on the thread that don't bother to read the terms of use or the explanation of the ban is spam as well. Spam fighting spam? Spamalot?
Twitter and Facebook: Spreading garbage right wing conspiracies about Clinton Assassinations, Pizzagate Child Porn, Obama Terrorism connections, and so on for the better part of a decade, and actively contributing to influencing the 2016 election through rampant misinformation
Hackernews: <CRICKETS>
Twitter: Blocks ONE similarly garbage smear piece by a political administration that has no qualms with completely lying to the entire world in every sense of hte word
People on HN have been up in arms about all those topics since they appeared. Maybe it was that the discussions got so inflammatory and repetitive they ended up getting flamed/flagged off the front page before you saw them. But if you do a few searches (in the box at the bottom of each page) like I just did, you'll find plenty.
1,764 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadThis is blatant disinformation meant to destabilize the election and disenfranchise voters with blatant lies. This action is exactly the kind of thing everyone blamed social media for not taking last time and they're finally doing the right thing.
This is exactly what they tried to do in the 2016 election by getting Comey to announce a new investigation that, surprise, turned up absolutely nothing. There is no substance to these allegations. At all.
Before you get up in arms about a slippery slope about arbiters of truth keep in mind that these sources have burned any credibility they have. Their ideas do not have a right to a fair trail in the public discourse because they are all acting in bad faith.
Twitter bans any posts about it and now it’s taking off like a firestorm.
Besides, the burden of proof applies here. "You can't prove it's not fake" is not a sensible approach. The burden is on the accuser to prove that the story is true, and the Post story does not do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jyT1rnW9fA
[1] https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/322395.html
When presented with the video of Biden admitting to it in his own words; he pressured to fire the prosecutor, but the prosecutor wasn’t investigating Burisma.
When shown that the prosecutor was actively investigating Burisma; well he pressured to get the prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma, but it was in the national interest!
I’m not sure if there’s another round in the typical exchange. Best to just skip to the last phase to move the conversation forward.
Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, that's not in dispute, he's on video saying he did it. What is in dispute is whether he did it out of a corrupt motivation to benefit his son and the business he was working for. That's not asserted in the article. It merely lays out the timeline of events -- granted, in an order which is meant to point the reader in a given direction. They even include a section with the Biden campaign's take on the prosecutor's firing.
Because that implies something far worse than the censored article's accusations about Hunter Biden.
What do you mean by disenfranchise, while we're at it? Even if we were to stipulate it's a lie, is it your position that to lie during campaign season is literally the same as taking away the right to vote?
So far, there doesn't seem to be much that hasn't already been confirmed. One new piece of information is the email that implies a Burisma exec. was at least introduced to Joe Biden. The Biden hasn't issued a categorical denail of this, only to say that such a meeting "wasn't scheduled."
What substantive allegation against Hunter Biden are you disputing, exactly?
NY Post doxxed their own source when put under scrutiny, who went on to do an interview yesterday. What John Paul Mac Isaac is saying isn't adding up.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In that case, all articles that include "sources say" etc should be banned from Twitter, shouldn't they?
In this case, NY Post threw their source to the wolves when they couldn't verify any of the information, so this story is not congruent with "sources say".
He can’t get something as simple as who initiated contact over the device straight? If I was a small fish about to source a story of this size, I’d have every single detail rehearsed and committed to memory. This guy doesn’t come across as legit at all.
What if I accuse someone of something, and then post that I accused them. The accusation maybe bogus but the post is technically not false.
Pre-framing a topic is malpractice.
In this case, the following are true: (1) Hunter Biden was a highly paid board member of Burisma while his father handled Ukraine policy for the U.S. (2) A computer repair store owner claims to have his data and to have given it to Rudy Giuliani (3) There was a Grand Jury summons to seize the computer as evidence in an unknown investigation.
This is far more than is usually needed to cover a story.
For what it's worth, NY Post (sorry for the link) is reporting that the Biden campaign isn't denying most of their claims: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/notice-biden-campaign-not-deny....
To be clear, this is a separate question from how the emails were obtained. That story is beyond weird and surely bogus. To be fair, it also seems to me an indication that Biden is more honest than Trump. Trump would just say the emails were fake whether they were or not.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the story is true, just that the campaign has made a deliberate choice.
> He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it.
He owns a computer repair shop and doesn't keep basic records of the devices he services? The moment he knew what he had, he didn't start taking any kind of notes?
> Throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”
How does he not remember who contacted who regarding the device? Also, how would the FBI know that he had to device to reach out to him first? This inconsistency is absolutely damning.
> Social media postings indicate that Mac Isaac is an avid Trump supporter and voted for him in the 2016 election.
> Mac Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post article’s publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”
Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah, shit.”
So Rudy was your lifeguard? the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.
He wasn't comfortable admitting he had been in contact with Giuliani, even though it's pretty obvious at this point that he was? That doesn't sound like a citizen fulfilling their civic duty if he was in contact with a political operative.
This story absolutely stinks to high heaven.
0: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Being nervous in an interview is one thing, trying and failing to wing it through basic questions is entirely different. His comment about the lifeboat particularly stood out to me because he very obviously didn't want to explicitly talk about Giuliani, but he was comfortable speaking in hyperbole about it. If you're so uncomfortable to answer a question, how would you then be comfortable enough to "say it" without saying it? If I was concerned that a question could threaten my safety or legal standing, I'd stay as far away from it as possible. This guy clearly wanted the reporters to know that he had been talking to Giuliani, and once that's out there, the context of the entire story changes.
If it's a legit scandal, there's no reason that a whistleblower should reach out to a political operative in addition to the authorities. The very fact that he did this says so much about his state of mind, that he was acting in support of a candidate.
Instead of responding, I would hope the Biden campaign talks about policy.
Not denying something doesn't make true any more than not confirming something makes it false.
I neither confirm nor deny that I have a bank account at a large commercial bank. What does that tell you?
Nothing.
Slinging unsubstantiated mud at your opponent is an old trick in politics and relies on the idea that you can make your opponent look bad just by having them address it at all.
The fact that Biden isn't addressing it is strong evidence that the story isn't getting the traction the hacks that put it out there wanted. It is not strong evidence of its truth.
>"We have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place," it said.
>"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 US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr Biden.
>"Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath."
I'm not sure what there is to deny.
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1316521338295783424
That's absolutely ridiculous logic.
Your argument is “I don’t believe it, so it must be false”
The question is whether this standard of reliability is one that they can actually apply evenly. This is a far higher standard that what was pitched. This content moderation was pitched as being limited to Russian bots and “vaccines cause cancer” and the like. Moderating articles from a publicly listed brick and mortar news organization, even if it’s a tabloid, based on the perceived credibility of the underlying facts, is a whole new level. It’s dramatically raising the bar. And maybe that’s where the bar should be, but I absolutely do not believe that Facebook and Twitter have the resources or integrity to apply that high standard fairly.
Before you dismiss my anecdote as one mistaken lawyer, note that the chairman of the FCC (who is a lawyer) and Justice Clarence Thomas both think that Section 230 doesn't offer nearly as much protection as social media companies seem to think it does. In response to recent events, the FCC plans to issue statements clarifying the meaning of Section 230.[1]
1. https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC/status/1316808733805236226 "Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech. But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters."
Section 230 will NOT get removed. ISPs and email service providers, and blog platforms, will still be able to use it.
But companies that add/remove/replace/gray-out/delete/hide/push-to-bottom content that they claim they did not editorialize -- will be called Publishers.
So these businesses will not be able to use statutory protections that are available for non-publishers under section 45.230.
An analogy might be: a for-profit-business cannot claim tax benefits available for a non-for-profit organizations.
So the tax-code does not get removed, just because somebody was actively abusing it. It stays the same, but the abuser would face criminal investigation.
And if the abuser was found to systemically and purposefully avoiding to be recognized as 'Publisher' (or as a for-profit business in this analogy), then the criminal penalties would be more severe, then otherwise.
Publishers can do this, yes. They just are not offered the legal protections of being a platform, if they act as a publisher.
The point is, that someone is acting as a publisher, then they should have these legal protections taken away form them.
Twitter claims that the justification is that the emails are "hacked" and/or "leaked" (they're inconsistent), even though (1) this is patently false since they were found on a hard drive which became property of the repair shop; and (2) Twitter has no problem with, say, Trump's tax returns and other "hacked"/"leaked" materials.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8842709/Joe-Bidens-...
Pretty obvious the guy who claimed to have obtained the laptop is fabricating the whole story: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Everything else in the release is 1) far more damaging than the above and 2) far harder to verify as accurate with what we've been given thus far.
The Biden campaign's refutation was not to say that the emails were doctored. They only said that they have checked the official schedule of Joe Biden from the day in question and there is no mention of a meeting with the Burisma executive (they don't say categorically that he did not meet with him, just that it is not present on the official schedule).
Other then the meeting w/ Biden, I'm not sure there's a detail that has been specfically contested.
I am not saying they have met a burden of proof, I'm saying that we don't censor news articles (even sensational or thinly sourced ones) because they haven't yet met a burden of proof.
And yes, the key to using the internet effectively is to filter things out that are garbage. I individually try not waste my time on bullshit, truth based organizations filter out a lot of crackpots: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2019020... and Twitter itself is free to try to do this filtering as well. I applaud them for trying to remove BS rather than trying to push addictive content but whatever. This very news site is interesting because they spend a lot of time trying to filter BS in favor of productive and informative conversations.
I don't doubt some things have been exaggerated, but I feel were pretty far past a theory right now. The question is just how much their influence affected policy.
SV is full of .. something. idk what to call these people, but reading this forum makes it clear they are all around me in my career domain.
The story received additional sources as it ran, and eventually grew into an investigation that yielded multiple criminal convictions.
The DNI publicly put out a report. I recall statements by the FBI Director, CIA Director, and NSA Director referring and promoting the conclusions drawn in the report (those 3 agencies were principally involved, in addition to being the three most important and largest intelligence agencies).
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
The Senate Intelligence Committee (which is GOP controlled) has also put out several reports concurring with Russian interference in the 2016 election.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
The initial news cycle would have been from highly valued and proven anonymous sources, which is typical for national security matters. If you are expecting a bunch of CIA analysts doxxing themselves on the front page of the NYT, you will be disappointed. That’s not how national security reporting (or reporting in general) works.
To be of excellent provenance doesn’t necessarily require a named source - if the paper and journalist have a good track record with unnamed sources in an area of expertise.
How partisan is the lease of logic?
Citation very much needed.
I can imagine a dystopian future in which three weeks before every election there's an explosion of insane bombshell claims about the candidates, with ever increasing effort put into them and no time to refute them before the vote. A misinformation arms war will ensue.
This is a difficult concept for whiners to accept.
And that happens mind you, on the PUBLICLY OWNED airwaves and spectrum....
If we really start considering media, a lot of taxpayer money worldwide went to broadband Internet infrastructure, so Twitter and friends do not play on a completely private field either.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: to be clear, I'm not just talking about this comment, but similar ones like these, which I didn't see at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518160
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517902
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517881
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517448
You simply can't post like that to HN, no matter how wrong or ignorant others are, or you feel they are.
I come here for the intelligent and interesting discussions. Often times these are the types of discussions that are difficult for people as they contain ideas that challenge one's sense of self and place are the most uncomfortable. But without those challenges, people will never grow. Trees are strongest where the forces of nature are not buffered. People are as well.
Take care
That may be true of trees and people but it is not true of internet communities. I think you're making a category error. The confrontational style you're talking about requires smaller, more cohesive environments to generate interesting outcomes. On a large, anonymous, open internet forum like HN, it just produces repetitive flamewar, then brain death, then heat death. Since the idea of HN is to be interesting (to the extent possible), we have no choice but to moderate this. I wish it were different—it would be a lot less work.
Usually when someone posts the sort of argument that you did, I have found that it's possible to persuade them to follow the site guidelines once they understand that everything we do follows from trying to optimize for interestingness (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It's not about enforcing some tedious moral code. If you decide you buy that and want to use HN as intended in the future, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and let us know.
Otherwise the phrase “government censorship” would be redundant. And that’s why the Hollywood Production Codes were a kind of censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code
And the idea that criticizing censorship when private organizations do it is “whining” is quite odd. Not everything bad is illegal. Lots of people criticized the Hollywood Production Codes as bad censorship, even though it was voluntary. Except back then it was liberals complaining that the Hollywood companies that controlled distribution were using their power to entrench conservative ideas and suppress liberal ones: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/17/cens-m17.html
Censorship in a privately owned entity is 100% legal. As is bias...
Its a really simple concept. I am surprised you dont understand.
I kinda anticipated Twitter and FBs actions vs. "hate speak" would come down to this. The extremists were never the target they were just the excuse.
Live by Twitter favoritism,...
Also it's unfair to say they are doing this for political favoritism. Democratic politicians are the loudest ones calling for their breakup, ie. Bernie, AOC, Warren.
Reading this story without understanding the entire political landscape is as dangerous as the misinformation itself.
Incidents like this may make Republicans a lot more interested in breaking up Facebook and Twitter...
But certainly we can handle a distributed model. There's plenty of people who think it would work better (socially, not just technically).
I have yet to see a clear decisive causation link between the Russian interference (e.g. bot farms) and the outcome of the election. Of course there was interference, nobody denies it. But show me that these trolls swayed the election. There is none.
The Russia conspiracy theory is laden with these. So many conversations are very tedious because of the number of falsehoods you have to break down before you make any progress. Many folks seem to accept it as a given that troll farms were successful. The posts themselves are laughable.
Uh, that's not what left-leaning people are blaming the election results on. That's what right-leaning people claim left-leaning people blamed it on.
Left-leaning people blame the election result on racism, sexism, xenophobia, and intolerance. Donald J. "Grab 'em by the pussy" / "look at my large hands" / "birther in chief" / "interrupting cow" Trump is the direct result of the hatred that has been pouring out of talk radio and Fox News for the last several decades.
Censoring Bernie's/AOC's political rivals (carrot) could be a better move to avoid being broken up than punching back directly (stick) which may only motive them further.
(Pause for people to jump in to cite examples of such papers getting it wrong. This will be the small set of examples that is always cited).
The Post is not such a paper.
With a bunch of Trump campaign and administration officials admitting in federal court to collaborating with Russian government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
- Tax fraud
- Admissions of sexual assault on tape
- Tax fraud
- Credible allegations of rape or sexual misconduct (26)
- Lying to the American public about the threat of covid (on tape)
What do you want to call it?
Anonymous officials ready to support any given narrative seem to be a dime a dozen anymore.
Unless the leaked information is accompanied by an insurmountably huge collection of documents outlining a complex tapestry of affiliations, interests, and events such as the alphabet agencies are want to produce, I typically assume it's the latter.
The NYT doesn't get a pass from me just because it used to be great, and do the work requisite to earn its sterling reputation.
I honestly wish I could provide citations where they've fallen here, but most of them come from The Intercept's podcast (Intercepted, I recommend it), where Scahill's opening rants regularly take aim at publications across the spectrum's use of anonymous officials, and the questionability of the claims they cite, and it would be far too exhausting and disheartening to record them all. As petty as some of them have been, it's just background noise, anymore.
Both platforms bans anyone mentioning the supposed "whistleblower" (whom actually only had newspaper articles as 'evidence'), bans anyone mentioning Bidens kid, bans anyone mentioning the death of Clintons ex-staffers, Wikileaks content related to Dems is blacklisted, and they remove videos of Bidens gaffes for being "manipulative" when it's just clips from livestreams.
While no action is taken if you post conspiracies about Reps, fabricated videos of Trump (for humour or propaganda), discredited 'leaks' such as the infamous dossier, that ICE is running concentration-camps and engaging in genocide, or pictures of you vandalising Trump-supporters property.
EDIT: Even on HN, a site that usually is for free speech and discussing alternative theories, the posts about bias in tech are near instantly flagged and users praising media companies for removing "bad information" while people not following political narratives get downvoted; seems to indicate larger issues.
1. Elite class does exist in the society, and they exert tight control on the flow of information in traditional media, e.g. TV, newspapaer etc. Their control is loosened in the Internet age initially, which led to the rise of Trump. Trying to correct this, a narrative of blaming "fake news" was used to pressure leading companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to toe the elite line.
2. Censorship of "effective" speech, which is speech that can reach vast audience, always exists in any society. Just think back about the "mask is useless" than "everyone should wear mask" media campaigns in the in the past few months, on traditional media. Internet weakened the traditional guardians of "effective" speech. With the multiple challenges faced by the elites today, e.g. COVID, class and racial conflicts, disruption to internal orders, the elites are trying harder to take control of important nodes of Internet, so they can build consensus and move the society to a direction they desire.
Trump is just a middle finger to the Democrats woke policies coming from social science university labs and generally more artistic people, which indeed tends to be over representated in the entertainment industry.
This is just plainly false. I've seen much of that discussed on both platforms.
You're just making stuff up to support a narrative.
Big Tech employees are the largely the same demographic as HN readers, which are a large proportion of would-be white knights, most making $150k or above, thinking they're gonna save the world from itself "because they know better".
In our field we constantly see languages with stronger intellectual foundations (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Perl6) constantly lose out market share to pragmatic, practical, messy and oftentimes ugly languages/libraries/tookits etc. We often knowingly choose the latter set knowing full well what their downsides are, because we still come out ahead.
If you're wondering why someone would support Facebook/Twitter/YouTube's recent moves, it really is that simple. Their foundations don't have to be perfect, or even particularly good or fair. They just have to be better the deluge of toxic sludge that's currently overwhelming these systems. That is to say, there is no answer to the Paradox of Tolerance and you don't need an answer. If you feel people are taking advantage of you, you will (and should) crack down, and if you crack down too much eventually people will (and should) rebel.
I’m exaggerating a bit but not by much.
The whole story is that this is Hunter Biden's laptop, but in reality some random dude dropped it off and the owner said that "he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it." [1].
Then, it gets passed off to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani back at the start of the year when Guiliani is already trying to get Ukraine to stir up a story on Hunter Biden. They then sit on it for most of the year and release it 20 days before the election.
Something like this, even as absurd as it is, will take weeks to thoroughly debunk. Meanwhile, people are literally in lines voting and stuff like this has an effect. That's probably why it was released right now, because even though it's most likely false, by the time it has flown around the internet unimpeded the damage will have already been done.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Twitter has never once censored any of smears or leaks against the Trump campaign.
Also, your criteria for this story to reek shows your bias. It's not like Joe Biden himself bragged about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired with the threat of holding back a billion dollars. It's on video, just Google it. And Hunter Biden is an admitted drug addict. So nothing that has been exposed from that laptop reeks too much.
You want to say Hunter was set up? Okay, I'll go down that rabbit hole, but to say this is all false? Well, again, your bias is showing.
Of course not. It's selective interference. They're just getting more brazen about it as we get closer to election day.
Also telling is that they have a pinned story at the top of the empty search page with the link titled, "Joe Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor for investigating his son, The Washington Post reports"
EDIT: Here's a link showing the WaPo headline that Twitter is adding: https://twitter.com/RepLeeZeldin/status/1316523575373893632
Frankly, they should do this much more when officials lie (which the current administration has demonstrably done ad infinitum for four years). There's no reason at all for them to help officials lie about important matters.
As a private platform, it's certainly a matter of whether or not they are helping you do something rather than whether or not they are preventing you from doing something. If we want a reliable avenue for public communication, Silicon Valley ain't gonna give it to us, and they shouldn't.
It would be another thing to prevent people from stating that someone else had said something (given that the statement did actually happen). Sometimes, Twitter does block all posts that even mention a topic. This is definitely a bad approach, and I think they do tend to rectify it when this happens, but they still screw it up pretty often.
Things are changing, I don't think we can point to prior behavior of these companies as the line they're going to hold in the future.
Setting aside the speculation at the end, this summarizes the issues with the story: https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/14/suspect-provenance-of-hunt...
It's hard to learn when you've already made up your mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html over, and you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
This seems like a really bad standard to apply to the president. I'd argue that morally there are two relevant factors when it comes to finding someone guilty: the damage that would be done to others by failing to punish the perpetrator, and the damage that would be done to the alleged perpetrator by punishing them. We choose different standards depending on those two factors. For example, in civil cases, someone specific has lost something and someone else has gained at their expense. And you're not seeking to imprison someone, but to take away some of their wealth. So we pick a standard of evidence (preponderance of the evidence) that's lower than in criminal cases (with a very high injury to the perpetrator and typically lower injury to the community).
In contrast, an impeachment is not a prison sentence. It would injure a president only insofar as that president would no longer keep the most prestigious title and position of power in American society. And failing to impeach for serious corruption or crimes (say, if a president were conspiring with China to weaken America's standing overseas) could be catastrophic. So I think a much weaker presumption of innocence is in order.
Flynn was then charged for lying when he plead guilty, because ht wasn't actually guilty. Seriously. This is a Kafka trap.
On top of that, it's now clear Sullivan was getting e-mail, exparte, and ENTERING THEM into evidence!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFMk48KA608
To me from pizzaGate to RussiaGate to the impeachment to this Hunter Biden thing is all junk ... arbitrary distractions to the issues that are important ... the economy, healthcare, equality, etc.
Each side will do whatever it takes/strategy to try and win and too many sheep follow along/get soaked up in the soap opera drama.
For me it's all transparent and tiresome!
Just watch closely for a while and you'll see it happening everywhere. There are lies and misinformation and hate and fear directed _everywhere_ no matter what "side" you're on and the volume of it is massive. Then the media and influencers and regular people amplify it and spread it and debate it until they all hate each other and don't trust anyone.
It's working too. America is imploding. The UK got duped into Brexit. Several countries have a growing following of citizens that think immigrants and minorities are the cause of their misfortune even though those tend to be vulnerable groups that are exploited the most. Cancel culture is dialed up to 11. It's crazy and scary.
You really missed all of 2017-2018. My wife is a never-Trumper and this issue got her to tune into Rachel Maddow and all the podcasts and the idea that the collusion was two-sided and went to the highest levels in the Trump campaign was pervasive.
See: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russ...
Ahem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=x6U2Un5kEdI
edited It seems this particular mac doesn't have the T2 chip. It would still have disk encryption on by default.
"A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots." — Mark Twain
Anyway, would not invalidate the story, just because of the way it was leaked.
>During the subsequent summer and fall, Mac Isaac said he became alarmed after browsing through the computer's files. He claims he then spoke with an associate more versed than him in the law and in current events.
>That unnamed person then contacted the FBI, Mac Isaac said.
>Federal investigators from Wilmington and Baltimore then subpoenaed the laptop in December, Mac Isaac said.
>Shortly after, they called Mac Isaac asking him to assist them, technically, in viewing the files on the damaged hard drive, he said.
>Mac Isaac admitted that the request raised his own suspicion, given that the FBI has its own technical staff.
2. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing a reputable shop would be doing with someone's property (poking around inside, sending it to Giuliani). Could it have violated the law?
3. The stories tell what we already knew: Hunter tried to cash in on his dad, while living the loser life of an addict. Won't change my vote.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/feds-exam...
>Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The story is light on details.
Now if Twitter wants to not allow tweeting of October surprises, I suppose that's their business. But if so, block it for both sides.
I also think it's totally counterproductive for them to (try to) do so. Block links to the NY Post article? Great, but then what? Block links to the BBC article? To the HN discussion? To every random blogger who writes up a post about it, with links to the BBC article, the NY Post article, and the HN discussion? Twitter might be able to stay on top of that, but it's going to be hard, it's going to leak, and it's going to look really bad. It's going to give the story far more legs than it otherwise would have had (Streisand effect). It's going to spawn a whole bunch of new conspiracy theories, with Twitter as part of the bad guys. The net effect of all this is not going to be what Twitter wants...
2) Conspiracy theory
3) Lie by omission (it was sent to the FBI in December, he sent a copy to Giuliani)
Your debunking is objectively poor
Hunter's lawyer has allegedly emailed the store asking for the laptop back
If those two things can be corroborated and they aren't forgeries, it should dispel all speculation about who dropped it off and who it belonged to.
A US government website put the details on their website. Twitter is now blocking the US government webpage hosting the details. They are blocking actual politicians linking these details. https://twitter.com/CongressmanHice/status/13167418079595724...
Worse yet, they have highlighted the exact opposite story. They are featuring washington post who are calling it false.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1316398754883272704
I'm not an American. Any Americans want to weigh in on your views of this?
>which need not discriminate on whether the entity pushing it is associated with a government or not.
I was ignoring the NYPost, to judge action taken by Twitter. Twitter should never ever censor a government website regardless for what it says.
>Whether or not I want Twitter to be an arbiter of truth, some very basic research does seem to make it seem this story is a bit on the order of a conspiracy theory.
Do you want Twitter to be the arbiter of truth?
My usual source of Democrat/Left news is Msnbc. For whatever reason they are not covering the story at all.
Can enlighten me on why it seems to be a conspiracy theory?
If they get it wrong, fine. We can use other platforms if we don't like the decisions one makes. But I'm tired of the idea that they should NEVER be able to even try to recognize the difference between truth and lies.
But that's not what they are doing, is it? They are recognizing the difference between potential truths that would benefit whomever they are politically aligned with from potential truths that would benefit whomever they aren't politically aligned with.
They don't ask for truth, proof or anything similar, they ask for consequences, and whether those consequences appear to be good for their political agenda.
Not because it's false, fake, or a conspiracy.
While the leak is obviously timed to directly impact the election. They no doubt have been sitting on the information for months or longer.
What do you think about Twitter outright censoring the entire subject? It only makes me want to know more.
These companies are not neutral communication platforms; they have no duty to neutrality. Although I agree they should remain neutral as much as reasonable, drawing the line at election manipulation is perfectly reasonable and consistent.
The bigger problem is that journalists/newspapers are no longer the arbiters of truth, and instead the distributors are.
Sure, but this will not be adjudicated on twitter. Letting the unverified and extremely suspicious story spread on twitter does nothing to bring us closer to the truth. On the contrary, the truth is harmed by the unchecked spread of misinformation because the truth doesn't have the same viral quality as lies.
I agree with this, but I think Facebook & Twitter shot themselves in the foot by allowing rampant & salacious accusatory headlines to run across their platform unhindered during the past 4 years. There are numerous examples from alleged pee tapes to collusion, and general he said she said.
That's the issue I see at least.
> So I have sympathy for the position they are in and the difficulty in being consistent with their policies given the vast range of ways manipulative information can be spread.
I think the true test will be how this is held up in the future. Of course we're in the middle of an insane political divide, but eventually we'll be past it, and next time there will be new candidates, and each time beyond that. So the litmus test will be whether the rules are fair and applied equally as time goes on.
Convincing people you're the best person for the job is only one approach. Another approach is to convince people that don't like you to not vote, or to split their vote across multiple candidates.
If agree that the manipulation happens outside of the campaign. Once you've won, you can choose who gets to vote in the next election, whether they are allowed to vote at all, or if their vote counts in your next campaign vs somebody elses'
Eg. Gerrymandering, allowing/disallowing felons votes (and moving more people in/out of felon status), adding/removing rules on how voting is done etc
The technology exists for the public sector to disentangle itself from these commercial platforms. I don't know why pols and journos are so blind to this.
[0] This is a W3C Recommendation -- a protocol, by the words of Wikipedia that is in "the most mature stage of development. At this point, the standard has undergone extensive review and testing, under both theoretical and practical conditions. The standard is now endorsed by the W3C, indicating its readiness for deployment to the public, and encouraging more widespread support among implementors and authors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#W3C_...
If by any chance Trump wins next month, this will be the end not only for Facebook and Twitter, but for the wider Internet in general and Social Media in particular. Because if Trump wins, he is not going to let it slide. The destruction of Facebook and Twitter will most certainly done by removing the safe harbors by citing this incident in particular. That will be a bloodbath with a lot casualties of innocent bystanders in Silicon Valley.
And the knock-off effects of this will be even more damning. Even if Trump loses, many other countries will take a big, hard look at the possibility of regime change and political interference being done by a bunch of Western Activists. Especially in Asia and Africa, where the memories of Western Imperialism have not yet faded and the wounds are still raw.
I am really surprised by the fact that the shareholders, investors and the board of Facebook and Twitter haven't stepped in to stop this or at-least deescalate this, considering they will be loosing a whole lot in this scenario. Or is everyone in Silicon Valley just too drugged out with activism to care about even themselves?
My wife is a registered Democrat who’ll be voting for Trump in a swing state. As recently as six months ago she loathed Trump.
Her stated reason is that she doesn’t feel like she can be herself, have her own opinions, among Democrats anymore.
Awesome point!
Political interference isn't new or particularly hard. We decades of playbooks dedicated to that courtesy of the CIA, KBG/FSB, etc. In more modern times, we have the Obama State Department (led by Secretary Clinton) working with Twitter to support the protests and overall idea of regime change: https://www.mic.com/articles/10642/twitter-revolution-how-th...
The goals and tactics aren't different, just the target.
You are probably aware then, that conservatives think of the Democrats as the global Cartel, consisting of - bribe takers and money launders - protege of sexual predators - systemic racists
And that claiming that this is a party, and they have a paritcular platform -- is like claiming that Mexican Mafia is a party with platform.
So you can imagine how suprised a conservative is, to learn of how many people lack even mediocre critical thinking, that is meant as immunity against manipulative and conniving propaganda machine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
If I made up stories they would be mundane and logical to not make people regard it as improbable.
It should mostly be the information on the HD that indicates the validity, not the fantastic way it was recovered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
> High Confidence:
> • Iraq is continuing and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-full-version-of-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
A big tech company openly saying "the CIA just called me up and told me to do something" would be suicide.
> Among their chief concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions, was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy — as Russian hackers did when they dumped real emails alongside forgeries ahead of the 2017 French elections — a slight twist on Russia’s 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked D.N.C. emails through fake personas on Twitter and WikiLeaks.
Now, it could still be a GRU operation, but it's not what the article was talking about.
But if it were true, wouldn't Joe Biden have come out already and said "These emails are fake and I never met with that person"? Instead, all we get is the campaign saying that those meetings do not appear on his calendar.
Plus oh my god if we go into 'but his emails!' and Trump is elected again I will leave this country. Keep 'hacked' 'email' ten thousand miles away from Biden campaign's mouth
"real news" loses to social media because it can't compete on the novelty dopamine feedback loop (otherwise known as popularity): being the first to bring up new info or make a novel comment about it, getting a dopamine hit (esteem), then going back to the trough for more. old journalism is comparatively too slow and sparse at this.
so traditional news, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to join the fray instead of being crowded out. this won't change until good journalism can compete for (enough) attention without being subsumed by the social novelty feedback loop.
it's not so much about value or even actualizing journalists' activist stances (as others seem to be arguing), but the competitive dynamics of the market they're in.
The media isn't interested in financial support from their readership. Too many of us to deal with. They prefer a few powerful interests and a small number of big checks written.
As always I'll point out that the real controlling law for all this stuff --- the quality of journalism, the quality of advocacy, the quality of software engineering, law, medicine, whatever --- is Sturgeon's.
Sturgeon’s law (most stuff is crap) does little to shed light on the massive CHANGES to journalism in recent years. Of course 90%+ don’t even realized it like you.
I'm not debating Taibbi with you because we don't share premises, so there's no point. You can feel free to declare victory to those who share your own premises!
Taibbi’s book does a good job of explaining these changes but the situation is still evolving and the definitive analysis has yet to be written. Much like the news today the story has to be pieced together from multiple sources with varying biases including outright misinformation.
I’m starting to think that this is the actual “normal” information situation. It’s everyone’s responsibility to determine the truth for themselves by comparing multiple sources, getting primary information and thinking hard about what’s going on.
Is ageism really a valid critique on professional journalism?
That is why we are in this mess. Social media was fun before "professional journalism" started getting involved.
Think about it. The toxicity on social media is entirely driven by the news media. The culture wars and everything from smollet to "culture of rape on campus". The news blames social media but it's actually the news traveling within social media that is the problem.
2. We must censor stormfront and the far right because it's the right thing to do
3. We must censor covid misinformation because it could kill people
4. We must selectively censor news reporting for political candidates we are aligned with because it's probably false.
---- we are here now
5. We must remove all news critical of our position .
6. We must actively force people to be re-educated to avoid harm.
7. We must exterminate dangerous elements.
The mental gymnastics used to justify this kind of censorship are frightening. Most news is full of inaccuracies and outright lies, from all sources.
The book burning going on lately is insane
If someone joins a mob against a single person, odds are that their self-identification as Galileo is ... unsound.
Really the problem is not with liars, it is with liars that wield lots of influence, power -- and try to actively and systemically circumvent existing law.
I cannot vote out the CEO of Twitter, Facebook, or Google because I think they are doing the wrong thing. This is worse, because individuals are powerless.
And before you argue that people can go to their own websites, how is meaningfully different from Chinese citizens who use VPN's. After all they can still access information.
In both cases it is near impossible for a message, movement, or anything else to grow without the use of the core popular platforms. And any message which could grow in other spaces would have the counter narrative pushed on the core platforms.
The whole American system says it is ok for successful companies to grow large and powerful. I personally wouldn’t mind some anti-trust actions, but even better would be for people to prefer non-mass media. Visit my website and listen to the guitarist at the local bar and watch indie films and read good books rather than popular books. But others have other preferences.
Making real change is society is not the same as propagating memes or conspiracy theories - it takes time and effort and a lot of eyeball to eyeball persuasion. If you don’t like what Twitter is doing you can create a competitor, and make it popular. The difference is competition - if you persuade enough people, you can replace Twitter. If Twitter is anti-competitive then there is a legal recourse. If you fail to persuade people that twitters method of trying to encourage truth and virtue are bad, that is a fact of your social world. Try again or give up.
If you're going to write out a response centered on "anyone [being able to] publish a website", at least respond to OP's point. How is that a solution that's in any way better than telling CCP citizens that censorship is totally fine because they can use a VPN?
Times have changed. Twitter is more powerful.
"Olbermann called for a wide range of Trump's "enablers" to be "prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society.""
Including 'enablers' like Amy Coney Barrett.
https://popculture.com/trending/news/keith-olbermann-raises-...
"A county prosecutor has again denigrated constituents, this time with the alarming claim that we must “cleanse society” of the “diseased thinking” of Trump supporters."
https://mynorthwest.com/2231869/rantz-county-prosecutor-clea...
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/a-prosecutors-anti-trump-post...
No, seriously. You have to draw the line somewhere, right? If your answer is "no, these platforms should be perfectly neutral", then are you okay with child pornography and terrorist beheadings in your feed?
If you say no to this, and the answer is based on the law, what happens if the law is unethical and for example the Trump/Republican administration passes a law saying "Acknowledgement of the gay lifestyle is illegal" (a la Russia).
Regardless of any political division there is a general humanistic "ethical line". It varies from person to person, but if you discount outright nazis and child pornographers generally we can find where that is.
Why should a private corporation not choose where that ethical line is for it?
2. Idiots elect clown because of propaganda
3. Hundreds of thousands of people die from preventable catastrophe.
I don't disagree with you but this is not an acceptable answer.
Yes. Is he the same type of clown as Trump? No. But Cuomo's an idiot.
Really it sounds like tens or hundreds of thousands of people could die during a pandemic, regardless of what effort goes into paving a politician's way into office with censorship.
Their vote is as valid as yours.
They undermine your argument, degrade the discourse, and have no place here.
Not trying to excuse Facebook and Twitter's behavior here, but let's not let social media become a scapegoat while News Corp continues to run rampant.
The “fact check” websites used to be great. Now, they wander way over “fact checking.” The worst abuses are when they provide “context” or challenge assumptions. Conservatives and liberals are not working from the same assumptions, and have a different set of contextual facts top of mind on different issues. The fact check organizations are pretty good about checking the actual assertion, but reveal bias through what contextual facts they provide and what assumptions they do or do not challenge. Another way they cross the line is “fact checking” obvious rhetoric: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trumps-exaggerated-claims-...
> At a rally in Sanford, Florida, President Donald Trump made the exaggerated claim that his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, “voted to obliterate” Puerto Rico’s pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.
As Biden would say, “c’mon man.” How many times has a politician said stuff like “they sent your jobs to China?” Did anyone fact check Biden’s assertion that Romney would “put [Black people] back in chains?” They explain the vote by saying things like: “at the time, eliminating the provision was seen as striking a blow against “corporate welfare.” Seen by who? They also note that the bill “also raised the minimum wage.” This isn’t “fact checking,” it’s the counter-narrative from the Biden campaign.
The vote in the House to send the bill to the Senate was 227-0 among Republicans and 186-10 among Democrats.
When the Senate's modified version came back to the House, the R vote was 160-70 and the D voter was 192-2.
When it got back to the Senate in final form, the Senate vote was 76-22. The stupid senate.gov site does not tabulate vote by party and I'm too lazy to do it by hand, but the Senate at the time was 55 R to 45 D. I do see that all 22 Nay votes were from R, and two D did not vote, so that would give the R vote as 33-22 and the D vote as 43-0.
Among the Yea votes in the Senate I see several current R Senators: Grassley, McConnell, Shelby, and Murkowski. I think Inhofe is the only current R Senator who was in the Nays.
I bet someone running against whichever of those first four Senators are up for re-election this year could put together a pretty good ad featuring Trump's talk of the bill "obliterating" Puerto Rico's pharmaceuticals and then calling out that Senator for doing so. How is the Senator going to respond? Say it was a bipartisan bill that was widely supported by both parties, which risks highlighting Trump's misleading use of it?
I actually have no idea whether this was a good bill or not. But who else voted along with Biden doesn’t really tell you anything. And that’s why it shouldn’t be the province of fact checking. It’s political defense of Biden’s vote.
> The less people trust twitter popularity as an indication of importance, the better off society is
How exactly will Twitter doing "more of this" result in "less people trust[ing] twitter popularity as an indication of importance"?
If anything, I think Twitter should just wear their bias on their sleave and stop pretending to be an open platform. Same goes for all social media.
There is no such thing as an unbiased disinformation watchdog. These are not public spaces with rights to freedom of expression. Distributed social media networks are the future.
This is kind of what I was getting at.
It is like having a for-profit business that claims tax umbrella of a charitable organization.
All we have to do is simply recongize, that these social networks are publishers of political content.
So they can choose to continue editorialization by crowdourcing, but comittees, by AI, by whatever they want.
And they can live happily but as publishers.
The ISPs (for which section 230 really was meant) -- can continue to be impartial and claim the protection benefits of that section.
This list seems like strong proof that the we cannot trust these social media companies to be neutral actors. They shouldn't be given controlling power to the digital public square.
yet ofc they aren’t censored
By now you should understand the Democratic Party's news cycle:
a) Make up a message (something, anything bad) and present it to the press as a Presidential abomination,
b) Get Democratically-favored media to repeat/embellish the rumour,
c) Get Democratic - favoring prosecutors, government spokesmen, bureaucrats, college professors, or outside "experts" to repeat the rumor and to fabricate supporting "evidence",
d) Call for investigations in the House of representatives [which the Democrats currently control],
e) Ask representatives to go on record to news media concerning the fabricated messages,
f) Invoke every right under the sun in support of the false message: e.g., "free speech is being violated", "trial w/o jury", "conspiracy", etc.
g)When a new fabrication is concocted, drop the current claims or say they were a Russian or Republican conspiracy, and go to the new fabrication. Never follow-up or complete investigations into past false messages.
Rinse, repeat;
IOW lie, lie, lie and lie again.
Recently Democrats have added to this recipe the following:
Bring out the mob, shout and scream, burn down the police station!
Every Democrat, from the lowliest Antifa street slug to Nancy Pelosi follows the same formula. They're political thugs who give the Thuggees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee
a bad name. Why? b/c their behavior will kill entire societies of people and their governments, not merely individuals as did the Thuggees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals#The_Rules
Russian bounties and Trump's knowledge of it is fact, so is that Trump saying “I have never discussed it with him [putin]”
[0]. For the purposes of section 230
Seriously, actually go read section 230 instead of relying on Internet commenters to tell you what it is.
Companies that control what information users can receive in order to allow only one side of a political discourse are in opposition to the policies being implemented in section 230.
I read section 230 and mentioned parts of it that I think are relevant to impartiality. In particular, I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party. And I don't see how you have forums for a true diversity of political discourse if forums are going to be partial to one political party.
If you can tell me, I would love to know, how do Twitter's actions in this case maximize user control over the information they receive? I don't think they do, I think it is quite the opposite of that, but go ahead and make a case if you have one.
Now it is true that the implementation of section 230 lacks an enforcement mechanism to enforce the policies that it advocates. That's a problem with the law, and it is what some people are advocating that we fix. I agree with those proposals, I would like to see section 230 amended so that companies that don't maximize user control over the information they receive lost section 230 protections. And the same thing for companies that don't allow a true diversity of political discourse.
I don't think the part you highlighted is relevant to impartiality. It sets an aspirational goal of Section 230 and the safe harbor is the means to promote that goal. Without the safe harbor, providers would be forced to strictly police what users post. Smaller providers who aren't able to bear the burden of strict moderation would be forced to shut down entirely. This would have the consequence of reducing overall user access to information.
> I don't see how you maximize user control over the information they receive if information providers are going to be partial to one political party.
By using a different information provider.
> description of the internet as, among other things, "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
You said it yourself. The Internet is neutral, according to Section 230. Not individual information providers. If you don't like what one information provider does, go make your own. It's all based on free tools and open standards. No one's stopping you.
Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes. That also reduces "user control over the information they receive", since the garbage will drown out anything useful and platforms will have no power to remove it.
That doesn't work when network effects are involved. Just like there aren't going to be hundreds of cell phone networks, there aren't going to be hundreds of networks with the reach of Twitter or Facebook.
Any time Twitter or Facebook don't allow certain information to be sent, users have less control over the information they receive.
>> Believe me, no one of any political stripe should want to take away ability to moderate Internet forums. It will turn all forums, regardless of political, religious or other affiliation, into spam-filled, unusable messes
The question is where the moderation happens, at the corporate level or at the user level. If a user who creates a space on a discussion board gets to moderate it, and anyone can create a space on that discussion board, that's perfectly usable and it puts the control in the user's hands.
Companies currently are acting in ways that are in direct opposition of those policies, so if you believe in those policies, you should want their actions to change.
But if an org is going to fly the flag of neutrality then they’ll get called out for crap like this.
That doesn't mean the list isn't valid; but it can't be assumed it is balanced.
Also, “conservative” and “liberal” are relative terms. Journalists are vastly more liberal than the public as a whole, so any news outlet that covers things from a middle ground perspective is labeled “conservative.”
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/media-bias-lef...
In an ASU study of financial journalists, people who labeled themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” outnumbered those who labeled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” 13:1.
I’m not saying that this makes liberal reporters bad, or biased in the sense of willful prejudice. But liberals and conservatives have different assumptions, have different sets of facts they consider salient to different issues, etc. When a liberal reporter covers Sanders’ suggestion of $60,000 minimum teacher pay, the facts that come to mind might be things like how the income gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals is bigger in the US than in other countries. To a conservative, the first thing that might come to mind is that US teachers are already paid well above the OECD average. Both facts are true (American teachers are paid more than British teachers, but American programmers are paid a lot more). These differences inevitably come out in the reporting. Just because an outlet is writing from a conservative point of view doesn’t mean it’s trying to manipulate or deceive people.
>Twitter's technicality is a fig leaf to enable continued control of public discourse by an unelected private industry that is 9-to-1 in the tank for Democrats and can decide what Americans are allowed to know.
in the headline. Yes, thank you, I reject this authors "fact synthesis".
This argument doesn't work in this specific instance because for most of the items on the list the only links are to other articles by The Federalist.
I don't know if you know this or not, but the technology exists for anyone to participate in a "digital public square" without use of the incumbent services (Facebook, Twitter, et cetera).
These services are not the digital public square. They are private spaces (like a shopping mall.) it would be wholly incorrect to make that assumption.
Just like if all people happen to congregate in a private mall for one reason or another, if someone's excluded from that mall it doesn't matter all that much that there are public parks where anyone can go if no one actually goes there.
yes, it is. It's a pretty healthy and vibrant ecosystem (I'm referring to the W3C ActivityPub ecosystem here because I didn't mention it in the grandparent comment)
So again, even though I think that we as a society would gain a lot from using these technologies, in the year 2020 they really don't have the same "public square" effect that FB and Twitter have, simply because most "regular" people (as in "not in tech") have probably never even heard of them, whereas everybody and their grandma is on Facebook.
Also, the fact that FB and Twitter aggressively attempt to bring people to their platforms likely blurs the line between them being a private venue or a public square.
People don't even realize what is going on. The addicts are getting cut of from their favorite drug. A drug that has conditioned their behavior for 10-15 years.
FB and Twitter, every time they make these moves all over the world, need to check out how good ol Alex Jones is doing. Cause thats where a lot of ppl who get cut off will be in a year or two.
Maybe shopping mall alleys should be considered public space instead.
i remember they had a video of gunshot sounds trending with a description saying that an innocent 16 year old girl was shot by police when in reality it was an armed 30 year old man who had just killed someone else.
i think its finally time to #deleteTwitter
I watched Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and I’d assume that for some reason these journalists thought that they can fix racism just not mentioning the race of the perpetrators.
e.g. Knowing which areas are more likely to be dangerous means I can avoid those areas. If an area is regularly the site of dangerous altercations, I know to be more careful around it. But if the news white-washes that actual factual information it becomes much less useful as actual actionable information.
That's for explaining.
Maybe fixing the crime and poverty is more important than calling it racist.
> There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved ~ Jesse Jackson
So we are agreed that affirmative action should go.
This is a harmful characterization of an important movement. No protests on that scale are going to go without a hitch. That shouldn't minimize their importance.
> Researchers at the US Crisis Monitor analyzed over 10,600 nationwide protests between May 24 (the day before George Floyd was killed by police) and Aug. 22, and found that nearly 95 percent were peaceful [1]
Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back children while his children watched. He was unarmed. Even if the alleged sexual assault charges are found to be true, this is not how justice should be carried out.
Also. He is charged with sexual assault and trespassing. I can't find any source that he's been charged with robbery. These are serious charges. But it should be up to the courts to determine his guilt. Not the police or the court of public opinion.
1. https://mashable.com/article/black-lives-matter-protests-pea...
He was armed, and he admitted to it, and it is documented in the DOJ statement.
1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/28/fac... 2. https://en.as.com/en/2020/08/25/latest_news/1598382234_23093... 3. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/2020/08/26/jacob-b...
5th paragraph
>Mr. Blake admitted that he had a knife in his possession.
> The DOJ has not clarified whether the knife was on the floorboard throughout the confrontation, or if Blake may have held it at some point. Spokeswoman Gillian Drummond declined to answer that question when asked by USA TODAY on Aug. 27.
I'm also making it in good faith, because it's entirely possible that all of the bad reporting on it would lead someone to believe that he was unarmed. That's the only reason for any of these replies.
Personally, I wouldn’t consider him to be armed unless he was actively brandishing it. Which the USA Today article says he was not.
Regardless. They shot a man in the back seven times while his children watched. The standard for that kind of force should be much, much higher than “he may or may not have had a knife in his possession”.
The fact that you thought otherwise illustrates the problem precisely. Social and traditional media companies had no issue allowing this misconception to spread unfettered because aligned with their political beliefs.
so >500 riots then?
> When destructive protests by demonstrators did take place, the "victims" were often statues of slave owners, Confederate leaders, and colonial figures.
1. Build out a good FOSS alternative.
2. Market the snot out of it until the unteched masses use it.
3. ??? open a foundation with that niche's leaders, or something?
4. FOSS is the new normal for that niche.
(edited for line breaks)
Specifically, I refer to "chaos/evil" as a type of entropy. It's a perversion of virtue. We live in a world system that always seems to have self-interest in there somewhere, but self-interest taken to extremes becomes evil.
So, "Freedom v2.2" is a system that allows for some entropy to motivate independent decisions that affect the public good (e.g., an entrepreneur), but are also punitive toward the public bad (e.g., child porn).
The real battle here that becomes political is the quantity and scope of controls. Generally, in the USA, the Republicans are presently leaning away from more controls and the Democrats toward it. The voter decides based on whether they think the system is self-correcting.
Or, to put another way, the entire essence of free information is either a self-correcting negative feedback loop (like the stock market) or a holy-crap-let's-stop-this-train-before-we-all-die positive feedback loop (like a horrifically dysfunctional family).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrvYNfsAgJY
"This is a blatant attempt at disinformation by politicians who have repeatedly attacked our employees, and we don't want it. It's our web site, stop trying to tell us what our own rules are. Go spread your nonsense somewhere else.
If you think this is a 230 violation sue us."
But I agree with the gist of your point. Social media platforms should stop pretending to be unbiased disinformation watchmen. It's their platform and they don't have to justify squat. If people want free speech, they can go somewhere else.
On that note, I really do think distributed social media networks are the future.
And the nail in the coffin is the simple fact that they decided to release a PDF-image of the emails instead of simply giving the raw email with its metadata which would allow us to instantaneously confirm it. Literally all they have to do is post the metadata.
While I'm not arguing whether the allegations are true or not, I don't think timing your most valuable opposition research findings makes things automatically false.
And in my opinion, these huge platforms that are basically monopolies should not be censoring things based on whether they think something is true or false. It's tempting to believe that every issue is either clearly true or clearly false, in most fields that is not the case and I don't want @jack deciding what's "safe" for me to see.
I think they could be the future, but any social media platform is only as strong as its underlying social graph. A flawless platform which checks every box will still fail unless you can convince a significant amount of users to join. Or, more to the point, a certain amount of graph edges need to be formed.
How do you do that? That’s the question floating over the graves of dozens of Facebook clones.
You cannot reveal personal details of someone on Twitter (email, phone number etc.) The article contained unreacted personal info so should be blocked.
You also cannot link directly to hacked/obtained without consent material on twitter. The article contained screenshot of the material so should be blocked.
You CAN link to material that discusses hacked/obtained without consent material on Twitter as long as it does not contain the material. eg. Trump Tax Return story by NYT.
Hackernews: <CRICKETS>
Twitter: Blocks ONE similarly garbage smear piece by a political administration that has no qualms with completely lying to the entire world in every sense of hte word
Hackernews: CENSORSHIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You. Are. All. RIDICULOUS.