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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

If I was a Twitter or Facebook investor, I have one question:

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.

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This post has a very odd tone, as if a private company enforcing their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence of a private citizen is some unquestionable moral wrongdoing that's apparently going to blow up. Surprised to see this as at the top, on HN.

National Review is a conservative wing-nut website trying to turn this non-story into fuel for their censorship culture war.

The media commonly relies on second hand accounts of leaked documents ("persons familiar with the contents of [X] document"), including private documents.

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.

> their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence

do you think their policy is evenly applied across their platform?

Of course not. But how could it possibly be applied evenly? That's not an expectation anyone could genuinely hold.

Been years since I read anything from National Review, so I was surprised to see them called a "conservative wing-nut website".

Even the wikipedia entry for them seems to counter that assessment pretty strongly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review

Any agreement with conservative principles will get you labeled as a bunch of unpleasant things.

Balanced budget, smaller government, prolife, personal responsibility, self defense, belief in God.

Express support for any of these and you will be attacked.

Not only that, but IMO context matters here. We are 20 days away from the election. People are standing in lines to vote as we speak.

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.

Funny how the same logic doesn't apply to the steele dossier :/

Love the downvotes for this. Anyone who thinks for a second that Twitter and FB have some kind of set of principles that this story and only this story have crossed is deluded.

How this logic not apply to the steele dossier is beyond me.

So sayeth Arthanos!

Did twitter censor all stories regarding the claim that Trump paid $750 in taxes?

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.

That's a bizarre comparison, because Trump has repeatedly lies about being willing but unable to release his own copy of his tax returns. And the NY Times didn't publish personal documents, they published facts about a certain class of personal documents (tax documents of a Presidential candidate) which for decades have been considered public information by all major corners of the political arena.

How did the NyTimes get those tax documents?

Exactly, and it's now spouted as a "fact" in multiple online communities I frequent.

Those weren't hacked or leaked. The story is much simpler, and the provenance of the files is not in question:

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]

[1] https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1316484977928941570

The provenance of the files is not questioned by far-right political operatives like Sean Davis who are pushing this story in the first place, but to anybody with half a brain cell and an ounce of skepticism the whole story stinks. Just listen to this interview with the owner of the repair shop these files purportedly came from, who changes his story about a half-dozen times in the span of sixty minutes:

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!

I hear your objection. Here is a fair and balanced coverage of the document's provenance by a 3rd party, uninvolved, newspaper:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8841255/Man-Hunter-...

I don't understand. The Daily Mail pretty clearly debunks your earlier claims and highlights the shadiness of the alleged source of the laptops.

This is a joke, right? The Daily Mail?

My pick - Daily Mail: a newspaper headquartered in London, UK - a 3rd party country, independent from the ongoing US election. Over 120 years long history of investigative journalism.

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.

The Daily Mail like the NY Post is a right wing tabloid with Terrible journalistic standards

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]

"120 years long history of investigative journalism"

I should have known I was being trolled; my fault for taking the bait.

The pentagon papers were unverified and leaked.

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?

How in the world can anybody dispute this!?!

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.

60 Minutes 2 aired a slanderous story about George Bush based on documents they knew were unverified.

And, the timing is not suspicious it is politics.

Exactly!

They probably have been doing this for a while, and this was just the first time they got called out for it.

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.

Actually, Twitter has one massive thing to lose: Section 230. Already, senators are taking this as the perfect reason to repeal or reform 230, and that would directly impact twitter.

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?

Repeal of section 230 would probably result in Twitter blocking a lot more things than they do now.

Which hopefully would spell the end of Twitter, in a shocking positive twist for human civilization.

Which is why we need reform: 230 liability protection needs to be extended only to those entities that only remove illegal content and nothing else, period.

So if I ran a chess forum, I could not remove posts about horse racing without losing my section 230 protection? Or posts advertising boner pills? Once I decide to allow people to post on my forum, for any reason, I have to allow every single post that does not violate the law, or I lose 230 protection?

Perhaps Twitter is being set up as a sacrificial lamb to quell the Techlash. In that case, I'm wrong.

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.

Ya, they have. Every major social network censors constantly and they get called out all the time but because the censoring favors a liberal agenda the mainstream media doesn't want to talk about it because they're also hugely biased (as are tech companies). Read Left Turn by Tim Groseclose or watch one of many people who talk about. I always like Larry Elder's perspective [1][2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJAQ2QB6WVQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-CugJieq2I

Yeah, remember when they didn’t let anything about Wikileaks get shared on their platforms?

This time they went too far though. Banning Alex Jones? He's a crackpot. Banning Mila Yannipopoulus? He trolled people. Censoring Trump tweets? Ok... Censoring the very much anticipated October surprise involving Hunter Biden? No way.

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.

Streisand effect in 3, 2, 1...

Regulation of online media is all but inevitable.

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.

>History does not look kindly on governments that denied reality.

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.

I don't have a compelling argument for why you're wrong, but it really seems like this is a weightier claim than you're giving it credit for. If social harmony is a sufficient reason for censorship, is there any basis left for objecting to the Great Firewall?

I don't believe social harmony is a sufficient reason for censorship or that censorship is the correct approach. There are many potential remedies including.

- 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.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

Also in this category of "did you actually think this through":

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.)

What's the probability that the story they're blocking is 100% bullshit? And if they have evidence or signals of that, does that weigh in to your opinion on their intervention?

The majority of things on Twitter and Facebook are bullshit. How many politicians and "pundits" are allowed to blatantly lie on Twitter? Not sure why this is different.

It's a newspaper collaborating with the president's personal lawyer, who is already the subject of investigations into persons in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, during the run up to an incredibly contentious election after these networks - Facebook and Twitter- have already been accused of allowing rampant disinformation campaigns. If they had reason to believe that the information was part of a malicious campaign, I can see why that might spur them to action.

> It's a newspaper collaborating with the president's personal lawyer

The President is still allowed to tweet almost anything he wants, so this is still very selective censorship.

Evidently Twitter feels that gives him special privileges, but they've been flagging his posts as possible misinformation for months. Clearly they're trying to find a way to navigate a difficult situation. I think they should be erring toward better control of disinformation, certainly not being more laissez-faire about a problem that is destroying the world.

> I think they should be erring toward better control of disinformation,

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.

He published a video (still on YouTube) with a unifying message after the death of George Floyd. Jack Dorsey on Twitter deleted it on the basis of copyright claims. If copyright had been truly infringed, it would have been taken down from YouTube.

Twitter is just an extreme example of a social media platform acting like a publisher and applying blatant censorship.

Is that Cohen when you say Trump’s lawyer? Do you have a source for that out of interest? It smells a bit like that National Review article Cohen planted about Cruz’s dad killing JFK or something in 2016.

I'm referring to Giuliani, who is the New York Post's source for these alleged emails and photos, acting as a supposed intermediary for a repair shop employee. Giuliani has been tasked for two years with digging up dirt on Biden, and every single story he has pushed has in my view, been outright fabricated agenda pushing based on narratives spun by dubious third parties.

I was just looking it up to correct myself, looks like Cohen is back in prison so.. probably not him :) yea Giuliani, makes sense, I’d be amazed if it’s not just an outright fabrication.

Pitchforks are out, once current election circus is over, they will come for FB, Twitter and YouTube. Politicians on either side are scared and don’t want such strong entities have control over information.

They probably expected it would go over like the Alex Jones thing or the warning messages on Trump's tweets, with a brief burst of interest followed by adjustment to the new consensus that some censorship is justified for the sake of social harmony. (And they may yet be right - there were headlines about those two things too.)

The just consequence should be that they should be considered publishers, rather than the republishers. And thus lose their 230 protection from civil litigation.

Isn’t the entire point of 230 to allow platforms to be moderated without being treated as publishers?

No, the original point of 230 was to allow platforms to republish user content without bearing civil liability for such content.

No, the point was to allow platforms to republish user content and moderate it without bearing civil liability for the content. Case law prior to section 230 had established that platforms only had liability if they engaged in moderation, but had no liability if they did not moderate in any way. Section 230 was created to address that absurd result of existing law. Protecting platforms that engage in moderation is the whole point, platforms that don’t moderate are already protected. This is why nobody has suggested that AT&T would have civil liability for posts on Facebook even though their wires carry the post to you. Dumb pipes don’t accrue liability.

Relying on the case law is much more expensive than relying on the US Code, since 230 allows to immediately go for the summary judgement, even if somebody still files a civil case. So the then smaller ISPs lobbied for that.

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.

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