On the other hand, if the party benefiting from this move gets into power, that might be enough to stop any change from happening.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782753.)
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.