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Comment by bananabreakfast | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Yes it is.

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.

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Well Twitter just poured jet fuel on the fire now that they locked the account deleted the tweet and now it’s back on Twitter.

That’s the amazing thing. The NYPost article was making the rounds Wednesday night and it was mostly crickets.

Twitter bans any posts about it and now it’s taking off like a firestorm.

The meta-story about how Giuliani got the emails aside, what portion of the actual story (related to Hunter's dealings) do you consider disinformation?

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?

No, it’s not fake. You can’t provide proof that it’s fake. You’re going off a political agenda. There’s a picture of hunter smoking a crack pipe!

To preface my comment, I think using Hunter's drug problem for political gain is tasteless. Despite that I find it abhorrent that Twitter is not allowing users to post the photo instead it is instantly causing accounts to get locked. https://twitter.com/search?q=hunter%20locked%20pipe&src=type...

I believe it's a meth pipe actually

Your political agenda is quite clear.

Wow! Bad news for Hunter’s election campaign!

A core assertion in the article is demonstrably fake. Biden did not pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma. It's something Trump has repeated countless times and something that's been proven false countless times, but the Post still stated it as fact in the article.

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.

> A core assertion in the article is demonstrably fake. Biden did not pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was investigating Burisma.

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.

I don't know much about this situation but is Biden not describing exactly this situation here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jyT1rnW9fA

No.

No. Biden did push for a prosecutor to be fired, something that the administration and other governments agreed on (the prosecutor was corrupt). But the prosecutor was not investigating Burisma.

Well, he was definitely investigating Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky. The prosecutor's office seized several of his houses and other property in February 2016 [1]. Ten days later, Biden urged Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor. Another four days later, the prosecutor was asked to resign.

[1] https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/322395.html

People claim Biden didn’t pressure to fire the prosecutor (even Twitter lied about this yesterday).

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.

Do people really fall asleep with crack pipes in their mouth?

I’ve done it before.

Do you have actual proof that this article is "blatant disinformation meant to destabilize the election and disenfranchise voters with blatant lies"?

Because that implies something far worse than the censored article's accusations about Hunter Biden.

Is this really the first you are hearing about it? Intelligence agencies have been trying to tell people for multiple years now that russia is actively doing things like this.

Actively doing what? Hacking U.S. officials and their contacts and releasing the information they obtain? You can argue that's dirty pool but I fail to see how it's "disinformation."

I am talking specifically about the NY Post article that has been censored.

“Glow in the dark McCarthy CIA types said Russia was doing something bad one time, therefore every single piece of news that is politically inconvenient for me is Russian propaganda”

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