Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Nothing about the CBS article he linked to indicates that the story is fabricated. It's mostly just a series of character assassinations, from Giuliani to the computer repair guy to...the Russians.
And that, my friends, is why Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay and why their insultingly duplicitous attempts to justify them aren't going to work. The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...
In addition, it appears the director of the DNI is saying this story is not part of a “Russia conspiracy” as a few Democrats are claiming.
Set aside the topic for a second.. how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable?
For the same reason as all Congressional behavior that is acceptable---voters don't hold them accountable.
As it stands, off-every-four-years elections tend to see sub-50% turnout.
I should have watched the interview and my comments further down are inaccurate.
But - oh wait - I didn't realize that Ratcliffe the guy that released dubious information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/dni-ratcliffe-declassifies-r...
''Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"''
Which totally violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was done to help the President's re-election campaign:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas...
Why do people trust this guy? You shouldn't. Even if what he says turns out to be true, his actions reveal him as an un-trustworthy person on this issue. ]
-------------------------------------------------------
----- Please just ignore this stuff below :-) ---------
> the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that.
While I didn't read/watch the interview/article in question, I just want to point out that the DNI statement, as you described it, is pretty carefully worded.
They "have not passed reports/briefings that say it's Russian disinformation". This leaves room for:
- Documents or meetings not officially considered reports/briefings.
- Documents or meetings with damning information but that draw no explicit conclusions, leaving it to the House Intelligence Committee to do that.
Obviously what I'm saying isn't a strong argument one way or the other. What I am saying, is, it's important to look at the big picture and to do so with a careful eye.
Personally I think the blog Lawfare does an excellent job of this and is a great guide for these sorts of issues. Here's their analysis of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did...
"One of the clever features of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is the committee’s apparent decision to draw no conclusions, merely to recount facts. This allowed the entire committee, irrespective of party or fealty to the president, to join in the factual findings."
And then ...
"To read these thousand pages and come away with the conclusion that they amount to evidence of “no collusion” really involves a protestation of faith, not a dispassionate assessment of presented evidence."
It's a very comprehensive document and I highly recommend it.
Though it's not related to the issue at hand I still recommend checking out Lawfare : ).
The whole "17 agencies" story being a great case in point. The 17 became 3, and the 3 became ~two dozen hand-picked analysts. None of that stops people like Schiff from continuing to spout the "17 agencies" line though.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-g...
Like Ray McGovern says, the biggest four letter word in DC is "accountability".
"U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.
The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
While some early Senate-confirmed Trump appointees, including his first DNI Dan Coats, were not transparent bootlicking shills in all their public comments, that's certainly not the case for any appointed as recently as this spring, like Ratcliffe.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dni-john-ratcliffe-dec...
'Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"'
Something which violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was clearly done to help the President's re-election campaign:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas...
Why do you trust this guy? You shouldn't, not on this. His actions reveal his priorities.
Do folks think that was a responsible, appropriate act for the Director of National Intelligence in line with their role and their obligations?
Why shouldn't that matter, if Twitter also cares about its reputation?
As a pure publisher, I think it's generally understood, there is inherent bias.
Indeed, even when people assume they're neutral, that assumption doesn't extend to full laissez-faire. All these platforms have basic "censorship" in place for legal compliance (DMCA takedown processes, interactions with government anti-crime systems, a need to follow US law regarding dissemination of pedophilic content, etc.).
Maybe because one can have extreme political views and easily find other like-minded people then one can become somewhat blinkered? If one's platform of choice is also stifling some content there is still enough of other stuff around that one may not notice?
If a publisher is also a platform, then they have different roles and responsibilities for each.
It's interesting to observe that he claims to be targeting Twitter with a defamation suit. I believe S230 would block that.
Under Twitter's behavior prior to about this year, they would have let unfiltered defamatory tweets go through without any fact-checking. Fact-checking may actually have saved this young man some malignedly-lost reputation had it existed at the time.
It seems fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that their actions were politically-motivated and have been for quite some time.
Oh, and Trump is a serial liar who has spread really damaging lies via twitter ... numerous times.
And last time around, how did they handle the claims that were leaked from the Steele dossier?
The problem is that this sort of censorship is almost impossible to apply fairly. When your workforce is dominated by one political viewpoint, you are inevitably going to be biased in a way that a “platform” should not be.
1) all platforms are acting against misinformation- singularly around the US elections mind you -
2) misinformation will be political, since it will impact one party or the other.
3) making a decision to remove it will therefore be a political decision
So to avoid being labeled political, platforms should not remove misinformation?
Not sure how that computes.
Leaving misinformation up for people to beat with better info, empirically doesn’t work. Social media has proven that at least, COVID and mask wearing is notable but only the most recent illustrative example.
So what should platforms do? Or maybe someone can outline a way to depoliticize such decisions?
Well yes. If you want to edit what your user post, you're not a platform anymore but an editor.
As much as I despise what Twitter did, I've been thinking about it for a couple of days and feel that the best option is a large number of strong Twitter competitors, rather than specific regulation. The slippery slope going the other way (silencing platforms) is just as bad as the one we're on. Throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Problem is you run into a physical limit at that point, there's only so many social media platforms we can be on, so creating such competition would be... hard... at this point.
As it stands, there is no reason to believe that it is fake.
There are new pictures of Hunter Biden smoking crack. Those clearly weren't released previously.
Is the claim that these pictures are forgeries, or that they were hacked and then combined with forged emails to show Joe Biden's corruption? I haven't seen this explained anywhere. Personally, the pictures make me think the whole contents is real, although maybe the origin story isn't.
I think the lack of denial from the campaign (as well as taking the candidate off the campaign trail for days) is a strong indicator the contents are not fabricated.
They’re not calling this one fake news. Even Twitter is not saying it was faked but rather that the data was illicitly obtained.
Speaking of Russian agents wasn’t it the Dems who pedaled the now discredited Steel Dossier?
Using “Russia” as an adjective right now has limited value and if anything should be viewed with suspicion of purposeful “redirection”. It’s not a believable accusation any more.
So the Steele dossier was created by Russia now? To smear themselves? This is the first time I've heard this accusation.
Giuliani has been working with Andriy Derkach who is believed to be an active Russian agent. See this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
It also included a lot rumors and unsupported allegations.
>Were they expecting it to be released before the election (it wasn't)?
It wasn't openly published before the election, but it was used during the election. It was given to law enforcement and major media outlets. Mother Jones wrote about it before the election.
Curiously, he was working at Brookings, home to people like Ben Wittes of Lawfare (a good friend of James Comey), who was a major proponent of Russiagate.
Now if he actually was a Russian spy, he’s a very good one, as he managed to trigger ongoing surveillance of a campaign and a sitting President (& it was acknowledged this wouldn’t have been approved without the dossier), which led to a massive investigation and ultimately an impeachment (thanks in part to Mueller holding back the report until the Democrats took the house). And all this continues to echo in the division and anger we see today. That would have to be some of the most effective Russian meddling ever.
One source re Danchenko (there are others):
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/25/...
Sure but that alone does not disprove any of the allegations.
It's as much a generic excuse as "Russians!".
The only source for "appears to be fabricated" appears to be politicians on the same side as Joe Biden saying so, as far as I can tell.
> Ratcliffe withdrew after Republican senators raised concerns about him, former intelligence officials said he might politicize intelligence, and media revealed Ratcliffe's embellishments regarding his prosecutorial experience in terrorism and immigration cases.
> Ratcliffe has little experience in national security or national intelligence and is reported to have demonstrated little engagement on the matters as a congressman.
Do you have any evidence to support the evidence being fabricated?
Do you have any evidence to show where the previously non-public images (like Hunter asleep with a crack pipe next to him) published by the Post came from, if not the hard drive of said laptop?
This anonymous / unsourced claim is false, according to the Director of National Intelligence. There is no intelligence that supports that and no one is even on the record claiming that it does. WashPo may have fabricated the claim. See linked video of DNI speaking about it.
Now apparently he's a befuddled old man allowing himself to be easily manipulated and led around by the nose by foreign intelligence agents.
I'm going to assume he's not that stupid. And the emails are real. Biden is owned by the CCP.
It's just more of "Muh Russians" garbage from Wa Post.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jan/28/blog-posti...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-lapt...
It's true and documented that Hunter Biden had a laughable no-work job, and that the Obama administration made Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was going after his employer.
This particular NY Post story surfaces... an email... saying Biden met with somebody. Whatever. Of course he met with lots of people, it's not really a story itself so much as an excuse to resurrect the actual story from a year ago. This isn't a court of law where we're establishing the quid pro quo for a judge/jury, it's the court of public opinion.
> In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts".[24] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[38]
Decry Wikipedia if you'd like, but this is easily verifiable from any number of other outlets.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin#Failure_to_prope...
Regardless, why was Hunter cokehead Biden making 600k from a foreign oil company? It's a bad look.
Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails?
Here is a link to an interview with a surrogate for the Biden campaign, who says “I Don't Think Anybody Is Saying They Are Inauthentic.” [0]
Bingo. Because the only thing better then evidence of corruption is disprovable denials of the evidence of corruption.
I'm guessing that's why Biden has not had a formal press event since this story came out. It's also why he's literally hiding at home until after the final debate.
Anything he says will be quoted back to him.
There are so many questions, and time too short to answer them all (purposefully, since it supposed to be an October surprise, the PDF with email print shows that it was prepared a year ago)
"Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"."
Sure, Russian Intelligence may have hacked my politicians computers. Or Russian teenagers. Or American teenagers. Or American journalists paid off an informant.
None of that actually matters because the only thing important is if the information is true or not.
If it was uncovered "legally" makes no difference in the USA, except for prosecutions and lawsuits. Journalists cannot be prevented from publishing true information, no matter how they got it.
Sure, if we are limiting the discussion to specifically the information presented in these documents, but we never leave it there. There is nothing in the body of the emails that have proven Joe Biden was involved in anything nefarious. However the larger story is whether these emails are an implication of his corruption. In this larger story, both the interpretation of emails and the larger context of the emails are just as important at the body of the emails themselves. The source matters in that regard. A biased source can hide exonerating pieces of context and only show the evidence in a manner that is most likely to elicit the response they want.
For example, let's look back to 2016. There was a big controversy over Clinton getting debate questions ahead of time. That was true and looks awful with the context we had. However, what if there was also an email that Sanders received the same debate questions (purely a hypothetical for the sake of discussion, I'm not actually suggesting this happened)? That would change the entire story. Suddenly we go from a corrupt candidate manipulating everything to her advantage to a story about the artifice of televised political events. The Clinton email would be no less "true", but the existence of evidence we didn't see would change what that email means. It is easy to manipulate with partial truth like this.
It doesn't change my thoughts on HB's actions, but now we have a much bigger issue: a conspiracy where the president in cahoots with an unfriendly foreign power. That's waaaaaay bigger than Biden's kid, or Trump's kids, enriching themselves because of their parents' position.
> Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it?
Of course, but when has the media ever done that? There is clearly a massive effort to sink this story. Why?
It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no?
> The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible
It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.
Even the source article had to go back to the W administration to find examples. In the age of the Internet news writers know to avoid making a statement of fact while busily implying facts, so later when it turns out when they're wrong they're just HACKS and not also FRAUDS.
This is the default state of the world until proven otherwise and is supported by countless examples. The media is not some bastion of truth, it's just as subjective as the rest of us and has progressively gotten worse as all standards are pushed aside for the narrative.
The reality is that not all news sources are equally bad or biased. Some do a better job of fact checking than others.
I'm glad they rate political inclination separately from factuality because I've gotten to the point that I only care about the latter, and not the former, and highly suggest others do too. Nothing rated below "HIGH" in Factual Reporting should be passed along, IMHO.
They always link to the evidence for their ratings.
Subjective language is one way they do it. For example, an organization might have a "culture of abuse". That's not factually wrong but it has no meaning either. When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". When they want to suggest a person is dishonest, it's "X claims, without evidence, that ...".
Another way is taking advantage of people's inability to distinguish anecdotes from a representative sample. If they want us to believe that crime is increasing, they'll report more on crime so the audience gets the impression that there's more of it. They may even say it's increasing, which it always is if you cherry pick the appropriate time scale.
Then there's using quotes from other people to say whatever the journalist wants to say themselves. A technique for interviewing people is to go fishing for someone to say the right thing, which someone inevitably will if you ask enough people. Or worse, telling their subjects what to say or tricking them into saying they thing they want, perhaps by expressing the same belief themselves and using the human nature of agreeableness to get the subject to say they agree, even if they don't really. Sometimes the quotes are written inline with the rest of the sentence so they feel like facts being asserted by the journalist but aren't subject to the usual standard of accuracy.
I'd say these are more serious problems than factual errors because they're convey high level feelings and overall sense of the state of the world which are being prefabricated and fed to gullible voters so they don't have to think for themselves. With factual errors, you still have to use those facts to conclude something, which is hard mental work.
That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack.
Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]:
> [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details.
That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence.
The fact that you
a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and
b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans
makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism.
> He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former
The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
> The former is consensus among researchers in the field.
No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual.
This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.
No I'm not. But the fact you count me as one, shows that it probably is increasing by way of being redefined to include a broader group of people.
If you want to be pedantic, "dumb" means unable to speak, so obviously we're using the term colloquially here. IQ is our best measure of intelligence and it's reasonable to say "dumber" means "lower IQ". You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it doesn't support your belief.
Nonetheless sites like Politifact still provide pretty accurate fact-checking more often than not.
The New York Times will be more reliable than the National Enquirer, and will (eventually) admit error or wrong doing.
It’s not very realistic to see it as black and white, that some bad journalism means all journalism is bad.
That’s simply not true.
To be honest, considering the incredible number of lies, mistruths, and deceptions President Trump has been spewing for the last four years I’d say the fact-checking has been okay.
Of course Democrats and liberals lie or deceive too, and of course some media institutions sometimes screw up or have biases there.
But if we step back and look at what fact-checking is the most important, the President of the United States continuously lying his ass off clearly tops the list, so if we’re going to discuss fact-checking let’s start there.
The problems with the media "tops the list" for me before they can claim to be fact-checking anyone else.
I disagree. And I think there’s empirical data to back me up.
We can pick one politician, and look them up on Politifact.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/joe-biden/
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
Do you really believe Fox News does a better job of fact-checking? Or your media organization of choice.
Politifact is solid. Pro Publica is solid.
Attempting to reduce it to “all are equally bad, or so bad it doesn’t matter” is disingenuous and actually furthers attempts to deceive the public by undermining sources which are actually trustworthy.
Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to turn off your thinking cap - we always have to exercise our own judgement, even when reading information from sources we believe to be trustworthy.
If you genuinely believe what you are saying then I encourage you to broaden your sources. For example, ‘Ghost Wars’, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and has been broadly acclaimed, covers the CIA and all the stuff it did / has been doing in Afghanistan since 9/11.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Wars
There are plenty of good books on domestic politics too. Books will help broaden your perspective and better evaluate these journalism or media organizations we are talking about.
If you’re not engaging in this discussion with good intention, and your goal is to deceive and generally undermine people’s confidence in reputable sources of information because you believe it furthers your own political beliefs, well, then you should feel ashamed of yourself.
I’m being honest - I don’t know which one is the case.
What you say, however, is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood.
> "Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone."
No. Did you just make this up? I don't believe anyone because I distrust them all. That's what "distrust" literally means.
> "Books will help broaden your perspective"
I know. I'm discussing the state of the media, not worried about my perspective.
> "is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood."
Just say "lie". These are same weasley words that media often uses to create a narrative. However my statement can never be a lie regardless of how you feel about it because it's my personal assessment.
> "people’s confidence in reputable sources"
Politifact isn't a news site. Pro Public might be good but, again, I don't care about site reputation. It no longer matters because this authority has been disaggregated and over-extended, a problem caused by the media itself. I look at every piece as an isolated instance and apply trust based on numerous factors, with the publishing organization very far down that list. I find this approach far superior in uncovering the truth.
I also have no interest or responsibility in other people's confidence in the media, and I'll freely express what I think. If their confidence is shaken so easily then maybe the problem is how little trust they already have in the precarious state of the media today. If you disagree and want to still rely on publisher-based reputation then that's your prerogative, but don't project your insecurities or political beliefs onto me.
President Trump is a serial liar (fact), implicitly condones white supremacy (fact), and actively undermines the important norms of our democracy, like elections (fact).
Fox News, for the most part, has been propaganda which is supporting him in that process. I don't have a bias - rather, I believe in small-d democracy, human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world.
Their actions are significantly worse than most other politicans (excepting Trump's political enablers) and news organizations at this time.
No, I don't understand. It doesn't make any specific point other than throwing up a strawman. A strategy used by the media (on all sides).
> "implicitly condones"
This is ignoring the explicit statements and actions to focus on the subjective narrative where anything can be implied. A cheap tactic often used by the media (on all sides).
> "I don't have a bias"
I'm sure you believe this, yet you're the only one vehemently choosing an irrelevant political side in this discussion about the media (of all sides).
> "human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world."
Great, me too. Just like the vast majority of people in this world. Are you claiming some kind of moral superiority here? What is this relevant to?
Your comments clearly reveal your bias and the narrative you seek to spread. You use many of the same tactics of the media (again, on all sides) and lack the same introspection. This is my personal assessment by the way, in case you want to argue that it's an "falsehood". I'll end it here since I see nothing more to discuss.
Instead of slapping a narrative on someone that summarizes all of their ignorance, maybe take a tactic that doesn’t make you stick out as an unlikeable, unpersuasive partisan.
Listen, consider and dispute what someone says.
Your strawman summary of a hypothetical dumb person is only nourishes the narcissist who hit reply.
>Giuliani told the Times he brought his documents to the Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."
The entire reason the story ended up specifically in the NY Post is because "the media" refused to publish it without attempting to ""prove that this evidence is in any way authentic".
It sounds like you really don't understand how journalism works if you think they will just publish everything regardless of the levels of supporting or contradictory evidence.
[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/giuliani-gave-hunter-biden-story-0547...
Although I do notice that you did not address the merit of my post. There is a little irony there.
As I’ve said, the NY Post is hardly a bastion of journalism. The thing is, neither is The NY Times, the Washington Post, or basically any media source other than CSPAN. They are all biased and anyone paying the slightest bit of attention over the past four years has noticed this. So to somehow claim that the “real journalists” would have done otherwise is absurd, considering that they’ve done the exact same thing repeatedly.
Everything is on the level of Fox News now.
[1] - https://www.mediaite.com/tv/exclusive-fox-news-passed-on-hun...
We were talking about the New York Post and the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't know what unverified information you are referring to here or how that would be relevant to this discussion. What is clear is that many "real journalists" were not satisfied enough with the evidence to publish it. That even includes organizations like Fox News that have a bias that would seem to align with publishing the story.
I’m sorry but I really have no interest in that kind of conversation. I’ve already made my points clear.
You are free to ignore this since you said you have no interest in this conversation. If that is the case, I will take a cue from the upvotes I am receiving and the downvotes you are receiving that the HN community thinks I am in the right here.
Not to say that it was an ad hominem attack. The comment above was extremely relevant and got to the point.
And CNN's home page looks more like an anti-GOP blog than a legit news site these days. Given that CNN was once my go-to news source back in the day, it's just sad.
I remember when all the major news sites, including Fox, covered essentially the same stories, albeit with a different spin.
Fox and CNN are not the same, whatever flaws CNN does have.
Disinformation campaigns aim to change your lens of how you view, process, and store those evaluations. The experience you have can also be explained by having your heuristics changed from disinfo.
Seems relevant to that response.
NONE of the news agencies are good faith actors anymore. It's all infotainment to the last atom. I mean, that's itself the subject of the linked blog post.
It's ok to recognize this. It's healthy to recognize this. It doesn't mean you wasted your time watching CNN (or Fox), it means you learned a valuable life lesson, one that vaccinates you against the next attack on your attention.
Look it up, it’s easy to find examples.
>The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations, while Trump has denounced it as fake news...Some aspects of the dossier have been corroborated, in particular its main allegations that Putin and Russia actively favored Trump over Clinton and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had multiple secret contacts with Russians. However, many allegations in the dossier remain unverified. One allegation against Michael Cohen was dismissed by the Mueller Report, a court ruled that another of the claims was "inaccurate and misleading" and stated another claim was inaccurate. Goldman and Savage have described it as "deeply flawed". The Daily Telegraph has reported that anonymous sources believe Russian intelligence agencies may have sought to create doubt about the veracity of the dossier.
Also, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have denied any of it so far, AFAIK.
If they comment - even to blanket deny - it gives the story weight which is exactly what the people who planted it want because then they can spin it out for a few more days/weeks.
Better to keep quiet - like with the court packing question - and let other people kick this ridiculous farce into touch.
Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
Yes.
> Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
"But he would say that, wouldn't he? Why would he deny it if it was fake?"
> Yes.
> > Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
> "But he would say that, wouldn't he? Why would he deny it if it was fake?"
That would be much easier to verify in that case. It seems more that the biden admin knows that any refutation of the content of the emails would backfire when they are proven to be true. In that case claiming ignorance is the correct nice.
We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
Specifically, I would add fake incriminating emails and then go to Ukraine and pay some people off to fake in the other side as well.
It could be invalidated later, but who cares. It would look good enough and people only remember original headlines, not corrections. And if related to an election, only needs to last until election night.
Easy peasy.
This is a dangerous line of thinking because you can apply it to anything you don't want to believe. Beliefs should follow from evidence, not supposition.
It is already public knowledge that Hunter Biden has addiction issues. How does this photo make you believe the other claims are authentic? I've heard before that a standard disinformation tactic is to sprinkle some truth along with the lies.
I'm particularly skeptical of using an unrelated personal problem to assassinate his father's character as being involved in some sort of international business crimes.
> We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
while you're claiming that reasonable people should withhold judgement, the election is 2-3 weeks away and low-information voters are not going to wait for a forensic analysis to form their impressions. It should be 'innocent until proven guilty', full stop, but you're saying it should be the other way around and that we should keep our minds open to the possibility that he's guilty. Totally backwards.
This is like accepting a cryptocurrency payment because the sender can prove they have access to the public key.
As far as I can tell there is at least as much wrong with the story as there is right.
Who has copies of their text messages on their laptop? Who has PDF copies of emails?
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/10/19/betty-cracker-asks-...
Anyone with the My Phone app in Windows and a linked phone.
> Who has PDF copies of emails?
Those look like they were created, e.g. with a PDF printer, from the originals. They've now released Hunter's signature on the repair form, as well, and claim to have phone calls from him calling about it.
So far the "Russian disinfo" campaign is without evidence of that, given that the ODNI says there's no intelligence pointing to that and nothing but anonymous rumors thereof. Doesn't mean anything in these files is true, but some of the details match what we already know.
That said, we'll have to wait and see. I don't think Steele's primary Russian subsource is behind this one, though, but it could be like the original Dossier--a mix of salacious but unverifiable statements with true but innocuous statements.
Though I think Hunter with the meth pipe is already pretty damaging. That aside, for the best for the public to know all about the future president & his son's Bursima dealings so that it cannot be used as blackmail in the future, no?
Which one of the (allegedly) three Macs was running Windows?
> the ODNI says there's no intelligence
Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI. He has zero intelligence background. He lied about his work in the DoJ. Because of those lies, the Senate refused to consider him for the ODNI position for over a year.
Ratcliffe has also been surfacing unsubstantiated crap through Johnson's Senate HSGA Committee. He was installed expressly for this purpose
https://airmore.com/alternatives-to-phone-companion.html
I was responding to the idea that it's somehow patently absurd for someone to have their text messages be present on their laptop, when it's obviously not.
> Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI.
Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI.
The FBI and DoJ have also said as much now. So you're in the position of maintaining a conspiracy theory without evidence vs. all of the US intelligence agencies. Moreover, they're not making a positive claim, they're making a negative one: that there is no evidence of Russian involvement.
It's one thing to say "don't trust this until all the facts come out"--that I would agree with--but the Russian conspiracy is a positive claim and those require evidence.
I have yet to see anyone present anything other than bare speculation for that, which only proves them correct in their statements. This is rebuttable: all you have to do is give some actual, verifiable evidence of Russian involvement.
You know, like Hunter's signature on the paperwork, or the EXIF data on the photos. Why do no problems show up under ELA or similar things? Why does this match what we know from public sources about Bursima paying him a ton of money? Why can we find his picture on their website in archives?
Where is there anything like that for the Russia conspiracy? The "best" I saw was a bunch of former agents speculating in a Politico story where they admitted therein that they had no evidence whatsoever...
And yet, your citation of Windows software suggests either that your grasp on the facts of the case are shaky, or that you're more interested in trying to convince others that this is true, than you are in whether or not it is actually true.
> Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI
You completely ignored the credibility issues I raised - issues that even the Republican majority in the Senate found troubling.
Further, your insistence on inscribing the authority of the ODNI (as an office) on Ratcliffe suggests that you, yourself, think he lacks sufficient credibility on his own. The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this. There is only the assertion of Ratcliffe, himself, who has already blown his credibility defending disinfo from Derkach (who the DoC outed as a high level Russian agent).
I'm not going to respond further on this. But I'll leave you with a quote I found insightful:
> these fake scandals Republicans concoct to smear Democrats work by being too complicated for anyone to follow. Instead, there's a drip-drip-drip of confusing stories filled with buzzwords and noise, all working together to build the illusion of scandal where none exists. The goal is to keep the words "Biden," "Burisma" and "Ukraine" in the headlines so people start to assume there must be something shady going on, even if there's nothing there
https://www.salon.com/2020/10/15/giulianis-latest-bs-ukraine...
> The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this.
Of course not, because there's no intelligence pointing to Russia as the source of this, which kinda undermines your whole conspiracy theory. You do nothing whatsoever to support that with evidence, which is itself an admission that it's bogus.
That last quote is basically how the original Russia conspiracy started, BTW. You know that we've untangled the citogenesis a long time ago, right? They bootstrapped the conspiracy with the original FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of our own spies against Russia, who provably worked on an opp against them not too long prior), leaking some things to the media, then using the leaks themselves to bolster their claims for the FISA warrant.
But unlike that, which relied on anonymous leaks (since de-anonymized by Strzok & co's text messages), the drip drip drip here is of stuff like Hunter's signature matching the form of the one from the legal papers, having recordings of him calling the repair shop for his laptop, having pictures of him with a meth pipe, etc.
But sure, go on and tell us how that compares to the Russian conspiracy's anonymous leaks of unverifiable information.
The question we are tryong to answer is: was Hunter Biden using his dad to get some easy money; or was Joe Biden using his son to hold the payouts? The former is a slimy gray area; the latter outright corruption and highly compromising.
If it were not from Biden's son, or the emails were fake or altered, then I would expect the Biden campaign to say so.
Since they have not done so, it seems more likely the laptop and emails are legit.
Can you think of any reason the Biden campaign would not call out fakes, if they were in fact fake?
Once we have verified speech, someone will eventually think to keep score. citeseer, pagerank, arvix for journalism.
In other words, like with peer review in science, let the peanut gallery determine truthiness.
Which actions? Suppressing the story or allowing it to circulate at all? Everyone can agree that they hate Big Tech, so there will be broad bipartisan support for a bill that simply destroys these companies, but requiring any specific content moderation policy is going nowhere.
The fact that you are setting that as the standard for a company that has based its entire existence on people sending messages of 140 characters (and now up to 280) is pretty ironic, don’t you think?
We're still talking about this story a week later right now, in a media environment where way bigger scandals are forgotten in a day because the President said covid gives you super-speed or something.
Following this logic, how was censoring the story not a corporate in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign?
The newspapers who got moderated by Twitter and are now crying foul are the same ones who are the reason Twitter started with their heavy-handed proactive approach to moderation in the first place.
Twitter, Facebook, most platforms really, just want to be dumb service providers. But they got bullied by major news organizations who, as always, had no fucking clue what they are asking for, into becoming what they are now.
I don't think anything will change though. Within their opinion columns only their inability to reflect upon past mistakes is more chronic than than their inability to think their hot-headed demands to their logical conclusions.
I think this was true before both started pushing algorithmic feeds over chronological ones. Now it's pretty clear that both Twitter and Facebook want to curate what you see based on criteria and algorithms they choose.
While it's true that algorithmic feeds fundamentally give the platform control over what you see, this is not the type of slam dunk argument you are making it out to be.
First of all, the primary reason social media platforms move to algorithmic feeds is to increase engagement (eyeballs, ad revenue etc.), not censorship. And this is because a lot of the content posted by people is crap and not interesting to others, and a purely chronological timeline puts all such content at equal footing. For the longest time FB let you switch to a chronological feed, and for most people, it was absolute crap, because generic posts by your friends, updates about changes they made, social media posts by brands etc. all got exactly the same weightage, and you had to trawl through a lot of crap to find useful stuff on the feed.
Left to their own devices (and by that I mean, without traditional media raking them through the coals every single day), these platforms would be happy to keep leftists in their leftist bubbles, rightists in their rightist bubbles, and so on, as long as it kept all these factions individually engaged and happy.
Do you think Facebook _enjoys_ dealing with these pointless he-said she-said sort of arguments every day whenever something contentious comes up? They don't. It's a HUGE time and money sink for them, and causes reputational damage no matter what decision they take, because someone will always be upset.
Yeah, I was interested in their analysis of how the social media platforms got blamed for 2016 even though the big news outlets were at least as culpable, if not more so.
I never thought it was fair to lay the blame at social media's feet. Certainly not without blame, but they sit rather at the end of the rope, not the beginning and at least for me this blog post's examination of agency vs. responsibility was alot more satisfying than "free speech they can do what they want checkmate."
I’m seeing more and more that COVID wasn’t “a thing” until mid-march, and it clashes with my impressions.
I have a clear date for when it was “becoming serious” for me, because I pretty much sold my entire stocks portfolio, 24th of Feb, which is almost a month before.
Am I the only one with that impression?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_governmen...
Also, various corporations were already enacting travel-related policies for their employees in mid/late February.
If you're curious for a more objective measure of when mass behaviour started to change, you can look at data like Opentable's seated dining reservations[0] or mobile-device travel data[1].
[0] https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...
The internet weirdos I followed were all tweeting about it in mid-January, so by the time it was February I was checking Twitter every night for an update, and having a laugh at the totally brainless exhortations by the mainstream media that anybody that believed in Coronavirus was a right-wing conspiracy nut. (By mid-March this had flipped.)
March 1-2: Hey, should we be worried about this coronavirus thing? Nah, seems fine.
March 2-9: Hey, should we be...
March 9: Hey, should we actually be worried about this coronavirus thing? Ehh.. it still seems pretty low-risk.
March 10: Y'know, there's a decent number of cases in <place we were going>; maybe we should hold off just in case?
March 11: Oh, this isn't just my vacation -- my school is closing too.
March 12: Oh boy. This is gonna be a big deal.
That March 12 date sticks out for a lot of people I know. Even as someone who was tracking coronavirus as early as January, I just didn't think it would be that big of a deal until March 12.
At least in Europe, COVID was definitely “a thing” by end of February. We went into full lockdown in The Netherlands at March 12, and we were relatively late.
This was in Thailand, which was the first country outside of China to have a confirmed case (on 13 Jan). By and large people here were taking it quite seriously at the time (and continue to do so); nobody waited for the government or health authorities to tell them to wear masks, they just did it. It was clear to me back then it was going to spread to the west pretty quickly and be a massive problem if countries didn't lock down and lock down fast.
According to the Johns Hopkins dashboard, Thailand has had 3,691 cases and 59 deaths out of a population of ~70 million. At one point we reached 100 days with zero local transmission. Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind.
> Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind
Sounds like freedom is incompatible with your mind.
Regrettably, I think the lesson learned here won't be that censorship backfires. I think the lesson will be, "do it better next time".
You see, the story still needs to disappear. But instead of making the story disappear in a very public manner, just shadowban it. Throw a few fake likes and retweets on the post to comfort the user, but display it to no one. And if anyone asks, deny everything.
This technique is magnificent. The Streisand Effect can't happen if the request to remove the material isn't made public, and the users are duped into believing the material is still there.
[citation needed]. Streisand Effect is real, but we're comparing it to the relative megaphone that is a traditional media source using the accelerant of Twitter to circulate an under-researched story.
Blocking the story on Twitter didn't stop its spread, but perhaps it gave truth some time to get its boots on before letting a lie ride the Twitter train in the good cars for free.
It is up to each individual to find sources of information that they trust. If they pick a biased source, then so be it.
Many sources of information are springing up that are proving more trustworthy than social media and traditional media.
Educate people to be critical thinkers so that they can pick better sources of information.
It’s hard to be stupid when being smart is so economically valuable and freely attainable by all.
I hate to be that guy but, citation needed.
I’m willing to bet highly that misinformation travels at the same speed in most western countries, and that to a first order approximation misinformation travels proportionally to bandwith.
> media literary courses are required
Please provide evidence of this, I've never had such course.
Also, the media landscape in Denmark are more or less the same from a political point of view, and you're forced to pay for "DR" a public news broadcaster. It goes by "DDR" in right wing circles.
The Nordic isn't the paradise you dems believe.
I've lived in the states for several years.
Also the second sentence of your about page is: Recommended by The New York Times as “one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject”
https://www.kialo.com/are-the-hunter-biden-emails-as-release...
This is also crowdsourced, and anyone can suggest additional arguments for any given point.
> An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans into corruption allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter, involving Ukraine found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, closing out an inquiry its leaders had hoped would tarnish the Democratic presidential nominee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry...
I used to be all aboard the "social media is the problem" train, but...
>> "The point of this is not to debate whether or not the email story was true, or Hunter Biden’s laptop story. Rather, it’s to establish that while social media publishes everything, from mountains of misinformation and conspiracy theories to critical information about an impending pandemic, making something matter requires more than manufacturing zero marginal cost content. The New York Times has that power by default, while Twitter and Facebook only has that power to the extent they do the opposite of what most expect from them (which is to act as a utility for the conveyance of information)."
It really does seem like a long list of Very Serious News Organizations taking it seriously enough to publish hundreds of articles on these things does more harm than it floating out there in the goofball ether. No one should have taken a tabloid seriously. They're still going to, because it's profitable, so the solution is probably not "block it" or "don't write about it." The article has some good ideas.
edit: in particular the comparison between responses from Twitter and Facebook. Facebook slowed rather than blocked. That gave fact checkers time to warm up without dumping go juice into the conspiracy loop. I haven't heard the same apoplectic screaming about Facebook.
In an ideal world, which we do not live in.
> They're still going to
... and that's what makes the question of the role of Twitter and Facebook in modern society so dang complicated.
Now, in a world where Facebook exists, we should probably consider the effect that its particular flow of information has on society. Keep in mind: this is the same company caught running A/B tests on its users without their knowledge on whether running "happy" or "sad" stories had effect on their observable behavior.
The public should probably care about what effect Facebook has on it, because Facebook cares about what effect it has on the public.
Are there any non tabloids left? All of the major news organizations have ideologically and clickbait driven debacles in the last few years.
Excuse me? This seems like quite a claim to be making, if it is in good faith. Or we have very different conceptions of the pretty clear-cut term "genocide" (such as the dog whistle misappropriation, "white genocide.") Care to elaborate or provide any evidence at all for these supposed widespread calls for mass murder?
The principle of putting the brakes on unverified stuff is good, but, of course, you have to decide what counts as "unverified", and you have to do that objectively, and quickly. What would the NYT say if there was an unverified anti-Trump story a week before the election, but twitter slowed the spread of it until it could be confirmed?
What they're saying out loud IS escaping accountability and they're putting it in moralistic and advocacy forms. If a bunch of enlisted folks who make less than 30k a year get the equivalent (or close to) a felony for their actions, I would expect the Secretary of State to get much more.
Obviously it makes it hard to have this discussion in light of someone like Trump who has escaped accountability at every turn, and attempts to do so devolve into a sick game of "which is worse". What I'd like to remind people of is what she did is a felony for most, and the constituents (and her) turned it into a meme to escape accountability. If we're big enough to say Donald Trump is bad, I think we're big enough to stop letting people trivialize this issue to their own ends too.
It makes it seem extremely political, to the point that I think they are trying to help Trump win. Which I guess makes sense, I could see how Trump being president is good for business for them.
Probably because they have no proof it is fake.
One of Biden's campaign surragates, Jenna Arnold, said "I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic or not." It seems like the Biden campaign is not even denying it.
If they removed this for being fake and it turns out to be accurate they would be called bias for not removing fake things about Trump.
Secondly, the idea that "more information" will deal with misinformation, is often made, despite significant evidence that this is not true. Worse, it is Social media, which is being defended here, which has shown us that even showing people labelled misinformation allows it to stick.
What gives?
The article argues that this is because of the agenda setting power of the NYT, which links to a 1972 research paper. I took a dive into that realm of study, and its taken me an hour to get no substantiate answer either way.
As far as I can tell, Fox has far larger reach, and far larger agenda setting power for its audience. Subscriber figures are given below the line.
Secondly, the article lauds the ability of social media to talk fast - in particular communication between experts between Jan and March 2020. And then disapproves of Twitter's handling of the NY Post article, arguing that
> > Twitter’s role with regards to the Hunter Biden story should have been to facilitate more information sharing, in this case to disprove the story, not to arbitrarily decide what was or was not true.
The first argument ignores the amplification of conspiracies that are unique for social media. Here is a study on the transmission of information between conspiracy networks, and expert networks:https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554
The study says it so : > These results suggest that news assimilation differs according to the categories. Science news is usually assimilated, i.e., it reaches a higher level of diffusion quickly, and a longer lifetime does not correspond to a higher level of interest. Conversely, conspiracy rumors are assimilated more slowly and show a positive relation between lifetime and size. For both science and conspiracy news, we compute the size as a function of the lifetime and confirm that differentiation in the sharing patterns is content-driven, and that for conspiracy there is a positive relation between size and lifetime
Which seems to be exactly how COVID misinformation behaved online. Despite the ample evidence against it.
That misinformation or confusion, was amplified by a subset of news media channels, with mask wearing becoming a political point.
If you hold the first thesis true, then shouldn't there be a discussion on media agenda setting power? And wouldn't that largely implicate one of the largest news networks in America?
And on an even broader scale - with people arguing about fixing social media (and this article rightly highlights the problem of content on SM, as opposed to the dynamics around content sharing), is the creation of problematic content not simply an issue of creating content that keeps people on the news channel?
As stated here:
>Fox is small-town/suburban and populist. Fox competes directly against hundreds of other cable channels and has established a specialized niche in its media ecology. Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons (lest the viewer push the buttons on his or her remote…
Maybe I am missing something large, but as a business model, it seems that news media + attention battles result in a bad outcome for everyone. Not just for the NYT or FOX, but for all channels.
In which case, maybe some form of reliable high quality news may be considered a public good, and then funded and protected from interference?
-----------------------------
Media impact, News papers vs Television:
The article says: "research shows that “fake news” makes up a fraction of American’s media diet; ", which links to this research paper: "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem"
The abstract states that-
> First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet.
So the cable news cycle is in effect, and the Agenda setting power of news media is significant. Which brings us to viewership figures:
Subscriber base:
NYT has 4.3 mn subscribers, as of Q2 2020. This is a relatively dramatic increase, with 3.8 mn subs in Q1, and 2.98 subs in Q2 2019.
Fox news, for prime time, had 3.98 mn viewers in Jun 2020, with its core opinion leaders:
>With an average total audience of 4.8 million viewers, Hannity finished in first place overall, followed by Tucker Carlson Tonight (4.8 million total viewers). Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2020/06/09/hannity-...
CNN in contrast has: 2.5 mn prime time viewers for the same period.
Agenda setting power is not evenly distributed, and both audiences on the America divide behave differently, and are composed differently - creating different issues both groups are interested in.
Plus: * The hard drive wasn’t “stolen” - it was forfeited when the customer didn’t pick it up and pay the bill. That’s called a mechanic’s lien. Try taking your car into the shop and then never pick it up - same thing happens. * So at that point the laptop belongs to the shop. * How is it “stolen”, then? * If I had a laptop like that in my possession, I would be afraid too, and want to hand it off!
You’re being disingenuous :-/
Do you have a URL for this? I haven't found anything in my searching to indicate anything like this happening?
If this story wasn't about sensorship I wouldn't be laughing.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-china-email-so...
I imagine the candidate himself is not denying it, because even addressing it to defend himself from a totally false accusation turns it into a headline. Which, given the content of these leaks, is obviously the entire point of them.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
This seems to dodge the actual matter at hand. The question is whether the email conversation was fabricated or actually happened, not whether everything the participants said in the conversation was true.
- The laptop had emails on it that were previously not public
- The laptop had pictures of Hunter and family that were previously not public
- They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
- Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
- The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
- The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign and that there's not intelligence saying it is
- No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine (only that they couldn't find a meeting on the books that matches the one in the email)
Facts in support of the laptop coming from Vladimir Putin:
- Literally nothing
By the way, he guy at the computer store came forward as to why he got in contact with Rudy Giuliani. He went to the FBI with the info and got stonewalled by them. Sensing they were covering it up, he decided to become a whistleblower and went to whoever would listen.
Have yet to be authenticated though?
> - They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
Can't find a source for this - only that it says "Hunter Biden". Do you have a handy URL?
> - Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
Again, can't find a source that doesn't say "allegedly" in the sentence. Do you have a handy URL with proof?
> - The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
Given they seem to think it's a Russian disinformation play being made through the campaign team of POTUS, yeah, I'd expect them to be going through it with a fine toothcomb to find out who, where, when, etc.
> The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign
Alas, his credibility is probably lower even than Guiliani's.
> that there's not intelligence saying it is
The FBI seem to be approaching things from the point of view that it is a Russian op. Awkward!
> No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine
They've also not denied that Hunter Biden is a lizard person. SUSPICIOUS.
Not public no, but in the posession of Vlad since January as reported here: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/478090-russia-hacked-u...
>- The laptop had pictures of Hunter and family that were previously not public
I hear Jennifer Lawrence is part of the Ukraine scandal now too.
>- They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
As already established, Vlad has Burisma's emails, so we already know he has Biden's signature.
> - Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
Yes, Hunter's lawyers would probably want access to the fabricated evidence used to attack his father. That doesn't make it authentic.
> - The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
The fact the FBI investigated and didn't pursue Biden is evidence the material is not reliable.
> - The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign and that there's not intelligence saying it is
Ah yes, Trump's political appointee thinks Trump's personal lawyer is doing the Lords work. I'm so surprised. The ranking member of the houes intellgience committee disagrees.
>- No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine (only that they couldn't find a meeting on the books that matches the one in the email)
Because the ownership of a laptop is not the scandal, it's the fabricated Russian-sourced smear campaign is.
>By the way, he guy at the computer store came forward as to why he got in contact with Rudy Giuliani. He went to the FBI with the info and got stonewalled by them. Sensing they were covering it up, he decided to become a whistleblower and went to whoever would listen.
I'd love to get into the process by which a blind computer repair person trusted Rudy Giuliani more than the FBI.
IMHO this article is a lot of very well-argued, rational suppositions and hypotheticals. It's an op-ed piece masquerading as a watertight argument.
And it depends on a lot of "what-if's". One assumption depends on the other and in each case it comes down to "this is what I think is logical".
Maybe he's right, maybe he's not, but the thinkpiece is riddled with (reasonable) assumptions when there are probably studies or reports that have been done which could have been referred to and cited for a higher degree of certainty.
I feel like there are plenty of political scientists, people studying the internet, or just other studies, etc, which at this point have researched in depth the 2016 election, and while citing Nate Silver is a great start, if you want to make an argument for what's true, then that's insufficient.
And plenty of people making a serious study of online censorship and freedom of the press.