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Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

What is your logic for thinking this is even possibly the case?

Consider something. Let's use Trump as an example, since the discussion of 'why aren't they releasing stuff on [the other side]' is generally connected to him. Imagine somebody had a treasure trove of leaked and compromising information on Trump. And they then submitted this information to Wikileaks. As the weeks and months passed by, it became clear to them that Wikileaks was not going to publish this information. Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets? US media outlets would do absolutely anything for this sort of information.

I'm curious to see where my logic may be failing me.

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> Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets?

Other outlets are accepted [by general public] to have already been compromised wrt bias.

Up until the Trump campaign - Wikileaks was considered to be an unbiased leak of private and/or confidential information.

The name "Wiki" even intentionally evokes the name Wikipedia, the (slightly biased) generalist source of information that appears at the top of many of our search results.

In many cases, Wikileaks is actually worse. Seeing MSNBC or Fox News flash on the screen, we know the bias put forth by the company. We don't know Assange's bias. Correction, we do now.

To be honest, I'm curious to see how your logic even equated Wikileaks to other media outlets in the first place.

I don't feel you're answering the question. I asked exactly why you felt there was good reason to consider, let alone assume, that Wikileaks is choosing to withhold meaningful and impactful information on Trump.

If I take your response as the answer then it would imply you believe that somebody would choose to simply not publish substantive leaks if they couldn't get them published by wikileaks. However, I'm sure you don't believe that, so that must be a straw man - leading me to believe that you probably are simply choosing to not answer the question.

There are far too many assumptions in this comment, particularly in the second paragraph, to even begin to unpack.

Your entire Parent post is centered around a false equivalency between MSM outlets and Wikileaks.

Here's a similar assumption I'll throw your way: Parent personally slighted you and/or your belief system, and caused you to react this aggressively to my comment.

If I were to employ the same non-sequitur logic you used about myself further, I would reckon you are a shill.

Again, I feel I am asking a very simple and reasonable question. You suggested that Wikileaks 'might' (and your phrasing is more akin to are) be witholding valuable and condemning information on Trump.

I'm just asking why you think this and in particular why our hypothetical leaker would not simply contact another organization for publication if Wikileaks failed to do so? Many of the biggest leaks in recent times have not come from Wikileaks. The Panama Papers were published by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Snowden's NSA and global surveillance leaks were brought to the public attention through contact with Glenn Greenwald.

I'd actually even take this a step further. Wikileaks is under an implicit, but mandatory, obligation to publish such materials if they were given them. Imagine our leaker did simply take the materials to e.g. Glenn Greenwald and published our hypothetical groundbreaking leaks. A condition of said leaks could also be publication of the fact that they were provided to Wikileaks who chose to not publish them. That would, overnight, destroy Wikileaks as an organization.

Exactly. You are thinking of this logically while most of the people accusing Wikileaks of acting deliberately on Trump's behalf do not pay close attention to Wikileaks or understand its obvious journalistic motivations.

The minute anyone can prove that WL withheld anything newsworthy to suit its own political goals, WL is done. This has not happened. Further, anyone who leaked something big about Trump to WL (such as his taxes) would clearly want to see them exposed, and would not sit by and wait for Trump to win while the damning materials went unpublished.

As a voter, if someone hired by a potential political nominee asked Wikileaks for illegally acquired information, I'd like to know. In a hypothetical world where Wikileaks gave them that information, it would in fact be criminal.

Assange stated that the data was requested by Cambridge Analytica knowing they were hired by the Trump campaign for normal opposition research. I consider withholding that information alone (the fact that the guys Trump's campaign hired attempted to break the law and were rebuffed) as quite impactful. Trump is quite tight with Brad Parscale, as he was the "Campaign Digital Director" in charge of these things.

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