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Comment by Arthanos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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