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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing is inevitable given the trend of weaponizing social media history. No one with any online presence can, over a long enough time scale, go without eventually posting something stupid, or something that can be construed as offensive. Especially when the line between what is acceptable humor and not shifts over time.

The media has made a lot of hay crucifying people lately. The only way to push back against that effectively does seem to be deploying their own tactics against them in this kind of mutually assured destruction.

There is a high level of hubris in penning a story dragging someone for stupid tweets made as a teenager, and not bothering to at least scrub your own timeline before publishing.

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The problem is that I'm not sure there can be "mutually assured destruction" when one group has much more power to dictate the narrative. The media can't completely control the story, but they certainly have lots of influence. Just over the last couple years there have been:

* NYT editor apologizes for racist tweets about Jews and Indians [0]

* NYT editor demoted for past racist tweets [1]

* NYT editor apologizes for racist tweets about white people [2]

* NYT stands by editor who made racist tweets about white people [3]

However, the only punishment received by any of these people was a demotion in the case of [1]. Meanwhile, the paper has the power to put out articles that shape the narrative, deflect attention away from the tweets in question, and reframe the story as an attack on journalism by nefarious actors [4]. Meanwhile, if a non-member of the media, particularly in the case of an average person like Carson King, has their past tweets dug up and reported on, they don't have anything close to the same voice to defend themselves, and are more liable to be treated as a pariah by the public or fired by their workplace.

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/458466-new-york-times-edi...

[1] https://nypost.com/2019/08/13/ny-times-demotes-top-dc-editor...

[2] https://www.rt.com/usa/469408-nyt-editor-racist-tweets/ [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/politics/trump-allies-...

I always thought that "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." quote attributed to Richelieu was hyperbole (and so not likely to be an actual quote).

I'm no longer sure about either of those assumptions.

That reminds me of the Richard Nixon (or LBJ) recordings. There was literally years of conversation captured. It would be pretty easy to piece together some damaging utterances with years or recordings.

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