Do you think its correct to delibrately spread a false story about Hunter Biden? Is this type removing false information censorship?
This is blatant disinformation meant to destabilize the election and disenfranchise voters with blatant lies. This action is exactly the kind of thing everyone blamed social media for not taking last time and they're finally doing the right thing.
This is exactly what they tried to do in the 2016 election by getting Comey to announce a new investigation that, surprise, turned up absolutely nothing. There is no substance to these allegations. At all.
Before you get up in arms about a slippery slope about arbiters of truth keep in mind that these sources have burned any credibility they have. Their ideas do not have a right to a fair trail in the public discourse because they are all acting in bad faith.
Twitter bans any posts about it and now it’s taking off like a firestorm.
Besides, the burden of proof applies here. "You can't prove it's not fake" is not a sensible approach. The burden is on the accuser to prove that the story is true, and the Post story does not do that.
When presented with the video of Biden admitting to it in his own words; he pressured to fire the prosecutor, but the prosecutor wasn’t investigating Burisma.
When shown that the prosecutor was actively investigating Burisma; well he pressured to get the prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma, but it was in the national interest!
I’m not sure if there’s another round in the typical exchange. Best to just skip to the last phase to move the conversation forward.
Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, that's not in dispute, he's on video saying he did it. What is in dispute is whether he did it out of a corrupt motivation to benefit his son and the business he was working for. That's not asserted in the article. It merely lays out the timeline of events -- granted, in an order which is meant to point the reader in a given direction. They even include a section with the Biden campaign's take on the prosecutor's firing.
Because that implies something far worse than the censored article's accusations about Hunter Biden.
What do you mean by disenfranchise, while we're at it? Even if we were to stipulate it's a lie, is it your position that to lie during campaign season is literally the same as taking away the right to vote?
So far, there doesn't seem to be much that hasn't already been confirmed. One new piece of information is the email that implies a Burisma exec. was at least introduced to Joe Biden. The Biden hasn't issued a categorical denail of this, only to say that such a meeting "wasn't scheduled."
What substantive allegation against Hunter Biden are you disputing, exactly?
NY Post doxxed their own source when put under scrutiny, who went on to do an interview yesterday. What John Paul Mac Isaac is saying isn't adding up.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In that case, all articles that include "sources say" etc should be banned from Twitter, shouldn't they?
In this case, NY Post threw their source to the wolves when they couldn't verify any of the information, so this story is not congruent with "sources say".
He can’t get something as simple as who initiated contact over the device straight? If I was a small fish about to source a story of this size, I’d have every single detail rehearsed and committed to memory. This guy doesn’t come across as legit at all.
What if I accuse someone of something, and then post that I accused them. The accusation maybe bogus but the post is technically not false.
Pre-framing a topic is malpractice.
In this case, the following are true: (1) Hunter Biden was a highly paid board member of Burisma while his father handled Ukraine policy for the U.S. (2) A computer repair store owner claims to have his data and to have given it to Rudy Giuliani (3) There was a Grand Jury summons to seize the computer as evidence in an unknown investigation.
This is far more than is usually needed to cover a story.
For what it's worth, NY Post (sorry for the link) is reporting that the Biden campaign isn't denying most of their claims: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/notice-biden-campaign-not-deny....
To be clear, this is a separate question from how the emails were obtained. That story is beyond weird and surely bogus. To be fair, it also seems to me an indication that Biden is more honest than Trump. Trump would just say the emails were fake whether they were or not.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the story is true, just that the campaign has made a deliberate choice.
> He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it.
He owns a computer repair shop and doesn't keep basic records of the devices he services? The moment he knew what he had, he didn't start taking any kind of notes?
> Throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”
How does he not remember who contacted who regarding the device? Also, how would the FBI know that he had to device to reach out to him first? This inconsistency is absolutely damning.
> Social media postings indicate that Mac Isaac is an avid Trump supporter and voted for him in the 2016 election.
> Mac Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post article’s publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “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.”
Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah, shit.”
So Rudy was your lifeguard? the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.
He wasn't comfortable admitting he had been in contact with Giuliani, even though it's pretty obvious at this point that he was? That doesn't sound like a citizen fulfilling their civic duty if he was in contact with a political operative.
This story absolutely stinks to high heaven.
0: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Being nervous in an interview is one thing, trying and failing to wing it through basic questions is entirely different. His comment about the lifeboat particularly stood out to me because he very obviously didn't want to explicitly talk about Giuliani, but he was comfortable speaking in hyperbole about it. If you're so uncomfortable to answer a question, how would you then be comfortable enough to "say it" without saying it? If I was concerned that a question could threaten my safety or legal standing, I'd stay as far away from it as possible. This guy clearly wanted the reporters to know that he had been talking to Giuliani, and once that's out there, the context of the entire story changes.
If it's a legit scandal, there's no reason that a whistleblower should reach out to a political operative in addition to the authorities. The very fact that he did this says so much about his state of mind, that he was acting in support of a candidate.
Instead of responding, I would hope the Biden campaign talks about policy.
Not denying something doesn't make true any more than not confirming something makes it false.
I neither confirm nor deny that I have a bank account at a large commercial bank. What does that tell you?
Nothing.
Slinging unsubstantiated mud at your opponent is an old trick in politics and relies on the idea that you can make your opponent look bad just by having them address it at all.
The fact that Biden isn't addressing it is strong evidence that the story isn't getting the traction the hacks that put it out there wanted. It is not strong evidence of its truth.
>"We have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place," it said.
>"Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr Biden.
>"Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath."
I'm not sure what there is to deny.
That's absolutely ridiculous logic.
Your argument is “I don’t believe it, so it must be false”
I can imagine a dystopian future in which three weeks before every election there's an explosion of insane bombshell claims about the candidates, with ever increasing effort put into them and no time to refute them before the vote. A misinformation arms war will ensue.
The Biden campaign's refutation was not to say that the emails were doctored. They only said that they have checked the official schedule of Joe Biden from the day in question and there is no mention of a meeting with the Burisma executive (they don't say categorically that he did not meet with him, just that it is not present on the official schedule).
Other then the meeting w/ Biden, I'm not sure there's a detail that has been specfically contested.
I am not saying they have met a burden of proof, I'm saying that we don't censor news articles (even sensational or thinly sourced ones) because they haven't yet met a burden of proof.
And yes, the key to using the internet effectively is to filter things out that are garbage. I individually try not waste my time on bullshit, truth based organizations filter out a lot of crackpots: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2019020... and Twitter itself is free to try to do this filtering as well. I applaud them for trying to remove BS rather than trying to push addictive content but whatever. This very news site is interesting because they spend a lot of time trying to filter BS in favor of productive and informative conversations.
I don't doubt some things have been exaggerated, but I feel were pretty far past a theory right now. The question is just how much their influence affected policy.
SV is full of .. something. idk what to call these people, but reading this forum makes it clear they are all around me in my career domain.
The story received additional sources as it ran, and eventually grew into an investigation that yielded multiple criminal convictions.
The DNI publicly put out a report. I recall statements by the FBI Director, CIA Director, and NSA Director referring and promoting the conclusions drawn in the report (those 3 agencies were principally involved, in addition to being the three most important and largest intelligence agencies).
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
The Senate Intelligence Committee (which is GOP controlled) has also put out several reports concurring with Russian interference in the 2016 election.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
The initial news cycle would have been from highly valued and proven anonymous sources, which is typical for national security matters. If you are expecting a bunch of CIA analysts doxxing themselves on the front page of the NYT, you will be disappointed. That’s not how national security reporting (or reporting in general) works.
To be of excellent provenance doesn’t necessarily require a named source - if the paper and journalist have a good track record with unnamed sources in an area of expertise.
The question is whether this standard of reliability is one that they can actually apply evenly. This is a far higher standard that what was pitched. This content moderation was pitched as being limited to Russian bots and “vaccines cause cancer” and the like. Moderating articles from a publicly listed brick and mortar news organization, even if it’s a tabloid, based on the perceived credibility of the underlying facts, is a whole new level. It’s dramatically raising the bar. And maybe that’s where the bar should be, but I absolutely do not believe that Facebook and Twitter have the resources or integrity to apply that high standard fairly.
Twitter claims that the justification is that the emails are "hacked" and/or "leaked" (they're inconsistent), even though (1) this is patently false since they were found on a hard drive which became property of the repair shop; and (2) Twitter has no problem with, say, Trump's tax returns and other "hacked"/"leaked" materials.
Citation very much needed.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8842709/Joe-Bidens-...
Pretty obvious the guy who claimed to have obtained the laptop is fabricating the whole story: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Everything else in the release is 1) far more damaging than the above and 2) far harder to verify as accurate with what we've been given thus far.
Before you dismiss my anecdote as one mistaken lawyer, note that the chairman of the FCC (who is a lawyer) and Justice Clarence Thomas both think that Section 230 doesn't offer nearly as much protection as social media companies seem to think it does. In response to recent events, the FCC plans to issue statements clarifying the meaning of Section 230.[1]
1. https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC/status/1316808733805236226 "Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech. But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters."
Section 230 will NOT get removed. ISPs and email service providers, and blog platforms, will still be able to use it.
But companies that add/remove/replace/gray-out/delete/hide/push-to-bottom content that they claim they did not editorialize -- will be called Publishers.
So these businesses will not be able to use statutory protections that are available for non-publishers under section 45.230.
An analogy might be: a for-profit-business cannot claim tax benefits available for a non-for-profit organizations.
So the tax-code does not get removed, just because somebody was actively abusing it. It stays the same, but the abuser would face criminal investigation.
And if the abuser was found to systemically and purposefully avoiding to be recognized as 'Publisher' (or as a for-profit business in this analogy), then the criminal penalties would be more severe, then otherwise.
Publishers can do this, yes. They just are not offered the legal protections of being a platform, if they act as a publisher.
The point is, that someone is acting as a publisher, then they should have these legal protections taken away form them.