I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news organizations" peddling unverified and factually incorrect reports on Twitter.
I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.
Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
This has been the reality for people on the political fringes for some time now. Unfortunately nobody's been paying attention to it due in large part to the commentariat/journalistic class's willingness to encourage and provide cover for this behavior as a matter of political expedience.
Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
So will you vote for the guy with the worse record of sexually harassing women instead? Have you looked at all the corresponding inappropriate gifs of Trump? Remember the "grab her by the pussy" statement? The whole Stormy Daniels fiasco?
Joe Biden is a terrible candidate. He's just not as bad as Trump. The fact that America is in that stupid position is its own fault.
I haven't voted for either face of the status quo party, for president, in the last twenty years. This time around I'm going Green. I think Creepy Joe is kind of fun, but I have no doubt that the inexorable drumbeat for sanctions and wars will intensify when he is president. We still haven't left Syria, so whoever it is on the "democrat" side of the party who has such a hard-on for pipelines will get to kill more innocents there. Even better for them, Trump has destroyed the one decent diplomatic thing Obama did (Iran), so they won't have to pretend not to undermine the work of their "own side". (Keep in mind that Syria and Iran are allies, even though Republicans pretend to hate Iran while Democrats pretend to hate Syria.)
I don't vote for lesser evils. Because of that I never have to regret how I voted.
Do you really think that it's out of "political expedience" that sites are blocking links to probable foreign disinformation? Or is it out of a moral interest in not being pawns of the bad actors who stand behind it?
This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously false and dangerous speech should be suppressed. Twitter (and other sites) is taking a moral stand, not an expedient stand.
Journalists and commentators are the ones acting out of political expediency. The platforms themselves are a mixed bag, occasionaly banning content that represents legitimate disinformation, but often suppressing information that's contextually true, or conflicts with an existing broader social narrative which the moderator required to inspect the content has bought into. The human moderators are often inconsistent.
The concept that any person or organization should be granted absolute authority to serve as the arbiter of whay constitutes dangerous or false speech, and the power to arbitrarily silence those who utter it offends me, and I consider it to be dangerous in and of itself. We'll not be able to agree on this.
WRT the NYP piece, probably foreign sourced is about right. Even before the media picked up its Russia Trumpet, I remember reading a rumor towards the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine phone call debacle that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's some. Irrespective of the source, the computer shop narrative reeks.
But in spite of information's questionable provenance, it has been accompanied with compromising images of Hunter himself, and beyond stating that a meeting with Burisma execs wasn't on Biden's 'official' schedule, the biden campaign has yet (to my knowledge), to expressly deny the validity of the documents.
If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA. Beyond ambiguous citations of 'anonymous officials', I've yet to read that they've communicated anything to this effect. The Director of National Intelligence has gone so far as to claim that this wasn't a Russian disinformation project. But he's a Trump apparatchik with no history in intelligence outside his appointment, so I generally ignore him.
Probably foreign sourced? My gut says yes.
Possibly disinformation? The juries still out. Possibly's a pretty low bar for stealing someone's voice.
The tech companies took it upon themselves to censor this information. They've not claimed they were compelled or reccommended to by any official bodies any more than they were required to censor the name of the Urkaine whistleblower. But they chose to, of their own accord.
If you want to be treated like a platform, you have to live with the fact that your platform's going to be used to further the aims of anyone who wannts to use it. Bar illegal content and behaviors (things disinformation is not), the most you should do is notify your users, sit back, and take it.
Happy to see people think for themselves and form their own opinion. Good balance in your comment. You left room for doubt and rationally stated the reasons behind your opinion. Refreshing. Thank you.
> that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's
Questions: why would the Chinese do that? Or do you mean a Chinese billionaire did it without the involvement of the government? Or do you think their recommendation of Biden is a calculated move to get people to vote for Trump?
My understanding is that he was a billionaire on the outs w/Xi's administration, however I only recall that much because it seemed like an interesting assertion at the time, but didn't look into it, nor did I bother remembering the source, because it was while I was skimming a bunch of articles and posts at once trying to keep abreast of the Burisma controversy. So I would take it with a significant grain of salt.
Whether or not China would support the action is opaque to me. Trump's trade policies have massively reframed our relationship to the country, but whether or not that's been a positive thing for factions within the CCP is well beyond my knowledge or means to learn.
Billionaire Miles Guo is an anti-CCP dissident. His website Gnews.org, is the only site I've come across with elicit Hunter Biden footage. I have no idea how/why he has that material, but I think if he sees an opportunity to undermine the CCP's public image by linking them to a corrupt drugged-out American "Princeling", he would capitalize on it.
> If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA.
This is ridiculously wrong. The FBI and CIA and every other government agency absolutely do not want to comment on something like this, because it just pulls them into this political bullshit. This is exactly the "official" reason James Comey was fired, for an almost identical issue, almost exactly 4 years ago. It is a near 100% certainty that any FBI or CIA official commenting on this issue now will be fired a few months from now.
Just like with DT this is also pulled out of context. I don't like any of them and won't (and can't) vote for any of them so I have no dog in the fight.
That website shouldn't have been blocked, whoever did it should probably been charged with election meddling but it doesn't change my view of Biden.
As for the videos I think many of them shows him (clumsily) trying to comfort people.
Again - I'm also the guy who points out that "fine people on both sides" as presented in mainstream media is a hoax.
I don't like either if them but think we should be fair to both if them.
If I lived in the US my lawn sign would be "Any Reasonable Person".
Election meddling in general isn't a crime. It's not something the government could charge the site owner for, unless they somehow violated campaign finance laws.
Are they out of context? Granted they are short video clips, but what would the greater context show?
In three of the videos with younger women, they all seemed to recoil from his "affection". With the young girls, I don't think it would ever be appropriate for a stranger to touch them like he did.
> In three of the videos with younger women, they all seemed to recoil from his "affection".
I pointed out it was clumsy ;-)
But I think the larger context is he knew he was on tape so he should know better than to willfully do something that would be taken as sexual harassment.
I honestly think he tried to come off as caring, just failed spectacularly.
I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions.
We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
It’s completely correctable. If fb/Twitter wanted to, they could track every person who saw a piece of “wrong” information, and plaster the retraction in front of their face.
> With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?
It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.
Edit:
> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.
Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
Wildfire also spreads much faster on the web. If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
It turns out this doesn't work. The relative prominence of the counter-information doesn't change people's first impressions.
People are still doing "but her emails" despite all the investigations into what happened. It's clear that the Hunter Biden story is an attempt to fabricate a "but his emails" narrative; there may be some facts in there, but none that impinge on Joe Biden.
You can argue about facts all day, but I would argue that "truth" ends up being something more. Innocence or guilt, vindication on the history books, really any assignment of a quality is done by a collection of people, and the results apply with the bubble of people who have agreed to no longer question what is agreed upon as true.
I promise I could argue all day about whether your initial simple statement was true or not. What does received mean? What did the email say, and did it actually mean what you paraphrase? You'd probably view it as bad faith (and you'd be right), but that faith already implies the exact social consensus I'm taking about.
Our understanding of the truth of things we read online is a social construct. Whether or not Hunter Biden received an email isn’t something ordinary readers like us will ever know, having no direct access to any of the evidence. At best we can read accounts written by others and decide whether they seem plausible.
Even our understanding of Hunter Biden’s existence is a social construct to most of us, since we have never met him and never will. (It’s much easier to make the call on that one, though, based on pictures and it being undisputed.)
The email didn't say "thanks for the meeting with your father"; it thanked Hunter for "inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father", wording that leaves it ambiguous whether the meeting had already occurred or was in the future. This is important because, even if it is authentic, it does not necessarily contradict Biden's claim that (according to his schedules) no such meeting occurred.
Biden's claim is that there is no trace of the meeting in the diary, but they did mention that the meeting could have happened informally. So they didn't claim no such meeting occurred.
I am a bit puzzled that there wouldn't be a log of who comes in and out of government buildings. It should be easy to prove whether the said executives were at least in the building over that period or not.
Or better yet: Body cams for all politicians. Or camera + audio recordings of all government rooms and corridors. All encrypted, hashed and archived with a very specific and difficult to fake process that can "unseal" them.
I don't think I'm a genius or anything, but why aren't we putting really smart people on this problem and giving them plenty of funding? I constantly think we're just a few steps away from putting in a small set of technological solutions that would over time solve all our political/criminal problems.
E.g. Just imagine a world where all politicians, CEOs, major figure-heads are safely and securely recorded constantly. Think of all the ridiculous talking points and "Scandals" that would go away, be disproven, or never occur at all.
That was tried (recording the oval office for historical purposes). Then it was immediately weaponised by the political opponents and the recording system promptly removed.
Well, I think it will result into the same consequences. It would be immediately weaponised by the political opposition and would be retired almost as soon as it was introduced.
All "things" can be weaponized to various degrees. The good has to outweigh the bad, and we can't dismiss potential solution areas because they can be weaponized to some degree or have some set of negative consequences. A lot of the things we take for granted that exist currently could just as easily have been argued-against under the banner of "can be weaponized by the political opposition". And we've seen that potential, and put various "checks and balances" in place to try to stem that possibility.
In my mind, the constructive way to proceed would be, and I'd hope that you or others would indulge me on this: How can we have a tamper-proof evidentiary record of all the conversations that politicians engage in whilst minimizing the potential of it being regularly abused/weaponized and compromising the privacy of the individuals involved?
It would be if I was presenting an argument. However, I was asking out of curiosity. Their response seemed to be a criticism and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt by giving a valid alternative interpretation.
I believe you're referring to what the Biden campaign said to Politico, that Biden could have had (in Politico's words) "some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi" but "any encounter would have been cursory". [1] The Washington Post notes that Hunter Biden did arrange for a different business partner to shake hands with Joe Biden at an existing public event, and speculates that he could have done something similar for Pozharskyi. [2] While it's only speculation, that does amount to another possible scenario where the email is accurate. But I wouldn't call such an interaction a "meeting" exactly, and it would scarcely be evidence of corruption.
Unfortunately the notion of truth or lie is often less clean cut.
For instance, when the media tell you "you can get reinfected by covid", is it a lie? As of today, there has been only 5 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, out of 50 millions confirmed cases. So it is technically possible but statistically insignificant. Are the media lying when they tell you it could happen to you? I think they do. But technically they don't.
Also most of the lying is lying by omission. I present you one fact but you will never hear about that other fact that completely mitigates the first (the context, or the rest of the sentence, etc). So you can say something factually correct while completely misleading your interlocutor.
I agree. Fabricating damaging information on the eve of an election is easier than ever, and impossible to correct. Allowing propagation of such fabrications is to be complicit with the bad actors responsible.
Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.
Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.
So, what do you suppose? Prohibition of political news stories leading up to an election?
Have you heard of an October surprise?
"On October 20, 1880, shortly before the 1880 presidential election, a forged letter was published purportedly written by James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the United States. At the time, most white Americans opposed Chinese immigration and both presidential candidates were in favor of immigration restrictions.[3]"
> So, what do you suppose? Prohibition of political news stories leading up to an election?
That's exactly what I propose, precisely because October surprises are not in the best interest of democracy.
Many countries [1] prohibit all political news stories during their election cycle. An added benefit of this policy would be to limit the length of the election cycle.
Election silence is unenforceable and becomes muddy in the era of the internet - with elections in USA, who do you sue if UK news outlet runs with some story? Who has jurisdiction? Besides, reporting news itself is usually still allowed as long as it is not political agitation ("Biden did something bad" is ok, "vote Trump" is not). I've been tempted to test this by posting agitation to Facebook from the USA (Poland still has election silence) or showing up with slogans to the polling stations (you can still vote when abroad in a few places set up by consulates), but I still like to visit my family from time to time.
this is a good point, but I would not be surprised if the more recently someone hears a piece of information, the more impactful it is on their decisions. I would attribute this to not only individuals memory but also the amount of distractions within the 10 weeks (in your example) that would take away peoples focus.
Just an inclination, not sure how much of this would be supported by the literature if there is any
The liberal wing was upset that state and non state actors influenced the 2016 election by manipulating social media.
Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.
I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.
Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.
I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.
I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
Should T Mobile or Verizon be able to censor your phone calls and text messages if they don't like the content? After all, they're private companies as well.
I would say yes. If they censor my calls, I would switch providers. But more importantly, if we as a country believe that’s wrong, we should pass legislation
We can’t even get it applied to ISP’s, I don’t know how we could stretch it to social media.
My guess is that any legislation attempting to make social media common carriers would eventually be found to unconstitutionally abridge the first amendment.
For one, ISPs aren’t social media companies. If my ISP censors information, then effectively I have no way to access that information, particularly in cases when there’s no other ISP in my area.
A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
At the end of the day, you still have a variety of content sources on the internet to consume that same content. Twitter is not the only source of information, and if you believe it is, then we have more serious problems.
I was literally banned from r/conservative for posting a question that folks found very inconvenient. Should they be forced to reverse the ban? How far do you believe is too far?
In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.
I’m surprised the free enterprise conservatives are actually the ones so against this. “We want government to get out of the way... unless it furthers our agenda and helps us stay in power, in which case, let’s threaten to regulate or break up private companies.”
> In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.
On one hand yes, but on the other, does that also apply to other services? Can I open a shop only for <insert skin color> people only and claim that if you don't like it, go somewhere else? How about other categories, protected or otherwise? As a society, we already agree that there are some freedoms that private businesses are denied, and for good reasons, because when taken to the extremes, you end up with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche.
> A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
Not really - you can start your own media outlet and selectively run the stories you want, that's fine. But if you just regurgitate user-generated content, IMO you better be really careful about applying your own rules consistently and in a transparent manner.
> Can I open a shop only for <insert skin color> people only and claim that if you don't like it, go somewhere else? How about other categories, protected or otherwise?
You're missing the fine distinction between protected and non-protected categories. Discrimination based on what you are is banned - those constitute the protected categories. Sex, gender, national origin, race, family status, veteran status, religion, and sexual orientation all fall under things you are.
Business and private organizations however, are allowed to discriminate against their customers based on their actions. It gets fuzzier if those actions intersect with a protected category (e.g. a supermarket probably (IANAL) can't throw out a gay couple for family-friendly PDA if a hetero couple would be allowed to stay). But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
Imagine if weren't so. Anyone could disrupt religious services by shouting obscenities. You couldn't have a peaceful shopping trip or grocery run. It would be total chaos.
So can I be banned from a social media platform if it so happens that I am a member of a church that forbids something and it so happens that I am vocal about it?
> But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement (and I can still discriminate based on what you are, but maintaining plausible deniability).
I have no idea, legally speaking, what they would be permitted to do.
In reality what they would actually do would depend on what that "something" is. If it's something like "don't eat meat on odd-numbered dates", you're probably fine. On the other hand, you say something harmful or distasteful to other protected categories, you'd be lucky to keep your account. They'd weigh the harm to you of kicking you off versus the harm to others by letting you stay and (of course) the PR liability incurred by doing either.
If the discrimination criteria are broadly found to match up with a protected class you're in legal hot water. IOW using proxies for "plausible deniability" is a risky strategy and businesses have been punished in the past for doing it.
> It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement
You're right it can be. But again, consider the alternative on online forums. Anyone could post porn or vulgarity on religious forums, or socialist propaganda on business forums. It would be very disruptive if selective enforcement weren't allowed.
You make valid points and I don't know why are you downvoted. But Twitter is not a journalism play, it is a platform play and purported to be neutral. If there is blatant supression then they will antagonize atleast 50% of Americans which would be terrible for their bottom line.
"Platforms" and "publishers" are not actually legal categories, not mutually exclusive, and any sorting of Twitter into one of those categories happened entirely in your head. Twitter also doesn't specifically call itself "neutral" (some "publisher" comes to mind doing that far more).
YSK there's no requirement for a "platform" to be "neutral". By law platforms can do whatever the heck they like with regards to content moderation. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or misinformed.
> Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.
Which part of it is not believable?
We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.
The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).
There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
> will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small
Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...
Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
> Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.
I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
I get tired of seeing these comments too. In the last few years it has become commonspeak to throw around these terms with no nuance. Strawmanning is a new favorite word for many. I sometimes shudder at the pretentiousness of it all (for some reason "false dichotomy" gets on my nerves, I feel like there are easier ways of saying that there are other possibilities).
> To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it-please try to believe me-unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...
> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)
In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).
I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].
So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
I think delaying the story until it could be somewhat verified is reasonable. I actually read it minutes after it was posted on the NY Post and my first thought was that it sounded like it shouldn’t have been published. I literally thought they’d retract it.
I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
Well, ok, but can you find any other instance of a story that could have used some verification being suppressed by Twitter and Facebook at the same time?
I can't, but I don't think its a bad idea. Given that, I guess you have to start at some point -- right? And last election social media was given all sorts of grief for the fake news... I can understand them wanting to be more careful this time. And of all news stories in recent years, this seems like a good one to begin with.
Are they? Or do they just seem like the opponents to every political group? I'm sure liberals would say these media companies are also their opponents.
They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation.
It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
You may be right in practice, but according to Twitter the claimed reason was hacking/doxing, not misinformation -- in fact, the opposite of misinformation!
“pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news”
I am astonished at your blinding confidence in your ability to distinguish misinformation from news. You must be a Facebook content moderator ::snicker::
I can't tell you for sure if this story is misinformation or not. That's part of the problem with misinformation. Well constructed misinformation is not easily proven false.
What I can tell you is that it is absurd to believe it is true given what we know about the details surrounding the "discovery" of the information.
They never provided evidence for this. By their own standards they should censor their own actions.
Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.
Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on).
I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity.
If I made a tweet that reads:
"Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive"
— it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.
There certainly wasn't a hack. At worst there could be a copyright issue, but political stuff is very strongly protected for fair use. The drive legitimately changed ownership, according to the repair contract, after 90 days of abandonment.
Almost by definition information that was stolen via hacking is true, unless for some bizarre reason the victim was privately forging documents about themselves, which nobody has ever alleged.
At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.
> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.
> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.
> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.
People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone)
Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'.
> has catalogued these at length on his substack.
If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent?
> In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier
Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.)
But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other.
I didn’t post the WaPo link because it’s pay-walled. I’m not endorsing the Mercury News article. But the whole “obstruction” debate was really proof of how sideways the media coverage had gone. Obstruction without something else is a pretty bullshit charge: https://reason.com/2019/04/19/in-defense-of-trump-obstructin.... We were promised he was a Russian asset, and when that evaporated we had an excruciating technical debate about Mueller’s assumptions about whether he could indict for obstruction.
Also, while "Hitlerian race theory" is an appropriate description for someone who says white people should "strive to be less white." Picturing someone telling my half-white daughter that makes me think that Taibbi's description is on the nose.
"White fragility" appears to legitimately be a shit book, and not just one with a very shit title, according to a lot more self-described leftists than just Taibbi. This is a bizarre and unconvincing argument.
Also you clearly appear to be unfamiliar with Taibbi's writing style. That's how he wrote stories about the war crimes of the previous admins; remember those? Or is GWB now considered a leftist?
> But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years?
It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider lament about the media reaction he expects to follow the NYT story, not the story itself. And in particular that his own article years earlier in Rolling Stone already told the same basic story about Trump as con man but I guess won't get any credit.
As for the list of bombshells, there a link to another story which steps through many references to news stories in turn, in a narrative style, not an enumerated list.
If your test of being "left leaning" ignoring inconvenient facts then I might suggest that your viewpoint will not do well in a debate.
There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous.
I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Republican policies are horrific (their approach to deficits is not acceptable), that their rhetoric is sometimes unhinged and that the fringe elements of the right wing are dangerous lunatics. Still think they are the better of 2 options.
And on White Fragility is exactly the sort of book that would have, in the 1940s, been used to justify Hitlerian race theory. In the 1940s it would be pointing out that Jews are systematically advantaged and as a group trying to downplay race but that one can't claim to be blind to it.
> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news
"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
I think the question is, what is the information? The story seems like spaghetti, thrown at the wall to convey a sense of corruption, with no disprovable claims being made.
I think it's fair to characterize tone and intent as part of the message. And when the tone of the message is, BREAKING NEWS THERE HAS BEEN A CORRUPTION, having no evidence of it seems worthy of the phrase misinformation.
As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?
According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic.
The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.
I mean it's a false equivalency in the first place to put Hunter in some special bad place while the First Children reap the rewards of nepotism themselves. Misinformation doesn't need to be foreign, just good enough swill to distract some people from the important abuses of power.
Is anyone putting Hunter in some special bad place? We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. I think everyone agrees that nepotism and misinformation are bad, so surely journalists should critically examine all allegations of misconduct, even when it affects their preferred candidate?
> We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail.
They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties.
Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.
It's entirely possible that both parties you mention could be corrupt. The concern of the article is that a large chuck of the entire news industry is trying to bury the story because they want to the election to go a certain way, which makes them just as despicable as the remaining chunk of the news industry. Remember how Tara Reade was handled? Me too.
Tara Reade also left a long trail of disaffected associates including multiple landlords, who told the same story about her being a prolific liar. Now of course you're welcome to believe that their testimonials were coached by the media boogeyman, but that's a conspiracy with far too many moving parts to hold up in my view.
Your article [2] doesn't actually say anything about Bobulinski claiming laptop emails were authentic, though perhaps he did somewhere in the full statement. Even if the emails themselves are authentic, the New York Post article which revealed them (the article that was suppressed) is misinformation in that it mischaracterized them. Their alleged provenance is also probably not authentic.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've changed the link to a different article that has Bobulinski's full statement. He verifies the authenticity of the contentious email referring to a "10% cut for the big guy" in the first paragraph of the full statement.
What exactly did the New York Post mischaracterize? I read the article and my general impression was that it was a bit sensationalized, but that's rather typical when it comes to bombshell scoops. My understanding of the term misinformation is that it refers to presenting outright false information as fact, not the (unfortunately typical) narrative framing of factual information that happens in the news every day.
Regarding the provenance of the emails, the FBI subpoenaed the laptop over a year ago, and they've had the original in their possession since then. If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play, I'd consider that a good indication that the laptop is indeed Hunter's and was found in the repair shop. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop on Oct 13, in an attempt to recover the laptop.
> If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play
We only know the FBI subpoenaed the laptop because it was leaked to Fox News. The leak itself is presumably accurate, but we have no information about what the FBI did or did not find on the laptop – except for a letter that they have "nothing to add at this time" to an appearance by DNI John Ratcliffe on Fox Business.
In that appearance, Ratcliffe (a highly partisan official) did claim that the laptop was not part of a disinformation campaign, but also said that "I know so little about those emails and what is apparently on Hunter Biden's laptop". So it seems like he was referring to a lack of information about the laptop from the intelligence community rather than inside information from the FBI.
Admittedly, the FBI generally can share information with the intelligence community, and apparently in this case it has not. That does suggest that they probably don't have e.g. evidence that a specific foreign actor was behind things. But we don't know whether they've found evidence that foul play in general occurred or might have occurred. Heck, it's even possible that they found evidence of foul play by a specific entity, but didn't send it to the intelligence community because that entity is American – though I wouldn't say that's likely.
As for the lawyer, the closest we have to hard evidence is a screenshot of an email apparently showing that a lawyer for Hunter Biden spoke with the repair shop owner after Hunter was presumably asked for comment by the Post; it doesn't show any specific claims made by the lawyer. Beyond that we just have Adam Housley and Rudy Giuliani relaying the claims of the repair shop owner. Leaving aside those sources' lack of trustworthiness, Housley himself claimed that the attorney had the wrong year for when Hunter dropped off the laptop and "didn't even know when he left em there" [1]. If anything, that suggests that Hunter doesn't know the provenance, though it's hard to say without more information.
> According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation.
You're just saying that a misinformation campaign aiming at manipulating the US elections quite possibly according to the whims of a totalitarian regime that aims at undermining the US from the top might not have resorted to use totally false and made-up information.
It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head and he was dumb enough to drop a laptop off for repair and never come back to pick it up. There is a signed receipt by Hunter. The email dates match up with secret service flight records. Hunter peddles access to his father for millions of dollars. Joe got a piece of the action.
> It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head (...)
Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against.
I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining beacon of democracy, see their democratic process dragged through the mud by people the likes of you, who are more interested in fabricating propaganda and conduct smear campaigns than actually help out their country rise above their internal problems.
And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`
`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`
`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`
It's not a smear campaign. These are facts. The Biden's are political whorebags and don't deserve power.
I'm a 10th generation American. The spirit of liberty runs deep in me. But speaking truth to power is part of the democratic process. Sorry you were mistaken in believing that democracy is all sunshine and rainbows. It's not. It's very messy and imperfect. And like gardening, you have to weed out the corruption by calling it out.
Worth noting that DNI Ratcliffe is the most unqualified DNI to be appointed (and only managed to get appointed on his second try by a minority), is a Trump loyalist, lied in his bio (disqualifying, I'd say) and appears to follow QAnon (but that could be for work purposes.)
The zerohedge URL is truncated and consequently doesn't work.
> And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
Show us the DKIM headers and let us verify the authenticity, then we'll talk about the content of the emails.
My understanding is that the purported emails were sent to Biden. He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him, so verifying that these emails were sent doesn't really prove anything. If he had forwarded the emails in a way that indicated his agreement, or if they had been sent by someone else connected to the candidate, that would be a situation in which DKIM would be relevant.
> He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him
In which case the whole situation is nonsense and moot.
But it appears that some of them are from Biden - "The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire" - in which case the DKIM headers would be a simple check on authenticity, no?
Sure, if he is alleged to have sent an incriminating email, the headers should be published along with the exact contents so that the public may judge for ourselves. This was done for the Clinton 2016 emails that clearly showed undemocratic interference in the primary elections. So, the fact that they haven't been published in this case does make the whole story less believable. The journalists involved this time probably aren't as smart as Wikileaks, but that's no reason their reporting shouldn't be held to the same standard.
Edit: actually, screw it, I'm also going to point out that there are way too many people showing up in this thread with useless number strings in their handles and completely blank profiles, trying to argue a conspiracy theory.
If this is "democracy" I don't see a point to it. I haven't been able to vote on any civilizational matters under "democracy" anyways. This is like the CCP but instead of CCP restrictions it is DNC restrictions.
I suggest you refrain from making such hyperbolized false equivalencies if you want people to seriously consider your perspective. People can empathize with your frustrations around the seeming lack of agency available to individuals in some democratic countries (in the US especially) without you comparing it to some authoritarian country.
It's not hyperbole, and we do live in authoritarian countries across most of the "Western" world. If you question the Leftist narrative in a public manner you will lose your professional job. If you tweet facts that the Left does not like, it will be deleted (and possibly result in the aforementioned termination of your employment). We don't presently have camps, but we absolutely have an undocumented social credit system.
you are clearly super biased and just painting the same old reactionary picture that doesn't actually exist. If you think a few examples of misdirected cancel culture and a couple private companies choosing some very specific sources/articles they don't want on their platform is akin to "authoritarianism" you either need to read up on the definition or you are being completely disingenuous to support your regurgitated narrative.
this comment make for a good example of why it is very difficult these days to have a reasonable discussion based in reality: many people have no interest in the truth and just want to see their side "win".
This also results in something related to what the article talks about: any reasonable criticism that goes against mainstream thought (or against mainstream news in general) will immediately be coopted and used as ammo by those mentioned in my first point who will take it and twist it into absurd, conspiracy-level or hate-fueled perspectives thereby minimizing the legitimacy of original criticism in the eyes of the public.
I would assume that the FBI looked into the provenance of the laptop when they subpoenaed it over a year ago. Biden's campaign has also not repudiated the repair shop owner's story of how the laptop came into his possession, and the owner has a signed receipt. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop owner the day before the New York Post published the story. This set of facts indicates to me that the laptop was probably not obtained as part of a misinformation campaign.
Fundamentally, for me the null hypothesis is that this is typical election year opposition research. Those claiming that this is an elaborate Russian conspiracy have to present a pretty compelling case to convince me otherwise, given the repeated collapse of such narratives over the past few years.
What Fox News was since Ailes took over, CNN and MSNBC have become. That's something to be really worried about. For a long time, I read the NYT and watched CNN. I never felt the need to check in and see what Fox was saying until the last 2-3 years. Now I do, because I don't trust that I'm getting the whole story.
Don't worry. When it comes to (especially) foreign policy, none of the media have been doing anything but state propaganda since the Remember the Maine incident. If you think blue TV is lying and check red TV you're missing the case where both blue and red agree it's good to lie to people. These cases where they agree revolve around suppressing opposition to corporate rule and around the nature of military alliances and misadventures.
I don't think rayiner says he's only watching fox now, rather he's checking that as well.
Here's my take: When you look from different angles it gets harder to hide things. Fox News wants to hide some things, CNN wants to hide others. Looking at it from both angles you get to see some of the stuff each tries to hide and maybe you can make a reasonable guess on what both tries to hide.
Ah... I was assuming he was watching both. The problem is sometimes all the TV channels agree! You have to look for (usually written) news that is willing to criticize the state, corporations, and the war machine to get that angle.
> Can you point me to a claim from the Bidens or law enforcement that the information was hacked?
I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive.
> What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
You're using the word "criminally released" but that is an unproven fact, the times claims that "all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it". Now I wonder how that can be as well, but at least that's the statement.
So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation, I can see them looking at both article and thinking the first one talks about a hard drive being copied by a shop owner and leaked. While the other is nebulous on the origin but claims it was legally obtained.
This is obviously all speculation. But that be my thoughts, that I can see how the policy might have applied to one and not the other.
I also have to think that it coming from the NY Post must have contributed. I don't assume Twitter reviews every tweet manually, and I can see how NY Post is more likely to get flagged than NY Times.
>I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive.
The NY Post article claims the laptop was abandoned at the repair shop (never picked up) and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner.
>all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it
Notice that The Times does not say the source was legally authorized to release it. I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released. For example, if an IRS employee or an employee at Trump's accountant released it without permission, those would be crimes.
>So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation
I can accept that for the low level employee at the time of moderation. But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
> I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released
In that case it wouldn't make it a hack, but just a leak.
> and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner
That's something I'm still fuzzy on. I'm not sure if it's the law in the state, or just the store's contractual policy. Also, I don't know if the laptop becoming property of the shop extends to the information contained within it. And it also didn't specify if the data on the hard drive was password protected or encrypted in any way which meant retrieval would still require hacking into it.
> But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
I can't speak to that. Now Twitter has a PR issue, and I'm guessing whatever choices they've made or not are based on them trying to mitigate and limit the PR damages.
My guess is, the NY Post is now smearing twitter's own reputation, and possibly twitter doesn't like that, and are worried they'd use their account to further promote anti-twitter rethoric which might be why Twitter is against unblocking their account.
I'm a bit confused how they unblocked the tweet about the email story but kept the account blocked, that's a bit strange.
Another thing I wondered is how likely could Twitter be accountable for if Hunter were to sue them for defamation and libel? Normally it seem fair game to defame and cause libel to politicians, but would that extend to Hunter which isn't directly involved in politics? Or could that be a winning lawsuit from him if he wanted too?
Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.
This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
I certainly hear a lot more talk about the suppression than the actual story (excluding the non-stop spew from Trump, I tuned him out a long time ago), so Twitterbook's attempts at suppression seem to have backfired. Taibbi may think it's under-reported, but even my non-tech acquaintances know about this scandal.
Awareness of the story in the context of potential disinformation and twitter's attempt at stopping it is entirely different than awareness without this extra context. The downstream effects of the two scenario are likely to be very different.
> even my non-tech acquaintances know about this scandal.
Baudrillard talks about this regarding the Watergate scandal. The word scandal implies this is a one and done thing, you've seen the thing, and there is absolutely nothing else to see. This was an outlier.
But was it? I think this one story itself is a canary in the coal mine. Extrapolate this to the long tail of stories for which their potential suppression won't make enough waves, and this is a much much bigger problem than what your non-tech acquaintances might hear.
This concentrated of a narrative shaping power is certainly not unprecedented but is something we would normally associate with totalitarian regimes. And even then it would be easy for people to assume the suppression from state channels. What we have today is a much knife-edge mixture of truths, non-truths and missing truths, coming from hundreds to thousands of micro channels with people's faces attached to it. I think the grand total of its effects will indeed be unprecedented.
You hear a lot more talk about the suppression than the actual story because the news media you follow isn't covering the content of the story.
There are emails being released constantly detailing various business dealings with CCP linked companies including undisclosed loans from Chinese banks that the Bidens continually roll forward.
I'm sorry, but you must not be familiar with the Post. It's a sensationalist tabloid. The reason they don't publish retractions is NOT because of the airtight integrity of their reporting.
It's not anyone's job to inform you of easily available history. Pointing out that someone is a known liar goes to credibility, and is not as hominem. Calling them "Republican" or would be an ad hominem argument against credibility..
This is a very roundabout way of expressing inability to accept that such a paper may still be more accurate in its reporting than other papers that you prefer.
> The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions.
Yes, I claim the reason is a lack of accountability. You claim the reason is impeccability of reporting. I think the reputation and style of reporting is relevant to deciding which of those factors is more relevant. You're free to disagree with that.
But please don't call it a clever shift. I'm having your conversation here.
I'm the absence of a specific story, we are estimating based on our assumptions about how many retractions your "average" paper would make. Knowing what I do about incentives, any paper without rigorous principles of going to tend to issue fewer retractions. It's time consuming, doesn't drive revenue, personally embarrassing for people. It actually takes a lot of journalistic integrity to issue any retractions at all (how many have you personally published to a large audience?).
It's fairly clear to me that the burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim that the NY Post is even close to the level of journalistic rigor as the NY Times, let alone so far surpasses it that they issue fewer retractions because of the accuracy of their reporting.
You're asking me to prove water is wet. You're showing me a dog in a trench coat and telling me it's an accomplished neurosurgeon. Have you ever even read the Post or the Times? Have you lived in NY, and are familiar with either publication? I'm pretty sure I'm done arguing because you've presented nothing of substance on your side, besides the claim that I have not provided logical evidence, which is correct, but I reject that burden. Feel free to offer any information of value you might have.
I think you're the pot calling the kettle black, I'm sorry. We are not estimating anything about average retractions about papers. We're talking about a specific story.
As it stands, there is no evidence that the specific story requires retractions.
You ask for evidence. The evidence is the laptop, and the text messages, and the emails. If you disagree that these things are evidence, the burden of disproof is now on you. That's how it works.
And so far, there have not even been as much as basic denials by the Bidens.
Yes, I have lived in NYC for several years, and I still read the Times more than the Post. But this is, once again, meaningless criteria.
You keep trying to make it about the paper, when the discussion is about this specific story.
If you're going to obstinately insist that the NY Post is serious journalism, just because they happen to publish an unfounded accusation that you happen to like, maybe you should investigate the history of the publication.
Wikipedia [1] for example cites several sources critical of the paper's veracity. Here [2]'s an article citing employees of the NY Post complaining about the flimsiness of the reporting.
A sign of respect, but the NYpost was never given that option and immediately went into suppression, and it did not turn out to be false information.
Meanwhile, CNN and NYTIMES post content and retract it in higher amounts, and they never were surpressed, locked out of their account or even had twitter force to fix "itself" by now agreeing that they'd "wouldn't" remove content but now just "flag it."
A story that contains the claim “someone who didn’t leave their name dropped a random laptop off at a store and we’re going to pretend it was Hunter Biden without evidence” can’t ‘turn out to be false’ because there’s no assertion there to begin with. It’s like claiming that an unsigned int set to zero hasn’t gotten any smaller.
What exactly is the information that was reported? Is there an actual claim in here, or is it just an information dump, so that someone can point to it and say, "just look at all the corruption" without actually making any disprovable claims?
The NY Post is not a serious source of journalism. Like the other Murdoch properties, it's primarily a propaganda outlet. Even its own employees will tell you that [1].
Retractions are an indication of journalistic integrity. So of course they don't issue retractions, that would imply commitment to the truth. Who else doesn't issue retractions? Fox, The Sun, The Times (UK).
No one would argue that Twitter does journalism, but their content policy does prohibit spreading of deliberate, dangerous misinformation, which the Post reporting obviously is.
It may well have made the story bigger, but also it may have benefitted Joe Biden anyway due to (e.g.) the education many people got regarding this attempt at election meddling. The polls didn't seem to get significantly worse for Biden as this unfolded.
And why should it. According to the WSJ news side, Joe Biden had nothing to do with anything in that story.
If there was an actual story here, the DOJ and FBI are more than capable of launching an investigation. The NYTimes, WaPo, LaTimes, WSJ, would all have no issues reporting on this either through investigation or a leak from those former orgs.
And maybe in the past, this would have mattered, but don't be surprised when after 4 years of norm breaking and corruption, people don't care about this except those with a specific ideology.
There is no clear principles or policies for censorship or suppression for economic or political reasons. Until there is, we must look each case as single instance.
That case was hilariously crude attempt at influencing and creating false narratives. The whole thing collapsed quickly but it still had huge impact. Mixing something real and something false makes people accept falsehoods.
Censoring obvious falsehoods like in this case is not the scandal. The lack of policy principles is. Twitter could have reduced the frequency the links show in the feeds dramatically and nobody would notice. It would be there when you look at it, but it would not propagate. In fact, that's what Twitter and Facebook are doing for commercial reasons.
Yeah, Twitter managed to kneecap a false narrative before it took hold and influenced an election. If there's a 48h waiting period for questionable stories like this, I'm all for it.
Could someone just explain in simple words why everyone keeps calling this story false or debunked or whatever? Everyone keeps downvoting me and I don't know why. It seems like to debunk this story you'd have to have a journalist do some journalism and figure out why all these companies were giving hunter biden money.
Trump's conspiracy theories thrive in Ukraine, where a young democracy battles corruption and distrust. We talked with two dozen leaders and investigators in Ukraine. They all agree the claims against Joe and Hunter Biden are baseless. Yet they persist. https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2019/10/10/trump...
Repudiable media outlets will generally avoid writing stories about unverifiable claims. But once you deny the claims, then repudiable media outlets can bypass the need for corroboration and write stories on your denials, while also detailing the claims you are denying, which just further spreads the content of the claims.
Nobody can discredit it so they suppress it. It’s the same thing Twitter did for the same reasons.
For starters it doesn’t even need to be discredited — it just needs to be denied, which it hasn’t been. I mean the basic facts like the authenticity of the laptop/emails or the meeting.
The problem is that the whole thing is basically an unsupported allegation. It might be true, but for the time being we have no way of knowing.
* The material was provided via two of Trumps henchmen, who may or may not have altered it along the way.
* They gave it to the NYP after Fox News (never one to miss an opportunity to bash the Democrats) turned it down due to lack of provenance.
* It was originally derived from a laptop that may or may not have been dropped off by Hunter Biden or someone associated with him.
* The computer repairman at the centre of this has given contradictory explanations of the timeline, how many laptops were involved, and whether he contacted the FBI or the FBI contacted him.
At what point do we look to capitalism as a driving factor for misinformation spreading?
Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published.
Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.
> Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes.
Yes, in a way, but also obviously not. If that was their only/primary driver, they'd go all click bait all the time. They wouldn't report things that aren't loved by the masses.
They clearly do, so clicks/shares/likes can't be their primary things.
I do believe that it's partially right, it's just not number one. Number one is agenda, and within the pool of stories that benefit the agenda of the company, they choose what generates most engagement.
The "agenda" of the paper is whatever position it thinks it's reader base has, if it's reader/ad funded. The political bias due to owner or donor conflict of interest is only one potential source of funding.
Since newspapers are often front-runners and form their readers opinion (rather than just parroting back what their readers already believe), I have doubts.
There's certainly a part of "we need money from ads", but being able to influence the political decisions of a nation is power. That's a value in and by itself, it's not just something you wield to sell ads.
> "Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes."
Even an individual who posts a blog post wants clicks/shares/likes, even if there's no money involved, to validate their work in putting out a post and to bolster their self-esteem. That highlights why capitalism is not itself the issue; any type of news media would just respond to what its customers want. And what the public wants is infotainment, not well-researched stories.
The real problem is people and that's a problem that can't be solved.
The abundance of low-quality news today can be understood as a consequence of the cantillon effect in an inflationary environment. American-style crony capitalism might incentivize low-quality media, but without the presence of massive subsidies propping up News Corp, AT&T, and the other few firms owning the vast majority of American media, I would expect more legitimate and reputable news firms like Bloomberg or Reuters.
The low quality media we are drowning in is memes and conspiracy theories from random individuals. Even in the mainstream, the worst news is Rupert Murdoch's, and he made his money selling low quality media, not made his low quality media from crony capitalism.
Capitalism is the least of journalism's problems. Journalists making political endorsements has all the same dangers under communism (where they always endorse the state party without exception) or capitalism (where in the last 50 years they've overwhelmingly endorsed global interests and Democrats over American ones).
This isn't capitalism, this is an outlet with connections to a the current regime trying to come up with ways to protect that regime, while intermediaries with deep connections to the previous regime try to blunt the effectiveness of that outlet to aid in restoring that previous regime. Nobody cares about the clicks on this article, and no one is taking a moral stance.
Capitalism is trash, but this is traditional kleptocracy. Both sides are conservative; one is literally running to "restore normality."
Yeah the censorship is bad and further reduces trust in the media and tech companies (though its already at zero for many people). But isn't the story here that the vice presidents son was being paid millions of dollars by chinese, ukrainian, and other companies for .. something? It's not his business accumen, right? What could they possibly be paying him for other than access to his dad? Is there any other reasonable explanation for these "business arrangements?"
It's a lot of money for a person, but it's not a lot for a business. It's a cheap insurance policy to stay on the "good side" of someone who operates, even privately, in the quid pro quo seeking way that Trump does very publicly.
4 years of investigations and the best they got on so called Trump Quid Pro Quo was him asking Ukraine about this specific grift by the Biden’s.
Either he’s better at hiding his crimes than Muller and the Democrat party is able to investigate them, or gasp they can’t actually find anything because there is nothing...
The reason stuff like this gets flagged is, in my opinion, that while the underlying issue is of relevant interest (stinking tech companies caught poisoning yet another thing), it’s too close to simple politics to prevent a thread full of hyperpartisan bickering.
That’s exactly the point. Your attempt to pretend paying a drug addict $83k per month is fine, nothing to see here, is definitely not the same opinion of most voters.
That alone is worth the tech companies risking their reputations and livelihoods of all their employees / partners! Trump cannot win! He’s eeeeeeeevil!!!
> Companies hire people in useless positions all the time you know.
Yeah, they're called princelings, it's very common in China. If you want to do business, you hire the child of a high-ranking party member, pay them large sums of money for zero work and then you get all the permits you need.
Mmhmm. I said it’s unfair. Again I don’t see how reiterating that Hunter Biden probably got some jobs because of his name proves the more salacious allegations that were the center of the story...
Well there’s other evidence of that! And the trouble here is the evidence from the story is not verified (the FBI has not confirmed its HB’s laptop, has it? The screenshots of the Russian blackberry seem... dubious...). And that’s the sort of thing that most news organizations would gate reporting on.
I do agree it’s a bit strange for Twitter to step in and try to apply editorial standards where NYP didn’t when they otherwise disclaim responsibilities of being a publisher. I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
> And that’s the sort of thing that most news organizations would gate reporting on.
I don't think that's true. The Steele Dossier ("Trump pays Russian Hookers in Moscow to pee on him") wasn't treated special in any way, and it was much more questionable at the time than this story (where the unclear part is what they got for their bribes, not whether they payed his son for access to the VP). Of course, one argument might be "we've learned from our mistakes", but I believe that's a bit too obvious.
> I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
I don't think it needs a conspiracy theory, the coordination was very public. That there's political corruption in the US is also not news, it's the reason why children of politicians are making giant sums of money, politicians being paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech etc. That's normal, there's not much to be found, I believe.
Discussion of the suppression is not encouraged here: even a story about the suppression of the story was pretty much immediately suppressed on HN.
You’re making my point aren’t you? You think the NYP story is as reputable as the dossier ?
All the same, I don’t know of any newspapers which published stories treating the dossier as a source. As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes. As corroboration: please share if you have any.
Actually I think what happened is Rudy etc got a little too desperate and excited and blundered tactically: surfacing the contents of the hard drive as continual leaks, like the DNC emails, would’ve allowed for a similar dynamic to 2016. Wouldn’t have mattered politically if the contents were real or not.
By reaching and trying to drop the story as “real news,” the dubiousness of the source material got thrust directly into the spotlight. Blaming twitter, liberals, or whoever, for their poor smear tactics is just a coping mechanism at this point if you ask me.
> You’re making my point aren’t you? You think the NYP story is as reputable as the dossier?
My impression is that it's less made up than the juicy parts of the dossier. The dossier contained more truth though, but it was lame stuff that nobody cared about or reported on.
> As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes.
That's just moving goal posts. It's essentially "Now, I'm not claiming A did Z, but I hear a lot of people saying that A did Z. Did A do Z? What do you think, dear viewer?" Of course they're running the story, even if they throw a "this hasn't been independently confirmed" in the footer. That's the beauty about propaganda, you don't need to claim that it's true for the effect to be achieved.
I doubt anyone is surprised by another plausible case of corruption (or depravation / or pedophilia if you address the other allegations).
There is also the story that the FBI was sitting on this since December (potential for blackmail in case Biden is elected? who knows) which is scary as well.
In the end, I think it's endemic in having human corruptible politicians who can accentrate power.
We will minimise this problem only if we decentralise the structure of powers in our society.
Not that any mainstream party has an interest in promoting that (unless you consider Jo Jorgensen and the libertarian party)
It is the people who want suppression of information. Twitter and FB are responding to user demand.
This post has been flagged. People don’t want to see or hear about this. HN may, or may not, remove it. Either way, there are HN users who want this removed.
That's just some users though, and I'm 99% sure they don't want others to see it, because they believe knowing about it might damage their political side. I'm sure they have good intentions and believe that the end justifies the means and if suppression of truth is required to let the good guys win, then so be it.
Of course, everybody generally thinks they are the good guys, and once you're going down the road of "everything is allowed because my goals are good", you're not going to stop until somebody else stops you.
You could say that about lots of news that FB and Twitter allow. If FB and Twitter are strictly blocking unverified news then they would have also blocked things like the NYT tax return story. You also wade into some hairy territory of who is verifying news, and why.
Facebook and Twitter are effectively acting as editors for select news organizations.
Why is this flagged? Even if you disagree with the assessment, the relationship between the press and big tech described here seems very relevant to HN.
For some reason people seem to be assuming that more lately (i.e. that "flagged" means mods did it). I'm not quite sure how to correct that notion. I suppose we could hyperlink "[flagged]" to an explanation...but would people click? It's not as if this isn't in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Explanations don't seem to help much.
That would indeed be unambiguous. But it would also be verbose and there's something about that which doesn't fit the HN spirit.
I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.
It wouldn't explain a recent change, but the label "flag" does imply calling something to someone's attention, and that someone would presumably be a moderator. Whether or not not stories are killed immediately by flagging (and it makes sense to me that they are), would it be reasonable for a moderator to eventually review everything that is flagged, or at least everything flagged by more than one person? I don't have a good sense of what the volume would be, but I think it would lead to better results than allowing a tiny number of of users to suppress stories without administrative review.
We do review all of them. But there are so many that I can't say we review them all equally closely. A lot of the time we're tired and just skimming. Vigilant users' contributions are extremely helpful.
The left is obsessed with suppressing anything that’s “dangerous” cause they think the lowly under-class can’t be trusted to review information and form opinions.
If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.
This is incorrect. Just because the two party system has suppressed anything to the left of the democrats does not mean liberals are in any way “the left”; there are many leftist voices in the US (Matt Taibbi, author of the post you’re replying to and presumably read, being one of them) and they are often critical of liberals.
> If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal.
Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data:
It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-dimensional spectrum where the left and right poles are liberal and conservative is popular, and it's true that partisans on both sides like to portray the opposing party as more ideologically unified and extreme on that axis than it is, so that if you polled Republicans, they'd probably come close to identifying Democrats as consistently both left and liberal.
It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism. But left and right political spectrum and the corresponding terms have meaning outside of the limited political window of centre-right US mainstream discussion.
There is absolutely a distinction between liberal media (the NY Times, MSNBC, etc) and left media (Jacobin, Democracy Now!, Current Affairs, etc) and this distinction is made by Taibbi. Your ignorance on the subject is not shared by everyone.
This distinction is neither as clear nor as absolute as you appear to believe.
Classical liberalism[1] is an economic stance somewhat similar to the economic views of libertarianism in the US. This is distinct from social liberalism which is what "liberal" commonly means in the US, which mostly overlaps with what could be called "progressive politics".
"Classical Liberalism" is confusing in the modern context, so it is rarely used execpt by people trying to confuse people (eg, right wing commentators who claim to be "classical liberals"). The biggest exception to this is the (right-wing, conservative) Liberal party in Australia, which was founded on the ideas of "Classical Liberalism"
There's also "liberal" in the "liberal democracy" sense. This is where multiple parties contend for power under known, written down rules.[2]
And then there is "left-[wing]". Left wing can refer to a social view, where it is used as a close-synonym for social liberalism or progressivism. Or it can refer to an economic view, which is much more context (and country) specific.
In the context of US politics the Democratic party is the most left-wing major party in both an economic and social sense.
In terms of media sources, the NY Times is definitely a proponent of "liberal democracy", but in a social and economic sense it is fairly centerist (despite the claims to the contrary by populist).
All this yacking about "well in America words have different meanings" (as if anyone on earth has been able to escape the onslaught of USA media) only makes it clear how unfamiliar all these nerds are with Taibbi's work. Taibbi is an actual leftist, and therefore has been attacked by liberals. If you search you can find absolutely ridiculous slander written about him in HN comments in the last several years.
> It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans
Probably.
> who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism.
It's impossible to know something that isn't true. From about the late 1980s to sometime in 2016-2017 (the end was more sudden than the beginning), the dominant factions of both parties supported pro-capitalist neoliberalism, it's true, but each has had significant factions not focussed on that position the whole time, and the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party has been weakening for most of the last decade or so, and the neoliberal faction of the Republican Party was overthrown for dominance by a party that, insofar as it has a coherent economic policy at all, would be more populist protectionist than neoliberal (if one is being generous; kleptocratic opportunist if one is less generous.) American political parties are much more diverse than is the case of parties in systems that is typical in either proportional or parliamentary systems (and, especially, systems with both PR and parliamentary systems.)
Is there an issue with saying left-libertarian? Cause it's hard for me to believe that all these tech/media/etc employees aren't left, if it's reasonable to describe them as "progressive."
I think you’re confused about what or who “the left” is; corporate media and the liberal party in the US (the Democrats) are not leftist in anyway; a writer like Matt Taibbi is a leftist or has leftist leanings. But as is very clear from this article, there is clear disagreement between leftists and the party they are forced to vote with if they want any semblance of representation.
> If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.
I think the fact that this is flagged shows that ycombinator is part of the same problem.
Freedom of speech is what's great about this country, and big tech is about suppression of it. I look forward to my post getting deleted by the mods, reinforcing the simple truth.
This story has “62 points” and was posted 43 minutes ago (at the time I’m posting this comment) but as soon as I read the story and hit back in the browser, it was pushed off the first three pages of articles. What happened? Did this story get flagged? There’s lots interesting discussion here.
I think that's just HN's flamewar prevention method. Any story with a low score and a large number of comments are pushed down quickly, this is in addition to the fact that the post is getting flagged which pushes it down further.
And for the comments of people saying it's a non-story, you need to check your beliefs and look at the facts.
This is pay for play, and corruption at it's finest. After attacking Trump for 4 years for falsehoods, you shy away from addressing issues with the opposing candidate?
I think there's a fundamental difference of opinion about the notion of fairness. Some people think that fairness is defined as something that affects everyone equally in some clean-slate world, while others think of fairness as equalizing the effect of something in an already unfair situation in the world as it is. To the first camp it seems that "suppressing" a particular story on a particular platform is unfair regardless of circumstances because it is not done to other stories; others think that if that particular story has a de facto unfair advantage of being amplified by an army of bots on that particular platform, then "suppressing" it is the fair thing to do. The question is, is it always unfair to tip the scales or does fairness depend on whether or not the scales are already tipped? Should the fairness of laws, rules and regulation be judged with or without consideration to existing circumstances?
That's a really long way of trying to justify unfairness under some arbitrary criteria.
If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
Thus paving the way for being arbitrary. Because the decision of what's fair is hidden. That's not criteria: is lack of.
I understand you can't 100% define what's fair. That's why judges interpret. But if Jack has to come out to state they screwed up, something's not right. And they're not fixing it, by design: decisions will still be made by highly biased Twitter personnel.
> Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new
I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be boring.
Separately, I'll note that this story was submitted yesterday, quickly got to 38 votes and 7 comments, and then was flagged off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000. I vouched for it, which brought it back briefly, but then it was killed again.
Oddly, that version doesn't appear when one clicks on 'past', or with search terms for "taibbi" or "suppression". Any idea why this might be? Are flag killed stories always omitted from searches?
Edit: This post discussing the flagging of this story is flagged as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835. Should it be? It seems like it raises reasonable issues. Vouching for it did nothing.
Thanks for vouching, that was the thread I linked in the GP post dang was replying to. Constructive ideation on fixing a community problem of censorship is now "metadrama", Orwellian. I'm open to it not being a problem, but we can't even have that discussion.
Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and got lucky with timing, maybe they'd listen? I may have to just accept one of the last decent sites for discussing tech events is going down the same path as the rest of them, though tbh it's been on the path for a long time now (I've noticed at least 15 decent articles in the last year flagged for essentially being "not liberal" despite high quality content).
You're talking as if there's some new development here but HN has operated this way for many years. People are prone to interpret normal fluctuation as catastrophic decline. They were saying similar things about HN over a decade ago. It reminds me of what Voltaire said when told that he drank too much coffee and that it was a slow poison: "It must be very slow". [1]
Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads here than most political commentators. If HN did as you seem to be suggesting and disallowed flags on any articles like this—the ones that you like, plus the ones that everyone else likes, since why should one user be privileged over another?—then the site would consist of nothing but articles like this. That's obviously not its mandate. I don't see how this is "Orwellian", but it's not always easy to know WWOD (what would Orwell do).
So many strawmen! Dang maybe you’re just burnt out or something, because you’re not replying to anything I said.
I would never and didn’t at all ask for privilege. I set out suggestions to avoid majoritarianism, systemically. One - make flags “cost”, for less brigades. Two, make vouches cost more, but also have more weight, as vouching can protect a minority view.
I never said disallow flags on articles “like that”? I’m not even a big fan of Taibbi, I’m just a bit disgusted by people who would flag away things they just don’t like politically. It’s a problem, but my guess is it suits your politics and your bosses, so it’s not very pressing.
What’s Orwellian is that you can’t seem to grapple with anything I’m saying and instead or twisting it all to totally different arguments, while using quite creative yet generic words to hide behind authority. Read your initial reply: The reason you give for why it’s valid to dismiss an article on simple suggestions to fix flagging was... “it was flagged”, it was “Metadrama”, and it would (in your psychic wisdom) lead to a “generic hodgepodge” discussion. Could literally apply to any HN submission about the site itself, and in this reply you seem to had misread it as some beg for privilege for myself or something weird like that.
I’ve also been on HN for over a decade. I’ve seen a ton of controversies, I never waded in really. I’ve held my tongue for years on the suppression one, it’s been obvious for years. I’ve seen many claiming it went downhill. In fact at my first job a decade ago I remember multiple co-workers warning me how it’s gone downhill. I know it’s always been that way.
But the reasons it was going downhill before and now are categorically different. Before it was due to incessant flame wars, bad faith pedantry, lack of openness to new ideas (but within discussion).
Now - it’s literal flag brigading.
To be honest, this happened near the election last time. People lose sanity, and then they see abuse of power as “popular” and therefore justified, and then after the election the tide will naturally turn and you’ll forget the problem for a bit.
Censorship, majority rule, there aren’t the same as the critiques I’ve seen many many times over the years. Before it was about quality of discussion, now it’s about banning discussion entirely.
I didn't think or mean to imply that you were asking for special privilege. I just wanted to make the logic explicit that if we were to disable the flagging system, we'd have to do it across the board, and that would turn HN into a political site.
It's true that I'm using somewhat generic terms to describe these situations but there's a simple reason for that: there are hundreds of users asking (and sometimes outright demanding) answers and only one of me to answer them. If there's something specific that I said that you feel is unclear I can try to clarify it.
I don't find words like "suppression" super helpful because they mostly just add negative emotional valence to something that's not secret and is rather benign. If we have more political opinion pieces and/or inflammatory political stories on the front page, then we have less room for discussion of the topics that HN primarily exists for. You can call that suppression if you want. Is a florist suppressing chocolate by only offering a small selection of the latter in their flower shop?
Even more ironic is you missed the point of the post anyway, and your core reply here off: it wasn't meta-discussion, it was an entirely different discussion on the overuse of flagging on this site with examples of how it's happening + call for comments specifically on how to change flagging. In fact it was constructive, and the tone tempered.
Not being able to discuss changes to the flag system itself because it gets flagged is a big... red flag.
It's become used for "I personally don't agree with this" instead of "this is off topic, inflammatory, illogical, etc". Once you go down the path of allowing flagging for personal distaste, you've lost.
By meta I mean Hacker News threads about Hacker News. Meta is the crack of internet forums. Users tend to flag such threads and moderators tend to moderate them because they're mostly all the same, they breed like rabbits if allowed to, and they're not actually interesting—they're internet drama, which feels interesting but isn't. Such pseudo-content pleases/riles the self-obsessed minority (I mean the minority of HN users who are fascinated with HN, which certainly includes me) but leaves the majority of the audience cold. Self-referentiality is one way for a forum to lose its audience, and our #1 job is to prevent that happening to HN.
I realize that your intention was good and that what I'm saying here must sound cynical and heavyhanded, but you have to understand what it's like to see these things a hundred times and realize that they're never different and never lead anywhere. If they don't make you feel weary and slightly nauseated, that's because you haven't seen too many of them yet.
I think there's a difference between meta-drama and discussion of improving the algorithm itself to avoid meta-drama.
I'd actually honestly like to hear your reply on the proposals for flag rule changes. I think they would work, and would improve the discussion quality. We'd get more "out of the box" stuff - far left or right, but also just more out there ideas.
Finally - you spend a ton of time on the meta stuff. I read over a few pages there. You say often you don't have time for it. Perhaps it's time to try making some changes that would reduce the burden? And not ones that further lock it down, but instead add some transparency?
You guys already have vote brigading rules, flag brigading seems natural. Adding cost will improve the quality. Making vouches more precious would improve the quality.
Perhaps add a meta column to the topbar and direct/move all meta discussions there? I know your reply will be "this will only further it" but I doubt it, they could then avoid the home page altogether.
Only trying to help here, but I think you're now so meta-tired you've forgotten that meta discussion can be constructive and there's perhaps really simple changes that would reduce a good chunk of these complains.
Final note - seems like a lot of the complaints are all going the same direction. Maybe they're valid and not just drama.
Edit: let me reframe it in a way that may be helpful: if you could reply to every meta thread with a single link to a static page on HN, a small write up that included a changelog of the latest rule changes you've implemented, a clear policy enumerated, and a link to a "meta" area where you'd automatically move comments/threads, you'd save yourself a ton of time going forward, and I think you'd gain a ton of positive goodwill on the site. You'd conquer the meme thats been building for years as well.
Of course the rules prohibit flag brigading. If you're saying that political stories are getting flagkilled because politicized users are organizing to kill the ones their cause opposes, then either you have evidence I haven't seen (and I need to see it) or you are vastly overinterpreting the data. Certainly such behavior would be abusive, and we would either penalize such accounts or ban them outright. Just keep in mind that evidence means something objective, such as a post on some external site organizing people to flag something on HN. Posts getting flagged when you think they shouldnt've is not evidence of brigading. It's just evidence that other users disagree with you.
A separate meta section would be a disaster—it would create a dedicated place for the problem to metastasize, and the demands on moderation would go up not down. I once had a conversation with the founder of a forum much larger than HN, who told me that creating a meta section in the hope that it would help contain such complaints was the biggest mistake they ever made.
The meme that HN is declining is more or less as old as HN itself. Maybe HN is declining and we're doomed unless we make major changes (though the prescriptions for such changes are perennially contradictory). I think you're missing a more likely explanation though: internet users just like to complain a lot. Moreover there's a nostalgia bias that always makes it feel like the site was better when you first joined it. (I don't mean you personally, I mean any of us.) Like tree rings, each cohort dates the decline from approximately when they joined the site. It's always the later users, the hoi polloi, who are the invasive species ruining everything—in conjunction with the feckless and ignorant mods.
How about we make this into a positive this way: if there's a specific article that you feel was intellectually interesting, and capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN, and which was flagkilled unfairly, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. So far you've mentioned two. In one case we'd already turned off the flags before we saw your complaint (and I think that was because someone emailed us—which is what the site guidelines ask you to instead of making meta posts). In the other case we simply didn't agree that it was an intellectually interesting article that was capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN.
Moderators have to make these calls in the end because if we don't, the site will be consumed by flamewars. That's a different issue from getting any particular call wrong. If we get one wrong, I'm happy to be persuaded, to admit it, and to correct the error in that case. But I don't agree that the system is malfunctioning and needs an overhaul. I think it's basically functioning the way an immune system has to, which includes being overzealous at times.
I spend a ton of time on the meta stuff and I spend a ton of time on all the other stuffs too. As you'll gather from my several lengthy replies to you, I don't have any problem engaging with specific users' concerns about the site. But I prefer to do it either in situ, or by email. Making meta submissions to complain about downvoting or flagging doesn't have good effects. It just stirs up mobs, in which everyone with a complaint shows up to make it, the discussions turn into the same thing they always do, and it's simply impossible to respond. Don't forget that there's currently only one mod (me) who's in a position to respond publicly.
I appreciate the replies. I've noticed at least a couple handful over the last year, some more unfortunate than others, but I'm not keeping close score so I don't have them on hand. I don't actually even follow flaggings really, I assume there are many I miss.
Is there a place to see flagged-but-highly-upvoted articles? That would be another helpful area to let users check and report false negatives.
When I notice more, I'll just shoot you an email.
I am agreeing on the complaint meme, by the way. As I see it, the meme used to be that it's a bunch of assholes and closed-minded-pedants/contrarianistas (and to be honest, it kind of was for a while, and I think mods have fixed it a bit), and now the meme is that it's getting a bit groupthinky and quick on the flag button (and I suspect that meme is true as well, and can be fixed).
Simply stop taking twitter seriously. If there's something posted which interests you, read it. If not, ignore it. Whatever emotion it causes in you, just walk around the block and ignore it.
Just don't give a s..t, and twitter will get back to normal in the long run.
If you think it merits discussion and your discussion is merely some opinion that doesn’t cross any of the site guidelines (sums to “I don’t care about this topic much so you shouldn’t either”), then there’s no basis for flagging it.
Flagging means it’s either off topic, inflammatory, or not worthy of discussion. It’s on topic, and obviously not inflammatory. So you’re left with worthy of discussion... and you obviously are discussing it.
Put it this way: if this is worthy of a flag, why are you here giving soft opinion as to why you personally would ignore it, as opposed to arguing why it shouldn’t be allowed period?
I think the story is a big nothing. It was a comment not by Hunter Biden, but an associate, who may have been overstating or exaggerating what Hunter Biden said he'd do.
And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.)
But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.
Many are confusing "censorship" with "content moderation". The difference is very important.
Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs.
Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story.
In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
It's a matter of scale. As the article says, the current Democratic Party Alliance for suppressing damaging stories is so broad, that even though you can publish your story, the chances of reaching its intended audience at scale are slim.
Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
Twitter did not decide that in good faight. First, because they are used as a public platform, like it or not, and as such they are not expected to moderate anything. People follow or block what they want. And second, because they are biased in their censorship and are not forthcoming about it.
> as such they are not expected to moderate anything
When even the president's tweets have been squelched or tagged, I highly doubt that anyone reasonably familiar with Twitter over the last couple of years would have that expectation.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security
There's no sane way to interpret twitter's actions as anything except censorship. The fact that they're legally entitled to commit this censorship doesn't make it something else.
To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
Who the hell cares if the information was stolen? Jeffrey Epstein's little black book was "stolen information" - do you object to using that information to make an indictment?
> intentionally misleading information
Crazy how a credible leak is "intentionally misleading" when it's politically inconvenient.
Content moderation is a form of censorship. Censorship isn't always bad. You can look up the history of the term if you want (hint: it shares the same origin as the term "census").
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
So this would make censorship a form of free speech.
We've reach a contradiction, so there must be an error in the chain of reasoning. My money is on "content moderation is a form of free speech" being wrong.
I'm not sure. What is the exact contradiction that you see?
Viewing moderation as another form as speech seems reasonable to me, or at least as reasonable as viewing a campaign contribution as a form of speech. Perhaps the actual issue is that "free speech" cannot be a guaranteed right shared by all, but is inherently a rivalrous good.
My money is on censorship being a form of free speech. Not a concept that I've heard before, or that (at a glance) makes any kind of sense to me. Can you walk me through that equality?
No, it’s only that people are using differing definitions of “censorship” and talking past each other.
Content moderation is, in fact, a form of free speech. Twitter (for example) is allowed to choose what they want to host on their website, and what they want not to host on their website. This is free speech – it’s their site, one can’t make them host what one writes. If choosing what to remove from their website is deemed “censorship”, then there’s no contradiction.
Content moderation isn't free speech, it's freedom of association, or in constitutional terms, freedom of assembly.
Consider that Ben Franklin wouldn't publish libelous or slanderous material submitted to his newspaper - clearly a form of "content moderation." He believed in the right of the people submitting such things to express them and would suggest they try elsewhere, but also believed in his right not to publish those views on his "platform."
I don't think anyone would accuse Ben Franklin of not believing in free speech, so clearly a reasonable person can square the apparent circle. Freedom of speech isn't the only right relevant to speech, and freedom of speech doesn't guarantee a right to speak on all platforms.
Content moderation decisions can adhere to this principle or not. Removal of viagra bot spam from a blog comment section is a clear example where content moderation adheres to the principles of free speech.
Removing content on a platform like Twitter simply because the Silicon Valley elitists/leftists that run Twitter don't like it is not in keeping with the principle of free speech (for the record I interviewed and got an offer from Twitter but declined). A good razor to use is to see if the rules are being applied in an uneven way. The principle of freedom of speech is an application of the idea of epistemic humility.
The point you were trying to make is "Content moderation falls under the first amendment" which I can't disagree with.
It's important to understand the difference between a moral principle and a legal instantiation of it (the first amendment). I hope that helps clear things up for you.
"Content moderation" is about the speech someone running a website is willing to participate in. Requiring them to publish everything their users post would be what's called "coerced speech", which happens to be single biggest no-no of the legal concept of freedom of speech.
Forcing someone to say something against their will is considered far worse than preventing someone from saying something they want to say. That's how "warrant canaries" work: the government can stop you from disclosing the court order you received. But they cannot force you to continue saying that you never received such an order.
I think you're stretching the idea of compelled speech to the point where it loses its essential meaning. Compelled speech is when someone forces you to say something, not when you are prevented from disallowing someone to say something under their own name on your website/property.
When I comment on HN I do not comment as HN itself.
What you're talking about seems like an application of the idea of private property rights (i.e. kicking someone out of your house/office for saying something you don't like).
How does removing “Viagra bot spam” adhere to the moral principle of free speech? Why does the New York Post get special moral privileges that Bob’s Viagra Store does not?
This is the frustrating thing about this debate: one side tries to position itself as “anti-censorship”, when really that position only extends to cover speech they care about.
To accept the legitimacy of the principle of freedom of speech is to make a value judgement. If you want some pure criteria you can use to make content moderation decisions, then the purest criteria is no content moderation at all.
You can remove obvious spam (e.g. viagra advertisements posted by bots) and still adhere to principles of free speech. Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth. And I mean that very broadly. Even trolling can be done in good faith.
> Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth.
So if Twitter didn't believe that the New York Post article was written by people acting in "good faith in the pursuit of truth", it's okay to censor?
The intentions of the speaker and the value of their speech are subjective. It's fine to argue that we should be okay with censoring some thing you don't like. But at least acknowledge that you're not making an appeal to "the principle of freedom of speech" — you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable.
> you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable
By virtue of operating under the principle of respecting free speech you are making a value judgement and asserting a set of values. There is no panacea or pure criteria you can use besides no content moderation at all. I give the example of spam posted by bots as what I think is an obvious and non-controversial example of content that can be removed that doesn't violate the principle of free speech. Another example might be someone who simply replies "f* you" to every comment on a thread.
I don't know how to further explain this or qualify this. I think you just fundamentally don't understand or haven't actually reflected on what I'm saying.
You are correct, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I agree that there is no panacea or set of pure criteria other than not moderating at all. But there is also no singular principle of free speech beyond that, either — just different sets of tradeoffs that try to cultivate discourse that the moderator thinks is valuable. My issue is that people tend to present their own preferred set of tradeoffs as the One True Set that embodies the principle of free speech.
You mentioned “good faith” before, so let’s say that’s our operating principle: all parties must be speaking in good faith. Now consider that Twitter suppresses the New York Post because they believe they’re publishing in bad faith. Twitter is still adhering to our set of free speech tradeoffs. So why is this comment section full of people saying they’re not upholding the spirit of free speech?
It’s because they want Twitter to make a different set of tradeoffs. That’s fine, and I’m happy to have that discussion. But not when it masquerades as a discussion about whether Twitter suppressing this article is somehow incompatible with free speech as a concept.
It really comes down to whether or not you believe in objective morality. If you do then there is a sensical notion of free speech (or any other principle) even if no one person has a complete picture or understanding of what it is right now (although I would argue that we have a much better understanding of free speech than we do 6000 years ago). It is something we can strive for and recognize since it is an objective thing.
To reiterate my example, I would say a reasonable person living in 2020 would say that removing bot spam from a comment section is a content moderation decision that is in keeping with the idea of free speech.
Even if you believe in objective morality, I think my point about how the discussion should go stands.
Let's say that your definition of free speech is the objectively correct one. You then have to convince people to adopt that framework. You can't appeal to the objective definition; that's a circular argument. So you have to do it on the merits of the tradeoffs, like "bot spam is noise that detracts from a conversation".
To your example specifically, my own opinion is that it depends. I'm fine with removing bot spam from a comment section. But move down to more "infrastructural" layers, and I become less okay with it. For example, I don't think ISPs should try to block spam; they should be entirely agnostic to what content passes through their pipes.
Oh yes, you're referring to the pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe in his mouth and things like that. You're correct. I took that to be just proof that they had the laptop. Everyone knows that Hunter has a crack addiction problem.
I think I totally forgot about that because of the censored sex tapes and nudes being published by Gnews which are way more salacious.
Hunter Biden left his laptop at the repair shop and never paid for the repairs. After waiting the legally required 90 days, the repair shop became the rightful owner of the laptop and its contents.
Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted.
The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussions or allowed access to any sensitive material?"
Even if there were no corrupt actions at all, Hunter Biden represents every kind of HUMINT leverage imaginable.
So if I sell my laptop that still has some photos on it, the buyer would own the copyright over those photos because they own the laptop?
If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then?
What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then?
That doesn’t seem right. Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium. You don’t lose copyright by losing ownership of the physical medium that holds a copy of the photos/source code/etc.
That is a really loose definition of censorship. Most dictionaries say it is the "prohibition or suppression" of content, which I don't think a content moderation is. It requires trying to stop the spread of the content itself, not just the content on a particular medium.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
I don't know about Russian involvement, but it was clearly a right wing attempt to meddle in the election to achieve a last minute bomb on their opponent like in 2016.
If something is going to be suppressed as Russian propaganda, there better be evidence that it is Russian propaganda. Otherwise the suppression itself is propaganda in the other direction.
Twitter's objection was that the New York Post article contained hacked or illegally obtained material (personal intimate photos, etc.). Publishing those materials is a legal grey area.
No, if if the content is true and in the public interest, there is really no question about the legality of publishing it in the US: it is 100% constitutionally protected.
Twitter’s initial justification for removing the “hacked” material is completely at odds with their past decisions to leave up hacked/illegally obtained materials like the Snowden docs, Trump tax returns, Panama papers, etc. Of course they have since changed their stance.
That's exactly why it's a legal grey area. We don't know if the content is true or forged. Publishing stolen content is illegal unless you can prove it's in the public interest, and even if some of it is, it's doubtful the personal photos are.
Even if the content of the leaks was fake, which we have no evidence to indicate and none of the key actors have really claimed (as opposed to the story about how they were obtained), it would still be legal to publish it because the public officials involved mean it has a clear public interest.
There’s the possibility of civil damages if it amounts to defamation, but that’s quite a standard to reach. Such damages would fall on the publisher of the story, the NY Post, but not a platform like Twitter (per section 230 safe harbor immunity). There is no legal gray area here.
This is the same reason why those who publicized the now widely rebuked Steele Dossier are not facing legal consequences for it (including Twitter), nor should they.
Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
> the public officials involved mean it has a clear public interest.
It's clear only to you. You cannot normally legally publish hacked or stolen photos of celebrities. The personal, intimate, or family photos of Hunter Biden almost certainly do not meet the bar for public interest.
Twitter is not liable here. But as a private company they're allowed to have a policy against linking to hacked or stolen material on their platform. It's the NY Post that's in a grey area.
> Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
My original comment was in response to someone saying Twitter blocked it because it was Russian propaganda, which is simply not true.
That's circular reasoning. According to Twitter's statement, they blocked directly linking to hacked materials (which includes personal, intimate photos of Hunter Biden). They haven't suppressed any other discussion on Hunter Biden or the contents of that laptop.
Maybe you don't believe Twitter. Maybe Twitter suppressed the story for political reasons and you feel that proves the hacked content is of public interest. But if Twitter was honest then their policy is just to not allow direct links to any hacked or stolen photos. It doesn't mean they're important.
How are personal photos of Hunter Biden with his family important to public interest?
I don't think anyone is sure what it is yet. A common tactic in misinformation campaigns is to mix authentic (possibly hacked) photos with forged material. The authentic material is added to make the leak seem more believable.
By fabricating a story to be released exactly on October 15 where there's not enough time to verify if it is true or not.
We are here on Hacker News, are you certain that a legally blind person in Delaware. would be the guy to fly to all the way from California to repair water damaged laptop? If you don't know how such repair looks like, I recommend you to search Luis Rosmann on YouTube (actually cool to watch anyway).
I initially thought that the repair maybe involved reinstalling windows or removing viruses (which you could get assistance from text to speech tooling), but it was a water damage.
I wasn't born in US, but I'm an US citizen. It's funny you're accusing me being a foreign agent, when your account is only 6 months old and only talks about politics here.
As far as I know the Biden residence was sold few years ago, and Hunter lives in LA, but could be wrong, it's not possible to find definitive answer. But he has a house and his son was born in LA so high chance that's where he lives.
I also have hard time to believe that someone who makes $80k a month would care about laptop repair, and even if he did, wouldn't have someone on payroll (perhaps IT person from his company) who would go to his house to get it fixed.
Also, I still can't see how a legally blind person (I know legally blind doesn't mean completely blind) can do a water damage repair.
There are so many other holes in that story, but even if ALL of that was true, I don't see how actions of a 50 year old man implicate his father. There isn't any "smoking gun" in relation to Joe Biden. So what was the purpose of this story again?
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
You can call it "censorship" or "content moderation." I don't care, the distinction is meaningless for this conversation. The only meaningful argument is what Twitter (for example) CAN do (legally), and what they SHOULD do (morally).
Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they like.
More of a judgment call, but I would argue that Twitter is morally in the right as well. This is obviously a case of carefully engineering disinformation, using America's value of freedom of speech against us. If they don't suppress it, Twitter is actively aiding bad actors, with very serious consequences. Twitter does not want to be in the business of content moderation, but in this case the information is question is so obviously falsified; it is spread so obviously in bad faith; and its consequences are so obviously dangerous to the nation, that they are justified in taking a moral stand against it.
Good question. The answer is yes. Aside from the factual basis (or lack thereof) of the information in question, there's the question of how it's been used. Giuliani, obviously the bad actor of this story, has been sitting on this laptop for a year. If he wanted to have a serious discussion about Biden's alleged impropriety, he should have released it early. At this point in the election cycle, it's a blatant attempt to grab a news cycle and force voters to a bad decision before the dust has settled.
I support a total blackout of political stories in the run-up to an election.
[Edit: rephrase to clarify that my position would not change.]
No, prior restraint is a form of censorship where you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. "Content moderation" is a euphemism for censorship that you agree with. "Content moderation" is to platform censorship as "prevention of material support for terrorism" and "the maintenance of the public order" is to prior restraint.
I am always impressed when people make these kinds of absolute statements about the primacy of private property rights.
Now, let's consider:
* Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent
* Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club
* Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money
etc.
I am not saying I agree with those statements. I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform," you are not saying anything substantively different than those statements.
In a universe where the ability to put your speech in front of other people depends on being able to post it online in a place where they might be able to see, there are trade-offs involved that seem to be conveniently shoved aside when it is about news you do not like.
I prefer the cacophonous chaos of everyone being able to tell me about stuff they deem important. One step further, I prefer to live a society that can learn to live with that without falling apart.
Your analogy is broken. Clever to try to compare Twitter to discrimination though.
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
Twitter and Facebook are getting closer to: the post not delivering your mail, or the power company turning off your electricity despite paying your bill, or the phone company cutting you off after you say the wrong thing...
But isn't the sort of sneaky racism exactly what people claim is such a problem today? There's not overt claim of inferiority or an explicit denial of opportunity, but yet there is still "systemic racism".
The analogy is that Twitter can't censor stories that benefit republicans, but if the "reasons" for censoring always seem to work against republicans and are applied inconsistently, then perhaps things aren't as they seem.
It is an analogy, and it's already established we aren't discussing law. The question is the principles, causes, and reasons at play and how they relate to other principles, causes, and reasons.
I think it would be helpful to forget about the "Republicans" and think about other people who might hold other opinions which may not be shared by the owners of one of the dominant platforms for announcing your views.
No one is saying that New York Times has to publish the story. However, if someone wants to publish a story and announce it to their followers on a platform, citizens need to think long and hard before agreeing to "whatever the shareholders want goes."
The fact that they do not have a product they sell to the recipients of information at a positive price makes it harder for competitive alternatives to gain any traction at all. So, the fact that once a platform like this achieves a certain reach it is unlikely to be effectively challenged means we need to think hard about how much power we want them to have in terms of shaping the conversation: Both conversation we like and conversation we do not like ... It is not sufficient to think in terms of your affinity to the dominant forces. You have to think about what kind of society you want to be in when you are in the minority.
It can be, and the line may move. Sometimes “systematic racism” or similar arguments are thrown about without context, or with a local context that doesn’t make sense to others.
The republicans have a serious problem, and it isn’t Twitter. Blaming media outlets for not paying attention to things is a well worn if dubious path. It’s hard to give credence to with this story given the provenance of the information and obvious problems.
One person’s chaos is another’s vitality. Every human on earth, by living the natural world, has chosen chaos/vitality at some level. We also “moderate” that entropy in lots of convenient and comforting ways.
Cybernature is a new experience. As a species, we are working out what level of moderation we would like.
Explorers tends to be rough-and-ready sorts, and so veer towards the vitality side of things. They know how to make the chaos work for them. For good and/or evil. Since there isn’t the downside of “instadeath” of the physical world, more risk-taking, and thus more chaos, may be justified.
Settlers tend to like fences, highways, channel markings, flight corridors...structure. There are usually eventually more settlers in any area, so their view prevails in the long run.
(You can be an explorer in one area and a settler in another...it’s not some permanent psychological feature. You can demand political content freedom from de facto pseudocarrier monopolies while being happy with a locked-down OS for self-driving cars.)
In computing, the barrier to entry for exploration is so low and it is so new (in the long view) that the percentage of settlers is pretty low, hence the cultural bias toward freedom (including content) rather than control in these forums.
[Personally, I trust the American people to curate their own content. I expect the educational system to educate the citizenry to be skilled enough in critical thinking to be able to curate the content presented.
But I expect the marketplace of ideas to police itself against systematic biases and inaccuracies, either with effective editing of its own content and/or in actively and effectively supporting a “loyal opposition” to its views.
Twitter seems to be doing neither, because it’s much closer to being a de facto common carrier monopoly than a media channel. Common carrier monopolies had been accepted and successful for a hundred years in the US, but only with heavy Federal regulation. The hip, cool alternative: break them up.
Great truths from Gen X, the generation to which you can’t easily mass-market.]
> I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform,"
That's a straw man. I never said anything like what you are pretending I said. They obviously could not ban users on the basis of race or religion or a number of other criteria.
But that's not really what's under discussion. The question is should Twitter (or other platforms) lose their right to moderate content when they become successful?
Doh. By the same logic China (or other oppressors) is not censoring anything because people can travel to Vietnam (or Japan for that matter) and they can tell anyone what they want.
I would say you're proposing a false dichotomy. There are 4 options or more.
In the case of Twitter, in order to maintain their "good samaritan" the extent of their "content moderation" is quite specficic.
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.
The NYPost article was damaging a political opponent to be sure. It was not obscene, lewd, filthy; though clearly twitter allows porn so these are immediately ruled out. It wasn't violent by any means.
Was it harassing or otherwise objectionable? Well I think there's some good debate possible but that debate is cut off immediately because the "content moderation" must be done in good faith. This very clearly is violated.
So Twitter did not content moderate as per the laws they must obey. Therefore we now have 2 options. Twitter loses platform protections and becomes directly liable for any and all content they publish aka any anonymous person posting. OR they stop their censorship.
Interesting that this one is showing up here. I pay to subscribe subscribe to Matt Taibbi’s opinion piece/investigative thoughts via occasional emails. This was a good read, but other recent ones have been better. Perhaps this one was free?
I think Twitter was well within their rights to refuse to allow their website to be a vector for what they considered to be foreign meddling in an American election -- something that they've been criticized for in the very recent past.
If it wasn't a foreign meddling attempt then it was a domestic one. To me this is less a question about Twitter's right to block stories (which it absolutely has) but rather a question of whether election meddling attempts should be recognized on their own as blockable or censorable content.
The most recent OTM had a segment about the way conservative groups have been following the Russian playbook, creating fake local news sites, taking advantage of underemployed journalists to seed real content as cover for disinformation articles etc.
I'm definitely not one closed off to this story, I think it's important. That said I think "we" tend to forget that platforms like Twitter are private companies, we don't really have a "right" to post anything to them.
Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
If we're not happy about the moderation we don't have to use the moderating platform.
> Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
That may be the latest popular interpretation of the bill of rights, but it is absolutely not in the original spirit of its authors. They were defined as "inalienable rights" granted to all people. In other words, your essential human rights to free expression don't get waived depending on who the offending party is.
There is no “offending party”. Freedom of speech means speech cannot be compulsory. What would be contrary to the “original spirit” would be forcing Twitter and Facebook to amplify speech they don’t want to.
Your implication is that Twitter and Facebook are human beings, and I think a majority of people would contest that idea.
What I am saying is that the authors of the bill of rights did not intend for a person's human rights to go away the moment they are persecuted by an entity other than the United States federal government.
The New York Post is also not a human being, for that matter. But I wasn’t implying that.
People want to use Twitter’s property to spread a message, and Twitter said no. That’s not “persecution”, it just means they have to find some other way to do it. If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
We already have a significant amount of legal precedent to compel a private business to serve certain groups. Those protected groups were legally enshrined in the first place to extend them the same rights that everyone else already enjoyed by common custom, not to create a new group of people with elevated privileges. In my opinion, it's time that we now legally enshrine the common custom of a right to service as well.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. What group has elevated privileges, and what group is being discriminated against that needs protecting?
> If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
In some countries that would be violation of consumer protection laws. If some service or product is offered to a general public, than arbitrary exclusion of a consumer is illegal in some jurisdictions.
I do not think anyone is confused about whether or not the bill of rights applies to private companies. Free speech is an idea that can be extended to all types of speech.
Comments exist on many prior HN discussions of Twitter and Facebook that demonstrate confusion around whether the bill of rights applies to private companies or not.
The problem here is something new, as Matt points out.
Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a commoner) to know what I did wrong? Do I have the opportunity to change? Do I have the opportunity to face my accusers in a forum?
Our rights, and the framework they reside in, are far too outdated for this sort of problem. The leaders we have in both business and government are too cowardly, weak, or self-interested to directly address the McCarthy-esque patterns that are beginning to emerge that seem to be opportunistically aligned to further narratives.
If your point is that the originators of the Biden story are shocked and confused that it's being suppressed in an opaque tech cooperating agreement, they shouldn't be: the story is being suppressed because it's at best illegally obtained data, and at worst deliberately falsified; and in either case, it's now being used by bad actors in an attempt to manipulate the results of the election. There's no mystery here: Twitter is being very clear about why this story is blocked.
There's a severe double standard here given that Twitter has allowed worse than that, which was the whole point of the article: that the decision making is opaque, arbitrary, and probably coordinated.
As Matt stated, and really the whole point of the article, the Biden story doesn't matter. Forget about charging Biden with any wrong-doing for a moment and see what this relationship and mechanism between law enforcement, tech companies, and media entities is for its merits: The same mechanism that autocratic governments use for control and operated in the name of "the public good".
I don't follow, are you suggesting that Tech companies and the media, in acting directly in opposition to the sitting president, are somehow forming an autocracy? Does that word continue to have a meaning?
>Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
Congress is currently grilling tech CEOs as to why they aren't banning / censoring QAnon and similar information. It seems Congress has moved to attempt to censor free speech by applying pressure on these private platforms to censor free speech.
>That issue about the functioning of democracy is one where Facebook is in the spotlight right now as a hugely powerful platform for misinformation in the run-up to the US election.
>This week the social media giant moved to shut down groups spreading the Qanon conspiracy theory, which promotes the idea that President Trump is leading a battle against satanic child abuse.
>It was the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who wanted a really tough approach - a minority report from the Republicans agreed there was a problem, but favoured milder solutions.
Congress is grilling tech companies as to why they aren't censoring speech hard enough and are threatening a "really tough approach" if they don't comply. It seems censoring speech is not only government pressured now, but also bipartisan.
[I posted this comment as a child of another comment below, but I think it's important enough to this discussion that I'm reposting it here.]
To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
At "best" they're evidence of extreme corruption that compromises US national security. The allegations and evidence points to many insider dealings with CCP linked Chinese companies including what appear to be unreported loans from Chinese banks.
A cursory reading of the both the data itself and the circumstances by which it came to light will reveal that your interpretation is highly improbable.
You can believe what you like. But don't ask me to believe that a person took 3 laptops to a repair company in a state where he doesn't live; that the said company was operated by a blind person; that the security camera footage of the delivery of the laptops was erased; that the laptops were unintentionally forgotten there; and that they somehow found their way into the hands of one Rudolph Giuliani.
To believe that story, you have to be gullible or complicit.
Where are you getting this idea that 3 laptops were dropped off to this repair company? There was one laptop.
The repair shop is in Delaware, where Joe Biden was a senator for many decades and where the Bidens have held various political positions for many decades.
I suspect that you really don't understand the story that well. That is understandable considering the insane amount of gaslighting, misinformation, and censorship that is going on around it.
My apologies: one laptop, three hard drives. My point stands.
He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. Why would he travel across the country to visit a repair shop in the middle of nowhere with a conveniently blind owner and conveniently erased camera footage. There is no universe in which this story is plausible.
Before accusing me of not understanding the story, please take a moment to read what I wrote. You are contributing to the gaslighting around this topic.
They made copies of the hard drive in the laptop? As a software engineer I can assure you that that it is very easy to make copies of a hard drive and I expect that a computer repair guy would know how.
> He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time.
The Bidens have multiple houses in Delaware. There are many pictures leaked from Hunter's laptop that have Delaware in the geocode. If you want to be weird about it you can go look up the Biden family's social media accounts (still up) and see pictures of them at their houses in Delaware.
It really sounds like you just don't want to believe this. Very cult like behavior.
The reporters at the New York Post thought the story was so dubious that they refused to be named in the byline, and the basic premise directly contradicts the historical (and easily verifiable) facts surrounding the Shokin’s removal.
The reporters who wrote the story were so skeptical of what they wrote they didn't add their names to their own story... that they themselves wrote.
That's pretty stupid and unlikely. More likely, people were concerned about the real world ramifications of having their names on the story (e.g. getting killed or harassed).
I understand that this is a talking point but use your brain.
This has got to be Taibbi click-baiting pro-Trump subscribers. He buries his admission that Trump's Biden/Burisma narrative is a lie so deep in the piece, you really have to trudge through a lot of hand-wringing drivel to find it. You can read 90% of this piece thinking that Taibbi is clearly sympathetic to the Republican narrative, and he gives no indication otherwise!
I didn't get that vibe at all. To me Taibbi sounds like someone like me: a resident of the Democratic party who is willing to criticize the ends as well as the means of both parties.
This sort of conviction is not looked upon very highly by our "free" society.
I think your reading of Taibbi is correct. Unfortunately, articles like this feed into the currently fashionable victim mentality of the Republican party, wherein they contend that big tech unfairly suppresses news from conservative sources, and that there's a grand conspiracy afoot to protect Biden. I don't think that's true, but that is how this will play out in that particular fever swamp.
"The other side is worse!" cannot be perpetually be the answer or response. Politics is not everything; at some point we have to understand that politics does not make a society, a society makes politics.
Ask yourself this: if these same mechanisms, that again are used by autocratic governments, get taken advantage of by a future administration and we somehow defeat them will you be willing to admit accountability and culpability for the outcome? If not, then walk cautiously, because this future is very real and discounting people that raise the flag does not age well.
This is something he does in all of his recent political writing, to the point that I had to go and search for articles where he’s unambiguous about his political stances. Even after finding those, I never quite felt like I’m looking at the same political reality as him, and ended up unsubscribing. I’m sympathetic to the substance of his writing, so maybe that’s just what non-partisan writing looks like and it’s too strange to read in this media environment? I don’t know, but if anyone has more thoughts on this, then I’d like to hear them.
"maybe that’s just what non-partisan writing looks like and it’s too strange to read in this media environment"
This.
One must get beyond the idea that one team is unambiguously worse. In a way, Taibbi writes almost exclusively about the tendency of Americans to ignore the misbehavior of their own side and exaggerate that of the other.
There are lots and lots of articles informing the rank-and-file how to interpret contemporary events; how to discuss the Bidens' corruption, for instance (usually: bring up the Trumps' corruption, but often outright denial and shaming anyone who discusses it)
People who appreciate Taibbi are those who can hold at least two narratively contradictory facts in mind at the same time; eg that both the Bidens and the Trumps are corrupt; without leaping to defend one or the other.
Unfortunately I think this really nails why the content of the laptop is so difficult for many people to come to terms with.
We all know corruption happens at all levels in Washington, but if the contents of the laptop are true, it means a serious loss of ground in the culture war (potentially game over). It can’t be true and must not be true. To keep the game going we need to shut our eyes and wait to be rescued by a comfortable escape hatch narrative.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadI wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.
Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
Will we have to resort to signal and other encrypted direct messaging methods to have open discussion?
Or run your own mail server end hope your recipient doesn’t use one that censors?
Creepy stuff.
Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
Joe Biden is a terrible candidate. He's just not as bad as Trump. The fact that America is in that stupid position is its own fault.
I don't vote for lesser evils. Because of that I never have to regret how I voted.
This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously false and dangerous speech should be suppressed. Twitter (and other sites) is taking a moral stand, not an expedient stand.
The concept that any person or organization should be granted absolute authority to serve as the arbiter of whay constitutes dangerous or false speech, and the power to arbitrarily silence those who utter it offends me, and I consider it to be dangerous in and of itself. We'll not be able to agree on this.
WRT the NYP piece, probably foreign sourced is about right. Even before the media picked up its Russia Trumpet, I remember reading a rumor towards the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine phone call debacle that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's some. Irrespective of the source, the computer shop narrative reeks.
But in spite of information's questionable provenance, it has been accompanied with compromising images of Hunter himself, and beyond stating that a meeting with Burisma execs wasn't on Biden's 'official' schedule, the biden campaign has yet (to my knowledge), to expressly deny the validity of the documents.
If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA. Beyond ambiguous citations of 'anonymous officials', I've yet to read that they've communicated anything to this effect. The Director of National Intelligence has gone so far as to claim that this wasn't a Russian disinformation project. But he's a Trump apparatchik with no history in intelligence outside his appointment, so I generally ignore him.
Probably foreign sourced? My gut says yes.
Possibly disinformation? The juries still out. Possibly's a pretty low bar for stealing someone's voice.
The tech companies took it upon themselves to censor this information. They've not claimed they were compelled or reccommended to by any official bodies any more than they were required to censor the name of the Urkaine whistleblower. But they chose to, of their own accord.
If you want to be treated like a platform, you have to live with the fact that your platform's going to be used to further the aims of anyone who wannts to use it. Bar illegal content and behaviors (things disinformation is not), the most you should do is notify your users, sit back, and take it.
I also try to do the same[1] but crocodiletears did much better.
[1]: you'll find me pointing out the "fine people on both sides" has been debunked and asking questions about the Hunter Biden disk.
Questions: why would the Chinese do that? Or do you mean a Chinese billionaire did it without the involvement of the government? Or do you think their recommendation of Biden is a calculated move to get people to vote for Trump?
Whether or not China would support the action is opaque to me. Trump's trade policies have massively reframed our relationship to the country, but whether or not that's been a positive thing for factions within the CCP is well beyond my knowledge or means to learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui#GNews
It's also the only site where I've seen the "BGY Program" mentioned. https://gnews.org/51672/
This is ridiculously wrong. The FBI and CIA and every other government agency absolutely do not want to comment on something like this, because it just pulls them into this political bullshit. This is exactly the "official" reason James Comey was fired, for an almost identical issue, almost exactly 4 years ago. It is a near 100% certainty that any FBI or CIA official commenting on this issue now will be fired a few months from now.
Just like with DT this is also pulled out of context. I don't like any of them and won't (and can't) vote for any of them so I have no dog in the fight.
That website shouldn't have been blocked, whoever did it should probably been charged with election meddling but it doesn't change my view of Biden.
As for the videos I think many of them shows him (clumsily) trying to comfort people.
Again - I'm also the guy who points out that "fine people on both sides" as presented in mainstream media is a hoax.
I don't like either if them but think we should be fair to both if them.
If I lived in the US my lawn sign would be "Any Reasonable Person".
I didn't mean the site owner did election meddling, rather than Facebook when thet selectively block sites like this.
But what is the rule then? Manipulating social media in front of an election is only illegal if you are a foreigner?
For example, cohen paying off Trump's mistresses was prosecuted as an illegal campaign contribution.
In three of the videos with younger women, they all seemed to recoil from his "affection". With the young girls, I don't think it would ever be appropriate for a stranger to touch them like he did.
I pointed out it was clumsy ;-)
But I think the larger context is he knew he was on tape so he should know better than to willfully do something that would be taken as sexual harassment.
I honestly think he tried to come off as caring, just failed spectacularly.
We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?
It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.
Edit:
> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.
Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
People are still doing "but her emails" despite all the investigations into what happened. It's clear that the Hunter Biden story is an attempt to fabricate a "but his emails" narrative; there may be some facts in there, but none that impinge on Joe Biden.
Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view.
The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.
I promise I could argue all day about whether your initial simple statement was true or not. What does received mean? What did the email say, and did it actually mean what you paraphrase? You'd probably view it as bad faith (and you'd be right), but that faith already implies the exact social consensus I'm taking about.
Even our understanding of Hunter Biden’s existence is a social construct to most of us, since we have never met him and never will. (It’s much easier to make the call on that one, though, based on pictures and it being undisputed.)
I am a bit puzzled that there wouldn't be a log of who comes in and out of government buildings. It should be easy to prove whether the said executives were at least in the building over that period or not.
I don't think I'm a genius or anything, but why aren't we putting really smart people on this problem and giving them plenty of funding? I constantly think we're just a few steps away from putting in a small set of technological solutions that would over time solve all our political/criminal problems.
E.g. Just imagine a world where all politicians, CEOs, major figure-heads are safely and securely recorded constantly. Think of all the ridiculous talking points and "Scandals" that would go away, be disproven, or never occur at all.
In my mind, the constructive way to proceed would be, and I'd hope that you or others would indulge me on this: How can we have a tamper-proof evidentiary record of all the conversations that politicians engage in whilst minimizing the potential of it being regularly abused/weaponized and compromising the privacy of the individuals involved?
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...
For instance, when the media tell you "you can get reinfected by covid", is it a lie? As of today, there has been only 5 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, out of 50 millions confirmed cases. So it is technically possible but statistically insignificant. Are the media lying when they tell you it could happen to you? I think they do. But technically they don't.
Also most of the lying is lying by omission. I present you one fact but you will never hear about that other fact that completely mitigates the first (the context, or the rest of the sentence, etc). So you can say something factually correct while completely misleading your interlocutor.
Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.
Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.
Have you heard of an October surprise?
"On October 20, 1880, shortly before the 1880 presidential election, a forged letter was published purportedly written by James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the United States. At the time, most white Americans opposed Chinese immigration and both presidential candidates were in favor of immigration restrictions.[3]"
And a list of many more.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise
That's exactly what I propose, precisely because October surprises are not in the best interest of democracy.
Many countries [1] prohibit all political news stories during their election cycle. An added benefit of this policy would be to limit the length of the election cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
Without your proposed law: Stuff shows up 2 weeks before the election.
With a 10-week blackout: Stuff shows up 12 weeks before the election. (2 weeks before the blackout)
Just an inclination, not sure how much of this would be supported by the literature if there is any
Years of "sources says" later disproved. Russia this, Russia that. And it's only now that we should stop propagation of unverified stories?
Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.
I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.
Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.
I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.
I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
My guess is that any legislation attempting to make social media common carriers would eventually be found to unconstitutionally abridge the first amendment.
A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
At the end of the day, you still have a variety of content sources on the internet to consume that same content. Twitter is not the only source of information, and if you believe it is, then we have more serious problems.
I was literally banned from r/conservative for posting a question that folks found very inconvenient. Should they be forced to reverse the ban? How far do you believe is too far?
In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.
I’m surprised the free enterprise conservatives are actually the ones so against this. “We want government to get out of the way... unless it furthers our agenda and helps us stay in power, in which case, let’s threaten to regulate or break up private companies.”
On one hand yes, but on the other, does that also apply to other services? Can I open a shop only for <insert skin color> people only and claim that if you don't like it, go somewhere else? How about other categories, protected or otherwise? As a society, we already agree that there are some freedoms that private businesses are denied, and for good reasons, because when taken to the extremes, you end up with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche.
> A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
Not really - you can start your own media outlet and selectively run the stories you want, that's fine. But if you just regurgitate user-generated content, IMO you better be really careful about applying your own rules consistently and in a transparent manner.
You're missing the fine distinction between protected and non-protected categories. Discrimination based on what you are is banned - those constitute the protected categories. Sex, gender, national origin, race, family status, veteran status, religion, and sexual orientation all fall under things you are.
Business and private organizations however, are allowed to discriminate against their customers based on their actions. It gets fuzzier if those actions intersect with a protected category (e.g. a supermarket probably (IANAL) can't throw out a gay couple for family-friendly PDA if a hetero couple would be allowed to stay). But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
Imagine if weren't so. Anyone could disrupt religious services by shouting obscenities. You couldn't have a peaceful shopping trip or grocery run. It would be total chaos.
> But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement (and I can still discriminate based on what you are, but maintaining plausible deniability).
In reality what they would actually do would depend on what that "something" is. If it's something like "don't eat meat on odd-numbered dates", you're probably fine. On the other hand, you say something harmful or distasteful to other protected categories, you'd be lucky to keep your account. They'd weigh the harm to you of kicking you off versus the harm to others by letting you stay and (of course) the PR liability incurred by doing either.
If the discrimination criteria are broadly found to match up with a protected class you're in legal hot water. IOW using proxies for "plausible deniability" is a risky strategy and businesses have been punished in the past for doing it.
> It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement
You're right it can be. But again, consider the alternative on online forums. Anyone could post porn or vulgarity on religious forums, or socialist propaganda on business forums. It would be very disruptive if selective enforcement weren't allowed.
2. Neutral doesn't mean "whoever can game the algorithm wins"
3. Less than 50% of Americans are opposed to suppressing sharing of articles like the one suppressed.
You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.
Which part of it is not believable?
We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.
The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).
There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...
Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.
I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...
> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)
In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).
I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].
So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
I notice they started with their political opponents.
As if that already isn't the case...
It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
I am astonished at your blinding confidence in your ability to distinguish misinformation from news. You must be a Facebook content moderator ::snicker::
What I can tell you is that it is absurd to believe it is true given what we know about the details surrounding the "discovery" of the information.
Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.
Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.
At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.
This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.”
Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20
In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou...
> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.
> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.
> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.
People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'.
> has catalogued these at length on his substack.
If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent?
> In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier
Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.)
But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other.
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
[2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what...
[3] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
As to “White Fragility”—Taibbi’s language is colorful, but that book isn’t mainstream left: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi.... (Podcast version: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-awokening/id....) Whereas Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist” is a book about public policy written in familiar liberal public policy language, “White Fragility” is a bizarre self-help book for white people who read Kendi’s book and didn’t understand it.
Also, while "Hitlerian race theory" is an appropriate description for someone who says white people should "strive to be less white." Picturing someone telling my half-white daughter that makes me think that Taibbi's description is on the nose.
Also you clearly appear to be unfamiliar with Taibbi's writing style. That's how he wrote stories about the war crimes of the previous admins; remember those? Or is GWB now considered a leftist?
It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider lament about the media reaction he expects to follow the NYT story, not the story itself. And in particular that his own article years earlier in Rolling Stone already told the same basic story about Trump as con man but I guess won't get any credit.
As for the list of bombshells, there a link to another story which steps through many references to news stories in turn, in a narrative style, not an enumerated list.
There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous.
I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Republican policies are horrific (their approach to deficits is not acceptable), that their rhetoric is sometimes unhinged and that the fringe elements of the right wing are dangerous lunatics. Still think they are the better of 2 options.
And on White Fragility is exactly the sort of book that would have, in the 1940s, been used to justify Hitlerian race theory. In the 1940s it would be pointing out that Jews are systematically advantaged and as a group trying to downplay race but that one can't claim to be blind to it.
"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?
The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.
[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha...
[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134...
[2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...
They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties.
Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.
What exactly did the New York Post mischaracterize? I read the article and my general impression was that it was a bit sensationalized, but that's rather typical when it comes to bombshell scoops. My understanding of the term misinformation is that it refers to presenting outright false information as fact, not the (unfortunately typical) narrative framing of factual information that happens in the news every day.
Regarding the provenance of the emails, the FBI subpoenaed the laptop over a year ago, and they've had the original in their possession since then. If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play, I'd consider that a good indication that the laptop is indeed Hunter's and was found in the repair shop. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop on Oct 13, in an attempt to recover the laptop.
We only know the FBI subpoenaed the laptop because it was leaked to Fox News. The leak itself is presumably accurate, but we have no information about what the FBI did or did not find on the laptop – except for a letter that they have "nothing to add at this time" to an appearance by DNI John Ratcliffe on Fox Business.
In that appearance, Ratcliffe (a highly partisan official) did claim that the laptop was not part of a disinformation campaign, but also said that "I know so little about those emails and what is apparently on Hunter Biden's laptop". So it seems like he was referring to a lack of information about the laptop from the intelligence community rather than inside information from the FBI.
Admittedly, the FBI generally can share information with the intelligence community, and apparently in this case it has not. That does suggest that they probably don't have e.g. evidence that a specific foreign actor was behind things. But we don't know whether they've found evidence that foul play in general occurred or might have occurred. Heck, it's even possible that they found evidence of foul play by a specific entity, but didn't send it to the intelligence community because that entity is American – though I wouldn't say that's likely.
As for the lawyer, the closest we have to hard evidence is a screenshot of an email apparently showing that a lawyer for Hunter Biden spoke with the repair shop owner after Hunter was presumably asked for comment by the Post; it doesn't show any specific claims made by the lawyer. Beyond that we just have Adam Housley and Rudy Giuliani relaying the claims of the repair shop owner. Leaving aside those sources' lack of trustworthiness, Housley himself claimed that the attorney had the wrong year for when Hunter dropped off the laptop and "didn't even know when he left em there" [1]. If anything, that suggests that Hunter doesn't know the provenance, though it's hard to say without more information.
[1] https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/1317319606126604288
You're just saying that a misinformation campaign aiming at manipulating the US elections quite possibly according to the whims of a totalitarian regime that aims at undermining the US from the top might not have resorted to use totally false and made-up information.
Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against.
I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining beacon of democracy, see their democratic process dragged through the mud by people the likes of you, who are more interested in fabricating propaganda and conduct smear campaigns than actually help out their country rise above their internal problems.
Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote from 4/2019, signed by Hunter Biden: https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hunter%20bi...
And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`
`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`
`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`
https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden...
It's not a smear campaign. These are facts. The Biden's are political whorebags and don't deserve power.
I'm a 10th generation American. The spirit of liberty runs deep in me. But speaking truth to power is part of the democratic process. Sorry you were mistaken in believing that democracy is all sunshine and rainbows. It's not. It's very messy and imperfect. And like gardening, you have to weed out the corruption by calling it out.
The zerohedge URL is truncated and consequently doesn't work.
> And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
Show us the DKIM headers and let us verify the authenticity, then we'll talk about the content of the emails.
My understanding is that the purported emails were sent to Biden. He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him, so verifying that these emails were sent doesn't really prove anything. If he had forwarded the emails in a way that indicated his agreement, or if they had been sent by someone else connected to the candidate, that would be a situation in which DKIM would be relevant.
In which case the whole situation is nonsense and moot.
But it appears that some of them are from Biden - "The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire" - in which case the DKIM headers would be a simple check on authenticity, no?
Edit: actually, screw it, I'm also going to point out that there are way too many people showing up in this thread with useless number strings in their handles and completely blank profiles, trying to argue a conspiracy theory.
This is part of why institutional trust has collapsed in the US and this will all end violently.
This also results in something related to what the article talks about: any reasonable criticism that goes against mainstream thought (or against mainstream news in general) will immediately be coopted and used as ammo by those mentioned in my first point who will take it and twist it into absurd, conspiracy-level or hate-fueled perspectives thereby minimizing the legitimacy of original criticism in the eyes of the public.
Fundamentally, for me the null hypothesis is that this is typical election year opposition research. Those claiming that this is an elaborate Russian conspiracy have to present a pretty compelling case to convince me otherwise, given the repeated collapse of such narratives over the past few years.
Here's my take: When you look from different angles it gets harder to hide things. Fox News wants to hide some things, CNN wants to hide others. Looking at it from both angles you get to see some of the stuff each tries to hide and maybe you can make a reasonable guess on what both tries to hide.
(there's an obvious question about what you'd replace them with, but I think the answer is almost anything would be more informative)
What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive.
> What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
You're using the word "criminally released" but that is an unproven fact, the times claims that "all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it". Now I wonder how that can be as well, but at least that's the statement.
So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation, I can see them looking at both article and thinking the first one talks about a hard drive being copied by a shop owner and leaked. While the other is nebulous on the origin but claims it was legally obtained.
This is obviously all speculation. But that be my thoughts, that I can see how the policy might have applied to one and not the other.
I also have to think that it coming from the NY Post must have contributed. I don't assume Twitter reviews every tweet manually, and I can see how NY Post is more likely to get flagged than NY Times.
The NY Post article claims the laptop was abandoned at the repair shop (never picked up) and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner.
>all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it
Notice that The Times does not say the source was legally authorized to release it. I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released. For example, if an IRS employee or an employee at Trump's accountant released it without permission, those would be crimes.
>So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation
I can accept that for the low level employee at the time of moderation. But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
In that case it wouldn't make it a hack, but just a leak.
> and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner
That's something I'm still fuzzy on. I'm not sure if it's the law in the state, or just the store's contractual policy. Also, I don't know if the laptop becoming property of the shop extends to the information contained within it. And it also didn't specify if the data on the hard drive was password protected or encrypted in any way which meant retrieval would still require hacking into it.
> But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
I can't speak to that. Now Twitter has a PR issue, and I'm guessing whatever choices they've made or not are based on them trying to mitigate and limit the PR damages.
My guess is, the NY Post is now smearing twitter's own reputation, and possibly twitter doesn't like that, and are worried they'd use their account to further promote anti-twitter rethoric which might be why Twitter is against unblocking their account.
I'm a bit confused how they unblocked the tweet about the email story but kept the account blocked, that's a bit strange.
Another thing I wondered is how likely could Twitter be accountable for if Hunter were to sue them for defamation and libel? Normally it seem fair game to defame and cause libel to politicians, but would that extend to Hunter which isn't directly involved in politics? Or could that be a winning lawsuit from him if he wanted too?
Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.
This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
And you thought casino keywords brought in revenue...
Baudrillard talks about this regarding the Watergate scandal. The word scandal implies this is a one and done thing, you've seen the thing, and there is absolutely nothing else to see. This was an outlier.
But was it? I think this one story itself is a canary in the coal mine. Extrapolate this to the long tail of stories for which their potential suppression won't make enough waves, and this is a much much bigger problem than what your non-tech acquaintances might hear.
This concentrated of a narrative shaping power is certainly not unprecedented but is something we would normally associate with totalitarian regimes. And even then it would be easy for people to assume the suppression from state channels. What we have today is a much knife-edge mixture of truths, non-truths and missing truths, coming from hundreds to thousands of micro channels with people's faces attached to it. I think the grand total of its effects will indeed be unprecedented.
There are emails being released constantly detailing various business dealings with CCP linked companies including undisclosed loans from Chinese banks that the Bidens continually roll forward.
That's not surprising, because it's manufactured and bogus.
I don't think anyone has actually claimed that. What makes you say this?
You're hearing more about the supression than the suppressed story? That suggests the suppression worked.
The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions.
Ironic, considering the founder of the NYPost and his opinions on market economies.
Your claim that a failure to issue retractions is an admission of failure in accountability is true - when the reporting needs retractions.
So far, there's no evidence that the reporting does.
Yes, I claim the reason is a lack of accountability. You claim the reason is impeccability of reporting. I think the reputation and style of reporting is relevant to deciding which of those factors is more relevant. You're free to disagree with that.
But please don't call it a clever shift. I'm having your conversation here.
How can you call the lack of a retraction a lack of accountability, when there is no evidence that a retraction is necessary?
It's fairly clear to me that the burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim that the NY Post is even close to the level of journalistic rigor as the NY Times, let alone so far surpasses it that they issue fewer retractions because of the accuracy of their reporting.
You're asking me to prove water is wet. You're showing me a dog in a trench coat and telling me it's an accomplished neurosurgeon. Have you ever even read the Post or the Times? Have you lived in NY, and are familiar with either publication? I'm pretty sure I'm done arguing because you've presented nothing of substance on your side, besides the claim that I have not provided logical evidence, which is correct, but I reject that burden. Feel free to offer any information of value you might have.
As it stands, there is no evidence that the specific story requires retractions.
You ask for evidence. The evidence is the laptop, and the text messages, and the emails. If you disagree that these things are evidence, the burden of disproof is now on you. That's how it works.
And so far, there have not even been as much as basic denials by the Bidens.
Yes, I have lived in NYC for several years, and I still read the Times more than the Post. But this is, once again, meaningless criteria.
You keep trying to make it about the paper, when the discussion is about this specific story.
And you're wrong.
Wikipedia [1] for example cites several sources critical of the paper's veracity. Here [2]'s an article citing employees of the NY Post complaining about the flimsiness of the reporting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/new-york-post-inside...
Meanwhile, CNN and NYTIMES post content and retract it in higher amounts, and they never were surpressed, locked out of their account or even had twitter force to fix "itself" by now agreeing that they'd "wouldn't" remove content but now just "flag it."
That, is not respect, that is an alliance.
Retractions are an indication of journalistic integrity. So of course they don't issue retractions, that would imply commitment to the truth. Who else doesn't issue retractions? Fox, The Sun, The Times (UK).
No one would argue that Twitter does journalism, but their content policy does prohibit spreading of deliberate, dangerous misinformation, which the Post reporting obviously is.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/new-york-post-inside...
If there was an actual story here, the DOJ and FBI are more than capable of launching an investigation. The NYTimes, WaPo, LaTimes, WSJ, would all have no issues reporting on this either through investigation or a leak from those former orgs.
And maybe in the past, this would have mattered, but don't be surprised when after 4 years of norm breaking and corruption, people don't care about this except those with a specific ideology.
That case was hilariously crude attempt at influencing and creating false narratives. The whole thing collapsed quickly but it still had huge impact. Mixing something real and something false makes people accept falsehoods.
Censoring obvious falsehoods like in this case is not the scandal. The lack of policy principles is. Twitter could have reduced the frequency the links show in the feeds dramatically and nobody would notice. It would be there when you look at it, but it would not propagate. In fact, that's what Twitter and Facebook are doing for commercial reasons.
Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trump-revives-false-narrat...
Trump's conspiracy theories thrive in Ukraine, where a young democracy battles corruption and distrust. We talked with two dozen leaders and investigators in Ukraine. They all agree the claims against Joe and Hunter Biden are baseless. Yet they persist. https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2019/10/10/trump...
The facts behind Trump’s bogus accusations about Biden and Ukraine - Trump claims Biden threatened Ukraine to aid his son’s business interests. The facts suggest otherwise. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/23/20879611/j...
----
The latest NY Post story is just crazy.
Man Who Reportedly Gave Hunter’s Laptop to Rudy Speaks Out in Bizarre Interview https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...
What we know — and don't know — about Hunter Biden's alleged laptop https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...
If the basic facts of the story are wrong, like the laptop or emails are not genuine, why don’t the Biden’s deny it?
For starters it doesn’t even need to be discredited — it just needs to be denied, which it hasn’t been. I mean the basic facts like the authenticity of the laptop/emails or the meeting.
* The material was provided via two of Trumps henchmen, who may or may not have altered it along the way.
* They gave it to the NYP after Fox News (never one to miss an opportunity to bash the Democrats) turned it down due to lack of provenance.
* It was originally derived from a laptop that may or may not have been dropped off by Hunter Biden or someone associated with him.
* The computer repairman at the centre of this has given contradictory explanations of the timeline, how many laptops were involved, and whether he contacted the FBI or the FBI contacted him.
Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published.
Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.
Yes, in a way, but also obviously not. If that was their only/primary driver, they'd go all click bait all the time. They wouldn't report things that aren't loved by the masses.
They clearly do, so clicks/shares/likes can't be their primary things.
I do believe that it's partially right, it's just not number one. Number one is agenda, and within the pool of stories that benefit the agenda of the company, they choose what generates most engagement.
There's certainly a part of "we need money from ads", but being able to influence the political decisions of a nation is power. That's a value in and by itself, it's not just something you wield to sell ads.
Even an individual who posts a blog post wants clicks/shares/likes, even if there's no money involved, to validate their work in putting out a post and to bolster their self-esteem. That highlights why capitalism is not itself the issue; any type of news media would just respond to what its customers want. And what the public wants is infotainment, not well-researched stories.
The real problem is people and that's a problem that can't be solved.
It's having a centralised government (which can be used to obtain a lot of power) that create an incentive for misinformation.
Very wrong, but we both know that. Not the brightest war for leftie tech companies to be provoking though.
Capitalism is trash, but this is traditional kleptocracy. Both sides are conservative; one is literally running to "restore normality."
Either he’s better at hiding his crimes than Muller and the Democrat party is able to investigate them, or gasp they can’t actually find anything because there is nothing...
I’m surprised HN keeps this story up given the overlap of philosophies between the tech bubble and Democrat politicians.
That may be unfair but that particular point is not even the subject of the New York Post story.
Companies hire people in useless positions all the time you know.
That alone is worth the tech companies risking their reputations and livelihoods of all their employees / partners! Trump cannot win! He’s eeeeeeeevil!!!
Yeah, they're called princelings, it's very common in China. If you want to do business, you hire the child of a high-ranking party member, pay them large sums of money for zero work and then you get all the permits you need.
I do agree it’s a bit strange for Twitter to step in and try to apply editorial standards where NYP didn’t when they otherwise disclaim responsibilities of being a publisher. I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
I don't think that's true. The Steele Dossier ("Trump pays Russian Hookers in Moscow to pee on him") wasn't treated special in any way, and it was much more questionable at the time than this story (where the unclear part is what they got for their bribes, not whether they payed his son for access to the VP). Of course, one argument might be "we've learned from our mistakes", but I believe that's a bit too obvious.
> I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
I don't think it needs a conspiracy theory, the coordination was very public. That there's political corruption in the US is also not news, it's the reason why children of politicians are making giant sums of money, politicians being paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech etc. That's normal, there's not much to be found, I believe.
Discussion of the suppression is not encouraged here: even a story about the suppression of the story was pretty much immediately suppressed on HN.
All the same, I don’t know of any newspapers which published stories treating the dossier as a source. As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes. As corroboration: please share if you have any.
Actually I think what happened is Rudy etc got a little too desperate and excited and blundered tactically: surfacing the contents of the hard drive as continual leaks, like the DNC emails, would’ve allowed for a similar dynamic to 2016. Wouldn’t have mattered politically if the contents were real or not.
By reaching and trying to drop the story as “real news,” the dubiousness of the source material got thrust directly into the spotlight. Blaming twitter, liberals, or whoever, for their poor smear tactics is just a coping mechanism at this point if you ask me.
My impression is that it's less made up than the juicy parts of the dossier. The dossier contained more truth though, but it was lame stuff that nobody cared about or reported on.
> As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes.
That's just moving goal posts. It's essentially "Now, I'm not claiming A did Z, but I hear a lot of people saying that A did Z. Did A do Z? What do you think, dear viewer?" Of course they're running the story, even if they throw a "this hasn't been independently confirmed" in the footer. That's the beauty about propaganda, you don't need to claim that it's true for the effect to be achieved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
In the end, I think it's endemic in having human corruptible politicians who can accentrate power. We will minimise this problem only if we decentralise the structure of powers in our society.
Not that any mainstream party has an interest in promoting that (unless you consider Jo Jorgensen and the libertarian party)
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-in...
Or of course there is always 4chan if you are so concerned about censorship.
This post has been flagged. People don’t want to see or hear about this. HN may, or may not, remove it. Either way, there are HN users who want this removed.
Of course, everybody generally thinks they are the good guys, and once you're going down the road of "everything is allowed because my goals are good", you're not going to stop until somebody else stops you.
Facebook and Twitter are effectively acting as editors for select news organizations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813
Isn't removing it making its point?
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813.
I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.
Just throwing 'em out there.
For comments that may be overly verbose.
The distinction really isn't transparent.
If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.
If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal.
Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma...
It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-dimensional spectrum where the left and right poles are liberal and conservative is popular, and it's true that partisans on both sides like to portray the opposing party as more ideologically unified and extreme on that axis than it is, so that if you polled Republicans, they'd probably come close to identifying Democrats as consistently both left and liberal.
It doesn't do any good to introduce jargon to people who are unfamiliar with it without defining your terms.
Classical liberalism[1] is an economic stance somewhat similar to the economic views of libertarianism in the US. This is distinct from social liberalism which is what "liberal" commonly means in the US, which mostly overlaps with what could be called "progressive politics".
"Classical Liberalism" is confusing in the modern context, so it is rarely used execpt by people trying to confuse people (eg, right wing commentators who claim to be "classical liberals"). The biggest exception to this is the (right-wing, conservative) Liberal party in Australia, which was founded on the ideas of "Classical Liberalism"
There's also "liberal" in the "liberal democracy" sense. This is where multiple parties contend for power under known, written down rules.[2]
And then there is "left-[wing]". Left wing can refer to a social view, where it is used as a close-synonym for social liberalism or progressivism. Or it can refer to an economic view, which is much more context (and country) specific.
In the context of US politics the Democratic party is the most left-wing major party in both an economic and social sense.
In terms of media sources, the NY Times is definitely a proponent of "liberal democracy", but in a social and economic sense it is fairly centerist (despite the claims to the contrary by populist).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
[2] https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/l/Libera...
Probably.
> who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism.
It's impossible to know something that isn't true. From about the late 1980s to sometime in 2016-2017 (the end was more sudden than the beginning), the dominant factions of both parties supported pro-capitalist neoliberalism, it's true, but each has had significant factions not focussed on that position the whole time, and the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party has been weakening for most of the last decade or so, and the neoliberal faction of the Republican Party was overthrown for dominance by a party that, insofar as it has a coherent economic policy at all, would be more populist protectionist than neoliberal (if one is being generous; kleptocratic opportunist if one is less generous.) American political parties are much more diverse than is the case of parties in systems that is typical in either proportional or parliamentary systems (and, especially, systems with both PR and parliamentary systems.)
If that's true, why oppose censorship?
Would you say the same thing about the drug war?
Just because it fails to achieve its goals, doesn’t mean I should support it. There’s destruction in its wake.
Freedom of speech is what's great about this country, and big tech is about suppression of it. I look forward to my post getting deleted by the mods, reinforcing the simple truth.
It also set off the flamewar detector as as1mov described, but flags were the dominant factor.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813.
This is pay for play, and corruption at it's finest. After attacking Trump for 4 years for falsehoods, you shy away from addressing issues with the opposing candidate?
If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
I understand you can't 100% define what's fair. That's why judges interpret. But if Jack has to come out to state they screwed up, something's not right. And they're not fixing it, by design: decisions will still be made by highly biased Twitter personnel.
I think the post definitely has some merit on the discussion of free speech on the modern platforms that have become the new town square.
How suppressing :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835
Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new - they just become generic hodgepodges.
I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be boring.
Separately, I'll note that this story was submitted yesterday, quickly got to 38 votes and 7 comments, and then was flagged off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000. I vouched for it, which brought it back briefly, but then it was killed again.
Oddly, that version doesn't appear when one clicks on 'past', or with search terms for "taibbi" or "suppression". Any idea why this might be? Are flag killed stories always omitted from searches?
Edit: This post discussing the flagging of this story is flagged as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835. Should it be? It seems like it raises reasonable issues. Vouching for it did nothing.
Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and got lucky with timing, maybe they'd listen? I may have to just accept one of the last decent sites for discussing tech events is going down the same path as the rest of them, though tbh it's been on the path for a long time now (I've noticed at least 15 decent articles in the last year flagged for essentially being "not liberal" despite high quality content).
Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads here than most political commentators. If HN did as you seem to be suggesting and disallowed flags on any articles like this—the ones that you like, plus the ones that everyone else likes, since why should one user be privileged over another?—then the site would consist of nothing but articles like this. That's obviously not its mandate. I don't see how this is "Orwellian", but it's not always easy to know WWOD (what would Orwell do).
[1] Actually it was Fontenelle but Voltaire makes for a better story. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/22/coffee/
I would never and didn’t at all ask for privilege. I set out suggestions to avoid majoritarianism, systemically. One - make flags “cost”, for less brigades. Two, make vouches cost more, but also have more weight, as vouching can protect a minority view.
I never said disallow flags on articles “like that”? I’m not even a big fan of Taibbi, I’m just a bit disgusted by people who would flag away things they just don’t like politically. It’s a problem, but my guess is it suits your politics and your bosses, so it’s not very pressing.
What’s Orwellian is that you can’t seem to grapple with anything I’m saying and instead or twisting it all to totally different arguments, while using quite creative yet generic words to hide behind authority. Read your initial reply: The reason you give for why it’s valid to dismiss an article on simple suggestions to fix flagging was... “it was flagged”, it was “Metadrama”, and it would (in your psychic wisdom) lead to a “generic hodgepodge” discussion. Could literally apply to any HN submission about the site itself, and in this reply you seem to had misread it as some beg for privilege for myself or something weird like that.
I’ve also been on HN for over a decade. I’ve seen a ton of controversies, I never waded in really. I’ve held my tongue for years on the suppression one, it’s been obvious for years. I’ve seen many claiming it went downhill. In fact at my first job a decade ago I remember multiple co-workers warning me how it’s gone downhill. I know it’s always been that way.
But the reasons it was going downhill before and now are categorically different. Before it was due to incessant flame wars, bad faith pedantry, lack of openness to new ideas (but within discussion).
Now - it’s literal flag brigading.
To be honest, this happened near the election last time. People lose sanity, and then they see abuse of power as “popular” and therefore justified, and then after the election the tide will naturally turn and you’ll forget the problem for a bit.
Censorship, majority rule, there aren’t the same as the critiques I’ve seen many many times over the years. Before it was about quality of discussion, now it’s about banning discussion entirely.
It's true that I'm using somewhat generic terms to describe these situations but there's a simple reason for that: there are hundreds of users asking (and sometimes outright demanding) answers and only one of me to answer them. If there's something specific that I said that you feel is unclear I can try to clarify it.
I don't find words like "suppression" super helpful because they mostly just add negative emotional valence to something that's not secret and is rather benign. If we have more political opinion pieces and/or inflammatory political stories on the front page, then we have less room for discussion of the topics that HN primarily exists for. You can call that suppression if you want. Is a florist suppressing chocolate by only offering a small selection of the latter in their flower shop?
Even more ironic is you missed the point of the post anyway, and your core reply here off: it wasn't meta-discussion, it was an entirely different discussion on the overuse of flagging on this site with examples of how it's happening + call for comments specifically on how to change flagging. In fact it was constructive, and the tone tempered.
Not being able to discuss changes to the flag system itself because it gets flagged is a big... red flag.
It's become used for "I personally don't agree with this" instead of "this is off topic, inflammatory, illogical, etc". Once you go down the path of allowing flagging for personal distaste, you've lost.
This is bog standard HN moderation, btw, and has been the same for many years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Even my analogies have been the same for years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Everyone who rushes to post such a thread feels like this is the one that changes everything, but that's the crack talking.
I realize that your intention was good and that what I'm saying here must sound cynical and heavyhanded, but you have to understand what it's like to see these things a hundred times and realize that they're never different and never lead anywhere. If they don't make you feel weary and slightly nauseated, that's because you haven't seen too many of them yet.
I'd actually honestly like to hear your reply on the proposals for flag rule changes. I think they would work, and would improve the discussion quality. We'd get more "out of the box" stuff - far left or right, but also just more out there ideas.
Finally - you spend a ton of time on the meta stuff. I read over a few pages there. You say often you don't have time for it. Perhaps it's time to try making some changes that would reduce the burden? And not ones that further lock it down, but instead add some transparency?
You guys already have vote brigading rules, flag brigading seems natural. Adding cost will improve the quality. Making vouches more precious would improve the quality.
Perhaps add a meta column to the topbar and direct/move all meta discussions there? I know your reply will be "this will only further it" but I doubt it, they could then avoid the home page altogether.
Only trying to help here, but I think you're now so meta-tired you've forgotten that meta discussion can be constructive and there's perhaps really simple changes that would reduce a good chunk of these complains.
Final note - seems like a lot of the complaints are all going the same direction. Maybe they're valid and not just drama.
Edit: let me reframe it in a way that may be helpful: if you could reply to every meta thread with a single link to a static page on HN, a small write up that included a changelog of the latest rule changes you've implemented, a clear policy enumerated, and a link to a "meta" area where you'd automatically move comments/threads, you'd save yourself a ton of time going forward, and I think you'd gain a ton of positive goodwill on the site. You'd conquer the meme thats been building for years as well.
A separate meta section would be a disaster—it would create a dedicated place for the problem to metastasize, and the demands on moderation would go up not down. I once had a conversation with the founder of a forum much larger than HN, who told me that creating a meta section in the hope that it would help contain such complaints was the biggest mistake they ever made.
The meme that HN is declining is more or less as old as HN itself. Maybe HN is declining and we're doomed unless we make major changes (though the prescriptions for such changes are perennially contradictory). I think you're missing a more likely explanation though: internet users just like to complain a lot. Moreover there's a nostalgia bias that always makes it feel like the site was better when you first joined it. (I don't mean you personally, I mean any of us.) Like tree rings, each cohort dates the decline from approximately when they joined the site. It's always the later users, the hoi polloi, who are the invasive species ruining everything—in conjunction with the feckless and ignorant mods.
How about we make this into a positive this way: if there's a specific article that you feel was intellectually interesting, and capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN, and which was flagkilled unfairly, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. So far you've mentioned two. In one case we'd already turned off the flags before we saw your complaint (and I think that was because someone emailed us—which is what the site guidelines ask you to instead of making meta posts). In the other case we simply didn't agree that it was an intellectually interesting article that was capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN.
Moderators have to make these calls in the end because if we don't, the site will be consumed by flamewars. That's a different issue from getting any particular call wrong. If we get one wrong, I'm happy to be persuaded, to admit it, and to correct the error in that case. But I don't agree that the system is malfunctioning and needs an overhaul. I think it's basically functioning the way an immune system has to, which includes being overzealous at times.
I spend a ton of time on the meta stuff and I spend a ton of time on all the other stuffs too. As you'll gather from my several lengthy replies to you, I don't have any problem engaging with specific users' concerns about the site. But I prefer to do it either in situ, or by email. Making meta submissions to complain about downvoting or flagging doesn't have good effects. It just stirs up mobs, in which everyone with a complaint shows up to make it, the discussions turn into the same thing they always do, and it's simply impossible to respond. Don't forget that there's currently only one mod (me) who's in a position to respond publicly.
Is there a place to see flagged-but-highly-upvoted articles? That would be another helpful area to let users check and report false negatives.
When I notice more, I'll just shoot you an email.
I am agreeing on the complaint meme, by the way. As I see it, the meme used to be that it's a bunch of assholes and closed-minded-pedants/contrarianistas (and to be honest, it kind of was for a while, and I think mods have fixed it a bit), and now the meme is that it's getting a bit groupthinky and quick on the flag button (and I suspect that meme is true as well, and can be fixed).
We sometimes turn off flags when an article is able to support a substantive discussion. I don't know if this one can or not but it seems worth a try.
Just don't give a s..t, and twitter will get back to normal in the long run.
Flagging means it’s either off topic, inflammatory, or not worthy of discussion. It’s on topic, and obviously not inflammatory. So you’re left with worthy of discussion... and you obviously are discussing it.
Put it this way: if this is worthy of a flag, why are you here giving soft opinion as to why you personally would ignore it, as opposed to arguing why it shouldn’t be allowed period?
And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.)
But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.
Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs.
Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story.
In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
Says who?
> because they are biased in their censorship
Yes, and reality has a liberal bias, eh?
When even the president's tweets have been squelched or tagged, I highly doubt that anyone reasonably familiar with Twitter over the last couple of years would have that expectation.
There's no sane way to interpret twitter's actions as anything except censorship. The fact that they're legally entitled to commit this censorship doesn't make it something else.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
"We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information."
Is this a literal statement?
Is it bad information?
Who the hell cares if the information was stolen? Jeffrey Epstein's little black book was "stolen information" - do you object to using that information to make an indictment?
> intentionally misleading information
Crazy how a credible leak is "intentionally misleading" when it's politically inconvenient.
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
We've reach a contradiction, so there must be an error in the chain of reasoning. My money is on "content moderation is a form of free speech" being wrong.
Viewing moderation as another form as speech seems reasonable to me, or at least as reasonable as viewing a campaign contribution as a form of speech. Perhaps the actual issue is that "free speech" cannot be a guaranteed right shared by all, but is inherently a rivalrous good.
No, it’s only that people are using differing definitions of “censorship” and talking past each other.
Content moderation is, in fact, a form of free speech. Twitter (for example) is allowed to choose what they want to host on their website, and what they want not to host on their website. This is free speech – it’s their site, one can’t make them host what one writes. If choosing what to remove from their website is deemed “censorship”, then there’s no contradiction.
If content moderation is censorship, then you are arguing that if I ask you to say something out loud and you don't say it, you are censoring me.
Consider that Ben Franklin wouldn't publish libelous or slanderous material submitted to his newspaper - clearly a form of "content moderation." He believed in the right of the people submitting such things to express them and would suggest they try elsewhere, but also believed in his right not to publish those views on his "platform."
I don't think anyone would accuse Ben Franklin of not believing in free speech, so clearly a reasonable person can square the apparent circle. Freedom of speech isn't the only right relevant to speech, and freedom of speech doesn't guarantee a right to speak on all platforms.
Content moderation decisions can adhere to this principle or not. Removal of viagra bot spam from a blog comment section is a clear example where content moderation adheres to the principles of free speech.
Removing content on a platform like Twitter simply because the Silicon Valley elitists/leftists that run Twitter don't like it is not in keeping with the principle of free speech (for the record I interviewed and got an offer from Twitter but declined). A good razor to use is to see if the rules are being applied in an uneven way. The principle of freedom of speech is an application of the idea of epistemic humility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
The point you were trying to make is "Content moderation falls under the first amendment" which I can't disagree with.
It's important to understand the difference between a moral principle and a legal instantiation of it (the first amendment). I hope that helps clear things up for you.
Forcing someone to say something against their will is considered far worse than preventing someone from saying something they want to say. That's how "warrant canaries" work: the government can stop you from disclosing the court order you received. But they cannot force you to continue saying that you never received such an order.
When I comment on HN I do not comment as HN itself.
What you're talking about seems like an application of the idea of private property rights (i.e. kicking someone out of your house/office for saying something you don't like).
As many on HN have said in the past, corporations aren't people. Speaking about their will makes no sense.
This is the frustrating thing about this debate: one side tries to position itself as “anti-censorship”, when really that position only extends to cover speech they care about.
You can remove obvious spam (e.g. viagra advertisements posted by bots) and still adhere to principles of free speech. Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth. And I mean that very broadly. Even trolling can be done in good faith.
So if Twitter didn't believe that the New York Post article was written by people acting in "good faith in the pursuit of truth", it's okay to censor?
The intentions of the speaker and the value of their speech are subjective. It's fine to argue that we should be okay with censoring some thing you don't like. But at least acknowledge that you're not making an appeal to "the principle of freedom of speech" — you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable.
By virtue of operating under the principle of respecting free speech you are making a value judgement and asserting a set of values. There is no panacea or pure criteria you can use besides no content moderation at all. I give the example of spam posted by bots as what I think is an obvious and non-controversial example of content that can be removed that doesn't violate the principle of free speech. Another example might be someone who simply replies "f* you" to every comment on a thread.
I don't know how to further explain this or qualify this. I think you just fundamentally don't understand or haven't actually reflected on what I'm saying.
You mentioned “good faith” before, so let’s say that’s our operating principle: all parties must be speaking in good faith. Now consider that Twitter suppresses the New York Post because they believe they’re publishing in bad faith. Twitter is still adhering to our set of free speech tradeoffs. So why is this comment section full of people saying they’re not upholding the spirit of free speech?
It’s because they want Twitter to make a different set of tradeoffs. That’s fine, and I’m happy to have that discussion. But not when it masquerades as a discussion about whether Twitter suppressing this article is somehow incompatible with free speech as a concept.
It really comes down to whether or not you believe in objective morality. If you do then there is a sensical notion of free speech (or any other principle) even if no one person has a complete picture or understanding of what it is right now (although I would argue that we have a much better understanding of free speech than we do 6000 years ago). It is something we can strive for and recognize since it is an objective thing.
To reiterate my example, I would say a reasonable person living in 2020 would say that removing bot spam from a comment section is a content moderation decision that is in keeping with the idea of free speech.
Let's say that your definition of free speech is the objectively correct one. You then have to convince people to adopt that framework. You can't appeal to the objective definition; that's a circular argument. So you have to do it on the merits of the tradeoffs, like "bot spam is noise that detracts from a conversation".
To your example specifically, my own opinion is that it depends. I'm fine with removing bot spam from a comment section. But move down to more "infrastructural" layers, and I become less okay with it. For example, I don't think ISPs should try to block spam; they should be entirely agnostic to what content passes through their pipes.
I hope someone can step in and do to the Post what Peter Thiel did to Gawker.
I think I totally forgot about that because of the censored sex tapes and nudes being published by Gnews which are way more salacious.
Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted.
The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussions or allowed access to any sensitive material?"
Even if there were no corrupt actions at all, Hunter Biden represents every kind of HUMINT leverage imaginable.
If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then?
What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then?
That doesn’t seem right. Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium. You don’t lose copyright by losing ownership of the physical medium that holds a copy of the photos/source code/etc.
No, since you made an agreement to sell the laptop, and only the laptop.
> Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium.
That's correct. But it can be transferred to satisfy a lein; depends on the fine print the repair shop has in their contract.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
was it?
Twitter’s initial justification for removing the “hacked” material is completely at odds with their past decisions to leave up hacked/illegally obtained materials like the Snowden docs, Trump tax returns, Panama papers, etc. Of course they have since changed their stance.
There’s the possibility of civil damages if it amounts to defamation, but that’s quite a standard to reach. Such damages would fall on the publisher of the story, the NY Post, but not a platform like Twitter (per section 230 safe harbor immunity). There is no legal gray area here.
This is the same reason why those who publicized the now widely rebuked Steele Dossier are not facing legal consequences for it (including Twitter), nor should they.
Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
It's clear only to you. You cannot normally legally publish hacked or stolen photos of celebrities. The personal, intimate, or family photos of Hunter Biden almost certainly do not meet the bar for public interest.
Twitter is not liable here. But as a private company they're allowed to have a policy against linking to hacked or stolen material on their platform. It's the NY Post that's in a grey area.
> Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
My original comment was in response to someone saying Twitter blocked it because it was Russian propaganda, which is simply not true.
Really? Who would be the judge of that? The suppression itself is hard evidence to the contrary.
Maybe you don't believe Twitter. Maybe Twitter suppressed the story for political reasons and you feel that proves the hacked content is of public interest. But if Twitter was honest then their policy is just to not allow direct links to any hacked or stolen photos. It doesn't mean they're important.
How are personal photos of Hunter Biden with his family important to public interest?
We are here on Hacker News, are you certain that a legally blind person in Delaware. would be the guy to fly to all the way from California to repair water damaged laptop? If you don't know how such repair looks like, I recommend you to search Luis Rosmann on YouTube (actually cool to watch anyway).
I initially thought that the repair maybe involved reinstalling windows or removing viruses (which you could get assistance from text to speech tooling), but it was a water damage.
Edit: https://youtu.be/DoiByFIPgK8?t=468
As far as I know the Biden residence was sold few years ago, and Hunter lives in LA, but could be wrong, it's not possible to find definitive answer. But he has a house and his son was born in LA so high chance that's where he lives.
I also have hard time to believe that someone who makes $80k a month would care about laptop repair, and even if he did, wouldn't have someone on payroll (perhaps IT person from his company) who would go to his house to get it fixed.
Also, I still can't see how a legally blind person (I know legally blind doesn't mean completely blind) can do a water damage repair.
There are so many other holes in that story, but even if ALL of that was true, I don't see how actions of a 50 year old man implicate his father. There isn't any "smoking gun" in relation to Joe Biden. So what was the purpose of this story again?
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi... [2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118 [3] https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-... [5] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/T... [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbi-hunter-... [7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
[8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-putin/putin-...
Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they like.
More of a judgment call, but I would argue that Twitter is morally in the right as well. This is obviously a case of carefully engineering disinformation, using America's value of freedom of speech against us. If they don't suppress it, Twitter is actively aiding bad actors, with very serious consequences. Twitter does not want to be in the business of content moderation, but in this case the information is question is so obviously falsified; it is spread so obviously in bad faith; and its consequences are so obviously dangerous to the nation, that they are justified in taking a moral stand against it.
I support a total blackout of political stories in the run-up to an election.
[Edit: rephrase to clarify that my position would not change.]
Now, let's consider:
* Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent
* Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club
* Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money
etc.
I am not saying I agree with those statements. I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform," you are not saying anything substantively different than those statements.
In a universe where the ability to put your speech in front of other people depends on being able to post it online in a place where they might be able to see, there are trade-offs involved that seem to be conveniently shoved aside when it is about news you do not like.
I prefer the cacophonous chaos of everyone being able to tell me about stuff they deem important. One step further, I prefer to live a society that can learn to live with that without falling apart.
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
You may prefer chaos, most people do not.
Twitter and Facebook are getting closer to: the post not delivering your mail, or the power company turning off your electricity despite paying your bill, or the phone company cutting you off after you say the wrong thing...
The analogy is that Twitter can't censor stories that benefit republicans, but if the "reasons" for censoring always seem to work against republicans and are applied inconsistently, then perhaps things aren't as they seem.
No one is saying that New York Times has to publish the story. However, if someone wants to publish a story and announce it to their followers on a platform, citizens need to think long and hard before agreeing to "whatever the shareholders want goes."
The fact that they do not have a product they sell to the recipients of information at a positive price makes it harder for competitive alternatives to gain any traction at all. So, the fact that once a platform like this achieves a certain reach it is unlikely to be effectively challenged means we need to think hard about how much power we want them to have in terms of shaping the conversation: Both conversation we like and conversation we do not like ... It is not sufficient to think in terms of your affinity to the dominant forces. You have to think about what kind of society you want to be in when you are in the minority.
The republicans have a serious problem, and it isn’t Twitter. Blaming media outlets for not paying attention to things is a well worn if dubious path. It’s hard to give credence to with this story given the provenance of the information and obvious problems.
Cybernature is a new experience. As a species, we are working out what level of moderation we would like.
Explorers tends to be rough-and-ready sorts, and so veer towards the vitality side of things. They know how to make the chaos work for them. For good and/or evil. Since there isn’t the downside of “instadeath” of the physical world, more risk-taking, and thus more chaos, may be justified.
Settlers tend to like fences, highways, channel markings, flight corridors...structure. There are usually eventually more settlers in any area, so their view prevails in the long run.
(You can be an explorer in one area and a settler in another...it’s not some permanent psychological feature. You can demand political content freedom from de facto pseudocarrier monopolies while being happy with a locked-down OS for self-driving cars.)
In computing, the barrier to entry for exploration is so low and it is so new (in the long view) that the percentage of settlers is pretty low, hence the cultural bias toward freedom (including content) rather than control in these forums.
[Personally, I trust the American people to curate their own content. I expect the educational system to educate the citizenry to be skilled enough in critical thinking to be able to curate the content presented.
But I expect the marketplace of ideas to police itself against systematic biases and inaccuracies, either with effective editing of its own content and/or in actively and effectively supporting a “loyal opposition” to its views.
Twitter seems to be doing neither, because it’s much closer to being a de facto common carrier monopoly than a media channel. Common carrier monopolies had been accepted and successful for a hundred years in the US, but only with heavy Federal regulation. The hip, cool alternative: break them up.
Great truths from Gen X, the generation to which you can’t easily mass-market.]
That's a straw man. I never said anything like what you are pretending I said. They obviously could not ban users on the basis of race or religion or a number of other criteria.
But that's not really what's under discussion. The question is should Twitter (or other platforms) lose their right to moderate content when they become successful?
I don't think they should.
In the case of Twitter, in order to maintain their "good samaritan" the extent of their "content moderation" is quite specficic.
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.
The NYPost article was damaging a political opponent to be sure. It was not obscene, lewd, filthy; though clearly twitter allows porn so these are immediately ruled out. It wasn't violent by any means.
Was it harassing or otherwise objectionable? Well I think there's some good debate possible but that debate is cut off immediately because the "content moderation" must be done in good faith. This very clearly is violated.
So Twitter did not content moderate as per the laws they must obey. Therefore we now have 2 options. Twitter loses platform protections and becomes directly liable for any and all content they publish aka any anonymous person posting. OR they stop their censorship.
What if the shoe were on the other foot?
Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
If we're not happy about the moderation we don't have to use the moderating platform.
That may be the latest popular interpretation of the bill of rights, but it is absolutely not in the original spirit of its authors. They were defined as "inalienable rights" granted to all people. In other words, your essential human rights to free expression don't get waived depending on who the offending party is.
What I am saying is that the authors of the bill of rights did not intend for a person's human rights to go away the moment they are persecuted by an entity other than the United States federal government.
People want to use Twitter’s property to spread a message, and Twitter said no. That’s not “persecution”, it just means they have to find some other way to do it. If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
In some countries that would be violation of consumer protection laws. If some service or product is offered to a general public, than arbitrary exclusion of a consumer is illegal in some jurisdictions.
The article never talks about rights. The article is about journalistic failures.
Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a commoner) to know what I did wrong? Do I have the opportunity to change? Do I have the opportunity to face my accusers in a forum?
Our rights, and the framework they reside in, are far too outdated for this sort of problem. The leaders we have in both business and government are too cowardly, weak, or self-interested to directly address the McCarthy-esque patterns that are beginning to emerge that seem to be opportunistically aligned to further narratives.
Congress is currently grilling tech CEOs as to why they aren't banning / censoring QAnon and similar information. It seems Congress has moved to attempt to censor free speech by applying pressure on these private platforms to censor free speech.
>That issue about the functioning of democracy is one where Facebook is in the spotlight right now as a hugely powerful platform for misinformation in the run-up to the US election.
>This week the social media giant moved to shut down groups spreading the Qanon conspiracy theory, which promotes the idea that President Trump is leading a battle against satanic child abuse.
>It was the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who wanted a really tough approach - a minority report from the Republicans agreed there was a problem, but favoured milder solutions.
Congress is grilling tech companies as to why they aren't censoring speech hard enough and are threatening a "really tough approach" if they don't comply. It seems censoring speech is not only government pressured now, but also bipartisan.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54479130
To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
You can believe what you like. But don't ask me to believe that a person took 3 laptops to a repair company in a state where he doesn't live; that the said company was operated by a blind person; that the security camera footage of the delivery of the laptops was erased; that the laptops were unintentionally forgotten there; and that they somehow found their way into the hands of one Rudolph Giuliani.
To believe that story, you have to be gullible or complicit.
The repair shop is in Delaware, where Joe Biden was a senator for many decades and where the Bidens have held various political positions for many decades.
I suspect that you really don't understand the story that well. That is understandable considering the insane amount of gaslighting, misinformation, and censorship that is going on around it.
He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. Why would he travel across the country to visit a repair shop in the middle of nowhere with a conveniently blind owner and conveniently erased camera footage. There is no universe in which this story is plausible.
Before accusing me of not understanding the story, please take a moment to read what I wrote. You are contributing to the gaslighting around this topic.
> He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time.
The Bidens have multiple houses in Delaware. There are many pictures leaked from Hunter's laptop that have Delaware in the geocode. If you want to be weird about it you can go look up the Biden family's social media accounts (still up) and see pictures of them at their houses in Delaware.
It really sounds like you just don't want to believe this. Very cult like behavior.
That's pretty stupid and unlikely. More likely, people were concerned about the real world ramifications of having their names on the story (e.g. getting killed or harassed).
I understand that this is a talking point but use your brain.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/new-york-post-inside...
"Use your brain" indeed.
Ask yourself this: if these same mechanisms, that again are used by autocratic governments, get taken advantage of by a future administration and we somehow defeat them will you be willing to admit accountability and culpability for the outcome? If not, then walk cautiously, because this future is very real and discounting people that raise the flag does not age well.
This.
One must get beyond the idea that one team is unambiguously worse. In a way, Taibbi writes almost exclusively about the tendency of Americans to ignore the misbehavior of their own side and exaggerate that of the other.
There are lots and lots of articles informing the rank-and-file how to interpret contemporary events; how to discuss the Bidens' corruption, for instance (usually: bring up the Trumps' corruption, but often outright denial and shaming anyone who discusses it)
People who appreciate Taibbi are those who can hold at least two narratively contradictory facts in mind at the same time; eg that both the Bidens and the Trumps are corrupt; without leaping to defend one or the other.
We all know corruption happens at all levels in Washington, but if the contents of the laptop are true, it means a serious loss of ground in the culture war (potentially game over). It can’t be true and must not be true. To keep the game going we need to shut our eyes and wait to be rescued by a comfortable escape hatch narrative.