Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action.
The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting.
As a legislative move, this is changing their bet to the horse that's about to win. The social media companies are clearly more afraid longterm of what happens if they let this kind of stunt spread than they are afraid of the lame duck.
That's what I'm trying to say, here. Either way you slice it, 230 is in the crosshairs, it's just a matter of who's holding the gun and for what purpose.
I also wouldn't bet a cent of my own money on the GOP being "wholesale evicted". I heard very similar, equally confident talk in 2016.
It’s hard to see this as anything more than an attempt to change their bet on a losing horse in this race, as the commenter you replied to pointed out.
And I’m not sure if we’re remembering the same 2016 election. We’re both talking about the same election, that resulted in the largest win for an American political party in history, right? 2016 was absolutely horrendous for conservatives and their saving grace was the senate cycle was particularly bad for democrats. If there’s a similar performance this election there’s a good chance that they take both branches.
They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
Arguably, anti-trust breakup of major tech companies would be much more destructive to those tech companies, than merely removing some tech companies ability to moderate content.
My comment that you replied to says that democrats in the house have been bringing up anti-trust concerns. Anti-trust and 230 regulation are two separate things done for different reasons. They are not equivalent actions nor do are they being pursued out of the same concerns. Trying to conflate them is wrong.
I think that from a higher level principle, they can be conflated.
The way that they can be conflated is that many of these tech companies, just don't have many friends left.
Even if the exact reason as for why they don't have many friends left may be different, the end result is still the same.
The left and the right may be going after them from different angles, but that is still pretty bad, because nobody is there to defend them.
People who may have stuck their neck out to defend them in the past, just aren't going to do so anymore.
And sorry, they are still not conflatable - you’re still trying to create a false equivalence. They are not the same thing, the desire here to misrepresent facts to fit into a narrative is intellectually dishonest.
Well, in the legislative bodies, they have much less ability to defend itself, than in the past, due to both parties having significant, albeit different, problems with these companies.
> trying to create a false equivalence.
They are equivalent in the specific aspect of them having less allies in congress, and that this makes them more vulnerable than in the past.
IE, less people in our legislative bodies will be willing to stick their neck out to defend them.
> to fit into a narrative
It is absolutely accurate to say that these companies have less allies in congress, than in the past, and that being hit, from both sides, on these 2 issues, hurts these companies.
You can use different words to describe having less allies, or allies that are less likely to support them, if you want.
But my point still stands. They either have less allies, or those allies are less likely to look at these tech companies through "rose-tinted glasses"
Glad you agree that their former "allies" are no longer looking at these companies so favorable, using " rose-tinted glasses".
Arguments that would essentially allow monopolistic behavior has pretty much always been firmly inside republican laissez-faire circles, and those allies are still very much there. Railing against tech elites may play great for tv, but let’s be honest - Peter Thiel, strong advocate of monopoly, still spoke at the Republican national convention. There’s a good reason they overruled fact-checkers when conservatives violated their prescribed rules, they know where their bread is buttered.
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/29/21274812/joe-biden-donald... : "Joe Biden doesn’t like Trump’s Twitter order, but still wants to revoke Section 230"
> In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
Trump has plumbed the bottom of the non-white vote. The protests rankled many Latinos. In recent YouGov polling, a narrow majority of Latinos rated “the breakdown of law and order” as a “bigger problem” then “systemic racism.”
Meanwhile, Millenial Black voters are twice as likely to have favorable or somewhat favorable views of Trump than older Black voters: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/ucla-study...
> The data collected from April 2-May 13 by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, an initiative that conducted weekly surveys of thousands of potential voters for nearly a year, found that 29% of percent of black voters ages 30-44 and 21% ages 18-29 have a "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" view of President Trump. This compares to just 14% of black voters 45-64 and 9% of those 65 and older.
It’s not going to be Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. But Democrats shouldn’t be popping champagne corks assuming that the opposing party will never be in power again.
Nikki Haley is not as popular as republicans think she is - she's largely irrelevant right now.
What's more likely to happen is that the progressive dream of celebrity politicians in places like NYC will run aground of what the party is actually game for, because, as you observe, huge portions of the Democratic coalition are far more conservative than the Take Factory gives them credit for.
If they had just left it alone, maybe attached the standard "this might be false" disclaimer, it would likely have passed as yet another partisan thing, but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
I don't know. I think the people that are going to believe these kinds of stories at face value would have found this story on their own regardless. It is not like the NY Post is some obscure paper. It may make this story stronger with those that are already inclined to believe this stuff.
I think by this time people have already made their decision on whom they are going to vote and they will use any story that agrees with their decision as proof that they are right.
IIRC Trump was impeached for supposedly threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine unless they investigated this incident.
Several governments and other organizations were concerned because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma properly, having laid the investigation he inherited from his predecessor dormant. The demand to fire him wasn't something that Joe Biden came up with himself out of the blue, and at the end of the day it was most likely to Burisma's detriment.
It's not an impeachable offense to threaten to withhold foreign aid for valid reasons that further the interests of the United States. It was (and should be) an impeachable offense to illegally withhold aid that was already meant to have been delivered, and to do so for personal gain.
They just said they checked his calendar and could find no such meeting, then later backpedaled and said they couldn't discount the possibly that it happened and just wasn't on the official schedule.
The computer repair guy’s story is just comically implausible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
You want a real corruption scandal? How about the $10 million bribe paid to the Trump campaign by a state-owned Egyptian bank right before the 2016 election (and immediately after candidate Trump met privately with President Sisi). Which the DOJ never finished investigating because Trump-appointed officials instructed them not to. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donat...
It tells you that the story is being maneuvered for political advantage, because obviously. It tells you nothing at all about whether or not it's true.
What this story demonstrates more than anything is that Giuliani and Trump are getting pathetically desperate, because it is looking likely they will lose and both are facing significant criminal liability once they aren’t shielded by the Barr DOJ’s position that a GOP president enjoys absolute impunity and by the pardon power (which has already been corruptly used to let other Trump henchmen off the hook for crimes committed in his name).
Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war increases shareholder value for Facebook? Because the way they went about this is another escalation. Nothing drives engagement like military engagements, right?
Here is a good example. Right wing media likes to point at the homelessness problem in CA and claim that that is proof that Democrats are bad at governing. The homeless issue is a fact, supported by data. And CA being a Democratic state is also a fact supported by data. But pointing to both those facts and claiming it as proof that Democrats==bad is a bad faith argument. Blue states have higher GDP, higher levels of education attainment, and lower poverty rates than red states. And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars. I could make a similarly bad faith argument, and point out that West Virginia has the highest number of opioid overdoses per capita, therefore Republicans==bad. But I don't need to do that because the statistics that most reasonable people would agree to use as an arbiter of state level success are already in agreement with my position.
As you can see from the length of the above paragraph. These bad faith arguments require a decent amount of effort and/or knowledge to effectively counter. So as we move into this post-fact world, can you really blame people for just sticking to the 'narratives'?
Homeless is not a weird metric to use. It's absolutely a failure of government in the worst possible way. Democrats deserve all the criticism in the world for tolerating that situation.
Still, you're correct that there is bad faith: the bad faith is that Republicans care about homelessness, which they generally do not either.
Democrats deserve criticism for the failures of Democratic-controlled governments, and Republicans deserve criticism for the failures of Republican-controlled governments. In my opinion, they're both bad. Are they "equally bad"? Maybe not, but I won't accept that homelessness is a weird metric. There's a lot of bad faith is ignoring one's own faults.
This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Stephen Colbert's perception of reality has a known liberal bias.
> And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars.
But the overheated housing market is the criticism, and is completely valid. California is correctly criticized for letting housing costs get so bad that people who are making twice the US median income are nonetheless sleeping in their cars.
And California may be the worst, but it is actually a problem which is more severe in blue states than red states on average. Housing costs more in NYC than Austin, and more in Chicago than Charlotte, despite having a lower median income.
So sticking to the "narratives" doesn't get you there. It causes you to ignore the problems in your own back yard. You have to look at the facts, even when they're inconvenient, and admit it when it's your team making a mistake.
Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.
However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
When half the country disagrees with the other half as to who that is, I'm not sure "clearly" is the right word to use.
And if you don't entertain the possibility that it could be you, it will be you.
Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.
There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.
And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
That's not a thing I said.
I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.
Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.
> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.
But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.
School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.
Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.
You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.
Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.
Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.
This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.
I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.
What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.
The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.
Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.
No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:
"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."
There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
I agree with this. The Constitution is outdated in the extreme. We're long overdue for something new.
> A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
A divorce? I don't think that's going to work. Who gets custody of Wisconsin?
Some warlord from Michigan?
Which could, if you ask me, be a risk in case trump wins but it is rather clear that the election was fradulent (not saying it will be, but let's assume for the arguments sake it was). In which case the military would have to decide which "president" to follow, or to follow congress, or the senate, or someone else. Which could tear the military appart, let alone to speak of the national guard.
Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).
As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
I just hope that the outcome will be chrystal clear, hopefully democrat. And that if it is not unit cohesion is strong enough to prevent the US forces from falling apart.
You can make a pretty decent argument that this is already happening.
Actual police mostly have better procedures for this sort of thing, but still sometimes get the wrong guy or go to the wrong address. Somehow I doubt such groups will do better than them.
I think after the election we will have completely forgotten about this conduct while we still have to live with the spying on innocent people, non-sense travel restriction, and human-rights violating immigration system for years to come.
Making a scene of this decision just seems like stirring a storm inside a teacup, all the while we are experiencing a hurricane from the patriot act.
It begins with a legal dilemma: E.g. asylum is a human right, but how to determine who is eligible? In a timely manner that is. Especially if you have thousands of applicants and (almost) no documents. How do you house people in the meantime? What rights do they have?
Well, if it's a human right, then everyone. But it's not, which is why you have this twisted logic.
There is no right to freely cross borders.
It means everyone has a right to put in a claim to asylum and have it assessed properly by the authorities.
> There is no right to freely cross borders.
In some circumstances, yes there is.
If there's a war in country A, and non-combatants flee to neighbouring country B out of genuine necessity for safety, yes that border crossing is widely regarded as a human right.
It derives from the basic right to life.
Doesn't mean country B will respect it.
Immigrant have no right to just live in another country, refugees fleeing war have that right as long as the danger remains.
Just as any bird has the "right" to go wherever it wants and any other animal hat the right to go wherever it wants, I have the natural right to go wherever I want.
I'm a free human. As I'm born on this planet, it's my right to go wherever I want to go on this planet.
That governments want to take away that right of mine, that liberty, is just one example of how governments are using the tyranny of power to force people to their will.
That governments are just the thugs with the best weapons is just Realpolitik. This still doesn't invalidate my right to freely cross borders. I never signed away these rights.
Though I might be stupid to try to exercise it.
Remember your rights are my responsibility. They don't work in a vacuum nor can you make up your own rules.
Asylum is a human right https://ijrcenter.org/refugee-law/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Article 14
Doesn't that always happen step by step, with "early adopters" arguing on grounds of morality and other arguments, until eventually enough people start to believe something has a high moral value and should be raised to the level of a human right, enshrined in law?
Those who would argue for open borders as a human right are like "early adopters" of that idea.
We would all fit easily on Iceland, but most would die of dehydration or starve in a short amount of time.
I could be an early adopter of "cheese for everyone", but I would need to get a lot of cheese first to make that happen.
That said a world wide safety net would be a good thing to advocate for on moral grounds, no?
The EU has open borders for all EU citizens, and for the most part it's faring ok. There has not been a Europe-wide social safety net crisis as a result of this freedom, and crucially for this argument: there isn't an EU wide social safety net. It has freedom of movement without a universal safety net.
The USA's states are effectively countries. All USA citizens have open borders to travel between states in the USA. For the most part, it's faring ok and there has not been a USA-wide social safety net crisis caused by this freedom either.
Iceland and cheese for everyone: That sounds like what's called the slippery slope fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
That was set with our Constitution, and thoroughly tested in the 1860s. The idea has never really been seriously tested again since.
It’s a quite different setup from the EU.
But regardless if that is right or not, siblings have pointed out that open borders are in fact common-place in many parts of the world today, e.g. EU and USA’s internal borders are open. And (as sibling has also pointed out) historic precedent or existing examples are not necessary to justify any belief. Abolishing slavery did not need a historic precedent, neither did gay rights, and theoretically neither does open borders.
But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.
Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:
- The right of young children to be with their parents
- The right of spouses to be together and start a family
- The right to get married
- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation
- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine
- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter
- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)
- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else
- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised
- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
This statement might be technically true in legal terms (I am not a lawyer so I don’t know), but there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], ratified by all 193 members of the United Nations. That is a good place to start. Additionally the UN has more in depth declarations (e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child[2]; which my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them).
1: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
2: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx
---
PS. I truly encourage everyone to read the Declaration of Human Rights[1] in their native language. It is such a beautiful read and gives you a sense of shared humanity. It is not that long, and has over 500 translations. In my native language the translation is really clear and easy to follow.
> my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them
A fine example answer to "How does the immigration system violate human rights?"
If Twitter et al really want to be public resources they need transparency in their decision making and possibly independent oversight. If they want to just be regular businesses they need to take responsibility for the bullshit they propogate.
Straddling these two lanes hasn't been working for society and it seems like regulation or breakups are close to inevitable.
The GOP is prioritizing § 230 reform. Given their likely fall from power and prioritization of the SCOTUS confirmation, as well as Democrat control of the House and its focus on stimulus bills, the short-term threat is minute.
From an amoral government relations perspective, heavier moderation makes sense. A Biden spoof going viral during the election would attract the attention of incoming Democrat legislators. That creates a medium-term threat where there isn't one.
That said, I'm surprised they chose to block the content over de-prioritise it algorithmically and flag it with a warning.
EDIT: for those unaware, not only did the republican party take control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2016. They also made big gains in state elections. In fact, the republican party had a 'trifecta' (house, senate, and executive) in 25/50 states. It was a very significant shift in power: https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016
Its a fair point that polls missed in 2016. 2020 has kicked the hornet’s nest (rather, the last four years), voter turnout appears to be higher than previous years, and I’d bet an expensive bottle of bourbon current polls align close to what results will be (with modeling lessons learned from 2016).
Tangentially, quite a few Trump voters have simply aged out over the last four years (roughly 1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die each year). Broadly speaking, much older voters skew conservative compared to younger cohorts (per Pew Research), hence the confidence in a shift towards the left across branches in government representation during this election cycle. GOP support is quite literally dying out.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/907433511/trumps-base-is-shri...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-chance-taking-senate-fore...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/12/biden-tops-270-poli...
Doesn’t that mean older generations have more influence?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials... (Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation)
Young voters outnumber older voters, but this is mutually exclusive from an aging populace and a declining birth rate. You can chalk it up to population momentum and previously higher levels of immigration. It does mean Millennials will hold on to their electorate influence longer though.
While your point about ideology drift over time has some merit, I don’t believe it to be significant enough to materially consider.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889?jou... (https://doi.org/10.1086/706889 if you want to grab the full paper from SciHub)
“Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.”
If only a worldwide event would take place where the entire business world deemed it acceptable to change policies so employees can work remotely, then realize they can save boatloads of money by not paying inner city office rents and reduce employee salary expenses by vastly increasing their applicant pool, coinciding with significant increases in inner-city violence sparked by rioting protestors demanding to get rid of the police or else they'll burn the entire city down......oh wait
I'd point out that it's not the polls that are predicting such things. Rather it's people who are interpreting those polls.
Polls are just a snapshot of opinion in time. They are useful and can provide information about public opinion, but they certainly aren't predictive in the way you're stating.
Making predictions like "Biden is 80% likely to win" is a guess. Possibly based on polling data, but are not a poll.
A poll reporting[0] that the respondents of that poll prefer one candidate over another is not a prediction, rather it's data.
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
Some rural counties that are know to be republican strong holds by a huge margin are favouring Biden by ridiculous amounts. Its not going to happen. Its obviously an error, and the accumulation of these errors are the final polls. (Source https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YqKDpqkYBOKV)
Its true that the democrats are winning the early mail in voting. But since republicans don't trust mail in voting, as Trump told them to vote in person. They will come out on election night, by a large margin.
“Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.
More than 26 million people had voted as of Saturday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. That's more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016.”
Previous result are only predictive to a point.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-horrible-2018...
For comparison, the Republicans did very well in the 2014 mid term, convincingly taking over both houses of congress.
The democratic party had every advantage for a convincing win in 2018 and they instead had a very poor showing. The party is not good at elections and I don't see a reason why we expect this election to be different.
Dems did well in 2018, the issue was that the 1/3 of senators that happened to be up that year were in very bad states for dems geographically.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-democrats-won-h...
I’m not. The above analysis only depends on a lack of confidence in a GOP trifecta. That’s the only case where pissing them off could result in unilateral action and thus consequences for these moves.
Prior to Section 230, if you censor ANY content (say, child pornography) then you are "moderating" the discussion and are liable for ALL content. If Twitter deletes a death threat tweet, why didn't they delete the defamatory tweet against Hunter Biden or whomever? Biden could sue. So Section 230 allows websites to delete the kiddie porn without becoming a "publisher" of everything that gets posted. Biden can sue the poster but not Twitter.
Reforming (weakening) 230 would force Facebook, Twitter, etc. to choose between allowing all content, and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit. Of course Facebook and Twitter are not going to become an 8chan free-for-all, so they would be forced to crack down harder, censoring much more aggressively.
Also far-right sites (e.g. InfoWars) very much do not want increased liability here.
So "230 reform" is a useful rallying cry for conservatives who feel censored (rightly or wrongly) by social media giants, but the idea is so obviously bad that I can't imagine they'll go beyond minor tweaks.
<meta> It's rather sad that it has been downvoted, and those doing the downvoting should think a bit about their motivations. </meta>
Almost. That is the situation it would create for small venues like Hacker News-- extreme liability issues and heavy handed moves to mitigate them (if not just a shutdown as would probably be the case for many non-for-profit venues).
But Facebook, Google? These multibillion dollar companies have very little to fear from a lawsuit by the likes of me or you.
They could just staff up their legal team and work anyone who sues them into bankruptcy-- they already do. It isn't like litigation against parties for content they post in the US is easy to begin with even when you're not going after a 900 lb guerilla.
It would be bad news for them but ultimately just a cost of doing business. It might even ultimately be the best for their businesses as the ability to endure lawsuits would be one hell of a moat.
If a website is always responsible for whatever the users post you won't have much of a free internet anymore. However I think the issue with FB and Twitter is that they haven't had any repercussions for breaking the law in the first place.
The major criticism for S230 is that social media companies are rampant with fake news, and not doing enough to combat misinformation. If anything, it gives FB and Twitter a defense against an accusation of spreading political misinformation.
If the roles were reversed and a similar story came out about Trump and his son, would Twitter and Facebook have taken it down as part of a misinformation campaign?
Yes.
Parroting Russian disinformation during an election campaign because your owners don't like the politics of said disinformation target should be removed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
There needs to be more censorship on FB and YouTube which are in addition to Fox News doing WAY more damage to the United States than any foreign terrorists could ever dream.
Their coverage in the lead up to the Iraq Invasion did more damage to this country, Her military, and the rest of the world than some mean tweets or made up BS about Russia. Should we ban the NYT, too?
> There was no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails that the Post obtained, but its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at the 2020 election.
So the only proof that it comes from Russia is basically "that's the kind of thing the Russians would do." Aren't you spreading disinformation yourself by claiming that it is Russian disinformation?
> To reference, CrowdStrike’s account of their DNC investigation, published on June 14, 2016, “CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR…. At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016.”
0: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
You're talking about an ineffective hack that's used for scaremongering, that was caught and had little to no effect on the out come of the election.
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/131658513181811507...
YouTube has spent the summer censoring doctors because their views didn't match the WHO. The WHO has changed its own views so much that it's now contradicted itself many times, showing how terribly naive Google's policies are on this. Google never used to be naive, but clearly, times have changed.
The real problem is that YouTube inexplicably chose to base its public health "ground truth" on WHO guidelines, when as a US company their appropriate source would have been the CDC. The two were often in conflict, particularly with regard to civilian usage of masks.
The WHO spent a lot of time being wrong -- or, at best, confusing -- and a lot of people got sick unnecessarily as a result.
^ This is the actual disinformation.
Twitter, FB et al made a mistake ( calculated or otherwise ) and it is now hard to argue in good faith that tech companies are neutral arbiters.
To address your specific claim, if you showed me, say, RT post prior to yesterday that said what NY post posted, you would have a point. Instead, you have claims from Biden campaign staff and thanks to FB, Twitter, you now have a perceived bias in tech community that diminishes credibility of all those publications.
The fact that you seem to suggest that more like bias is needed, is, and I put it mildly, counter productive.
The story is already in full swing streisand effect mode.
edit: corrected some prepositions
None of the information was verified (even the easily verifiable bits) and the source, who was doxxed by the NYPost, is a Seth Rich conspiracist: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In some hypothetical "whatabout the other party", the only way to test it is if it were to happen.
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists and fake journalists completely in bed with the Democrats and very willing to conspire to throw an election and commit election interference.
The barely existent election interference by the Russians is trivial compared to what big tech is doing out in the open (hell, they're practically bragging about it at this point it's so brazen).
Several executives at big tech need to be put in prison for election interference. Start with Dorsey.
Yeah, I remember when the editor-in-chief at WaPo settled a Federal suit for $20M to avoid facing charges for his role in running a fraudulent university. Good times. Then there was the NYT board member whose namesake cancer charity foundation was shut down by the state attorney general's office because it turned out to be a front for his own business and political interests. What a con artist, huh. Not to forget the time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee stiffed his contractors for $70 million on a casino project that later went bankrupt. There oughta be a law.
Re-examine your own biases, then post.
Poster didn't say "they are con artists", they said "they are doing this and this, because they are con artists".
Your response was tu quoque mixed with ad hom: "oh yeah? Well the other guy is a bad person!"
(If it does, take the opportunity to freshen up on your Kierkegaard.)
I'm sure you could engage with it directly and without fallacy, you're obviously bright, but your replies were very low-brow ad hominem and tu quoque.
PS I don't invest "moral authority" in almost any leading politician today, though I certainly rank Biden higher than Trump in the "personal morality" stakes.
It's easy to be a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views. It's not easy when it doesn't.
If you're not being suppressed, you won't even realise you have it, and will happily advocate for censorship.
My political opinions are reasonably mainstream, but I'll happily defend the free speech rights of groups I disagree with (e.g. pro-lifers.)
Few free speech advocates think you should be free to call for violence. That's free speech that does threaten them. Speech that calls for discrimination against groups they don't belong to, however, is perfectly fine -- they know that they're too important to be threatened by it.
So practically all self-described free speech advocates do put limits on free speech, and there aren't any True Scotsmen.
'Free speech for my side, but suppress the other side' is not free speech. This is what Facebook / Twitter is engaging in.
You didn't see ANY suppression from them when Trump's tax returns were leaked like they're attempting to do with Hunter's emails.
Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
Heretic! True clocks look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Hexadeci...
> You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> In Italy under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed and warfare. And they produced indigestible noodles, boring operas and the FIAT. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world and Heidi!
:)
For instance, many left news organizations that were critical of NATO have seen their posts substantially deprioritized on FB.
“Congress shall make no law” is the text of the first amendment, which is in regard to limiting free expression, not expanding it.
Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
If I own my own business and I'm the only employee, let's say a plumbing business. For years I did my own work, own accounting, own taxes, etc. I decide to add an apprentice who I hire in full time. This apprentice starts evangelizing his political views while on jobs. This turns off customers and doesn't agree with my political views. I don't want my employee to do this. It is not my point of view and it's affecting business. Now in your world, I can't fire this person, or tell him to stop. But by not being allowed to fire this person, and allowing his speech to continue via my company, the government is forcing me and my property to endorse his speech. Why stop there? Why can't I put a Trump sign in my neighbors yard?
Now we're in a contradiction. Who's right to speech matters more in a private setting? Typically the owner of said private setting. By and large, this is true. Does this lead to sticky situations where people are profiled racially? Yes. But I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
Do you think it making it legal for an employee to bark racist words towards their minority colleagues all day at work is a good idea? Because under your free speech rule, that would be OK. Oh look, another contradiction. In any case, we have laws for these scenarios that are largely constitutional because the constitution largely ignores these private settings, thus it is up to us to legislate, hence we have laws on discrimination.
In “my world” where free speech is protected as a civil right, you would be allowed to fire an employee who is using his position to evangelize instead of doing his job. In my world the employee is simply protected from being fired for having a dissenting view when sharing their view in a forum where that would be otherwise appropriate. Or people cannot be censored on social networks for sharing inconvenient truths to any political side.
We already have laws that restrict discrimination in the workplace, setting it up so that protecting free speech in the work place necessarily contradicts that is either intentionally dishonest or an unintentional demonstration of lack of imagination.
The reality is that it’s possible and moral to legislate the protection of free speech civil rights without harmfully violating the employers’ rights. You just don’t believe in free speech civil rights.
Freedom of speech means the government will not target you for expressing your opinion. It does not mean that your employer has to tolerate it. If I write an op-ed about how my employer makes a shoddy product, they are well within their legal rights to conduct their business how they see fit and terminate their business relationship with me. You seem to confuse freedom of speech with freedom from consequence of speech.
Free speech is already a civil right. You are not talking about free speech. So employees would not be allowed to quit working for an employer because that employer used their free speech to support a position they were morally opposed to? Anti-discrimination laws almost exclusively protect who you are i.e. race, gender, nationality, religion, physical ability. Free speech is about the viewpoints you choose to express and the actions you choose to take. You have the freedom to speak and act how you choose, but I also have the freedom hear you and choose how I interact with you or choose not to at all. You can’t legislate that person A is free to speak but person B is not free to react to that speech, as you are restricting the basic freedom of person B. Of course, when B uses their speech and A is not free to react, you are now restricting everyone’s freedom and everyone loses their freedom. As opposed to not legislating the speech or the reactions to that speech and individuals have the freedom to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
This explains why individual billionaires bought all the newspapers.
When looking at the legalities keep in mind that these companies have been explicitly warned by the F.B.I. of such possibilities and have spent time combing through their own databases and have identified such events.
God. I’m on the Left, but can you all not see the blatant paternalism behind stances like this? It’s a pretty explicit: “we know best, don’t worry your pretty little head about this misleading content, we will take care of it”
This is not new. You will be censored or banned on Hacker News for not following rules. You will not see the distribution of the NY Post's material on this site.
I applaud them for enforcing rules, but not for being lenient with these actors. Free Speech has limits especially in someone elses' house, you should all know this.
Furthermore Reform Section 230 is political crap going nowhere. Any invokation of that here is political nonsense.
I don’t know what to think anymore because I don’t understand how this censorship will have any effect other than causing the story to spread like fire.
Does it really? I haven't seen anything on Reddit or the likes. Seems to me that the censorship has been rather successful so far.
I can't find this stated anywhere except HN posts. What is the original source for this?
That the email metadata was not released implies the emails are either inauthentic, or that the post did not contact someone with basic competence in computer forensics.
Either possibility seriously undercuts the article's credibility.
[1] https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1316407424648179717
Think of it like shooting the tires of all the cars you want to lose in a race. Sure you didn't push the winner across the finish line, but you made it damn near impossible for anyone else to even get there.
How about a straight forward algorithm for the feed instead of some hugely adbiased mess.
I've seen hypocrisy on both sides for sure but the intellectual dishonesty is only coming from one.
Let me guess: "The Other One!"
But it is known to use sans serif fonts and hire people that went to public schools.
You say this like it's an insult.
In my tax report I think my house is valued at 400 000 NOK.
When I talk to the bank it will probably be worth 4 200 000 NOK.
Tax authorities here know as banks update them every year.
Also in accounting it is common. I remember asking my teacher about it when we had basic accounting and it is simple: if you depreciate (?) an item to less than it is worth you just have to report a profit when you sell a "worthless" asset. (I'm not an accountant and English is not my first language but I think it should be possible to understand.)
It is like this for everyone!
Same with depreciation rules, when I learned the rules here my teacher was actually working with the tax authorities.
Depreciation in accounting is a technicality. And if you happen to sell a thing that is technically worth 0 in the books that just becomes an extra inflow of money to the company, which is taxable and so the tax authorities get their money.
Unless you have learned accounting, be careful :-)
Tax accounting is completely different to accounting you show to a bank for a loan. This is normal because they are used for different things, and are accounting for different things. For example - the tax rate and taxes paid have a real impact on cashflows which would impact your eligibility for a loan. In tax returns taxes paid are not included in profit and loss, because that would lower the tax paid by businesses.
So yes, NYT was absolutely gaslighting.
"Actual journalistic standards" yeah right! They literally carried out a fake news story about Nick Sandmann without any sort of verification. CNN settled 250 million $ lawsuit followed by Washington Post. Other publications are in the line next. They have zero credibility... especially after causing irreparable damage to a child's reputation by labelling him a racist when he was anything but. The real racists at the rally were those who accused this kid of racism. For full video of the actual altercation you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyOD8FIQk and decide for yourself.
Demonstration 1 of so called "Journalistic Standard": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/business/media/washington...
and
Demonstration 2 of so called "Journalistic Standard": https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-new-york-times-rollin...
Source or I call bullshit on this one.
> And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
Because that is the settlement. To save themselves from embarrassment and having to admit they faked the entire thing. I give credit to Nick Sandmann for being the bigger man here and settling instead of taking it all the way and making sure these media houses get crippled.
Anyways, the point here is not the amount of money settled. The point is that they faked the news and labelled an innocent boy a racist. You still haven't given a reply on that. Not that you are required to, but that is what is the crux of the matter here, not the money.
The difference is those stories had supporting details, with the reporters attempting to follow up.
They lost an editor for posting a mainstream opinion by an elected Republican... Note that they then shared the same sentiment about supporting police cracking down on protests in Hong Kong and received no internal pushback whatsoever.
The op-ed section isn't the news section. NYT is centre-left, NR is centre-right.
Anyway it won't hurt you to read things from the other perspective. The truth is often "in the middle" or only something you can triangulate after reading both sides.
Maybe I'm getting too bogged down in the op-ed section, like you say; but, it does make you think about the effect an op-ed section has on the news content as well.
The fist sentence has a word "tabloid" in it. It's not reputable source of news by any stretch.
also: c-f "russia"
WMD were non-factual, but even so nobody got censored back then (worse, nobody went to prison for going to war on non-factual information).
This is not even remotely close.
Magine if they had applied this to WikiLeaks.
Saying "if it's true, it's ban able for X" without out bothering to say that obviously it's bannable if it's false, isn't saying it's true. How could Twitter even know?
One thing I'm wondering is how can they censor it without getting either some evidence that it's fake or at least a clear denial? (Biden's campaign released a statement refuting it, but that's not the same as Biden himself publicly denying the claims.)
Thin evidence (someone found some damaging-looking emails) can be dismissed with thin counter-evidence (a denial). But it can't be dismissed with nothing.
Not really sure since when Twitter is required to host and aid in the spread of garbage
A story about potential corruption of a candidate for the US president has been censored by two of the largest information brokers in the world. Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true? lol
I assume most politicians at the presidential candidate level have some sort of PR team that works to come up with some official response to these sorts of controversies
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani - whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported - claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
idk, read for yourself
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2020/10/14/...
Like the censorship of "misinformation" would be more persuasive then I think.
Wait, so you're saying that providing an alibi as to why the claim is impossible is more suspicious than dismissing it as fake news without a defense? I'm not sure how else to interpret what you're saying, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but that position is mindboggling to me.
Bc, of course, light bribery probably does not go down when you're on the official schedule
But they didn't have some kind of scheduled meeting, so it seems unlikely that any business was done.
The Post story included a screenshot of what the paper said was a 2015 email from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” But the email doesn’t indicate whether Pozharskyi was describing a meeting that had already occurred or one intended to occur in the future. Nevertheless, the Post reported that the existence of such a meeting undercut Biden’s long-held assertions that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory.
Notably:
Burisma’s website lists at least some of Pozharskyi’s meetings with U.S. officials, including a meeting in November 2017 with then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and a series of meetings with members of Congress, though the company lists only Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) by name. It lists no meetings with Joe Biden. Pozharskyi also reportedly met in 2018 with Kurt Volker
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
This is politics 101.
And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
>And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
He addressed some parts of the specific allegations (whether a meeting took place), without addressing other parts (whether the emails are real). This immediately makes people think the email is real, which is what throwawa3495 was pointing out.
That's not what Biden said.
Biden said "and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place." That clearly is a denial that a meeting took place. It's not conditioned on a calendar entry. It's not saying "the calendar says no meeting took place", or "according to the calendar no meeting took place".
There’s an implicit dependency between these two clauses - we looked at the official schedule (there was no record, so,) no meeting took place.
Sentence construction in crisis management publications like this is poured over and very deliberate. Do not imagine this is just sloppy sentence construction.
It's just a kinda legalistic answer, you'd give in a deposition but is kind of besides the point now.
If i was Joe Biden and the yellow press came after me honestly I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
If people like Biden or Clinton responded every time someone tries to capitalise on some bullshit attached to their name they'd not be doing anything else
Joe Biden ignored the reports? The article says Joe Biden responded, saying the meeting didn't take place:
> In a Thursday afternoon statement, the Biden campaign said the paper “never asked . . . about the critical elements of this story,” and that a review of “Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time” show that “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails, though no other media outlet has confirmed the Post’s story so far.
Yep.
[0] “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
One major problem right now is that it’s 3 weeks from an election. Scrutiny and fact checks would risking being only after the election. I’m happy to see the requirements for credibility tightened right now, for issues related to the election.
Not that it has stopped Pompeo from teasing more Hillary emails in recent weeks, of course.
The main evidence is a PDF file of a print of an e-mail (without even providing a header information).
- we don't know if it's Hunter's laptop as claimed (kind of odd that somebody bothers with laptop repair (let's be honest, a lot people here probably buy a new one) and then leaves it there?
- we don't know if this is a real e-mail (headers could be used to prove that)
- we don't know that the sender e-mail is an e-mail connected to the person Hunter is accused talking to (the ".ukraine" in e-mail is very odd, who would put their country in an e-mail address, it's long and is not like he has a super common name)
- we don't know Hunter responded to it (since they have his laptop, you would think they would have his e-mails as well)
- we don't know the meeting actually happened
- this story is obviously an October surprise (the time is picked exactly to impact voting, there's also not enough time to prove it is false)
They are not responsible, to check all things. But it's mostly ethics and self preservation. I don't think anyone will deny that they actually have real impact now (even greater than MSM now) and I believe if Democrats win, there will be some laws passed adding some checks. I also believe trump with executive order about section 230 also probably contributed.
All it looks like to me is some Russian username. I don’t see how it ties to a real person. I haven’t read the article so maybe the post explains that bit.
There are so many other red flags (in addition whether this e-mail was really send, and the account belongs to that person) for example if Hunter responded to it (if they had his laptop surely they could get that from outbox? Why somebody who cares enough about their laptop to get it to repair (if you have plenty of money, more likely you'll get a new one) not care about getting it back?
This would prove that gmail indeed sent the e-mail, but it wouldn't prove that the e-mail wasn't created few minutes earlier.
If Twitter is censoring DMs of it though, then there must be something to it.
That "something" is almost certainly "the NY Post story has profound credibility problems, to the point that it may very well be a hoax, and Jack Dorsey is still reeling from his personal moral complicity in the flawed 2016 election."
Source I went to journalism school and worked in PR for years before I became a software developer.
revealing the dkim signatures at a later point would be twice as effective from a political and public opinion standpoint.
We need to take all of the press releases about "leaks" with a grain of salt, because I keep seeing "leaks" without actual content or verification. It's bullshit and why places that provide the actual contents of leaks are so important. Yes, certain publications are more trustworthy than others historically, but that doesn't mean they get an indefinite pass on providing verified information.
A couple searches: https://tineye.com/search/85ed99ec3e5397597a1100ce7d54c0bf99... https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZiu3ByKtFe0xCIg4gz... (The Google one weirdly searches for fun when entering this URL)
"That subpoena never existed"
or
"We issued it and didn't find anything credible to forward to the DOJ"
or
"We don't comment on ongoing cases."
... I'm not sure what silence means.
edit: Seems to be an old test vector for dnslib: https://github.com/paulc/dnslib/blob/d806cfc828d6bbae45c9b4c...
Edit: I've changed it from https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/facebook-twitter-block-the-pos... to what looks like it may be a more neutral source. Other users have supplied these related links:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-post-hunter-joe-bid...
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
But it's the same article, so it doesn't make sense to pretend that it comes from a different source, besides which the HN guidelines say "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If there's a more neutral and accurate article we can change it again.
>[Facebook And Twitter Limit Sharing New York Post Story About Joe Biden](https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/923766097/facebook-and-twitte...)
In comparison, there's Bloomberg:
>[Facebook Slows Spread of N.Y. Post Biden Story to Fact-Check](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/facebook-...)
Or CNBC:
>[Facebook, Twitter make editorial decisions to limit distribution of story claiming to show ‘smoking gun’ emails related to Biden and his son](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/facebook-makes-editorial-dec...)
A political article like this one would ordinarily get flagged off the HN front page. The subject matter of Twitter and Facebook imposing constraints on distribution is germane, but this article goes way beyond that by propagating the suspect email content.
Politics isn't completely off-topic for HN—there's overlap and it depends. There's lots of previous explanation about that at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
We turn off user flags sometimes when a story contains interesting (in HN's sense) new information and the probability of a substantive discussion clears a certain threshold.
Using information or skills uniquely possessed by HN readers?
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...
I'm still hearing daily from people who think Breonna Taylor was shot in her sleep.
Regardless of how you lean politically, this behavior should scare you. People with more power than you can censor at will while the public has basically no recourse.
What gives you the impression that this is the case? Hunter Biden's receipts from the computer repair shop are public for this too. I think bias might be clouding your judgement.
EDIT: Because HN isn't even allowing me to reply to the comment by user heartbreak, I will just edit this here:
He was NOT impeached for bribing Ukraine into fabricating exactly this sort of story. He was impeached because the democrats didn't want Biden's crimes exposed. “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime you’re being ruled by criminals” - Edward Snowden
The emails came from Hunter Biden’s laptop that he dropped off to get fixed. He never came back to get it therefore it became property of the shop. They spent money fixing it, waited for him to pick it up, he didn’t so by the terms of the agreement the shop owned it. All Hunter had to do is pay $85 and pick up his laptop. The NYT published illegally obtained tax returns of Trump. Why weren’t they censored?
No, he was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress[1].
> the democrats didn't want Biden's crimes exposed
Biden hadn't even won the presidential nomination then, so this seems quite a stretch. Also there were no allegations against Joe Biden then, and the allegations against Hunter Biden seemed all to be very non-specific.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Donald_Trump
Where? I didn’t see those. How does he have public receipts for something he never paid for?
Edit: Never mind. I saw it. It’s a quote, not a receipt. I just can’t believe someone would take a laptop to a random, low quality based on the price, repair shop for data recovery like that. “Hi. Can you get my sex tape, crack smoking video, and incriminating, politically sensitive emails off this thing?”
The Washington Post released unsubstantiated reports from anonymous sources that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia and released through Wikileaks. This is an extraordinary claim, and the evidence should be likewise extraordinary
4 years later, however, these remain allegations only, the lack of which drives the idea of a deep state conspiracy in conservative circles
If you're inclined to believe the Russia hacking allegations, this story will seem like a completely different, false equivalence, because one is true (the hacking allegations) and the other is false (the Hunter Biden allegation). But consider: there is as much hard evidence for one as the other, and both are damaging, destabilizing allegations
There was an indictment by the federal government[1][2]. That's certainly more reliable than a computer repairman finding an email on a hard drive on an abandoned computer.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/grand-jury-indicts-12-russian...
If you are indicted for a crime, the prosecutor must prove the allegations
If you are inclined to believe the allegation, your bar for proof will be quite low. Perhaps the accusation is enough.
For me, a destabilizing accusation like that requires more proof than anonymous CIA sources saying its true. I wish more Americans would put their dislike of Trump aside and demand that proof. It's not about Trump, it's about a destabilizing accusation from a government department. If they can do that about the President you don't like, they can do it about the President you do like
Again, the hard evidence, tangible and verifiable, is about the same for both
I am open to be proven wrong, believe me, but links to indictments is not proof
> unsubstantiated reports from anonymous sources that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia and released through Wikileaks.
A US government report is not anonymous. That's very clear who the source of that report is. It's the US government. I would also hesitate to call is unsubstantiated. There's a lot of substance in the indictment, including specific dates and times of actions, and names of the attackers.
> there is as much hard evidence for one as the other, and both are damaging, destabilizing allegations
No, there is more hard evidence for the DNC hack. If you want more hard evidence, see CrowdStrike's analysis[1], Google Search logs[2][3], ThreatConnect's analysis of email headers[4][5], Secureworks's analysis[6], Fidelis's analysis[7], FireEye's analysis[8].
[1] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379210
[3] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/roger-stone-aff...
[4] https://threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-all-roads-lead-rus...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16653671
[6] https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...
[7] https://fidelissecurity.com/threatgeek/archive/findings-anal...
[8] https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/solutions/pd...
[8] mentions "forensic details in the malware". Great! I want to be convinced! That is hard evidence! However, [8] does not contain details.
What specific forensic details, though? I have followed that rabbit hole. There was a limited release of the forensic details: the unclassified, public forensic evidence does not and cannot show the allegations to be true. It doesn't refute them, either, but it only shows that someone used (outdated!) malware that is available to any script kiddie, not state-level superhackerware. Stuxnet it ain't.
There are allusions to classified evidence that irrefutably demonstrates that Russia and Putin were involved. So, again, if you are inclined to believe the story, then "The CIA and NSA have evidence, but it's classified" is enough. Maybe it's true? Unknown.
If you are disinclined to believe it, or want hard evidence before you decide, then it looks suspicious. Destabilizing governments and throwing FUD is what the CIA does. This is documented. That's its expertise. That's its hammer. It doesn't mean that they are lying this time, but ... I mean, come on, it's the CIA. Reasonable people can be suspicious that the spooks are lying, here. Perhaps they are partisan Democrats, distracting from the content of the emails. Perhaps they are never-Trump Republicans. Perhaps Trump is a Russian asset indeed. Who knows? They don't show their hand. Nor hard evidence.
Hard evidence is not "Trust us, we have names, dates and credible intelligence" with lots and lots of footnotes
Now that you know what hard evidence would convince me, would you mind going through that list of links and finding it? If it's not there, consider that hard evidence does not exist. So, to recap: specific forensic evidence is great! Specifically "forensic details in the malware". That. Show me that. Or something equivalent
Links to people saying they have reviewed the forensic evidence and concluded Russians were involved, testimony before Congress, CIA reports without that forensic evidence, HN discussions, affidavits and such are not it.
Are you saying you think the affidavit is fake? Or that the info in the affidavit is not a strong indicator of Russia's involvement?
> but it only shows that someone used (outdated!) malware that is available to any script kiddie, not state-level superhackerware. Stuxnet it ain't.
Russia sometimes intentionally uses unsophisticated malware because it helps to make attribution harder.[1]
> Destabilizing governments and throwing FUD is what the CIA does.
Yes, but it's not what CrowdStrike, ThreatConnect, Secureworks, Fidelis, or FireEye do. Their business is to perform computer security investigations. Why would they jeopardize their business by publishing lies?
> Perhaps [the CIA] are partisan Democrats, distracting from the content of the emails. Perhaps they are never-Trump Republicans.
(a) Just because you're a partisan Democrat doesn't mean you do your job entirely wrong and fill your reports with lies. Same for never-Trump Republicans.
(b) The CIA is not a homogeneous unit. There are people there of various political backgrounds.
(c) Senator Richard Burr, who endorsed Trump[2], who was chosen by Trump to be a national security advisor[3], and who was accused of being "too close to Trump to lead an impartial investigation"[4], led a Senate committee that unanimously said the report was correct:
> A three-year review by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found that the intelligence community assessment, pinning blame on Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, was fundamentally sound and untainted by politics.
> “The I.C.A. reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the panel’s chairman. “The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”[5]
Also, the CIA wasn't the only federal organization involved, the FBI was as well. That would make it harder for the CIA to introduce any lies into the investigation. And the DHS and ODNI agree with the conclusion.[6]
So you want a list of specific hard pieces of evidence. Here are some:
(a) The attackers registered a domain (misdepatrment.com) and pointed it to a known APT-28 command and control IP: 45.32.129.185.[7]
(b) The domain shared an https certificate with a previous attack by Russian APT-28, on Germany.[7]
(c) The malware contained a hardcoded IP (176.31.112.10) that was previously hardcoded in malware used in that attack on Germany.[7][8][9]
(d) A Guccifer 2.0 document contained metadata with the name of a famous Russian person.[7]
(e) A Guccifer 2.0 document contained a message indicating it was edited by a computer with Russian language settings.[7][10][11]
(f) The way Guccifer 2.0 spoke to reporters indicated he was a team of people, because his English skills changed.[7][12]
(g) APT-28 beginning in 2015 launched phishing attacks using a bit.ly account to target 1,800 Google accounts. In 2016, they used that exact same bit.ly account to target Hillary Clinton's campaign.[13][14]
(h) APT-28 previously had created false hacker personas, similar to Guccifer 2.0.[15]
(i) The SeaDaddy malware from the DNC had nearly identical code obfuscation techniques and methods to SeaDuke malware previously attributed to APT-29.[8][16][17]
(j) Guccifer 2.0 used a Russian VPN with a custom config. Possibly an indication that it's a custom government-only deployment of the VPN.[18][19]
(k) Guccifer 2.0 once didn't use the VPN, and the IP was from Moscow.[19]
[1] https://youtu.be/xoNSbm1aX_w?t=286
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Richard_Burr
[3] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/electio...
[4] https://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/richard-burr-donald-t...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/russian-inter...
[6] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...
[7] https://www.vice.com/en/article/4xa5g9/all-signs-point-to-ru...
[8] https://fidelissecurity.com/threatgeek/archive/findings-anal...
[9] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49902/the-russian-emi...
[10] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/gucci...
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20170919113908if_/https://twitte...
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/06/h...
[13] https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/russian-ha...
[15] https://threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-0-dnc-breach/
[16] https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/unit-42-technical-analys...
[17] https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0053/
[18] https://threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-all-roads-lead-rus...
[19] https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-gucc...
There's a lot to absorb, so it will take me some time to look through it all. I will do that and get back to you with my thoughts.
Again, thank you very much!
I've barely scratched the surface here, and intend to continue, but it's been awhile and I want to honor your efforts here with a progress report.
While I am critical, I have not yet come to any overall conclusion about everything you have presented here. These are just some observations and comments about one article, the Vice article. I really want to stress that my pushback is not a refutation of the argument as a whole.
>> Yes, but it's not what CrowdStrike, ThreatConnect, Secureworks, Fidelis, or FireEye do. Their business is to perform computer security investigations. Why would they jeopardize their business by publishing lies? <<
This is not very convincing, to me. I don't think speculating on why someone would lie is fruitful. People and organizations lie or are mistaken all the time. In following the rabbit-hole of the vice article ([7], above) I found this [1] "A security firm made headlines earlier this month when it boasted it had thwarted plans by organized Russian cyber criminals to launch an attack against multiple US-based banks. But a closer look at the details behind that report suggests the actors in question were relatively unsophisticated Nigerian phishers who’d simply registered a bunch of new fake bank Web sites.... Colorado Springs, Colo.-based security vendor root9B, which touts a number of former National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Defense cybersecurity experts among its ranks." Why would a security firm with NSA and DoD experts exaggerate or be mistaken about a Russian hacking intrusion? Again, I don't care to speculate, but for our purposes it's enough to note that people and organizations do lie, or exaggerate, or are mistaken, and get headlines anyway from credulous media outlets
Speaking of rabbit holes, let's compare the coverage of the DNC hack to the coverage of the German Bundestag attack. This article [2] is very straight-forward. The investigator lays out the report clearly without lots and lots and lots of footnotes and testimonials and circumstantial, distracting links. I urge you do read it. It's quite short. The evidence is there, in the report. The language is simple. Russian hackers may have been behind the malware used in the attack on the Bundestag left. Could I read a such a clear and unadorned report about the DNC hack?
Let us contrast it to the link-flood above, and in the Vice article ([7], above) and in all of the coverage of the DNC hack. Perhaps there is a simple report like [2] that lays out the evidence clearly, but if so it is buried beneath baffling bullshit. It's almost as if the analogy of [2] does not actually exist anywhere, and the link-flood is an attempt to convince us that where there is smoke there's fire, and somewhere there must be hard evidence.
Specifically, let's unpack the Vice article a little bit. It takes 11 or so paragraphs to get to this, which arguably should have led the article:
"One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was hard coded [a] in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers. Russian military intelligence was identified [b] by the German domestic security agency BfV as the actor responsible [c] for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a shared [d] SSL certificate."
[a] https://twitter.com/RidT/status/751325844002529280
[b] https://www.wirtschaftsschutz.info/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/...
[c] https://www.spiegel.de/consent-a-?targetUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fww...
[d] https://twitter.com/RidT/status/752528393678225408
(I use letters, because I want to make a clear distinction between my links/footnotes versus those of Vice)
(Note that the shared SSL certificate, mentioned in Vice and [2], is also mentioned in Krebs On Security [1] - and rejected there as evidence of Russian hackers)
It should have led with its strongest evidence. Why didn't it?
I have supplied three footnotes, one of them to a very clear example of the kind of evidence or report I am looking for. This single Vice article, by contrast, provides no less than four in this single paragraph alone, never mind the entire article which is replete with them. Let's go through them
[Comment too long, continuing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24834762 ]
[... continued]
[a] is to a Twitter post, itself a reply to a now-deleted Twitter post. It's a person looking for clarification from the now-deleted OP! This is "one of the strongest pieces of evidence" that Vice (and yourself, apparently?) can muster, and it's a Twitter reply, seeking clarification, from a deleted tweet.
[b] is a German-language report from BfV about, as far as I can tell, Russian cyber attacks on Germany, and not relevant to the DNC attack.
[c] an article about the Russian attack on the German bundestag and the German response. Not relevant to the DNC attack.
[d] is the to the same thread as in [a], the fellow looking for clarification from the now deleted OP
Why would Vice provide so many links to only peripherally related material? Why didn't it link directly to [2]? The author must have seen it, and it far more supports the assertion than [a]-[d]
Could it be to bolster the appearance of overwhelming evidence when there actually is very little?
Let's evaluate that actual claim itself, the strongest evidence: "a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was hard coded in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers"
First, from the Bundestag report [2]:
"While attribution of malware attacks is rarely simple or conclusive , during the course of this investigation I uncovered evidence that suggests the attacker might be affiliated with the state-sponsored group known as Sofacy Group (also known as APT28 or Operation Pawn Storm). Although we are unable to provide details in support of such attribution, previous work by security vendor FireEye [i] suggests the group might be of Russian origin, however no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country. " (emph. mine)
[i] https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/global/en/cu...
The researcher is much less certain that the attack was from Russia than Vice is, apparently. Cannot provide details, literally says "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country"
From [i] "SOURFACE: This downloader is typically called Sofacy within the cyber security community. However because we have observed the name “Sofacy” used to refer to APT28 malware generally (to include the SOURFACE dropper, EVILTOSS, CHOPSTICK, and the credential harvester OLDBAIT), we are using the name SOURFACE to precisely refer to a specific downloader."
This is the only mention of Sofacy in the entire report, which goes on to link SOURFACE to Russia. The link to Russia, and it's a fair point, is that SOURFACE has been deployed in niche situations that support Russian interests. So SOURFACE is Russian. Russian state? Perhaps.
The evidence is even more tenuous: The FireEye report links Russia to SOURFACE, a piece of malware, and not Sofacy. But let's grant it. SOURFACE is Russian State, and we now know that Russia engages in cyber attacks.
What about "the strongest piece of evidence", that hard-coded C&C IP address `176.31.112[.]10`? I'm not rejecting the evidence, but am going to push back on it. I don't know enough to evaluate this claim: "Those servers were dead at the time, so at best these would be leftover artifacts, not in-use infrastructure" [3]
Is it not possible that the Bundestag attack and DNC servers were attacked by script kiddies, using outdated malware? I have a feeling the Bundestag researcher [2] would shrug and say "It's possible". Not Vice though.
If "those servers were dead at the time" is true, it wouldn't just be misdirection from Russian state actors, it would bespeak profound incompetence. It might even be evidence against Russian state actors at least, in these cases.
Why do I give a shit? Why spend an hour and a half writing this already too-long response, evaluating what's turning out not to be the hard evidence I asked for?
Remember: the original claim is that the DNC was definitely attacked by Russia, that Russia helped Trump to win with both the collusion of the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. In support of this claim were quotes from anonymous sources and a baffling maze of links designed to obfuscate the fact that it's far from definite.
Because of this dubious claim (again presented as definitely proven without a doubt):
* The legitimacy of the Office of the Presidency has been destabilized. I don't think most Americans understand how dangerous this is. It's more dangerous than an actual terrible, shitty President. It's more dangerous than Pol Pot himself being elected President, because checks and balances would reign in a genocidal maniacs worst impulses. Once that legitimacy is destabilized, all bets are off: peaceful transfer of power is destabilized and all hell breaks loose. The stability and prosperity that Americans have enjoyed for 150 years becomes civil war, strongmen, competing Presidents, ruin. This is not within living American experience, so people can be cavalier about saying "I know the President is a Russian asset" and then pass off a maze of nonsense as "proof". I don't get it, I really don't.
* With respect to Julian Assange, the erstwhile leader of WikiLeaks, the rule of law and inalienable human rights are being egregiously violated, with the encouragement of rank-and-file Democrats, because of this dubious claim that WikiLeaks colluded with Russia to get Trump elected. If it can happen to Assange, it can happen to any journalist, if the accusation is terrible enough. If it can happen to any journalist, it can happen to anyone.
I really do want to see the strongest evidence, not get worn down by looking at Twitter feeds and irrelevant German-language reports and such
So, please, for the love of everything you care about, don't make me dig through a flood of nonsense to find that one gem of [2] with falsifiable information. Link directly to the report, the strongest piece of evidence, if you can. Please, supply one link. If you keep flooding me with a maze of links, that will take me hours and hours to go through, it will make me think that you don't actually read what you're sending me, or that you don't have evidence.
In any case, I will continue to look more in detail at everything you have here. Maybe something there is that gem.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/05/security-firm-redefines-...
[2] https://netzpolitik.org/2015/digital-attack-on-german-parlia...
[3] https://twitter.com/outsh1ned/status/1019012623789010944 (hey, if you're going to use Twitter posts from randos on the internet as evidence, so can I!)
As the other user already pointed out this was has been proven. And they also have the exact unit and names of the Russian intelligence officers who did the hacking.
Please stop spreading disinformation about this.
"Please stop spreading disinformation about this."
Alas, the disinformation is that it has been proven.
Absolutely happy to be incorrect, but, again, it is an extraordinary claim, and the evidence for such a destabilizing claim is lacking
Again the hard evidence that you are dying to see is classified and would reveal American hacking capabilities. If Putin is not willing to send over his officers who did that hacking, then why should the US government give up the evidence for nothing in return?
Revealing how America identified the Russian hackers would be extremely valuable for Putin and his KGB/GRU operatives. They can use this information to better their hacking operations in the future.
Then we are back to exactly what I said at the start: they remain allegations only. Nothing has been proven, as you said. One either believes anonymous sources within the CIA and the people who believe them, or one wants evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
Remember: it's not just about Russians, but the original allegation was that the Trump campaign was involved. That has been very quietly walked back.
The DNC was definitely hacked and the content of the emails were embarrassing to powerful people, but whenever the content of the emails are discussed, people start shouting about Russians and Trump's love of Putin. This is very convenient to these same powerful people
The email exposure could have been a revelatory renaissance for the DNC, a real moment of self-aware house-cleaning. I was really hoping they would slim down and become a truly effective opposition party. Instead, it's Russians.
Given the lack of evidence and the unprecedented political climate, particularly the distraction from the emails themselves, I would like more evidence than "Trust the DNC and the CIA and the NSA when we say: Trump colluded with Russians to get elected!"
Do new Presidents have a meeting with Head Spook who says "Support our illegal, unethical mass surveillance program or we'll make everyone think you like to get peed on"?
Every single American should demand that evidence even if they despise Trump. The same destabilizing allegation can be made against anyone without that requirement for evidence irrespective of political persuasion. I would be this oppositional on behalf of Clinton, Biden, Obama, anyone. You should too.
Well considering that Trump's attorney general William Barr shut down the investigation and is reversing Mueller's charges that is not surprising. So not only was there never a full investigation done but the mediocre investigation we had is being undone. We will never know the truth of Trump's and Putin's secret relationship until a proper investigation is done. Including Trump's finances.
https://www.justsecurity.org/69266/barr-is-dismantling-charg...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/08/mich...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-...
No one walked back on anything. It was simply not investigated since Republicans (especially people like Mitch McConnell) are putting party over country and not holding the president accountable.
DNC has many problems including mediocre security and treating candidates differently and picking favorites but that is not the topic of the discussion.
>Every single American should demand that evidence even if they despise Trump.
The problem with your entire premise of demanding evidence is that it's a red herring. This is not about producing evidence because any evidence produced you can label as fake or made up or false flag. Once evidence is provided the goal post is moved to evidence being made up or not credible. There is absolutely no benefit in the US government revealing evidence except for making Putin's team of hackers smarter. The people who believed that Russia did it --- will continue to believe it and that people who didn't --- well they will find new excuses for themselves.
There was no goal-post moving here, and accusing others of bad faith is against the guidelines. Accusing me of bad faith here is unfair and inaccurate. I ask for evidence that matches the magnitude of the assertion and that has never changed. Evidence I would accept is falsifiable: the forensic footprints of the malware, or equivalent
Can I see the evidence myself and evaluate it on its own terms? The answer, after 4 years, is a hard no. Lots of articles; lots of partisans saying it's true; lots of people such as yourself who are convinced, accusing others of moving goalposts; but nothing tangible
My original assertion is that this all remains an allegation. In response, you and the other user posted lots of links to people affirming that they know it to be true.
Your original assertion was that it has been proven and to claim otherwise is "disinformation", but so far, and bear with me please: so far, you have people telling you that it's true. Only. And that's okay! It doesn't mean they are lying or misinformed. They could be telling us the truth. At the end of the day, if you trust those people not to be lying or misinformed, then it's good enough
I would hope that you see here that principled people can disagree, even if you find all the affidavits for it compelling and convincing.
>> No one walked back on anything. It was simply not investigated since Republicans (especially people like Mitch McConnell) are putting party over country and not holding the president accountable. <<
It could be that they are cynical, perhaps a bit evil, and know in their hearts the President is working against the interests of the country, but just gain too much personal benefit from looking too closely. Or, and stay with me here, perhaps at least some of them truly and reasonably believe that the evidence is not strong enough
I'm most likely done with this thread, but I do appreciate your contribution. If you would like to have the last word, know that I will read it and consider carefully what you have to say. I would love one link to the evidence you personally found most compelling. I will open-mindedly look at it
Again this is why we need a thorough investigation into the matter. So far there has not been one. You of all people need to be demanding this since you want to get to the bottom of this and see the evidence.
Furthermore senate republicans have walked of committee hearings, they refuse to call witnesses, and they refuse to listen to witnesses. This shows you that they don't care about the evidence. And that answers your last question.
It is a straight-forward report on what the malware found on the German parliament's computers. The researcher is clear about what is known for certain and what is speculation.
No editorializing, no committees, no VIPs testifying before Congress, no confusing arrays of links to other links to other links ending up at broken links.
Does such a thing exist regarding the DNC hack? If you cannot find it (as I cannot, after 4 years), consider that it does not exist. And if it does not exist, why not?
What makes that less credible than "anonymous sources"?
"Twitter blocked users from sharing an article that indicated Hunter Biden introduced his father Joe to a Ukranian businessman — charging that “hacked materials” were used in the story."
Very, very bad move by Twitter and Facebook. The partisan rule-bending is clear.
Would it be considered a hack if somebody within the IRS gave those documents to the press? What if the source was a foreign entity working through an intermediary?
That is to say, what distinguishes a source vs a hack is a function of the press' investigation into the authenticity of the materials.
I'm not sure blocking the NYPost is the right call here, much as I hate to say it.
Given that the administration has no qualms about using the DOJ to persecute tech companies in a politically motivated manner, I see no reason why Twitter and Facebook can't play dirty and fight back using underhanded means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Mother_Jones_st...
The salacious and new claims were those that turned out to originate from a Russian agent. The Steele dossier was Russian disinformation:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/...
You...you mean screaming at the NY post for printing itself? Yes, people do that constantly.
I think I agree that this article shouldn't have been blocked partially because it don't fit perfectly into this distinction
Bonus second reason why people might feel differently. People know and treat the NY Post as suspect. People like me don't read it. Probably some advertisers won't touch it, but I do use Twitter and FB. Most people do. They are arguably natural monopolies
Virality. Information spreads in a fundamentally different way over print [1] versus social media. It spreads faster. It spreads more insidiously. And it mutates--not per se, but in the context attached to it.
There is also social media's concentration. Before cable news, broadcast television was held to stringent standards. As competition emerged that went away. Facebook and Twitter are singular in their domains. Holding them to a higher standard while an election is underway seems reasonable.
[1] A newspaper on a website still behaves like print media. It has to be explicitly shared.
NY Post has always been trash and will always remain trash
If Biden loses. If he wins, it might very well do the opposite.
Fingers crossed.
Did everyone suddenly turn into a free speech nut this morning?
While it is true that Twitter has cracked the whip against the right far more than the left since they started regulation of misinformation, this is reflective of Twitter being unbiased - the problem is the 21st-century Western right.
We can make appeals to the ideal of free speech or point out instances of hypocrisy all we want, but it's a futile and demoralizing thing to focus on. It probably makes more sense to view Facebook and Twitter as media outlets with their own editorial agendas, just like the Washington Post, Economist, Daily Mail, etc. And then disengage if their agenda is at odds with yours.
In other words, Jack Dorsey supports totalitarians.
This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM. If you think that's OK for Twitter on its platform, is it also OK for AT&T on its phone network? For Google on Gmail?
T-mobile already classifies these calls as 'Scam likely' and they've never seemed to misclassify any, so obviously it can be done.
They do, my local politician robo-calls all his constituents with info, and T-Mobile always flags his calls as spam.
I guess in a way it's spam since it's unsolicited? But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling, and keeping people informed is part of his job.
> robo-calls
Yeah that sounds like spam. If info needs to get sent out, try email. Robo-calls are intrusive, and generally the wrong medium for transmitting information.
Edit: Obtrusive -> intrusive. Although I guess both are technically correct.
Granted that feels different than a phone call, but the intent may be the same.
Also, usually, you can unsubscribe to email lists/sender. While you can't do that for phone calls. You might block a specific number, but those robo-calls might use many different numbers
That's the way pretty much every spammer justifies their existence and somehow manages to sleep at night.
The only reason robocalling by politicians is not illegal is because it's them who get to make the laws. They should all get in the sea, alongside all the other spammers.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Took a long time to clear up in California.
I got one (Verizon) just as I started reading the comments for this post. :(
There are solutions[1], but you'll need to wait until next July[0],at least in the US. It's not a complete solution, but it should take care of the vast majority of scam calls.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
[1] https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/stir-and-shaken-overview/
Google recently unveiled plans for its "verified calls" feature, so that might help if you're on an Android 11 device.
I personally do not answer any calls from numbers not on my contact list. If a call was urgent, I'd normally recieve a text message (if informal) or an email (if formal, like the bank, for example) from the caller eventually.
That was 5 years ago. Maybe they've changed?
I do. Then take the time to get an actual human on the phone. Then I verbally abuse them until they hang up.
It's not effective in stopping them, but while I'm spewing vulgar stuff at them, they're not trying to rip anyone else off.
Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service. It's not a public utility.
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
Why use social media?
>You should have done that
In a way, the New York Post can do exactly this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781812
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
In our current world, they haven't, and you're responding here on a corporate social platform. Because that's where the people are.
What if it were your ox being gored?
Your political leaders and journalists are tuned in.
Thus your life is still affected.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
Many pols actually prefer single points of, ah, influence, so they're going to fight you.
(National Review|Atlantic|NYT|Reason|New Yorker|...)
Thus your life is still affected. Ergo, we should .... ???
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
The Holocaust happened 75 years ago. Twitter's decision came 2 days after Facebook's.
Q.E.D.
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, would you think they're colluding?
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
How would you feel if they had banned all talk of russian conspiracies the last few years? Would you be making the property rights argument still?
Yes. Because otherwise the Russians (or anyone else) could do so on my property and I would have no recourse.
The appropriate way to handle this is to vote with your feet/wallet.
Besides, Twitter and Facebook's revenue model is so incredibly evil and exploitative, folks should leave there even if they weren't blocking whatever it is that you think is important.
I did nearly seven years ago and I'm much happier for it.
Not exactly. The public has the right to have all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh private company".
Every forum online has rules about what you can and cannot post; there is no law stating they have to leave whatever you post up.
Phone companies are natural monopolies on account of the cost of building out a physical network and network effects. Social media has similar dynamics. The only difference is there is no requisite physical layer.
Is there a network effect? Sure. Did MySpace, Friendster, AOL, CompuServe etc have those first mover advantages as well? Where are they now?
They had the same first-mover advantages. They never achieved Facebook's scale and network advantage. In the early days, Ma Bell also faced competition.
But these problems will still be here post-Trump, or even if he wins re-election. We need to have reasoned debate on how to deal with our new world with social media.
AT&T is not in the business of content.
That's a very material distinction.
That says nothing about how/who/what Twitter should or should not be doing in this case, other than to say the moment you dip your toe into content management, it's going to get very complicated, as we now see on a daily basis in the news.
Twitter is a closed-system and not a utility, and I guess that makes all the difference.
From my understanding, the current status quo is:
1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;
2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.
This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.
EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.
I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.
You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)
In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.
Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.
The cases you're citing predate the law, so they aren't precedent on how the law should be handled.
If you want actual precendent, here's some:
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/perfect-10-inc-v-ccb...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/parker-v-google-inc
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/ma-v-village-voice-m...
- https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/jurin-v-google-inc
That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.
Here's matching precedent from 2018/19: https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...
It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.
The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.
Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.
The current status quo, as I understand it, is:
1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles). 2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition. 3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.
Once the subject is switched, we can comfortably speak in generalities about the abstract value of speech. It reminds me of what Keats said about a certain way of thinking about economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
We're dealing with something that most reasonable people agree is a genuine crisis of democracy, and it's sheltered by a naiive conception of speech that doesn't have anything specific to say directly about Qanon, Covid, the 2020 election. It's a view from 10,000 feet generality that works when the ocean is flat again.
I also think that not only is it legally permissible for Gmail to censor links, they do so already. Try reliably delivering a newsletter from a brand-new domain name (I have). Censorship isn't any better when it's the emergent effects of unknowable spam filtering and abuse algorithms than a decision by a human. (I'd say it's worse, because at least you can ask the human what they were thinking.) But the solution there is for consumers to stop using products that don't do what they want, not for big government to tell companies how to implement technical systems.
This isn't a new behaviour.
I've experienced it personally: Back in 2011, when I published the big archive of paywalled but copyright expired Jstor documents with attached manifesto facebook silently vanished any message containing a link to it or the title of it, even in private messages.
One reason you haven't heard more about this behaviour is because the fact of the matter is that its extremely effective.
This thing didn't even survive the first half of the day.
Must be true if Joe says so huh
The laptop was supposedly dropped off a few years ago. Giuliani, Bannon and the FBI have seen the data at least months ago. The NY Post has had it in their possession. None of these details are confirmed. Which means they either failed to verify any of it or they may even know it's a scam.
I want to see the raw emails.
Why was the pdf created in 2019? If the emails were supposedly found now and turned into a pdf for distribution.
It’s almost as if Rudy Giuliani is terrible at committing crimes like he’s been doing for the past 4 years.
“When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”
Entirely reasonable sentiment to express.
I think it's also interesting that the "hacking" ban doesn't have an exemption for the press. Even though the NY Post is fairly partisan even by tabloid standards,it seems like a double standard if I can still link to an NY Times article containing information about classified government activities that were revealed via hacking
The damage is still done then. NYPost knows the article is fake news, and so does Giuliani and the other folks surrounding the article.
But put it there, and by the time your "open discussion" is done, the elections will be over.
In normal circumstances, that doesn't matter. Talk about it, let it fly around the internet and then in a week or so we'll hear the authoritative rebuttal.
However, we are 20 days from the election. People are literally lined up and voting as we speak.
My feelings on this are mixed. It's effectively restoring the "old media" order where random trolls can't steal elections. But it's naturally preventing "the truth" from stealing an election too.
The FBI has confirmed the authenticity of subpoenas in the past and I'm confident that they'd be able to do so before November. Determining if the pictures are photoshopped is trickier but could probably also be done relatively quickly
Edit- I hit reply on the wrong comment, whoops
The purported facts beggar belief -- that an extremely famous person took his laptop, full of extremely damaging material, to a repair shop and then simply forgot about it. That a Mac repair shop owner violated all ethical standards to spy on a customer laptop. That after stealing the customer's laptop and data and finding supposedly treasonous data on it, he gave it to Trump's campaign team instead of the FBI.
There's no evidence that it's true and substantial evidence that it's false.
Repair shops look through equipment all the time-- they're one of the largest sources of reports for child pornography.
> instead of the FBI.
I think you've just proved you didn't even read the NY POST article? It claims he gave the laptop to the FBI and includes a supposed "federal subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI". The continues, "before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello"
I have no idea if this stuff is bullshit or not-- presumably the FBI will come out and debunk it completely shortly.
But I don't think the discourse is furthered by opinionated comments from people who don't even give an appearance of having read the article.
There’s no cool cosmic justice here, where the Post loses readership because they publish lies or that politicians will be punished for promoting lies from sources they knew to be bad. There’s just this hazy miasma, where the Post is vaguely not credible but also not totally distrusted, and people forget which politician promoted which story a couple days later.
That means the best way to play the game isn’t to research the truth but to drum up the most fantastical lies you can. That game has nothing but bad outcomes for humanity in the long term, and I don’t blame the platforms for trying extremely flawed approaches to prevent it.
What I do not get is why some people honestly do believe that an average person needs to be protected from lies by a censor? And who ensures censor is not a liar? Who guards the guards? The question is important as people seem to be clamoring for rather powerful guards of 'what is true truth'.
I was a Chomsky style free speech ultimatist.
Unfortunately, humans aren't rational.
Lying is super effective, its effects pernicious. They activate identity and trigger negative partisanship. Simply trying to refute lies only embeds them further. Profiting from the outrage machine (dopamine addiction) has created a vicious cycle, and worse every year.
Is this really what we want?
The founders had the notion that democracy requires an informed populace. When the audience of NY Post, Fox News, OANN, and others are objectively, stubbornly anti-informed, how is democracy served?
What's the alternative to censorship? How does Truth prevail in the public square?
Even Good Samaritan Chomsky has no response to the Paradox of Tolerance.
--
For my part, I think it's hysterical that Facebook and Twitter censored a NY Post. That's like the biggest dealer of crack cocaine indignantly tossing a hit of molly in the trash, because that crap ain't no good for y'all.
I'm still baffled why any one would get their news from NY Post, Facebook, or Twitter. It's quite a stretch to call any of that "news". So I don't see how allegations of censorship even apply.
I definitely agree that lying is effective. I agree that outrage machine is getting really annoying, but I also found a way to deal with it in an imperfect way. Stop consuming this information and, eventually, stop internalizing this overwhelming pile of crap that is shoved into our minds 24/7.
There is a reason we are a republic. There is a reason we protect ( or at least give lip service to protecting ) minority voices. And that's usually, because popular opinions don't need defenders. And I want those voices protected even if they are unpopular, ill-informed, dishonest, or even just lying.
The alternative is that we ban lying. Period. No cute ads that dance on the edge of misrepresentation. No white lies. You had a shitty day. Say so. No lie of omission. Your company uses child labor, disclose it in 10-k ( oi, all material facts should be available for investors ). No politician talk. We usher a new world where dictionary police is king and every single one of us has to weigh each word carefully..
I feel I should apologize. This post may be now coming across as snarky. I think that fact that I don't really have a good answer makes me frustrated.
edit: added don't in last sentence.
I chose to reply to you, specifically, because you were discussing ideas and principles, avoiding getting caught up by personalities and the food fight.
I've been obsessing about rhetoric, persuasion, discourse for way too long. I've tried any thing and every thing suggested. Stuff like David Domke and heroesnarrative.org. I've spent 100s of hours working on framing, wordsmithing, resolutions, whitepapers.
Nothing I've tried has made a lasting difference. Most of it was probably counter productive.
Of course there are some obvious things we (society) can do, short of banning falsehoods.
- Add friction to, and sometimes break, feedback loops to thwart the dopamine rush.
- Decouple (unbundle) activities to create opportunities for competition.
- Prohibit self dealing and other conflicts of interest.
- Ban toxic incentives (targeted ads, freemium).
You may note these remedies have some overlap with the adjacent issues of monopolies and privacy.
Of course, no silver bullets. People smarter than me will surely add to this list. (I barely understand the debates about Section 230.) And I'm still find a response to algorithmic newsfeeds.
All of these measures limit, deny, thwart.
But I want to find positive alternatives. Role models for better behavior. In the marketplace for ideas, I want to be selling the best ideas.
--
Have you listened to KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle (kexp.org) lately? In response to COVID-19, they're now doing mass psychiatry, group therapy with their "You are Not Alone" campaign.
I think this might be one antidote to the outrage machine.
It's a synthesis of many aspects and features you'll recognize. And most of the time these kinds of things backfire. Perceived as insincere empathy and saccharin positivity.
But KEXP somehow makes it work. A slow metamorphosis over years. They're now fulfilling a yearning need for connection and community and calmness that, frankly, is mostly missing in media.
One example of their genius: In response to the ridiculous assaults on the USPS, KEXP did the "Support The Post Office" event, encouraging listeners to send their song requests via USPS. Then one morning they played those requests and read the cards.
Not once did KEXP engage in the food fight. They didn't have to. They only said positive things and encouraged positive actions.
KEXP said what they're for, not what they're against.
Of course KEXP is listener funded, and therefore directly incentivized to do positivity and outreach. Versus ad based outrage machines.
(A few years ago, KEXP canceled their weekend morning shows on politics and current events. I had listened for decades and really liked those programs. But the format and strategy practiced by aging hippies, standard public radio fare, was long past being constructive.)
I'm now wondering how the KEXP experiment can be replicated. Done many many times vs scaled larger.
I'm also wondering if this strategy can reconnect people, help reduce our hyper polarization. Stock advice for cult deprogramming is unconditional acceptance, no judgement. Just be glad your friend or family member is back and listen listen listen.
That kinda feels like what KEXP is doing.
I am not against doing the things you mentioned ( adding friction, limiting conflict of interest and so on ). There is a clear need for that. And there are real business interest that would put up a big fight if there was a real threat of implementation.
WTF does this question have to do with the paradox of intolerance? There's nothing intolerant about the claim that the Bidens are corrupt.
> It's quite a stretch to call any of that "news". So I don't see how allegations of censorship even apply.
Freedom of speech isn't restricted to news and the idea that you can censor anything which doesn't fall into a narrowly defined category such as "news", with the censor deciding what counts as news and not, would completely kill the point of freedom of speech.
> The founders had the notion that democracy requires an informed populace.
I often see this claim but I'm not aware of any evidence that either the founders believed this, nor for the belief itself. It's also often used to argue for voting restrictions. It's kind of parallel to the idea that freedom of speech requires that people are rational, where again my question is: What's the alternative? What is the rational informed group that we should entrust restrictions to?
In your view some elite group should decide that NY Post, Fox News and OAnn are anti-informing people, not serving democracy. Well if we trust that elite group, why bother with democracy in the first place?
This is a very excellent point.
While bingeing on HOPWAG, it finally occurred to me that our current food fight (fake news, cancel culture, censoring, trolling) might be due to very different ideas of What Is Truth.
If we can't even agree that the universe is knowable and someone somewhere probably has the correct answer, then the whole fight is pointless.
"In your view some elite group should decide..."
That's the exact opposite of my view.
We'll always have more falsehoods than truth. Even when we're trying to find the truth. The challenge of mitigating the replication crisis (in science) is proof of that.
Plus, I no longer care what the truth is. Because my opponents don't care. So further debate is pointless.
At this point I only want two things.
#1
Unplug the outrage machine.
#2
To be left alone.
I'd like to go ONE FULL DAY without having to think about this stuff. I shouldn't have to completely unplug from the world and actively defend my filter bubble just to do normal people stuff.
"...have to do with the paradox of intolerance? There's nothing intolerant about the claim that the Bidens are corrupt."
Honestly, I'm not quite sure yet. It certainly seems "flood the zone with bullshit" strategy is related to triggering identity and radicalization.
Our imperfect species often draws a line in the sand and says you're either on this side or that. Sometimes that line is a fucked up line and we go to war over it. And other times, we accept it (yes there are other states), internalize it and move along collectively as consciously elevated apes with a new feather in our culture-cap.
That you might not feel a sliver of moral dignity in the line that was drawn by globally dominant companies today, fighting disinformation before an election, saddens me deeply.
Like, yea, your logical brain might be short circuiting right now but can't you see the bigger issue at play?
I'm reminded of the post circulating on HN a few days ago about how FB shut down some Holocaust Denier groups, and the commentary thread just blew up about "violating free speech" etc. That really messed me up, and made me lose faith in this community.
What is the bigger issue at play? I honestly cannot see a bigger issue than a society wide decree on what can and cannot be uttered. To me, the notion of being able to say what I want to say without the reprisal of "globally dominant companies today"/government/we, is so ingrained that it is possible that I genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees.
Great. And now I feel like a Boy Scout reciting badly written essay about why I love America.
For me there is no bigger issue.
1. We have essentially absolute free speech 2. We have the absolute right to gun ownership
If those values appeal to you, America is unrivaled.
Maybe I’m old. What are the kids reading in High School English? Marx?
The solution is media blackouts for a period of N days to weeks before elections. It's what other democracies do. But, during critical periods of time, we temporarily restrict speech. That's how you handle it. Is it a perfect solution, no, but it offers some benefit with not too much restriction.
https://twitter.com/noahmanskar/status/1316459416414302208?s...
(easy with the flagging guys. half the comments here are flagged. You re supposed to flag spam not anything that you wish wasnt there. wishful thinking isnt gonna help your cause)
If the polls are anywhere close to real, they’re going to see both houses of Congress plus the executive in Democratic hands. That is the same party publicly calling for their breakup.
So if you see it coming, get out ahead of it.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-facebook-exec-backs-kavana...
And find one of @pinboard’s regular threads on the political donations big tech companies make and you’ll find a lot of Republicans:
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1152245502361997314
The reality is that once you’re as big as FB, Google and the rest you have enough money to play both sides of the aisle. Doesn’t matter who is in power, you’ve got them both under control.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
I think HN keeps turning into an echo chamber and any opposing view point on a specific political topic gets censored/throttled here too. How can you expect me to have a proper discussion when I am not even allowed to reply?
----
96% of the donations from Big Tech went to Democrats. This is a verifiable fact.
The first censorship of this story came from Facebook and the statement from them was this by Andy Stone, FB communications. Andy Stone is a former DCCC (DCCC: Committed to electing Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives)
https://mobile.twitter.com/andymstone/status/131639590247987...
The person at twitter making these decisions is Nick Pacilio, Twitter Communications who's also Kamala Harris' former press secretary:
https://twitter.com/NickPacilio/status/1291160646231392261
Facebook's executive Jessica Hertz as well as Twitter's director of public policy Carlos Monje are Biden's transition team.
Kamala Harris had repeatedly called for suspending her opponent's twitter account:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mnunez/2019/10/02/kamala-harris...
Looking at companies themselves it seems like they readily back Republicans as much as Democrats. I didn't do any super deep digging, but this is what I am basing my statements on.
https://www.mic.com/p/tech-companies-have-given-millions-of-...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17219930/facebook-campaig...
Again, my point isn't that there are no Democratic Facebook execs, it's that they play both sides. To whit:
> Indeed, the three top leaders of Facebook's DC office all have extensive backgrounds in Republican politics: Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan; Vice President for U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin; and Public Policy Director for Global Elections Katie Harbath.
https://popular.info/p/the-republican-political-operatives
That article also outlines a number of right-wing friendly moves that Facebook has made in recent years, just as a counterpoint to the example being discussed here.
I agree with you that the vast majority of staff at these tech companies are Democrats, but I'm talking about the top-level execs. And once you reach that level you see the top tech companies play both sides of the political aisle as best they can.
Simply pointing out a couple executives being republican doesn't have anything of value. This isn't about democrat vs republican. This is about democrats + RINOs vs Trump supporters. Having people like Mitt Romney or John McCain type republicans is of no value. Vast majority of Trump supporters dislike them.
I will give a couple examples - the Biden campaign keeps tweeting the same lie again and again about Trump not condemning white nationalists at the Charlottesville incident. This is an easily verifiable lie. Yet twitter nor Facebook ever marks this as "debunked".
Another example - In October 2016 and October 2020, NYTimes put out articles claiming to have the tax data for Trump. They didn't disclose any sources, nor was it verified. And if the data they had was correct, they obtained it illegally. Yet Twitter nor Facebook banned this on their platform.
Another example - last week, media ran stories with secretly recorded audio of Melania Trump. This wasn't banned either.
Here's an example from a few hour ago where FB deleted a post and restricted monetization by BabylonBee (satire) for "violating our Community Standards.":
https://mobile.twitter.com/The_Kyle_Mann/status/131749666800...
Yet these platforms are now claiming the NYPost story cannot be allowed because it's "hacked" data. It's not hacked data plus even if it was, they don't apply the same standard to news which might hurt Trump.
As for not being able to comment on the same thread, if that's the case, then this is a very poor UX. Not being able to interact at all (I wasn't able to for at least a day) on a topic you are passionate about makes the site pointless.
EDIT:
It's strange how someone seems to be monitoring this 3 day old post on HN and flagging and downvoting my comments instantly.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
I was speaking elsewhere on Hacker News recently about how the attitude towards trusting corporations seems to have shifted so dramatically. Distrusting the motivations of large corporations was once a pillar of liberal thought in the west. Now many liberals seem to be willing to empower these corporations absolutely as long as they control online discourse in a way that largely benefits the liberal establishment.
I would encourage people to consider for a moment the financial incentives for organisations at the scale of Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. to support globalist political agendas. This isn't 'conspiracy theory' thinking, it's shareholder primacy, it's simple politics. Anyone who thinks that these organisations support liberal causes out of the goodness of their hearts needs a reality check. They pursue these choices for their own gain.
Twitter is an extremely powerful bit of technology that can basically make you believe anything. As a trade for entertainment/dopamine: you are allowing it to.
I don't believe this.
The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption. In human history, we've never before had individual companies like Facebook and Twitter that are so enormous and have so much control over our public speech. (2.7 billion and 330 million monthly active users, respectively.) They have become "the town square of the world", so to speak. Facebook and Twitter are not literally governments, but they're actually larger than many governments, with a larger population and more wealth than many nations. There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech. That assumption is no longer true. Indeed, the whole motivation behind this particular act of censorship is the idea that these platforms are so powerful that they can change the outcome of the election of one of the largest nations on Earth. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's clear in any case that Facebook and Twitter are not just normal "private companies". They're not little moderated discussion forums. They have effectively (unfortunately) become the public sphere.
Twitter once locked me out of my account because I made a joke about bitcoin. Their stupid "algorithms" got me. And the only reason I was able to get my account unlocked was that I personally knew a Twitter engineer. I don't trust Jack or Zuck even one tiny bit to exercise the vast power they have to silence millions of people. It's not even a question of whether I agree with the NY Post article: the story is probably bullshit. But so were the news stories about Iraq having WMD. How about suspending the NY Times account too? How about suspending every news outlet that has published a debunked story? "Anonymous sources tell us that yadda yadda."
By design, Facebook and Twitter allow everyone in the world to post anything they want. That includes lies. If they can't accept the consequences of the platform they created, then they should shut down. But as long as they exist, with the size of their user base, they are simply too big and too powerful to be allowed to restrict our freedom of speech.
>There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech.
The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property. The government can. It's an extraordinary power wielded exclusively by the government.
Consider this: If you think Twitter should be restrained from censoring their platform because the extent of their power is on par with the government, who will enforce any violations of that restraint?
I specifically said I was talking about freedom of speech. There are many different kinds of freedom, and these aren't specifically free speech issues.
There are more ways to control participation in public discourse than imprisonment and seizures of printing presses. Times have moved on. Instead of imprisonment, we have banning and filtering, with no independent oversight or appeal process. Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies can do more to restrict the spread of certain information than most governments in the world have ever been able, so why shouldn't at least the same standard apply to them?
Their virtual town squares are nowadays larger than any square ever under government control, and they have absolute control over who can and cannot participate. They are the absolute monarchies of 21st century, more powerful than ever.
The change you desire would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment to allow the government to compel the speech of a corporation in order to protect the speech of their customers. It would be complex, challenging, hard to predict, and almost certainly impossible even if people on average agreed it was needed.
You would have an easier time forcing payment processors, cdns, hosts, not to discriminate against alternative social networks. They at least ARE infrastructure. The challenge with those alternative networks is the only content that absolutely must use it is often odious leaving such networks with little of the desirable often uncontroversional content produced by the rest of the population of users and lots of the bullcrap nobody else wanted.
For example technically voat is more "free" than reddit but a brief look at the frontpage suggests that this freedom is mostly used to be the kind of offensive jerks nobody else wants to be around.
No, it would only require a change of mind (or at least a change of policy) by Jack and Zuck.
I would go so far as to say that Trump could not have been elected without misinformation promoted on Facebook and Twitter and the net result has been a massive probably irreparable rift in our nation and will ultimately when the dust settled have aided in killing addition hundreds of thousands of people that didn't have to die.
An trivially manipulable echo chamber designed to magnify lies and hate is not a matter of minor import without clear real world consequences.
It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later. Is this a trend you see reversing soon?
Whose heavy hand do you mean? It appears to me that the 2 major parties have very different ideas about what Facebook and Twitter should and shouldn't do.
Twitter itself as a organization is not making you believe anything specifically. However the information presented to you may influence your ideas and potentially your behavior.
In any case, I have to say censoring DMs is just too far for me to accept.
I've put in a decent amount of effort to curate my Twitter feed so that it's useful to me, but I can't keep using a service that will arbitrarily decide what private communications I'm allowed to have on their service. I guess I'm out, as much as I hate to do it.
The idea that social media is some sort of public service beholden to the expectation of not ever touching their platform is just nuts to me, yet it's pervasive here on hackernews. The irony.
It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
LOL now this post has been flagged wtfff
To say this strains credulity would be be a massive understatement.
who has been hacked?
> The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails
There are other red flags in the NY Post article (like, why wouldn't they just post e-mails with DKIMs), but this part is totally believable to me.
On the email remark, are you aware of any mainstream news org (wikileaks doesn't count) who has posted a full raw email with DKIMs as part of their story's evidence? I'd honestly be surprised if you can show me one, double so if it's commonplace, since it's one of those things I just sort of consider nearly impossible for the media to actually do.
Facebook will do whatever provides the greatest return for their shareholders - they have no duty to Constitutional values. That is the only thing that will drive their decision making, so obviously they decided the long term risks of letting Trump abuse their platform with propaganda outweighs the short-term blow back from conservatives, who appear likely to be out of power in 4 months anyways.
If the public wants a role in how Facebook should handle this type of thing, then Congress needs to stop play-acting and starting writing legislation.
The people who wrote the NY Post piece had plenty of time to prepare. Now the story is rocketing around at the speed of the internet; but it takes time to refute authoritatively.
Twitter, Facebook, HN, and similar channels will have spread the story regardless of its truth or untruth. They are vulnerable to propaganda, similar to how open relays are to spreading spam.
Wrong. I pointed out a problem, but I did not suggest a remedy.
It's a hard problem. There's a saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." It goes back centuries: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
1. "And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."
- Joe Biden on a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the firm that paid Hunter Biden. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCF9My1vBP4&t=78s)
2. The photos of Hunter Biden with a crack pipe that were included. (Scroll down: https://www.the-sun.com/news/1629764/joe-biden-hunter-emails...)
They wanted the prosecutor fired because he was ridiculously corrupt and protecting/ not prosecuting corrupt companies including Burisima (I repeat he dropped the investigation into Burisima). All of this is old news and was reported on during the impeachment trial
Yes. But it was not only that company. The corrupt prosecutor refused to investigate many corrupt companies and politicians.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/03/what...
> "Shokin played the role of protecting the vested interest in the Ukrainian system," said Carpenter, who traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015. "He never went after any corrupt individuals at all, never prosecuted any high-profile cases of corruption."
>That demonstrated that Poroshenko's administration was not sincere about tackling corruption and building strong, independent law enforcement agencies, said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank.
> In July 2015, Shokin's office became mired in scandal after authorities raided homes belonging to two high-ranking prosecutors. Police seized millions of dollars worth of diamonds and cash, suggesting the pair had been taking bribes.
> It became known as the "diamond prosecutors" case. Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko, who said he tried to investigate it, resigned months later, calling the prosecutor's office a "hotbed of corruption" and an "instrument of political pressure."
> Shokin's office also stepped in to help Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma.
> British authorities had frozen $23 million in a money-laundering probe, but Shokin's office failed to send documents British authorities needed to prosecute Zlochevsky. The case eventually unraveled and the assets were unfrozen.
In October 2015, Ukrainians staged a protest outside Poroshenko's home calling for Shokin's removal.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/03/what...
Biden's son hunter didn't play a role in it. Oh I'm sure that the company hired Biden's son in hopes of getting influence and that sort of soft corruption sucks, even if it isn't illegal (I wouldn't be opposed to trying to make it illegal even though I imagine it would be pretty difficult), but there is 0 evidence that this had any effect on Joe Biden or US policy, especially since this guy was protecting Burisima.
And it wasn't just Biden but Obama and most of the foreign policy guys in the US and EU that wanted Shokin dismissed because of his corruption, Biden was just the guy who got to deliver the message.
Later Trump and his allies were happy to buy into whatever lies the corrupt prosecutor Shokin was willing to make up abut Biden. Did they know it wasn't true? I don't know but I imagine they didn't care
https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/timeline-trump-giuliani-b...
Stories about Trump's tax returns don't include any sort of explanation about verification. They wouldn't even publish the documents in order to keep the source secret.
So I don't think its reasonable to assume the lack of easy confirmation means it is necessarily fake.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/12/trump-contr...
> The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails
And it’s not a lack of easy confirmation. It’s trivial to say conclusively whether or not that email was processed by Gmail. If it wasn’t it’s 100% guaranteed to be a really poor quality fake.
If it went through Gmail and has the proper signatures, then it’s not as easy to confirm or refute because you’d need a lot more info from the mail providers.
https://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/
Basically, you can encrypt a message over any medium (facebook, twitter, email, etc.). Wasn't super secure by any means, but the media companies wouldn't know what's being shared.
Honestly, I might rework it (not utilizing keybase). I think I can make it decentralized and / or super easy to use. It's already pretty much plug-and-play provided you know the recipients email.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.
I don't know why you are being downvoted, I think HN's flagging system is another way we are being censored.
Just this summer, I remember multiple articles with important, true contributions to our understanding of covid that got flagged.
We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue.
The link says Facebook did censor it.
Seems to be long gone, to be honest. We're now at a point where people are de-humanizing those on a different side of an issue to themselves. We unfortunately know what the next step is.
The NY Post story pushes the repeatedly-debunked claim that Biden pushed for the Ukraine prosecutor to be fired in order to protect his son. It has been fact-checked to death and found to be a lie. One side (the Trump campaign) continues to push this lie. The NY Post, owned by Trump henchman Rupert Murdoch, is pushing that lie in the article.
I don't see why Twitter and Facebook have to be neutral on their platforms when it comes to spreading lies in the run-up to a major election. The NY Post is a tabloid and this story has not been verified by any reputable news site. Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians. It's a net good.
> Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians.
This is the contradiction that I'm trying to get at: To justify censorship by claiming at the same time that something is obviously wrong (like the claim that Biden is conspiring with Martians) and that the public can't understand that it's wrong (though it presumably could understand that Biden isn't conspiring with Martians).
That's what this is - a pretty blatantly false tabloid story being pushed by Rupert Murdoch, the closest thing the world has to a cartoon villain, during the voting process in a major election. In the time it would take to conclusively debunk the story to the public, the damage would already be done. This is straight out of the 2016 election playbook, where disinformation was pushed as voting was happening.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to clutch pearls over a disreputable tabloid being treated like a disreputable tabloid. If anything it would be good for journalism if they banned the Post from the site forever.
They did the right thing in this specific case, seems a little alarmist to launch right into slippery slope prognostications about deplatforming. We're on the slippery slope right now when it comes to electioneering disinformation.
Just two weeks ago(!) there was a hearing about Section 230 and Facebook and Twitter were saying it was necessary, and they submitted testimony about misinformation at that hearing.
They've now blown any credibility they had left with half of Congress, possibly more, and have attracted 10x the attention and 10x the perceived credibility to the article.
How did they not expect this to blow up in their face?
Edit: and also the fact that it was written in collaboration with the President's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
As HN audience mostly claim to be full of "independent thinkers" we should have no problem with this being published by the Post if it indeed is legitimate, correct?
It turns out that journalism is hard to do correctly. As an "independent thinker" I'm going to independently decide to not trust a publication with the reputation of the NY Post until it's been corroborated.
It is not inability. It is just a ridiculous exercise in futility. Chomsky can barely do it. And he has way better memory, command of language and reasoning skills than I do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post
(turns out human beings don't fit neatly into these nice little categories)
Yes. That's literally the definition: "the conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system."
Did you confuse the NY Post with the Washington Post?
As one example of why:
> In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical.
[1] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/buzzfeed-media-bias
This is coming from someone who did not agree with most of Obama's policy decisions but at least could respect his integrity.
This gave me a real chuckle.
It’s easy to not be “actively involved in scandalous behavior” when the media refuses to consider anything you do scandalous or investigate it further. It’s a self fulfilling prophesy.
Uhhhhh... Not involved in scandalous behavior that you knew of, perhaps. Fast&Furious [0] would have been a major scandal in a Republican administration (despite the fact that it was started by a previous president), and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was a massive step in the erosion of civil liberties in the US. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others.
Not to say that Obama was a bad president, but "no scandals I've heard of" and "no scandals" aren't quite the same thing.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#2009%E2...
Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).
Obama might be a political opponent of Trump’s (despite not being on the ballot that year); but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things? The Russian interference / collusion was real and lead to multiple charges and convictions
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_...
Something the Justice Department have concluded an investigation into and have filed no charges. Perhaps it’s time to find a new talking point.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/politics/william-barr-unmaski...
Do you really think the Trump Justice Department would shy away from releasing a statement saying exactly that, were it to be the case?
Or other things like the "De-Ba'athification" policy in Iraq which most likely played a major role in the empowerment of ISIS (not really a scandal, more of a failed policy, but yet something that can be criticized).
Point being, there was a lot of things to rightfully criticize about the Obama admin, and therefore Obama himself ("the buck stops here").
The IRS targeting of right wing orgs was indeed a scandal but it turned out to not be true [0].
Not enough people cared about the extra-judicial assassination of a US citizen because he was probably a terrorist so it only lasted one news cycle, that could have been a scandal but it was not. If people don't care about the behavior as being wrong then the event won't be a scandal.
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-obama-administ...
In 2020, left-leaning media posts left-friendly news, and doesn't post right-friendly news. And right-leaning media posts right-friendly news AND STRAIGHT UP FALSEHOODS AND LIES DENYING RIGHT-UNFRIENDLY-NEWS, OR LIGHT-FRIENDLY NEWS.
It's not equivalent.
But even if you toss out peer-awards, Buzzfeed News has also won the Sydney award, which is awarded by the The Sidney Hillman Foundation, and was founded by the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, hardly a "journalistic" venture.
Buzzfeed News doesn’t have listicles, but it doesn’t have journalistic standards either.
They had two independent government sources, which doesn't even come close to comparing to this story where the entire source is a single repairman who can't even get their story straight.
And there's a very big difference between being fed wrong information from two sources and not doing enough to verify it, in a time where said information could be crucial, vs "lying" as you imply, which is what NY Post is doing.
1: https://nypost.com/2016/08/28/anthony-weiner-sexted-busty-br...
I've not read any comments on HN that claims that they have a problem with "this being published by the Post" whether it's legitimate or not.
It's possible that I missed such comments, but I don't think so.
I would be grateful if you could point me at a few of them.
I’m really astonished at the reaction to it.
Should campaigns be banned from conducting opposition research? Should we demand that journalist sources not have agendas? (Then who would speak to the press?) Should we require journalists to refuse assistance with their work?
I'm not a great fan of access journalism, but the reality too is that journalists will publish puff pieces or shaky misinformation pieces to curry favor for more solid news from that source in the future. That's why you see journalists even at institutions like the NY Times repeatedly publish stories from "anonymous" sources that turn out to be completely wrong but which advances some cause of the source - this has become an epidemic in the Trump era, given that a lot of political figures and career civil servants do not like the administration, and mass layoffs in the news industry have meant the replacement of veterans with younger reporters who have to curry more favor. I would prefer they not do that, but as long as you read the news with a critical eye, it's not a major problem.
I hear people (rightly) complain about this all the time.
> Can someone explain why it even matters.
I think it matters because Joe has denied any participation at all with his sons business dealings. The emails explicitly mention using influence, buying time with the VP, etc. If the emails are real, they would prove joe a liar.
You could say "but Trump is a liar" and you'd be right. You'd also be openly admitting that Joe is no better.
Nah. Everyone lies from time to time, or bends the truth to make themselves look better. Frequency and magnitude are the important factors.
Also, Joe could have had dinner with this guy and still never talked with his son deeply about work. Joe having eaten with this dude would call into question his claim, but it wouldn't be proof he was telling a falsehood.
However, it sure does look a little questionable.
For the record, I don’t hate crackheads. Also, yeah this cynicism goes for Trump too. It should be how we regard all politicians, as the profession overwhelmingly shows a high preponderance towards deceit, graft, rent-seeking, kickbacks, etc.
Sure, and you can complain, but Trump has already called for Biden and even Obama to be jailed. I could see this turning into "lock him up" chants in a few days.
> Joe has denied any participation at all with his sons business dealings
Having dinner with someone doesn't imply that. If there was anything actionable that came out of that meeting, then yes, but there's no proof of that. Just having dinner with someone proves nothing.
> Facebook announced it would limit the sharing of the story while fact-checkers reviewed the piece.
And immediately realize, this is it. Facebook is a publisher, not a platform.
https://twitter.com/russelneiss/status/1316398928850452481
https://twitter.com/russelneiss/status/1316402052885606400
https://twitter.com/marcusjcarey/status/1316386740794425344
National Review is part of the disinfo apparatus. Take anything they say with a pound of salt.
/edit: actually, it does format in that way, but only when you export the mail as PDF from Apple Mail, not in the client itself
Anyway, my 2 cents having worked with many Russians and Ukranians: the overall tone, writing style and vocabulary used does not read like its from a native russian speaker.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/14/suspect-provenance-of-hunt...
If I were to see a dump of the raw email headers from a trusted chain of custody, I would feel entirely different about the matter.
The other makes a specious claim about implied claims of timestamps that no one made.
They came for the New York Post and I said nothing...
They came for the (dnja$4 NO CARRIER
edit: and I wanted to reply to a comment here referring to section 230 but their comment got flagged and I am unable to reply to them. Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
My reply to that commenter would be that there is nothing stopping Congress-critters from standing up their own ActivityPub infra as well. A 'congress.gov' presence on the Fediverse would look pretty spiffy.
If you truly beleive the comment didn't deserve to be flagged (this does unfortunately happen sometimes, especially on threads like this) you can vouch for it if you have showdead on
From the DOJ's proposed 230 legislation[0]:
>>The second category of amendments is aimed at incentivizing platforms to address the growing amount of illicit content online, while preserving the core of Section 230’s immunity for defamation claims.
>>Section 230 immunity is meant to incentivize and protect online Good Samaritans. Platforms that purposely solicit and facilitate harmful criminal activity — in effect, online Bad Samaritans — should not receive the benefit of this immunity. Nor should a platform receive blanket immunity for continuing to host known criminal content on its services, despite repeated pleas from victims to take action.
Enforcing a hacked materials policy is fully consistent with the DOJ's proposed change. It's a classic strategy to curb potential regulation - clean up your act to show that you don't need to be regulated.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-unveils-pr...
But I when I see Twitter and Facebook deciding they have better journalistic judgement than a major newspaper, it seems that the world is upside down.
On the other hand, if the party benefiting from this move gets into power, that might be enough to stop any change from happening.
If this is the Russians (unproven speculation on your part), it does not mean the emails are not authentic.
The fact that this hasn't been done is concerning, unless it's being sat on for future impact.. the "drip drip drip" method of political bombshell news isn't a new tactic. If we're still here in a week with nothing other than screenshots, we can probably write the messages off as frauds. I'm withholding my judgement for a few days.
The "drip drip" is an intentional strategy, of course. This smells like a setup to me. They leak the lukewarm email, get a denial from Biden, then leak a smoking gun that cannot be denied (speculation).
Really though, even if DKIM wasn't a thing, there's little-to-no reason to only post screenshots if the actual raw files are available.
The Biden campaign has records to that time indicating no such meeting took place.
So far, without further corroboration, it's an allegation with no basis. Especially given justice department investigations into the purported impropriety that the supposed emails revolve around did not reveal any evidence of involvement of Joe Biden in his son's dealings.
Even if the source was Putin himself, shouldn't the question be "are the emails authentic" rather than "who leaked the emails"?
Wikileaks has had questionable sources in the past, but they've generally been authentic leaks (for example the DNC email leaks had authentic and signed email headers).
I'm not saying the emails are authentic, I'm saying the question of whether they are authentic is unanswered and that should be your primary concern over who the source is.
Theoretically, if Russia had proof of corruption would you not want to see it on the basis that it's Russia and it's close to an election?
If Russia had proof of corruption on the candidate they did not excessively favor then I would be interested. When historic propagandists have "proof" I need corroboration otherwise I'm being controlled by the propaganda as it was intended.
Remember Benghazi? How confident everyone was, for years? Nothing came from it because nothing was there. The people that were talking about Benghazi were only people that benefited from it politically. Remember Al Franken? Remember when people that didn't benefit from it politically agreed he should step down after his behavior?
Uh, what? A U.S. embassy was actively under attack and our "leaders" said "No thanks!" to sending help.
How is that not a scandal?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack#Investiga...
Russia, a known bad actor, who has been openly trying to destabilize America for years does not get the benefit of the doubt on literally anything. Everything that Russia "has" should be outright considered purposeful disinformation until it is clearly and widely proven otherwise. They have lost all credibility to provide proof of anything. Particularly in an election year.
- Litvinenko
- Novichok
- Crimean Annexation
- Russia Wikileaks (the Atlantic article is a good intro)
- Sergei Magnitsky, the Magnitsky Act, Russian Meeting at Trump Tower (in that order tells the story)
- Russian Disinformation Campaign (there are stories dating to shortly after the 2016 election)
There's probably more but this is all the top of my mind. Litvinenko was my wake-up to the realities of global politics and the potential dangers Russia poses.
They presented screenshots (!) uncritically, with no suggestion of doubt regarding the emails' provenance. They did not even bother asking the Biden campaign about the story prior to publication.
It's a transparent attempt to get to "just asking questions" which is where we are today.
This isn't true. They made the specific denial that according to his official schedules from the time, the meeting never happened. And then later quietly also said they "would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule". [0]
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
If I see the DKIM I'll start buying that there's smoke but until then I don't trust the messengers.
Gone are the days when if you read a story and thought it was BS, you ignored it and moved on. Or when a politician says something dumb, that's obviously untrue or a distortion, you just laughed and said "what an idiot".
Today, these things are "disinformation" and are "an attack on our democracy". This is a severe escalation, and I think what it's priming us all to do is reject Free Speech as a principle wholesale and replace it with an "official" narrative that is approved ahead of time (approved by who exactly, that remains to be seen).
All politicians spread "disinformation". That's the nature of politics: framing the facts of a story, or distorting them, to support your preferred narrative to get elected. Same goes for all partisan journalism, and the same goes for "mainstream" outlets that still have their own narrative they like to push for their own reasons. Somehow we're still so shell-shocked from 2016 that we've escalated every little bit of political tomfoolery to be a literal attack on the democratic institution itself. It's just bizarre.
The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information. Injecting completely false information into the public discourse is a direct attack on democracy.
>Injecting completely false information into the public discourse is a direct attack on democracy.
The line you are drawing here is very very close to accusing people who share false information of treason. Are we sure we want to walk up to that line? I'm not. I think it's frankly pretty silly. It's also interesting that you assume there is some neutral arbiter that can decide what is "real" and what is "true" and what is "fact" (all different things, btw).
>The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information.
It's also interesting that you think this was ever the state of democracy, and not the status quo.
Let’s review the history of the oldest democracy on the planet. And then the history of the second, the third, etc. Who gets to decide what information is real? CDC? WHO? NYT? Fox? Who’s the final authority if not each of us? Your statement implies incredibly low expectations for the people and inflated expectations for “authorities”. It is ultimately an _authoritarian_ view, quite the opposite of democracy.
But if you remove the loaded term of "free speech", what's actually being discussed here is "website moderation policies". With that framing, what is the expectation for Facebook and Twitter? To devolve into 4chan?
Personally, I like well moderated sites. That's why I'm here! It's bizarre to me that so many other people who chose to spend their time here expect Facebook and Twitter to be laissez faire about moderation.
So, to directly respond to what you're bringing up, laissez faire moderation policies are not a threat to democracy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782753.)
I can't understand why my generation wants to recreate Net Nanny on facebook and twitter. It just adds to the 2020 feeling that everything, all at once, is completely falling apart.
We always hear the adage about free speech and screaming fire in a crowded theater; facebook is a crowded theater and we have a lot of people trying to yell fire.
B. It’s really the double standard that is the problem here. If you do it do it for this then do it for everything else, including the myriad stories about Trump that are posted based on ‘rumors’, ‘leaks’, anonymous sources etc. Whether you like Trump or not should not matter if you are honest with yourself!
Funny thing is, this story was not ‘trending’ on twitter but the meta story (totally with no evidence) that this was the result of Russian hackers who gave the content to Rudy was trending! That tells you everything about why this is so inconsistent and thus either grossly incompetent or malicious.
I'm very surprised so many people have a problem with this.
I'm even more surprised people are demanding that forums and social media be stripped of the ability to moderate porn, spam, and vile personal attacks (ie not be able to moderate anything not illegal). Oh plus conspiracies and racism. This would likely turn most forums including HN into trash
Have you... seen Twitter? It's full of porn, spam, vile personal attacks, conspiracies, and racism. These things are mostly not moderated on Twitter.
Maybe Twitter claims to moderate them, but the reality does not reflect that at all. The main reason we see controversy over social media censorship is that it's extremely selective, haphazard, inconsistent, and often misdirected. There's no apparent general principles behind the individual decisions, though principles are often trotted out ex post facto when required for PR.
So good thing they're trying for a change?
That doesn't mean I agree with their moderation as a whole but they seem to have tried to do the right thing here
How dull. Is it too much to ask that these “breaches” involve some more elaborate spy tradecraft?
At least tell me that they were wearing wigs when they screwed the HDD into a USB enclosure and just mounted it.
Edited to add this article, which isn’t something I’d swear an oath on, but which has a great SoundCloud link in it interviewing the laptop tech himself: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
...where he literally talks anxiously about needing to “find people who are better [than me] at political spy craft.”
Its either lies or some pretty damming conspiracy, right?
This must be stopped and it must be stopped now. Trump is right, we should remove their special FCC protections.
The American People do not need Silicon Valley to tell us what we can and cannot read.
This is a joke. Nothing was hacked. The laptop was left at a repair shop and not reclaimed. The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed machines after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop.
Maybe the emails were forged. Idk. But nothing was hacked.
I wonder what the fallout will be.
Edit: Politics entirely aside. We need the truth on Twitter’s actions before we lose the chance.
> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.
NPR reporter:
> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
https://twitter.com/shannonpareil/status/1316452038465724417
Which is completely nonsense as a reason; you can, to use just one of a million examples, freely post this story on twitter:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
Facebook is also suppressing the story.
Quite remarkable.
that's a huge lie. the brazilian version of the intercept got actual hacked info from federal judges/prosecutor's cellphones and twitter did absolutely nothing -- hell, it was on our trending topics for weeks (search for "vaza jato").
we know it was hacked because brazil's federal police got the hackers.
seems like twitter really loves to pick-and-choose when to apply their hacked material policy.
These two seem to be begging for disruptive government intervention of the most unpleasant kind.
If you look at the screenshots, Twitter notes that the reason her account is locked is because they do not allow their service to be used to distribute "content obtained through hacking that contains private information..."
Why is this rule applicable to the NY Post's story, but not to stories from the New York Times concerning Trump's financial records, which were also illegally obtained? This seems like clear evidence of a politically-biased double-standard.
What did you expect was going to happen?
Honestly. Did nobody have the foresight at Facebook or Twitter to think that this wouldn't blow up? Did nobody think, just once, that this might invite regulatory action or be in news headlines?
And if honestly nobody thought this might happen, I'd want the entire management and "safety" team replaced for having no foresight for their actions whatsoever.
Regulatory action has been in the works for some time. Whether or not it goes through depends only on politics. The mainstream media already doesn't like them for eating their lunch. Twitter has nothing to lose by doing this. It will damage Facebook's brand identity as being a "free speech" platform, but that's about as factual as Google's "don't be evil" brand or Apple's "privacy first" brand.
I don't think anyone either on the left or the right thinks this move was a good idea. It will just make the Hunter Biden story blow up even harder.
Remember how there were hearings about 230 just two weeks ago? Twitter just shot themselves and their arguments for 230 in the foot with this. Which again begs the question from an investor's point of view: What did you expect was going to happen? Did you seriously not think this would affect the 230 debate?
But I don't think Section 230 will be repealed. The US government doesn't want to destroy the tech giants. It wants to use them to expand its global influence.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJAQ2QB6WVQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-CugJieq2I
The President is still allowed to tweet almost anything he wants, so this is still very selective censorship.
Maybe Twitter should just shut down for a month. That's my point, there's so much untruth on Twitter, even specifically related to politics and the election, that it's just impossible to intelligently "curate" the platform. There's no apparent principle in what they allow and what they don't.
> certainly not being more laissez-faire about a problem that is destroying the world.
It wasn't a story about climate change, or nuclear proliferation.
Twitter is just an extreme example of a social media platform acting like a publisher and applying blatant censorship.
The moderation clause was historically added because at that time, the failed CDA (Communication Decency Act) was likely to pass (later partially struck down by the Supreme Court). so the COngress added it as the implementation mechanism for the CDA. When the CDA was weakened, the moderation language was still left in 230.
These latest chilling developments make me think it's better to revert to case law.
Andy Stone, of the Facebook communications department, calling for fact checks while gloating about reducing its circulation.
https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000
(n.b. "gloating" is interpretation — if it is not the case that this is gloating then a key problem is that this tweet leaves itself very open to this interpretation.)
National Review is a conservative wing-nut website trying to turn this non-story into fuel for their censorship culture war.
More recently and less impressively, the entire world of Russia-gate stuff was unverified and leaked
Would you say the same if that stuff was censored?
Add WikiLeaks to the list too.
People can down vote all they want, but doing so just confirms that the only way to satisfy them is for Twitter to pick sides and apply its rules evenly unfairly on behalf of one political party.
And, the timing is not suspicious it is politics.
do you think their policy is evenly applied across their platform?
By falsely claiming the records were hacked, rather than the legal property of the repair shop following payment default by Hunter Biden, Twitter is itself deliberately spreading false information to justify its illegal election interference. [1]
--
https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
It's not even clear that it was Hunter who dropped off the laptops in the first place!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8841255/Man-Hunter-...
Your pick - The Daily Beast: a 12 years old opinion website in USA, directly interested in the ongoing US election.
Compare and contrast the opening - your choice focused on "character assassination" via conspiracy theory; my source focused on giving a broad background & overview as facts. The difference in quality of reporting is palpable.
I should have known I was being trolled; my fault for taking the bait.
At least NYPost unlike the daily mail doesn't have a history that includes supporting facists(as far as I know)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Support_of_fascism
> Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail's editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.[44][45] Rothermere's 1933 leader "Youth Triumphant" praised the new Nazi regime's accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by them.[46] In it, Rothermere predicted that "The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany". Journalist John Simpson, in a book on journalism, suggested that Rothermere was referring to the violence against Jews and Communists rather than the detention of political prisoners.[47][page needed]
> Rothermere and the Mail were also editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.[48] Rothermere wrote an article titled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" published in the Daily Mail on 15 January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine",[49] and pointing out that: "Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London, S.W."[50]
In case the point I’m making isn’t obvious: the NYT never published their source for that, and still haven’t. If twitter is removing stories for having dubious sources, then that story should not pass muster either.
If they’re removing stories for having “hacked” (or in the case of both this story about Hunter Biden, or Trumps taxes: “leaked”) sources, then discussion of BOTH of these stories should be banned.
Something like this has never been censored before.
It's not like they are taking down a post from a nobody. The NY Post is a major publication.
It's twitter saying they know better than the NY Post. That is a major step that I don't think has ever been taken before.
Even the wikipedia entry for them seems to counter that assessment pretty strongly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review
Balanced budget, smaller government, prolife, personal responsibility, self defense, belief in God.
Express support for any of these and you will be attacked.
If this was published at any other time (and the material for the story has apparently existed since December) the public and the professional media would have had time to scrutinize it, discuss its shortcomings, etc.
But, as Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." We can't do that and being complicit in spreading misinformation in the middle of an election is, I'm sure, still a strong memory that social media companies have from the 2016 election.
My guess as to how this will go is that it will take a week or two to authoritatively discredit the article, but by then, if left unchecked, the article will have already done its damage. The cynic in me says that the originators of the article already know that there isn't much truth here and that this is the point of releasing it while people are voting.
Historically all media sources were directly compared by individuals and groups. You used to get the paper from a news stand/paper boy and could glance at all the headlines in comparison to each other, your colleagues knew what the tabloids were running and what the different takes on the headlines were. In the radio and TV age, a small number of commentators were directly compared by channel surfers on the nightly news.
We're now in an unfortunate scenario where individuals only see algorithmically curated bubbles of news and facts that reinforce their world views regardless of those facts correspondence to reality. They've elected politicians that parrot those facts and world views back to them.
Breaking down these bubbles or removing the peddlers of alternate facts is required for a functional society (as well as a healthy platform). Neither of these actions is likely to be well received by all parties.
History does not look kindly on governments that denied reality.
- Mandatory content identifiers tags on content/claims for unfactual or unverified reporting reaching more than X people.
- Identifying frequent reporters of misinformation and identifying them as such when presenting/resharing information.
- Reducing the spread of misinformation in algorithmic sources such as newsfeeds/search rankings.
None of these approaches removes or censors the content, but they do identify it and help place it in the appropriate context. In the 90s I had to go looking for claims that the president had dinner with aliens every Tuesday, today such news articles are pushed via feeds.
History also doesn't look kindly on governments that deprive (directly or via an intermediary party) people of free speech.
Walking the line between the two is like trying to fit a telephone pole through a keyhole.
It's all over folks.
Streisand Effect
EDIT: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/27/863011399/trump-threatens-to-...
You might be able to spot it when there is a constant parade of anonymous sources that never seem to provide any actual proof for bombshell claims meant to hurt Trump etc.
Or maybe various newspapers and cable outlets will run hundreds of stories and thousands upon thousands of hours of ill-sourced coverage into the opposite allegations against Trump, that he would be colluding with some foreign actor, say, i don't know, Russia?
Maybe prominent Democrat house members might make claims again and again to the media that they had seen first hand evidence of collusion with Russia. Maybe the jig would be up when, under oath they would be asked the same questions and they were suddenly not so sure, nor could they produce any evidence.
It would be tricky, for sure.
Source: Video on c-span https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4865556/user-clip-trump-this-...
This and the Charlottesville "fine people hoax" that Biden himself keeps repeating is fake news that just won't die, nor does Twitter seem too keen on helping kill it off either.
PRES. TRUMP: THEY HAVE SPENT THE LAST THREE YEARS, AND I CAN EVEN GO FURTHER THAN THAT THREE YEARS SINCE THE ELECTION BUT WE GO BEFORE THE ELECTION, WORKING TO ERASE YOUR BALLOTS AND OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY. BUT WITH YOUR HELP WE HAVE EXPOSE THE FAR-LEFT'S CORRUPTION AND DEFEATED THEIR SINISTER SCHEMES. LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN THE COMING MONTHS. LET'S WATCH. LET'S JSUT -- JUST WATCH. VERY DISHONEST PEOPLE. NOW THE DEMOCRATS ARE POLITICIZING THE CORONAVIRUS. CORONAVIRUS. THEY ARE POLITICIZING IT. WE DID ONE OF THE GREAT JOBS -- HOW'S PRESIDENT TRUMP DOING? THEY GO, NOT GOOD. THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY CLUE. THEY CANNOT EVEN COUNT THE VOTES IN IOWA. NO, THEY CAN'T. THEY CAN'T COUNT THEIR VOTES. ONE OF MY PEOPLE CAME UP TO ME AND SAID, MR. PRESIDENT, THEY TRIED TO BEAT YOU ON RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIAN. THAT DID NOT WORK OUT TOO WELL. THEY COULD NOT DO IT. THEY TRIED THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX. THAT WAS ON A PERFECT CONVERSATION. THEY TRIED ANYTHING. THEY TRIED IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THEY LOST. IT IS ALL TURNING. THINK OF IT. AND THIS IS THEIR NEW HOAX. WE DID SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN PRETTY AMAZING. WE HAVE 15 PEOPLE IN THIS MASSIVE COUNTRY AND BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT WE WENT EARLY, WE COULD'VE HAD A LOT MORE THAN THAT. WE'RE DOING GREAT. OUR COUNTRY IS DOING SO GREAT. WE ARE SO UNIFIED. WE ARE SO UNIFIED. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS NEVER EVER BEEN UNIFIED LIKE IT IS NOW. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A MOVEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY LIKE WE HAVE NOW. NEVER BEEN
I'm struck by how this is almost a perfect example of the rorschach test that is Trump.
You could easily read this as saying that [COVID] is a hoax.
You could just as easily read this as saying that [the democrats saying he is doing a bad job with COVID] is a hoax.
Center-left/left parties use reality to galvanize their base voters into action. Their voters are people who aren't pleased with what's happening in their countries and want to change it for the better. There's no need for center-left parties to lie that their electoral opponents eat babies when their electoral opponents actually put children in cages.
In contrast, right wing parties overcome the inherent unpopularity of their revealed policy platforms (running on platforms of cutting taxes on the very rich while making life harder for the average person is not popular) by using disinformation to make a stated platform based on fabricated wedge issues. Hence, the imaginary convoys of South American migrants that were about to storm the US-Mexico border in 2018.
As such, restricting disinformation will have a partisan impact. Within the US, there is no Democratic equivalent to Qanon, so anti-disinformation measures that impact the likes of Qanon will have no impact on the Democratic party whatsoever. This, however, isn't a bad thing.
Functioning societies can have zero tolerance for 'alternative facts.' Disagree over goals and interpretations, but facts must be accepted by all. Democracy requires an informed electorate and there can be no functioning democracy when one side is free to invent its own version of reality.
Debating facts is pointless. People debate opinions, interpretations, implications. You cannot declare an implication from a fact as itself a fact. Nor can you claim people disagreeing with an implication are lying about facts.
As an aside - right wing platforms as you put it generally include a variety of popular proposals with the lower and middle class. These include immigration protectionism, lowering consumption taxes like gas taxes, taking a conservative stance on societally expensive government policies, and lowering unemployment rate through encouraging business growth. You may not agree with these policies, but to claim they are disinformation and thus not worthy of consideration is blatant biased censorship.
Censorship for thee but not for me.
You said something is "demonstrably false" that is actually happening and is documented in the subject of this whole thread.
Claim: Let's be honest, the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left
Contradiction: Trump, as I've shown in other comments, has also been calling for censorship for several news organizations.
The only way you believe this claim is not demonstrably false, is if you believe Trump is firmly left, which is ridiculous, but if he is, then I guess you got me.
This whole thing is a problem of the left (and I speak as a man of the left, thoroughly disgusted with the affair), and that is what I read from the "screaming" statement, and your counter as a denial of a very clear and shameful phenomenon.
The right wing tended to be more political ("Obama is a muslim communist who wants your guns") while left wing fake news tended to lean more towards new age, non-evidence-based "wellness" ("this juice cleanse will prevent cancer").
Trump, in what was quite frankly the smartest political move he's ever made, turned it on it's head and basically started using it to discredit actual stories that painted him in a bad light (inauguration numbers, etc).
Am I insane for seeing the dissonance here?
In this case, who is saying "we should stop the public from seeing that?" Not Biden. His campaign folks said "it's not true." I'm unaware of any calls from Biden to censor anything. Ever.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
I know it's been an insane 4 years, but, for Trump, this isn't true. He said, in his first year, he wanted to stated to take NBC off the air[1]. It's a message that he's been saying since before he took office. Understandably, taking a billion dollar corporation off the air is a lot more difficult than wiping an anonymous poster online, but to imply that "Fake News" is entirely just criticism is just complete ignorance of what the man has been saying for years.
>I'm not taking the side of Trump or anyone at all by saying that criticism is different than censorship, that's just a fact. Your argument is not in good faith if bringing that up to you is considered an implicit support for Trump, or anyone really.
If someone says the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left, how am I supposed to argue that point without focusing on Trump?
I'm not bringing this up because I want you to vote Biden or not vote for Trump, but to dispel this notion that "censorship" is exclusively some far left/right tool of oppression. My personal view is that these platform should do whatever they want, just like how HN mods run Hn the way they feel, and no private platform is "obliged" to give you a platform no matter how large they are. Regardless the _government_ should be limited in power to tell private companies in what they should and should not publish. To this day, there has been no _US government_ pressure to "censor" legal political posts - it's been entirely private actors who have taken censorship action. However to suggest that one side is 100% free speech and the other side are coming to take your "free speech" is misrepresenting what both sides.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Huh?
You state that criticism is different than censorship. I agree.
However, I don't get the connection here. Calling something "fake news" or calling it "disinformation" are both criticisms. In fact, those terms are pretty much synonymous.
Which is irrelevant to the issue.
Twitter and Facebook are limiting distribution of this particular piece. Which is certainly akin to censorship. However, It's Twitter and Facebook taking these actions, not "most people."
Based on the details I've read (and thanks to this post, I've read quite a few), this story doesn't really pass the smell test, and may well be "disinformation."
Will you now accuse me of advocating censorship?
What if I'd said it was "fake news" instead? Am I advocating censorship now?
Calling for censorship would be something like "Don't let anyone see that!" Or "These monsters need to be silenced!"
There's a difference.
Unfortunately, we're all wrapped so tightly because, you guessed it, Twitter and Facebook (and others) use exactly those sorts of tricks to rile us up, to boost engagement and make more advertising dollars.
Which leaves us fighting each other over which synonym is worse.
In truth, most people are kind, decent human beings who just want to have a decent life. Sure, we disagree about a few of the details concerning how to have a decent life, but we agree about many more details.
The interactions of a bunch of really small groups who want to influence us for their benefit (whether that be for political power, profit or both) are laughing all the way to the bank as we tear each other apart.
Let's not let them do that any more, as we're only hurting ourselves.
Also as a comedic medium, it's an art form nobody else is doing. He isnt even indecent compared to just full of themselves types. He's just rants on hypothetical nonsense.
He's literally the Jim Cramer of conservative voices. Everybody who listens to him listens with the foresight that there can both be positive and negative repercussions depending on how much of what they say you'll believe.
People have just gotten so used to conservative calls for censorship that they escape all notice.
Center-left/left parties use reality to galvanize their base voters into action. Their voters are people who aren't pleased with what's happening in their countries and want to change it for the better. There's no need for center-left parties to lie that their electoral opponents eat babies when their electoral opponents actually put children in cages.
In contrast, right wing parties overcome the inherent unpopularity of their revealed policy platforms (running on platforms of cutting taxes on the very rich while making life harder for the average person is not popular) by using disinformation to make a stated platform based on fabricated wedge issues. Hence, the imaginary convoys of South American migrants that were about to storm the US-Mexico border in 2018.
As such, restricting disinformation will have a partisan impact. Within the US, there is no Democratic equivalent to Qanon, so anti-disinformation measures that impact the likes of Qanon will have no impact on the Democratic party whatsoever.
Functioning societies must have zero tolerance for 'alternative facts.' Disagree over goals and interpretations, but facts must be accepted by all. Democracy requires an informed electorate and there can be no functioning democracy when one side is free to invent its own version of reality.
This year the president has sued to stop publication of two books because they embarrassed him, one from John Bolton and another from Mary Trump.
This year police in cities across the country have opened fire on journalists.
These are legal and physical attacks, on journalists and publishers, coming from government officials. Social media moderation policies are interesting and important. But if you see censorship and attacks on free speech only coming from one side, you should probably diversify your media diet.
It's getting pretty insane out there.
The Ministry of Truth and the protagonist of 1984, it’s employee, were engaged in revising the written record to make it match what the Party wanted in the present.
They were also the only source of information.
Twitter is not doing the former and isn’t the latter, so equating it with Minitrue is 100% factually incorrect.
That’s typically referred to, at its most specific: fact checking, less specifically: news reporting, and most generally: making a claim of fact... when one disagrees with the check, report, or claim.
You gotta admire the genius of it all. The state gets to control speech and the press via willing private citizens and corporations, whilst keeping its hands clean.
So I'd certainly say Reddit is at least comparable. Additionally, I see fact checks on tons of conservative posts on Facebook and Twitter (rightfully so most of the time). But the same procedure isn't followed for liberal posts.
I haven't seen any possible misinformation warnings on Facebook or Twitter for something like: people claiming the BLEXIT supporters at Trump's recent speech were paid. According to ABC News, some supporters travel and room/board were paid (but they didn't release any of the emails, just allegedly quoted them). So it would be misleading to say that BLEXIT supporters were paid to attend the speech, it should be labeled as a "possibly misleading" statement like the claims from the right typically are. I mean, the emails haven't even been released and/or verified as existing and people are just running with it because it's ABC?
Edit: would love to know why I'm getting downvotes for providing a comment with a source and a different viewpoint?
If a contracting client offered to pay for your room and board and travel expenses, but not for your time in the office to work on the project, it's a bad deal. Or they could pay for your time in the office but not travel expenses. Or they can pay for everything. Those are three separate situations. By not clarifying which one it is, it's misleading. So if the client said we'll pay you to come work on this project and you'd have to travel to it, then you get there and they only pay for room and board, you'd be pretty pissed.
The lack of specificity is the same thing happening here in the reporting. Therefore it's misleading.
Every tyrant ever thought they were doing what was good. Nobody ever does bad things just to be evil. They do them because they honestly believe the end justifies the means. We tend to give a pass to actions taken toward ends we agree with. Everybody is the hero of their own story. Nobody is acting in bad faith. They just believe that based on the information they have and their experience that the course they are choosing is correct. Those guys firing AGTMS at each other in the videos we get out of Syria are all trying to create a better world for the next generation. They just happen to disagree on the details.
Vultures, praying on a weak country.
I thought this was a Hunter Biden story?
But there is no evidence the information was hacked - the shop owner says Hunter Biden signed the data and computer over to him via the 90 day unpaid clause.
So Twitter is selectively enforcing their rules to suit their preferred narrative?
If the goal was to suppress disinformation, they failed miserably.
Admittedly, there may be a cost to pay for that, and it's possible it was a long-term bad decision, but their goal seems to have been met.
Steve Bannon—one of Trump's chief cronies—provided a mixed bag of allegedly stolen content from a laptop with some easily contrived "evidence" against Biden and Trump.
There don't seem to be any direct ties even to Hunter Biden, let alone his dad. Publishing this is a gift to Trump.
History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
First, he played good cop trying to protect free speech while his employees played bad cop trying to censor. That was just a test to see how people reacted. To see if people perceived Mark Zuckerberg better after this.
Now Facebook is playing bad cop so that Trump can be the good cop and win the election.
Facebook is benefiting from inflationary monetary policy and Trump being eyeballs deep in debt will ensure that inflationary policy continues. Trump is not going to let the economy tank on his watch.
If Biden wins, he will let the economy tank early in his term and blame it on Trump.
BTW, Spotify also played "Good cop, bad cop" with its employees this year related to Joe Rogan. Again, Spotify management playing good cop letting Joe Rogan express himself and Spotify employees playing bad cop wanting him censored.
I should have worked for Facebook. Trump would already be Supreme World Dictator by now and the Federal Reserve Bank would have been merged into Facebook.
That said, I think Twitter massively overreached on their efforts regarding this particular story. It would have been far more effective to just label these tweets as containing potentially misleading information. The story would have died out tomorrow and life would've gone on. Instead this has blown up in their face spectacularly and directly lends credibility to the idea that they have their finger on the scale for Biden. If Trump wins reelection I imagine that he will immediately use the full force of the DOJ against Twitter.
At this point, Twitter might as well just lean into it, and go all out for Biden. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't, so might as well pick a side and hope that you're on the winning side.
FB might get off here for only "slowing down" the spread of the article, but maybe not.
> By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Post, and many others for retweeting the story.
Twitter and Facebook decided to prove their critics right. Censorship was supposed to be for Russian bot-generated fake news. The New York Post may be a shitty tabloid, but it’s a real organization with a Manhattan office building and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
As far as I can tell, it’s unclear whether the laptop the New York Post sourced it’s emails from really belonged to Hunter Biden. That’s an ordinary question of a news article’s credibility. It’s insane to make that the bar for sharing an article on social media.
Matt Taibbi has catalogued how many New York Times stories about Trump ultimately proved unfounded: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 (paid). The Times is a hell of a lot more credible than the Post, but again, the fact that an article from a real source may prove to be wrong can’t be a justification for censoring it on social media.
not to mention the countless “russia” stories that have been debunked
(Of course, this explanation isn't exactly a good look either, but at this point it's a choice between imperfection options, and one seems a lot less imperfect.)
I hope that FB, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare and others continue to block and close accounts to prevent the intervention of democracy as much as possible.
A similar case to this may have been the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016. So these are all parties who are trying to right the wrongs here done by destructive state actors from abroad.
These are all companies who own the servers that this content sits on, and it’s well within their rights to get rid of it if and when they wish to.
If you don’t want your content removed from there, then don’t post there and don’t use their services. Simple as that.
They have never once throttled or banned articles that are anti-Dem.
This was a massive screw-ups by Twitter and by Facebook and they know it.
The argument for their regulation as publishers (rather than platforms) just got twice as strong.
Absolute fools, and biased fools.
What makes this "obviously smearing"?
2. There is no evidence that the emails are in fact real, and nothing is even offered to that extent.
3. The article does not come from a reputable news source. In fact it comes from a news source with serious damage to it’s reputation.
4. No other major news outlet is picking this story up, further undermining the credibility of the article.
If I was a social media company I wouldn’t want to touch this with a 10 meter pole.
Seriously we should have a 4 week quiet period. So people can sort out though all the dirt and make sense of what is real.
This just pushses everyone into sensory overload to blind out any rational thought.
You're asking for evidence the emails are real but no such evidence was demanded when NYT posted findings from what they claim are Trump's financial records.
If you're a social media company, your job isn't to decide what's true or untrue or what is permissible to share or not share. It is to facilitate communication and get out of the way. Instead, we're seeing companies that control the digital public square enact severely biased policies that favor their employee's politics. That's dangerous and unacceptable.
Free market: censors things
Conservatives: no, not like that
Literally the opposite of the case. Due to the power of Section 230, the online platforms are shielded from the normal liability, which gives them an inherent advantage. Section 230 distorts the market, making it non-free.
See also: the excellent "Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly"[1] story from earlier on today.
Moreover, the Section 230 was specifically created to distort the market, to help kickstart the online communications and commerce, by giving it an edge over the other businesses. Now that it has done its job, we can revoke the Section 230, and return to actual free market. Where a tortious interference would be sorted out by a lawsuit.
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I think you spelled, "where posters freely waive their right to sue the forum as part of their publishing contract" wrong
This is not entirely true. I’m not sure what the law is on slander (which would be the law in question here, I believe), and if social media companies would be breaking the law if they allow slander to be distributed on their platform.
But regardless if it turns out that the story is bogus, and the NYP is charged with slander, but this article had a widespread distribution and is successful in swaying voters on a false claim. Then the damage to democracy is quite significant, but the NYP gets away with a fairly minor charge of slander.
There needs to be a new solution. And this is a step towards that. Might be the wrong step...
Free speech for me but not for thee, much?
To those of you who have done this, or don't have a problem with it, or are about to downvote and/or flag this post, think carefully about if you're actually defending free speech or only speech that you agree with.
No it isn't. It's a platform run by a private company for its own ends that offers membership under terms of service which grant it absolute, universal, irrevocable and arbitrary rights over user content and accounts. Terms of service that everyone with an account agreed to beforehand.
That it has global reach no more makes it a public forum than CNN, the BBC or the Wall Street Journal, and "akin to a government institution" is just an attempt to muddy the waters between the definitions of public and private enterprise.
If you or anyone wants to make this a free speech issue, don't misrepresent the nature of the problem. State that you want the government to take over social media platforms, restrict their free speech rights and force them to publish content against their will. Even if it's racist, even if it's false, even if they're not a general purpose forum, the men with guns should force them to.
People who claim, for instance, that it should be a crime for websites to moderate any content, in any way, that isn't strictly illegal, or that all moderation should be subject to judicial review (both positions I've seen repeatedly here) should realize just how radical and potentially authoritarian such moves would be, particularly given their correlation with the current atmosphere of anti-leftist panic.
People who advocate that Twitter should not exercise editorial control over content are hypocrites for using HN's community editorial control tools to suppress, or remove, content that they don't agree with on HN.
People who value free speech as an absolute right in virtually all contexts have no business curtailing what they argue is an absolute right when it is exercised by people who have views they disagree with.
. . . .
As a substantive question, I agree that Twitter is large enough that it should be regarded as an infrastructure platform, akin to the phone carriers, and should not be expected to unilaterally decide on the fair bounds of political speech. That much power does not belong in the hands of any one CEO. Absent a more suitable long-term legal framework to combat propaganda, however, unilateral action is the best of a set of very bad choices. The political situation in America is far too dangerous for potential disinformation to spread unchecked.
If there is truth to the NY Post story, it will be corroborated by other news outlets and will eventually find its way to Twitter via that route. Until that happens, however, October surprises of potentially dubious validity should not be allowed to spread unchecked.
It's refusing to spread likely BS propoganda. And he is correctly implying that many people who claim to be free speech advocates are in no way free speech advocates and merely are upset that racist and conspiratorial speech is being censored and are fine censoring viewpoints they disagree with