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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

IMO it's relevant that twitter is blocking the story due to their rules about releasing hacked material, not misinformation. If the hard drive is a hoax, I think it's important to have an open discussion to shine a light on it. Banning the article in a way that appears to validate its claims will only embolden claims of a conspiracy.

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

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> If the hard drive is a hoax, I think it's important to have an open discussion to shine a light on it.

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.

As Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

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.

Which is to say that Twitter and Facebook seem to have learned something and probably have telemetry telling them when a claim like this is getting legs.

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.

I see your “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and raise you a “lies spread faster than the truth”. If you allow the article, the article goes viral, then the retraction a day later gets no attention (because it’s not as interesting) well then now a ton of people are gonna be walking around thinking “didn’t they get Biden’s son’s emails and catch him in a crime or something?”

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.

How could it possibly make sense to say that "it makes sense to ban publishing of hacked materials, except if the hacked materials are published"?

I think it would make sense to distinguish between some random jerk posting a photo hacked from his ex-girlfriend's iCloud account vs a news article containing a hacked photo of a slide detailing NSA's PRISM program. Twitter already makes "public interest exemptions" for their other rules

Are you just speculating, or is there actual proof that the article is fake? Twitter seems to think it contains at least some authentic material that was obtained illicitly.

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 supposed leaker has contradicted his own claims about the material, has refused to release evidence (like cryptographic signatures) that might prove whether the emails actually passed through email servers, and he is a zealous Trump booster, (supposedly) hid the information from the public for a year in order to maximize campaigns impact instead of sharing it immediately upon discovery, and none of the Republican Senators not Republican DOJ, who supposedly had this material for a year already, have mentioned its existence, despite having recently published reports investigating this exact issue.

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.

> That a Mac repair shop owner violated all ethical standards to spy on a customer laptop.

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.

Jeez, don’t take your computer to Best Buy if you view the world that way: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/geek-squads-relationsh...

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