How about the fact they also covered up the Hunter Biden federal investigation of his businesses. They blocked the media account of NY Post right before the election.
How about Republicans stop holding onto "evidence", which turns out to be manufactured, right before the elections and then expect everyone to take their evidence seriously when even the conservative-stacked courts tell them they are delusional.
It's because it was pretty obviously a giant lie due to the complete lack of evidence and just plain didn't make sense to begin with. Why would Hunter Biden fly hours to go get his computer repaired. Even if that was true, there would be serious questions about the chain of custody for this supposed evidence. Many stages for things to be fabricated with big incentive to do so.
At least one person -- strategist Frank Luntz -- verified the contents of one of the emails in the archive. Also, what about the photos? The Bidens also never denied that the laptop evidence was real.
>At least one person -- strategist Frank Luntz -- verified the contents of one of the emails in the archive.
Absolutely. Especially because Frank Luntz is completely non-partisan and has no interest in helping Biden's opposition[0]:
"Frank Ian Luntz (born February 23, 1962) is an American political and communications consultant, pollster and pundit,[1][2] best known for developing talking points and other messaging for the Republican causes. His work has included assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect; including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming.
Luntz has frequently contributed to Fox News as a commentator and analyst, as well as running focus groups during and after presidential debates on CBSN.[3] Luntz describes his specialty as "testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."[4] He is also an author of business books dealing with communication strategies and public opinion."
You are obviously clueless about the contents of the emails.
Get off your bourgeois partisan high horse and read the damn emails and Luntz's response (he was included in one of the produced email chains)
And by the way, Luntz is anti-Trump -- though I presume your knee-jerk reaction to this story indicates that you think it's some right-wing conspiracy.
>Get off your bourgeois partisan high horse and read the damn emails and Luntz's response (he was included in one of the produced email chains)
I'll let the relevant authorities do so. As I understand it, they have a laptop or the contents thereof, and are conducting an investigation.
If that investigation warrants charging Hunter Biden with any crimes, he can be tried by a jury of his peers and, if convicted, punished appropriately.
Adherence to the law isn't (or at least shouldn't be) a partisan issue, nor have I made any statement to that effect.
If you believe you have uncovered some relevant evidence, I suggest you take it to the authorities for further investigation.
> A statement from the team said Hunter had "fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger".
> The 50-year-old said he had learned of the investigation on Tuesday. He did not disclose any further details.
> "I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisers," he said.
If Donald Trump, the individual, would be treated like an ordinary user he'd probably already been kicked off the platform.
The president of the US as an office has public, secure communication channels, Donald Trump, having signed the same TOS like anyone else, should be treated like everyone else. Not exactly sure why Twitter feels the need to be apologetic about how they moderate their platform.
This! So very much, this! He’s not tweeting from the Twitter officially recognized @potus account; he’s doing so from the same account he registered as a regular citizen years ago.
This account should receive no special privileges. It’s asinine that Twitter ignores their own rules just to appease this man.
if they cared about being on the right side of history, which apparently they do, if only for a "inadvertently limited" amount of time, they would forget about the traffic. That traffic is from mostly people people better off not being (a part of you engagement)
Our nation is built on open discourse. One could argue that rather than silence opposition, one could inform the population. The "mother and father know best" attitude helps no one and fosters doubt into the integrity of things
Once a single voice is reaching enough people, I would argue that increasing the distribution of their words will on average decrease the amount of discourse. Almost no replies will be heard by a super-celeb, and it's hard to have a meaningful conversation with anyone else in the morass of replies.
>That traffic is from mostly people people better off not being (a part of you engagement)
I disagree. Given that many of those folks have not only continued to engage with the soon-to-be ex-POTUS, even to the extent that they are happy to be suckers...err......donors to his grift[0]...err.."Election Defense Fund", I'd think that Twitter would want to keep those folks around -- the more gullible someone is, the more likely they'll click on ads and generate revenue.
And advertisers stand to make money on conversions, assuming those folks haven't already given all their money to the Trump "Election Defense" con...err...fundraising drive.
Ironically, the 1st Amendment protects Twitter's ability to block anything that it likes.
Fundamentally, the government can't dictate what anybody chooses to publish (or not) on a website that they own. They can seize it and prosecute the owners if the content is illegal, but they can't force editorial decisions.
This whole arrangement drove a lot of traffic to Twitter and helped to keep it relevant; they just didn't want to kill their golden goose.
> Pretty sure that was a point early in his presidency where he was block, but Twitter being a US company was not allow to block the US president....?
IIRC, there was a lawsuit that ruled that the president was not allowed to block other twitter users. As far as I know, it would still be totally withing twitter's right to block Trump, if it wanted. But I think they don't because what he says on Twitter reveals important information about his character.
It isn't just Trump who gets special treatment. A lot of crazy people with blue check marks who get special privileges. After all, isn't that the kind of internet you want? Where certain people you agree with have privileges over everyone you disagree with?
Also, the president generally gets special privileges on media platforms because he is the president. That's just common sense.
Assuming you are american, I can't believe there are people actually advocating for big tech to censor the president. It just sounds insane to me that anyone would support such an idea.
Covid Misinformation and abuse seem most obvious, given that the platform has already removed Infowars and Alex Jones, whose content Trump at times ad verbatim retweeted. Here's a fairly long list[1] of public figures having been kicked off the platform for I suppose similar behaviour. I think even Trump Jr was suspended at one point.
Didn't Twitter even explicitly carve out an exemption for 'political figures'? Which let's be honest means Trump.
Id have to see specific examples as this is pretty vague. And I believe Dorsey said himself that misinformation is not against the Twitter rules (might have an exception for certain topics though). Probably because half the users on the site would be kicked off in a year.
Also think we need to be careful about the term "misinformation" as that can at times mean my opinion vs your opinion. For instance Fauci flipped on masks several times (im not hating on the guy)...but which time was it misinformation and not misinformation? This is exactly why people need to be entitled to their opinions in a free expression form. You can direct the conversation without kicking people off and censoring people. Another example is Twitter completely flopping when censoring the NY Post "misinformation" which turned out to be undeniably true.
I just read the Wikipedia Twitter suspension list. It's alarming - many of the reasons for the suspensions were false, if not absurd, and those suspensions should never have happened in the first place.
It's like snowflakes run amok at a major media platform.
IMO, in all societies ever, we're not equal individuals and we shouldn't be treated alike. Some people are more important, and to pretend that the President of the US is the same as random Joe down the street is delusional. It would be just as bizarre to imagine that Xi Jinping is the same as random Chinese TikTok makeup artist.
Coincidence that the people at these companies hate the President with a burning passion and many are caught on tape saying they train their AIs to look for things like guns and God and the crucifix when shadowbanning because "who talks like that?"
Quite often twitter seems to have a pattern of escalations. They remove verification. They "accidentally" take action. And then they ban for real. So it seems like it should be taken as a threat.
Twitter is completely free to ban anyone they want for any reason they want. Don’t want that? Nationalize it or set rules that social media companies are not allowed to ban anyone no matter what they say.
The criticism above is a criticism of how Twitter is handling situation, not how the government should handle it. Just because they're free to do so doesn't mean that it can't be criticised.
There's really no amount of "censorship" that would be too much when it comes to the individual called Donald Trump.
The idealism of free speech was invented in a time where village idiots could harass a maximum of perhaps hundred people and convince about 2. Now they can harass millions of people, and convince the same 2%, but now that two percent is a huge amount of people.
The amount of damage these village idiots can cause is now a civilization breaking power. Why would we not fight against it?
Village idiot here. I will save this pearl of progressive-marxist thought to show to my fellow village idiots how exactly we are seen by the self-appointed, "educated" elite who want us to surrender our rights at their feet.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398576
Absolutely. Especially because Frank Luntz is completely non-partisan and has no interest in helping Biden's opposition[0]:
"Frank Ian Luntz (born February 23, 1962) is an American political and communications consultant, pollster and pundit,[1][2] best known for developing talking points and other messaging for the Republican causes. His work has included assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect; including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming.
Luntz has frequently contributed to Fox News as a commentator and analyst, as well as running focus groups during and after presidential debates on CBSN.[3] Luntz describes his specialty as "testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."[4] He is also an author of business books dealing with communication strategies and public opinion."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
Get off your bourgeois partisan high horse and read the damn emails and Luntz's response (he was included in one of the produced email chains)
And by the way, Luntz is anti-Trump -- though I presume your knee-jerk reaction to this story indicates that you think it's some right-wing conspiracy.
I'll let the relevant authorities do so. As I understand it, they have a laptop or the contents thereof, and are conducting an investigation.
If that investigation warrants charging Hunter Biden with any crimes, he can be tried by a jury of his peers and, if convicted, punished appropriately.
Adherence to the law isn't (or at least shouldn't be) a partisan issue, nor have I made any statement to that effect.
If you believe you have uncovered some relevant evidence, I suggest you take it to the authorities for further investigation.
Thank you for sharing your point of view.
> A statement from the team said Hunter had "fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger".
> The 50-year-old said he had learned of the investigation on Tuesday. He did not disclose any further details.
> "I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisers," he said.
Anyway, this Hunter Biden thing is like trying to smear Devin Nunes with the antics of Anthony Nunes (https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2012/09/15/police-san-leandro-m...).
It is was nothing burger and actually made Biden look good for the many families dealing with drug addiction.
I can't wait for the Trump clown show led by head jester Giuliani to end on the 20th Jan.
The president of the US as an office has public, secure communication channels, Donald Trump, having signed the same TOS like anyone else, should be treated like everyone else. Not exactly sure why Twitter feels the need to be apologetic about how they moderate their platform.
This account should receive no special privileges. It’s asinine that Twitter ignores their own rules just to appease this man.
I disagree. Given that many of those folks have not only continued to engage with the soon-to-be ex-POTUS, even to the extent that they are happy to be suckers...err......donors to his grift[0]...err.."Election Defense Fund", I'd think that Twitter would want to keep those folks around -- the more gullible someone is, the more likely they'll click on ads and generate revenue.
And advertisers stand to make money on conversions, assuming those folks haven't already given all their money to the Trump "Election Defense" con...err...fundraising drive.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fundra...
Fundamentally, the government can't dictate what anybody chooses to publish (or not) on a website that they own. They can seize it and prosecute the owners if the content is illegal, but they can't force editorial decisions.
This whole arrangement drove a lot of traffic to Twitter and helped to keep it relevant; they just didn't want to kill their golden goose.
IIRC, there was a lawsuit that ruled that the president was not allowed to block other twitter users. As far as I know, it would still be totally withing twitter's right to block Trump, if it wanted. But I think they don't because what he says on Twitter reveals important information about his character.
Also, the president generally gets special privileges on media platforms because he is the president. That's just common sense.
Assuming you are american, I can't believe there are people actually advocating for big tech to censor the president. It just sounds insane to me that anyone would support such an idea.
Didn't Twitter even explicitly carve out an exemption for 'political figures'? Which let's be honest means Trump.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...
Also think we need to be careful about the term "misinformation" as that can at times mean my opinion vs your opinion. For instance Fauci flipped on masks several times (im not hating on the guy)...but which time was it misinformation and not misinformation? This is exactly why people need to be entitled to their opinions in a free expression form. You can direct the conversation without kicking people off and censoring people. Another example is Twitter completely flopping when censoring the NY Post "misinformation" which turned out to be undeniably true.
It's like snowflakes run amok at a major media platform.
The idealism of free speech was invented in a time where village idiots could harass a maximum of perhaps hundred people and convince about 2. Now they can harass millions of people, and convince the same 2%, but now that two percent is a huge amount of people.
The amount of damage these village idiots can cause is now a civilization breaking power. Why would we not fight against it?