Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story
taibbi.substack.com
taibbi.substack.com
I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.
Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
Will we have to resort to signal and other encrypted direct messaging methods to have open discussion?
Or run your own mail server end hope your recipient doesn’t use one that censors?
Creepy stuff.
Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
Joe Biden is a terrible candidate. He's just not as bad as Trump. The fact that America is in that stupid position is its own fault.
I don't vote for lesser evils. Because of that I never have to regret how I voted.
This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously false and dangerous speech should be suppressed. Twitter (and other sites) is taking a moral stand, not an expedient stand.
The concept that any person or organization should be granted absolute authority to serve as the arbiter of whay constitutes dangerous or false speech, and the power to arbitrarily silence those who utter it offends me, and I consider it to be dangerous in and of itself. We'll not be able to agree on this.
WRT the NYP piece, probably foreign sourced is about right. Even before the media picked up its Russia Trumpet, I remember reading a rumor towards the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine phone call debacle that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's some. Irrespective of the source, the computer shop narrative reeks.
But in spite of information's questionable provenance, it has been accompanied with compromising images of Hunter himself, and beyond stating that a meeting with Burisma execs wasn't on Biden's 'official' schedule, the biden campaign has yet (to my knowledge), to expressly deny the validity of the documents.
If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA. Beyond ambiguous citations of 'anonymous officials', I've yet to read that they've communicated anything to this effect. The Director of National Intelligence has gone so far as to claim that this wasn't a Russian disinformation project. But he's a Trump apparatchik with no history in intelligence outside his appointment, so I generally ignore him.
Probably foreign sourced? My gut says yes.
Possibly disinformation? The juries still out. Possibly's a pretty low bar for stealing someone's voice.
The tech companies took it upon themselves to censor this information. They've not claimed they were compelled or reccommended to by any official bodies any more than they were required to censor the name of the Urkaine whistleblower. But they chose to, of their own accord.
If you want to be treated like a platform, you have to live with the fact that your platform's going to be used to further the aims of anyone who wannts to use it. Bar illegal content and behaviors (things disinformation is not), the most you should do is notify your users, sit back, and take it.
I also try to do the same[1] but crocodiletears did much better.
[1]: you'll find me pointing out the "fine people on both sides" has been debunked and asking questions about the Hunter Biden disk.
Questions: why would the Chinese do that? Or do you mean a Chinese billionaire did it without the involvement of the government? Or do you think their recommendation of Biden is a calculated move to get people to vote for Trump?
Whether or not China would support the action is opaque to me. Trump's trade policies have massively reframed our relationship to the country, but whether or not that's been a positive thing for factions within the CCP is well beyond my knowledge or means to learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui#GNews
It's also the only site where I've seen the "BGY Program" mentioned. https://gnews.org/51672/
This is ridiculously wrong. The FBI and CIA and every other government agency absolutely do not want to comment on something like this, because it just pulls them into this political bullshit. This is exactly the "official" reason James Comey was fired, for an almost identical issue, almost exactly 4 years ago. It is a near 100% certainty that any FBI or CIA official commenting on this issue now will be fired a few months from now.
Just like with DT this is also pulled out of context. I don't like any of them and won't (and can't) vote for any of them so I have no dog in the fight.
That website shouldn't have been blocked, whoever did it should probably been charged with election meddling but it doesn't change my view of Biden.
As for the videos I think many of them shows him (clumsily) trying to comfort people.
Again - I'm also the guy who points out that "fine people on both sides" as presented in mainstream media is a hoax.
I don't like either if them but think we should be fair to both if them.
If I lived in the US my lawn sign would be "Any Reasonable Person".
I didn't mean the site owner did election meddling, rather than Facebook when thet selectively block sites like this.
But what is the rule then? Manipulating social media in front of an election is only illegal if you are a foreigner?
For example, cohen paying off Trump's mistresses was prosecuted as an illegal campaign contribution.
In three of the videos with younger women, they all seemed to recoil from his "affection". With the young girls, I don't think it would ever be appropriate for a stranger to touch them like he did.
I pointed out it was clumsy ;-)
But I think the larger context is he knew he was on tape so he should know better than to willfully do something that would be taken as sexual harassment.
I honestly think he tried to come off as caring, just failed spectacularly.
We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.
I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?
It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.
Edit:
> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?
My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.
Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
People are still doing "but her emails" despite all the investigations into what happened. It's clear that the Hunter Biden story is an attempt to fabricate a "but his emails" narrative; there may be some facts in there, but none that impinge on Joe Biden.
Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view.
The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.
I promise I could argue all day about whether your initial simple statement was true or not. What does received mean? What did the email say, and did it actually mean what you paraphrase? You'd probably view it as bad faith (and you'd be right), but that faith already implies the exact social consensus I'm taking about.
Even our understanding of Hunter Biden’s existence is a social construct to most of us, since we have never met him and never will. (It’s much easier to make the call on that one, though, based on pictures and it being undisputed.)
I am a bit puzzled that there wouldn't be a log of who comes in and out of government buildings. It should be easy to prove whether the said executives were at least in the building over that period or not.
I don't think I'm a genius or anything, but why aren't we putting really smart people on this problem and giving them plenty of funding? I constantly think we're just a few steps away from putting in a small set of technological solutions that would over time solve all our political/criminal problems.
E.g. Just imagine a world where all politicians, CEOs, major figure-heads are safely and securely recorded constantly. Think of all the ridiculous talking points and "Scandals" that would go away, be disproven, or never occur at all.
In my mind, the constructive way to proceed would be, and I'd hope that you or others would indulge me on this: How can we have a tamper-proof evidentiary record of all the conversations that politicians engage in whilst minimizing the potential of it being regularly abused/weaponized and compromising the privacy of the individuals involved?
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...
For instance, when the media tell you "you can get reinfected by covid", is it a lie? As of today, there has been only 5 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, out of 50 millions confirmed cases. So it is technically possible but statistically insignificant. Are the media lying when they tell you it could happen to you? I think they do. But technically they don't.
Also most of the lying is lying by omission. I present you one fact but you will never hear about that other fact that completely mitigates the first (the context, or the rest of the sentence, etc). So you can say something factually correct while completely misleading your interlocutor.
Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.
Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.
Have you heard of an October surprise?
"On October 20, 1880, shortly before the 1880 presidential election, a forged letter was published purportedly written by James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the United States. At the time, most white Americans opposed Chinese immigration and both presidential candidates were in favor of immigration restrictions.[3]"
And a list of many more.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise
That's exactly what I propose, precisely because October surprises are not in the best interest of democracy.
Many countries [1] prohibit all political news stories during their election cycle. An added benefit of this policy would be to limit the length of the election cycle.
Without your proposed law: Stuff shows up 2 weeks before the election.
With a 10-week blackout: Stuff shows up 12 weeks before the election. (2 weeks before the blackout)
Just an inclination, not sure how much of this would be supported by the literature if there is any
Years of "sources says" later disproved. Russia this, Russia that. And it's only now that we should stop propagation of unverified stories?
Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.
I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.
Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.
I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.
I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
My guess is that any legislation attempting to make social media common carriers would eventually be found to unconstitutionally abridge the first amendment.
A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
At the end of the day, you still have a variety of content sources on the internet to consume that same content. Twitter is not the only source of information, and if you believe it is, then we have more serious problems.
I was literally banned from r/conservative for posting a question that folks found very inconvenient. Should they be forced to reverse the ban? How far do you believe is too far?
In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.
I’m surprised the free enterprise conservatives are actually the ones so against this. “We want government to get out of the way... unless it furthers our agenda and helps us stay in power, in which case, let’s threaten to regulate or break up private companies.”
On one hand yes, but on the other, does that also apply to other services? Can I open a shop only for <insert skin color> people only and claim that if you don't like it, go somewhere else? How about other categories, protected or otherwise? As a society, we already agree that there are some freedoms that private businesses are denied, and for good reasons, because when taken to the extremes, you end up with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche.
> A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.
Not really - you can start your own media outlet and selectively run the stories you want, that's fine. But if you just regurgitate user-generated content, IMO you better be really careful about applying your own rules consistently and in a transparent manner.
You're missing the fine distinction between protected and non-protected categories. Discrimination based on what you are is banned - those constitute the protected categories. Sex, gender, national origin, race, family status, veteran status, religion, and sexual orientation all fall under things you are.
Business and private organizations however, are allowed to discriminate against their customers based on their actions. It gets fuzzier if those actions intersect with a protected category (e.g. a supermarket probably (IANAL) can't throw out a gay couple for family-friendly PDA if a hetero couple would be allowed to stay). But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
Imagine if weren't so. Anyone could disrupt religious services by shouting obscenities. You couldn't have a peaceful shopping trip or grocery run. It would be total chaos.
> But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.
It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement (and I can still discriminate based on what you are, but maintaining plausible deniability).
In reality what they would actually do would depend on what that "something" is. If it's something like "don't eat meat on odd-numbered dates", you're probably fine. On the other hand, you say something harmful or distasteful to other protected categories, you'd be lucky to keep your account. They'd weigh the harm to you of kicking you off versus the harm to others by letting you stay and (of course) the PR liability incurred by doing either.
If the discrimination criteria are broadly found to match up with a protected class you're in legal hot water. IOW using proxies for "plausible deniability" is a risky strategy and businesses have been punished in the past for doing it.
> It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement
You're right it can be. But again, consider the alternative on online forums. Anyone could post porn or vulgarity on religious forums, or socialist propaganda on business forums. It would be very disruptive if selective enforcement weren't allowed.
2. Neutral doesn't mean "whoever can game the algorithm wins"
3. Less than 50% of Americans are opposed to suppressing sharing of articles like the one suppressed.
You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.
Which part of it is not believable?
We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.
The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).
There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.
Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...
Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.
I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...
> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?
-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)
In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).
I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].
So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
I notice they started with their political opponents.
It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.
Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.
At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.
This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.”
Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20
In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou...
> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.
> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.
> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.
People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'.
> has catalogued these at length on his substack.
If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent?
> In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier
Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.)
But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other.
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
[2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what...
As to “White Fragility”—Taibbi’s language is colorful, but that book isn’t mainstream left: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi.... (Podcast version: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-awokening/id....) Whereas Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist” is a book about public policy written in familiar liberal public policy language, “White Fragility” is a bizarre self-help book for white people who read Kendi’s book and didn’t understand it.
Also, while "Hitlerian race theory" is an appropriate description for someone who says white people should "strive to be less white." Picturing someone telling my half-white daughter that makes me think that Taibbi's description is on the nose.
Also you clearly appear to be unfamiliar with Taibbi's writing style. That's how he wrote stories about the war crimes of the previous admins; remember those? Or is GWB now considered a leftist?
It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider lament about the media reaction he expects to follow the NYT story, not the story itself. And in particular that his own article years earlier in Rolling Stone already told the same basic story about Trump as con man but I guess won't get any credit.
As for the list of bombshells, there a link to another story which steps through many references to news stories in turn, in a narrative style, not an enumerated list.
There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous.
I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Republican policies are horrific (their approach to deficits is not acceptable), that their rhetoric is sometimes unhinged and that the fringe elements of the right wing are dangerous lunatics. Still think they are the better of 2 options.
And on White Fragility is exactly the sort of book that would have, in the 1940s, been used to justify Hitlerian race theory. In the 1940s it would be pointing out that Jews are systematically advantaged and as a group trying to downplay race but that one can't claim to be blind to it.
"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?
I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?
The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.
[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha...
[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134...
[2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...
They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties.
Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.
What exactly did the New York Post mischaracterize? I read the article and my general impression was that it was a bit sensationalized, but that's rather typical when it comes to bombshell scoops. My understanding of the term misinformation is that it refers to presenting outright false information as fact, not the (unfortunately typical) narrative framing of factual information that happens in the news every day.
Regarding the provenance of the emails, the FBI subpoenaed the laptop over a year ago, and they've had the original in their possession since then. If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play, I'd consider that a good indication that the laptop is indeed Hunter's and was found in the repair shop. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop on Oct 13, in an attempt to recover the laptop.
We only know the FBI subpoenaed the laptop because it was leaked to Fox News. The leak itself is presumably accurate, but we have no information about what the FBI did or did not find on the laptop – except for a letter that they have "nothing to add at this time" to an appearance by DNI John Ratcliffe on Fox Business.
In that appearance, Ratcliffe (a highly partisan official) did claim that the laptop was not part of a disinformation campaign, but also said that "I know so little about those emails and what is apparently on Hunter Biden's laptop". So it seems like he was referring to a lack of information about the laptop from the intelligence community rather than inside information from the FBI.
Admittedly, the FBI generally can share information with the intelligence community, and apparently in this case it has not. That does suggest that they probably don't have e.g. evidence that a specific foreign actor was behind things. But we don't know whether they've found evidence that foul play in general occurred or might have occurred. Heck, it's even possible that they found evidence of foul play by a specific entity, but didn't send it to the intelligence community because that entity is American – though I wouldn't say that's likely.
As for the lawyer, the closest we have to hard evidence is a screenshot of an email apparently showing that a lawyer for Hunter Biden spoke with the repair shop owner after Hunter was presumably asked for comment by the Post; it doesn't show any specific claims made by the lawyer. Beyond that we just have Adam Housley and Rudy Giuliani relaying the claims of the repair shop owner. Leaving aside those sources' lack of trustworthiness, Housley himself claimed that the attorney had the wrong year for when Hunter dropped off the laptop and "didn't even know when he left em there" [1]. If anything, that suggests that Hunter doesn't know the provenance, though it's hard to say without more information.
[1] https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/1317319606126604288
You're just saying that a misinformation campaign aiming at manipulating the US elections quite possibly according to the whims of a totalitarian regime that aims at undermining the US from the top might not have resorted to use totally false and made-up information.
Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against.
I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining beacon of democracy, see their democratic process dragged through the mud by people the likes of you, who are more interested in fabricating propaganda and conduct smear campaigns than actually help out their country rise above their internal problems.
Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote from 4/2019, signed by Hunter Biden: https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hunter%20bi...
And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`
`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`
`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`
https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden...
It's not a smear campaign. These are facts. The Biden's are political whorebags and don't deserve power.
I'm a 10th generation American. The spirit of liberty runs deep in me. But speaking truth to power is part of the democratic process. Sorry you were mistaken in believing that democracy is all sunshine and rainbows. It's not. It's very messy and imperfect. And like gardening, you have to weed out the corruption by calling it out.
The zerohedge URL is truncated and consequently doesn't work.
> And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
Show us the DKIM headers and let us verify the authenticity, then we'll talk about the content of the emails.
My understanding is that the purported emails were sent to Biden. He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him, so verifying that these emails were sent doesn't really prove anything. If he had forwarded the emails in a way that indicated his agreement, or if they had been sent by someone else connected to the candidate, that would be a situation in which DKIM would be relevant.
In which case the whole situation is nonsense and moot.
But it appears that some of them are from Biden - "The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire" - in which case the DKIM headers would be a simple check on authenticity, no?
This is part of why institutional trust has collapsed in the US and this will all end violently.
This also results in something related to what the article talks about: any reasonable criticism that goes against mainstream thought (or against mainstream news in general) will immediately be coopted and used as ammo by those mentioned in my first point who will take it and twist it into absurd, conspiracy-level or hate-fueled perspectives thereby minimizing the legitimacy of original criticism in the eyes of the public.
Fundamentally, for me the null hypothesis is that this is typical election year opposition research. Those claiming that this is an elaborate Russian conspiracy have to present a pretty compelling case to convince me otherwise, given the repeated collapse of such narratives over the past few years.
Here's my take: When you look from different angles it gets harder to hide things. Fox News wants to hide some things, CNN wants to hide others. Looking at it from both angles you get to see some of the stuff each tries to hide and maybe you can make a reasonable guess on what both tries to hide.
(there's an obvious question about what you'd replace them with, but I think the answer is almost anything would be more informative)
What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive.
> What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
You're using the word "criminally released" but that is an unproven fact, the times claims that "all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it". Now I wonder how that can be as well, but at least that's the statement.
So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation, I can see them looking at both article and thinking the first one talks about a hard drive being copied by a shop owner and leaked. While the other is nebulous on the origin but claims it was legally obtained.
This is obviously all speculation. But that be my thoughts, that I can see how the policy might have applied to one and not the other.
I also have to think that it coming from the NY Post must have contributed. I don't assume Twitter reviews every tweet manually, and I can see how NY Post is more likely to get flagged than NY Times.
The NY Post article claims the laptop was abandoned at the repair shop (never picked up) and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner.
>all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it
Notice that The Times does not say the source was legally authorized to release it. I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released. For example, if an IRS employee or an employee at Trump's accountant released it without permission, those would be crimes.
>So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation
I can accept that for the low level employee at the time of moderation. But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
In that case it wouldn't make it a hack, but just a leak.
> and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner
That's something I'm still fuzzy on. I'm not sure if it's the law in the state, or just the store's contractual policy. Also, I don't know if the laptop becoming property of the shop extends to the information contained within it. And it also didn't specify if the data on the hard drive was password protected or encrypted in any way which meant retrieval would still require hacking into it.
> But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
I can't speak to that. Now Twitter has a PR issue, and I'm guessing whatever choices they've made or not are based on them trying to mitigate and limit the PR damages.
My guess is, the NY Post is now smearing twitter's own reputation, and possibly twitter doesn't like that, and are worried they'd use their account to further promote anti-twitter rethoric which might be why Twitter is against unblocking their account.
I'm a bit confused how they unblocked the tweet about the email story but kept the account blocked, that's a bit strange.
Another thing I wondered is how likely could Twitter be accountable for if Hunter were to sue them for defamation and libel? Normally it seem fair game to defame and cause libel to politicians, but would that extend to Hunter which isn't directly involved in politics? Or could that be a winning lawsuit from him if he wanted too?
Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.
This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
And you thought casino keywords brought in revenue...
- Aaron Swartz
I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or can't be said. Essentially only approved opinions and movements are allowed to gather steam, no different to the movement of dissent and mistrust of the government that had to be stemmed previously using gulags.
So yes, you are 100% right it's not the same and we are not being sent to re-education camps. But that doesn't mean certain individuals are not being persecuted through "random" algorithms that target and marginalize them. As another poster here mentioned, censorship does not need to be absolute for it to have an effect. You also mentioned network effects earlier: I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
If the sole purpose of tech and social media is opinion and thought control and dissident suppression, it doesn't seem to be working outside of the obvious authoritarian places like China.
> I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
Subtle network effects and mild censorship exist everywhere - we typically refer to these networks as "society", "culture", "religion", "family,", "employer," etc. Certainly social networks can modify behavior, but typically it's easier to undermine that effect on social networks (through alternate accounts) than it is in real life, and typically the negative consequences for breaking norms on social media are less severe than in real life.
> Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends.
> Steve Huffman, Co-Founder/CEO
> Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder
I'm aware that PG has called him a founder, but seemingly the Reddit guys never thought of him as one.
Is it then mods enhancing the freedom of expression by unflagging something, or censoring the community self-moderation? You decide!
Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...
This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".
This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.
What you're doing amounts to an ad hominem attack: you're criticizing the person delivering the message, rather than the message itself.
Liz Bourgeois would be an example of such a person.
She was Assistant Press Secretary at the DNC and prior to that was a Legislative Correspondant for Nancy Pelosi and Debbi Wasserman Shultz.
Now she works as "Director, Strategic Response Communications" at Facebook.
Don't pretend those two parties form an ideal set of alternatives; they have many common problems maintained by their duopoly.
"Thiel is Silicon Valley's most outspoken Trump supporter" [1]
I didn't know this was happening, but I guess I should have.
What's most f-ed up about that one is that Liz posts from her personal account. The appropriate thing to do is to post from facebook comms or something.
Overall though, its a continuation of the grand old tradition that appeals to SV tech companies must come from "important" people or trusted sources (like Twitter or here) or they don't matter. It is super disturbing though.
Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.
The discussion of other governments will probably lead this thread into a swampy delta and it will lose its motive force.
In the past, I would have said that Posse Comitatus would have prevented such behavior from being directed toward American citizens, but after seeing the mutual-law-skirting nature of the Five Eyes approach, as well as the presence of Federal troops in law enforcement roles in US cities over the past year, I'm no longer confident.
Get back to me when twitter can order an airstrike against an minor and enjoy qualified immunity.
If these allegations are not true, then the public conversation has been censored & the story of censorship overshadows investigation which would absolve the innocent parties.
Either way, the public deserves to have direct access the truth.
The very same sorts of people with the very same views are also in government institutions in abundance, as we've seen in recent years with the descent of the various left-wing elites into conspiracy theories about Russia - theories that were then used to try and effectively block implementations of public votes, on the belief that surely the public could not possibly reject their enlightened governance unless they were being manipulated.
This isn't purely a US thing. The UK has the same problems. Recently one of the government's advisors on COVID was complaining (on Twitter!) that the BBC had agreed to unfairly rig a debate she was involved with, but hadn't properly enforced that rigging:
https://twitter.com/SusanMichie/status/1311234012283899904
A lot of the British political class lost their minds over Brexit. You saw incredible things, like politicians running as candidates of the party saying they'd implement the decision, and then switching post-election to the party with saying they'd void the vote and never leave. They had flat out lied to voters about their intentions. That happened quite a few times. There were many other tricks deployed too. They fundamentally didn't believe in the legitimacy of their political opposition and were willing to manipulate the electoral processes to try and "win" despite having lost at the ballot box.
Those two things aren't remotely the same. The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question when they participate in direct voter suppression, gerrymandering, continually lose popular votes but still gain controlling power of the strongest apparatus of the government, have used that power to appoint (shortly) 16 of the last 20 SCOTUS Justices going back to 1969 using rules they are quite literally making up on the spot. "Consent of the governed" is a valid question under these scenarios.
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist." You're using some very strong language based on very weak arguments.
The fact you, presumably, pass off things such as Russian interference in fair and free elections as "conspiracy theories" should, god willing, be absolutely damning to your credibility. Or that "herd immunity strategies," as mentioned in the tweet you link, should be presented as a valid and equal alternative strategy to NOT LETTING PEOPLE DIE; you're arguing flat-earthers should be given equal footing in a debate with NASA.
At least one very recent example: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/12/keith-olber...
> "The hate he has triggered, the Pandora’s box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed,” he said. “So, let us brace ourselves. The task is twofold: the terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box, and then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs, and the Sean Hannitys, and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Gullianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus."
The implication "should not be allowed to exist" is very different from "prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society." So even taking a marginalized voice talking from his YouTube channel, arguing that the left believes the right "should not be allowed to exist" is a ridiculous stretch.
You need to read more than just the headlines.
you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
You literally start by saying:
The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question
Perhaps you're using an odd definition of legitimate, but generally for a political movement to be recognised as legitimate means it is allowed to take part in the political process, to be supported by people without suppression and so on. Terrorist groups are not politically legitimate, political parties with voters are. It gets tricky in the unusual cases where political parties and terror groups become closely related, as was seen with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
You yourself are now arguing that maybe the right isn't legitimate because of a bog-standard list of leftist talking points, none of which are obvious or uncontroversial, for example what you call "voter suppression" is more obviously interpreted as enforcing existing laws that define who can vote; calling this "suppression" implies that no such laws do or should exist. But nobody is arguing that, are they?
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
This thread is literally about Twitter shutting down a conservative newspaper that has reported news relevant to an election in which conservatives are competing. The NY Post and the story it reported no longer exists on Twitter. How much clearer a piece of evidence do you want?
And again - hold a mirror up and look at the reflection. Your post ends by saying that I should not be given "equal footing in debate" i.e. that people with those views should be (debate-wise) wiped out, not allowed to exist at all. You are the embodiment of what I'm talking about.
By "not allowed to exist" I don't mean literally executed in a mass genocide of half the voting population. Using such an interpretation is very bad faith, assuming that's what you're getting at.
I mean not allowed to be visible, to play any part in the public sphere, not allowed to "exist" in the sense of mattering to the structures of power in a country. Being forced to be invisible, forgotten, erased from the written and spoken record. And with that far more rational interpretation you can hopefully see that your views definitely qualify.
We're discussing western first-world governments for the most part, and short of some crazy world-altering event or war, they most certainly do not have the actual power to do this.
If every single private website threw you, and your views off the internet tomorrow, you'd return to the age of tyranny and darkness... That ~every human being on earth lived in prior to ~1995. The horror!
In contrast, your government can kill or imprison you, if you say something it doesn't like - but for some strange reason, nerd culture spills gallons of ink on the thesis that private censorship is scarier.
This is a serious case of misplaced priorities.
Then Amazon refuses to sell your books. And VISA refuses to let people buy them, if they find them in an alternative outlet. What's the big deal, you're only rolled back to the 1980s. And then they go a step further and say, if you're assisting in the distribution of these books, we'll cut off your AWS and payment processing services as well. Hey, you're only rolled back to the 1940s. People can still photocopy the sheets they got from a friend manually as long as the companies they rely on don't find out, right?
The problem here is that a small number of large companies are being captured by extreme left-wing political activists who don't recognise disagreement as being legitimate. Trying to figure out how much private sector censorship is OK is a distraction. The problem here is the ever increasing power of Marxists inside large powerful institutions, often smuggling their ideologies in under the guise of 'diversity' or 'inclusion' programs (which are inevitably about conformity and exclusion).
While this may be true of the rank and file, the policy people (like Liz upthread or Joel Kaplan) are always political activists/lobbyists because the gig is talking and convincing political organisations of things.
And please note that there's been a bunch of stories about Facebook particularly, intervening on the right-wing side a bunch - how does this support your theory about left-wing activists?
That's why in 2020, when you go on Facebook, you can't even talk about conservative ideas, like Laffer curves, owning guns, reducing entitlements, pooh-poohing (non-police) unions, voting for a republican, the virtues of surprise-billing and of having your health insurance tied to your employer, starting wars against yet another state that most of us can't even place on the map...
But, wait, you can.
If that's how Facebook erases conservative ideas, they are doing a pretty poor job of it.
The platforms can deny me a voice, can allow lies about me to circulate in my absence, and can cause a mob with pitchforks to metaphorically show up outside my door. Job, career, ability to support my family, place in any community? All gone.
My government owes me constitutional behavior and is answerable for violating it. The platforms owe me nothing and are answerable for nothing.
Consider that an overwhelmingly partisan ownership and stewardship of the majority of media, (whether left or right - currently, as the example in the article it's liberal left) has a more insidious power to control the narrative and push counterpoints to the margins until they die naturally, partly because there is in that situation a de facto monopoly.
Government-censored material never actually dies, and has a habit of being leaked (or released on change of government) and causing scandals; Silicon Valley etc-suppressed material has a habit of being sidelined into the anaemic and eccentric irrelevance of the cancelled and the crackpots, and by the time we realise some of them are actually worth listening to, the damage is done.
Especially in the context of a society where "speech is free", and egregious censorship is assumed not to exist, this is arguably even more damaging - the idea that suppression exists is itself dismissed by the mainstream and chattering classes; that isn't necessarily the case in a country under authoritarian, censoring governance.
Agreed, their narrative shaping capabilities far exceed governments'.
> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now,
That is a very poor way of judging it for several reasons; a) we are not currently on Twitter or Facebook, we don't have the same reach nor subject to same corporate normativities b) past performance is not always indicative of things to come.
> You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices,
Except they claim they are not making editorial choices, and can't be held up to that standard, which a great chunk of the problem.
It's the kind of rule you have since, well, ever.
Does anyone expect to force a private publisher such as the NY Post or even NY Times to publish content against the will of their editorial board just because you see fit?
This issue has absolutely zero to do with censorship. A random publisher not posting something is not censorship. It's literally the editorial board's job to decide which gets published and which is left out. Not posting false or deceitful information forced upon by third parties is also not censorship. Just because you have a personal view that is not aligned with an editorial board's mission statement that doesn't mean the editorial board is engaged in censorship.
This topic seems to boil down to some people wanting the benefits of abusing a publisher's reputation and readership to force-feed their own personal opinion on the public. Not being able to perform that kind of abuse is not censorship.
However, it is still a scandal and worth bringing everyobody's attention to. I don't think we've ever seen such naked politicking by a tech company in the West. This is a concerning new low for Silicon Valley.
Yes, technically the info is still available.
As long as you control what a large segment of the population sees, you can orchestrate peoples actions. Censorship has never been absolute or complete and doesn't need to be in order to be effective.
My children’s schools requires the use of Microsoft Teams From home (and associated TOS) for them to attend class. There is also a parent WhatsApp group for urgent messages to parents. And as of the pandemic, there is also mandatory Zoom classes.
This is a public school. If I sue I could possibly avoid these - I am not even sure of that. But either way, I and my children will suffer if I don’t comply.
Microsoft. Facebook. Zoom. Coerced de facto to follow their rules; they might cancel my accounts if I don’t behave accordingly - Facebook and Google have certainly done so before.
Getting banned by Google/Facebook and losing all your data in the cloud is just the modern equivalent of losing everything when your hard drive dies. The way to mitigate this danger is the same.
No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups.
With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.
The obvious solution would be to self-host an email server, but unfortunately that's impossible as it will be mercilessly assaulted by spammers and hackers on the inbound side and you'll be having issues with deliverability on the outbound side.
The real solution would be for legislative and regulatory action that recognizes the importance of identity and forces all email providers to adhere to due process. But unfortunately, worldwide legislators are too old / too incompetent or in the pockets of other people who don't care...
Exactly. Back up your cloud data.
> With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.
I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement.
You can use a new email to contact people. Especially when you have your backups.
No recourse, no one to talk to; my solution was to switch from a small but reputable ISP I had used for 17 years (and which never had a single spam complaint or blacklist entry in any list I can read) to fastmail for that domain; because Google decided they didn't like something about that setup; already spent a couple of work days no one was paying for to troubleshoot and eventually gave up.
Google+Microsoft+FastMail likely cover 95% of your recipients. If they don't like you, you're going to have a very hard time reaching people.
It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "sign in with Facebook/Apple ID/..." you are at the mercy of the target site having a fallback login mechanism. (Hint: many don't or it's buggy because never tested)
I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.
A friend of mine has been unable to convince a credit agency to reset their password as they are out of the country and cannot fulfill the requested authentication task. Wouldn’t be a problem in normal times, as they are back and forth every other month. Except it’s been 7 months since corona disrupted that. They can’t just “sign up for a new account” as it tied to their identity.
I’ve never had this problem myself either. But it’s a real problem.
First class mail is working internationally, by the way, to almost every country. Unless they're in Yemen or something perhaps. Keep in mind we were comparing the dangers of corporations to governments. So being in a developing country during a pandemic when there's a communications breakdown with the US also presumably means you can't access a US consulate either. So you'd have the exact same difficulty if it was a govt agency you needed to deal with instead of Google/Facebook/Microsoft.
And, yes, a government agency would cause the same issues. The thing is, government is (supposedly) accountable to the people, but GoogFaceSoft is accountable to their shareholders. The incentives do not align -- but many of the powers (and abuses of power) do.
The companies which seem to benefit the most from the government's power are the ones which would suffer the most from losing the government's current favor. They must bend over backwards to stay in the government's good graces, not the other way around.
I'm sure courts can properly resolve this, after a few months, if it did happen ....
It's the government coercing me to comply with Microsoft's TOS that's the problem.
> They must bend over backwards to stay in the government's good graces, not the other way around.
Of course, but they pay for the government's good graces by e.g. giving them free access to all hosted data -- not by making sure the users are well taken care of..
If the government points their guns at me and says eat at that restaurant or else, the restaurant owner has done nothing wrong. It is the government forcing me to wear shoes, not him. Even if he lobbied for a law that made dining at his restaurant mandatory, the government still decided on its own to go along with it - the restaurant owner had no power to make them do it. Forcing the restaurant to allow me to take my shoes off will only make the dining experience of everyone else forced to eat there more unpleasant.
It is dumb that the local school chose a setup that relies completely on Microsoft. You and everyone else negatively affected should be sure to show your dissatisfaction with the school board on election day. But there's nothing wrong with Microsoft having the ability to kick you off if it doesn't like you.
Unfortunately, said restaurant owner can (and has) kicked people of for sharing recipes that owner thinks it owns (but doesn’t have to prove)
The problem was never with the shoes off crowd.
My point is, it's not overt like government suppression, but pressure can be applied nonetheless.
Companies ultimately have shareholders and customers they are accountable to. Even fairly awful companies like Facebook have to meet some minimal standard of conduct to keep advertisers on the platform.
> They have no constitution to answer to.
Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
> They’re not elected.
Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has authority over so many concerns that the one you care about is going to be diluted to the point where you may not even want to vote for the thing you care about the most.
If the people demand they answer to it, it’s that or off with their heads, usually.
The hard part is getting people to demand they answer.
Lots of cool gadgets and the belief we’re making each other better to dispose of.
Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it.
Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance.
> What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
Courts.
Also it affects politicians directly. There was a petition here to give a mountain on the Finnish border to the Finnish people. Many people advocated for this but in the end it was struck down because politicians aren't even allowed to give away land and they know it.
In America the right to an abortion is more respected under our legal system than the right to a gun despite what is written in the Constitution.
The law is downstream of culture, and that document only says what 5 Justices say it says.
For the second part they seem to be lucky to get a good judge now that will not let her own ideas interfere much with her job and instead interpret the constitution as it was written.
Does this mean she'll be ruling that owning people is ok, removing the vote from women, and striking down the 2nd Amendment?
13th: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
19th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
2nd: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Any political and / or legal discussion should start with at least a vague understanding of that document. All our laws and institutions are founded with it.
"was written" would not include "amendments".
Perhaps it was meant to be "is written" and that would definitely include the amendments but then you absolutely do not get to call yourself an "Originalist" because, e.g., the 19th was passed 130 years after the Constitution was written and for damn sure none of the framers were still alive then.
Anyway I think this should be obvious. The subset of people who has long time accounts on HN and who also are for slavery is really small, possibly non-existent.
Originalists interpret the applicable parts of the constitution as they were written, when they were written.
Search Scalia on the topic and watch some videos. He goes into pretty interesting depth on the subject. It's pretty fascinating.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?292678-1/justices-breyer-scali...
If you were so inclined you could find some alternative points of view in the right newsagents, but mainstream mass-media generally represented a single perspective, and that was the filter through which most people saw the world.
People back then complained that the "Republocrats" were a cosy duopoly. There was no culture war because a large majority of Americans were part of a single culture. (As long as you were white, of course. If you were anything else then nobody cared what you thought).
It's not that Aaron was plagiarizing—the quote is from a documentary interview (https://www.reddit.com/r/aaronswartz/comments/dpo2ot/both_th...). In that context it's not common to make attributions and the editors would probably have cut it out in any case.
Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs.
Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story.
In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
Says who?
> because they are biased in their censorship
Yes, and reality has a liberal bias, eh?
When even the president's tweets have been squelched or tagged, I highly doubt that anyone reasonably familiar with Twitter over the last couple of years would have that expectation.
There's no sane way to interpret twitter's actions as anything except censorship. The fact that they're legally entitled to commit this censorship doesn't make it something else.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
"We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information."
Is this a literal statement?
Is it bad information?
Who the hell cares if the information was stolen? Jeffrey Epstein's little black book was "stolen information" - do you object to using that information to make an indictment?
> intentionally misleading information
Crazy how a credible leak is "intentionally misleading" when it's politically inconvenient.
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
We've reach a contradiction, so there must be an error in the chain of reasoning. My money is on "content moderation is a form of free speech" being wrong.
Viewing moderation as another form as speech seems reasonable to me, or at least as reasonable as viewing a campaign contribution as a form of speech. Perhaps the actual issue is that "free speech" cannot be a guaranteed right shared by all, but is inherently a rivalrous good.
No, it’s only that people are using differing definitions of “censorship” and talking past each other.
Content moderation is, in fact, a form of free speech. Twitter (for example) is allowed to choose what they want to host on their website, and what they want not to host on their website. This is free speech – it’s their site, one can’t make them host what one writes. If choosing what to remove from their website is deemed “censorship”, then there’s no contradiction.
If content moderation is censorship, then you are arguing that if I ask you to say something out loud and you don't say it, you are censoring me.
Consider that Ben Franklin wouldn't publish libelous or slanderous material submitted to his newspaper - clearly a form of "content moderation." He believed in the right of the people submitting such things to express them and would suggest they try elsewhere, but also believed in his right not to publish those views on his "platform."
I don't think anyone would accuse Ben Franklin of not believing in free speech, so clearly a reasonable person can square the apparent circle. Freedom of speech isn't the only right relevant to speech, and freedom of speech doesn't guarantee a right to speak on all platforms.
Content moderation decisions can adhere to this principle or not. Removal of viagra bot spam from a blog comment section is a clear example where content moderation adheres to the principles of free speech.
Removing content on a platform like Twitter simply because the Silicon Valley elitists/leftists that run Twitter don't like it is not in keeping with the principle of free speech (for the record I interviewed and got an offer from Twitter but declined). A good razor to use is to see if the rules are being applied in an uneven way. The principle of freedom of speech is an application of the idea of epistemic humility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
The point you were trying to make is "Content moderation falls under the first amendment" which I can't disagree with.
It's important to understand the difference between a moral principle and a legal instantiation of it (the first amendment). I hope that helps clear things up for you.
Forcing someone to say something against their will is considered far worse than preventing someone from saying something they want to say. That's how "warrant canaries" work: the government can stop you from disclosing the court order you received. But they cannot force you to continue saying that you never received such an order.
When I comment on HN I do not comment as HN itself.
What you're talking about seems like an application of the idea of private property rights (i.e. kicking someone out of your house/office for saying something you don't like).
As many on HN have said in the past, corporations aren't people. Speaking about their will makes no sense.
This is the frustrating thing about this debate: one side tries to position itself as “anti-censorship”, when really that position only extends to cover speech they care about.
You can remove obvious spam (e.g. viagra advertisements posted by bots) and still adhere to principles of free speech. Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth. And I mean that very broadly. Even trolling can be done in good faith.
So if Twitter didn't believe that the New York Post article was written by people acting in "good faith in the pursuit of truth", it's okay to censor?
The intentions of the speaker and the value of their speech are subjective. It's fine to argue that we should be okay with censoring some thing you don't like. But at least acknowledge that you're not making an appeal to "the principle of freedom of speech" — you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable.
By virtue of operating under the principle of respecting free speech you are making a value judgement and asserting a set of values. There is no panacea or pure criteria you can use besides no content moderation at all. I give the example of spam posted by bots as what I think is an obvious and non-controversial example of content that can be removed that doesn't violate the principle of free speech. Another example might be someone who simply replies "f* you" to every comment on a thread.
I don't know how to further explain this or qualify this. I think you just fundamentally don't understand or haven't actually reflected on what I'm saying.
You mentioned “good faith” before, so let’s say that’s our operating principle: all parties must be speaking in good faith. Now consider that Twitter suppresses the New York Post because they believe they’re publishing in bad faith. Twitter is still adhering to our set of free speech tradeoffs. So why is this comment section full of people saying they’re not upholding the spirit of free speech?
It’s because they want Twitter to make a different set of tradeoffs. That’s fine, and I’m happy to have that discussion. But not when it masquerades as a discussion about whether Twitter suppressing this article is somehow incompatible with free speech as a concept.
It really comes down to whether or not you believe in objective morality. If you do then there is a sensical notion of free speech (or any other principle) even if no one person has a complete picture or understanding of what it is right now (although I would argue that we have a much better understanding of free speech than we do 6000 years ago). It is something we can strive for and recognize since it is an objective thing.
To reiterate my example, I would say a reasonable person living in 2020 would say that removing bot spam from a comment section is a content moderation decision that is in keeping with the idea of free speech.
Let's say that your definition of free speech is the objectively correct one. You then have to convince people to adopt that framework. You can't appeal to the objective definition; that's a circular argument. So you have to do it on the merits of the tradeoffs, like "bot spam is noise that detracts from a conversation".
To your example specifically, my own opinion is that it depends. I'm fine with removing bot spam from a comment section. But move down to more "infrastructural" layers, and I become less okay with it. For example, I don't think ISPs should try to block spam; they should be entirely agnostic to what content passes through their pipes.
I hope someone can step in and do to the Post what Peter Thiel did to Gawker.
I think I totally forgot about that because of the censored sex tapes and nudes being published by Gnews which are way more salacious.
Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted.
The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussions or allowed access to any sensitive material?"
Even if there were no corrupt actions at all, Hunter Biden represents every kind of HUMINT leverage imaginable.
If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then?
What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then?
That doesn’t seem right. Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium. You don’t lose copyright by losing ownership of the physical medium that holds a copy of the photos/source code/etc.
No, since you made an agreement to sell the laptop, and only the laptop.
> Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium.
That's correct. But it can be transferred to satisfy a lein; depends on the fine print the repair shop has in their contract.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
was it?
Twitter’s initial justification for removing the “hacked” material is completely at odds with their past decisions to leave up hacked/illegally obtained materials like the Snowden docs, Trump tax returns, Panama papers, etc. Of course they have since changed their stance.
There’s the possibility of civil damages if it amounts to defamation, but that’s quite a standard to reach. Such damages would fall on the publisher of the story, the NY Post, but not a platform like Twitter (per section 230 safe harbor immunity). There is no legal gray area here.
This is the same reason why those who publicized the now widely rebuked Steele Dossier are not facing legal consequences for it (including Twitter), nor should they.
Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
It's clear only to you. You cannot normally legally publish hacked or stolen photos of celebrities. The personal, intimate, or family photos of Hunter Biden almost certainly do not meet the bar for public interest.
Twitter is not liable here. But as a private company they're allowed to have a policy against linking to hacked or stolen material on their platform. It's the NY Post that's in a grey area.
> Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
My original comment was in response to someone saying Twitter blocked it because it was Russian propaganda, which is simply not true.
Really? Who would be the judge of that? The suppression itself is hard evidence to the contrary.
Maybe you don't believe Twitter. Maybe Twitter suppressed the story for political reasons and you feel that proves the hacked content is of public interest. But if Twitter was honest then their policy is just to not allow direct links to any hacked or stolen photos. It doesn't mean they're important.
How are personal photos of Hunter Biden with his family important to public interest?
We are here on Hacker News, are you certain that a legally blind person in Delaware. would be the guy to fly to all the way from California to repair water damaged laptop? If you don't know how such repair looks like, I recommend you to search Luis Rosmann on YouTube (actually cool to watch anyway).
I initially thought that the repair maybe involved reinstalling windows or removing viruses (which you could get assistance from text to speech tooling), but it was a water damage.
As far as I know the Biden residence was sold few years ago, and Hunter lives in LA, but could be wrong, it's not possible to find definitive answer. But he has a house and his son was born in LA so high chance that's where he lives.
I also have hard time to believe that someone who makes $80k a month would care about laptop repair, and even if he did, wouldn't have someone on payroll (perhaps IT person from his company) who would go to his house to get it fixed.
Also, I still can't see how a legally blind person (I know legally blind doesn't mean completely blind) can do a water damage repair.
There are so many other holes in that story, but even if ALL of that was true, I don't see how actions of a 50 year old man implicate his father. There isn't any "smoking gun" in relation to Joe Biden. So what was the purpose of this story again?
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi... [2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118 [3] https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-... [5] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/T... [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbi-hunter-... [7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
[8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-putin/putin-...
Clearly, Twitter is legally in the right to suppress this information, because it's their platform. They can set the content rules as they like, as arbitrarily and capriciously as they like.
More of a judgment call, but I would argue that Twitter is morally in the right as well. This is obviously a case of carefully engineering disinformation, using America's value of freedom of speech against us. If they don't suppress it, Twitter is actively aiding bad actors, with very serious consequences. Twitter does not want to be in the business of content moderation, but in this case the information is question is so obviously falsified; it is spread so obviously in bad faith; and its consequences are so obviously dangerous to the nation, that they are justified in taking a moral stand against it.
I support a total blackout of political stories in the run-up to an election.
[Edit: rephrase to clarify that my position would not change.]
Now, let's consider:
* Alice should be able to choose without restriction to whom she is going to rent
* Bob should be able to choose without restriction who's allowed to play golf at his club
* Carlos should be able to choose without restriction to whom his bank is going to lend money
etc.
I am not saying I agree with those statements. I am saying when you say "Twitter is a private company. They can choose without restriction who's allowed to use their platform," you are not saying anything substantively different than those statements.
In a universe where the ability to put your speech in front of other people depends on being able to post it online in a place where they might be able to see, there are trade-offs involved that seem to be conveniently shoved aside when it is about news you do not like.
I prefer the cacophonous chaos of everyone being able to tell me about stuff they deem important. One step further, I prefer to live a society that can learn to live with that without falling apart.
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
You may prefer chaos, most people do not.
Twitter and Facebook are getting closer to: the post not delivering your mail, or the power company turning off your electricity despite paying your bill, or the phone company cutting you off after you say the wrong thing...
The analogy is that Twitter can't censor stories that benefit republicans, but if the "reasons" for censoring always seem to work against republicans and are applied inconsistently, then perhaps things aren't as they seem.
No one is saying that New York Times has to publish the story. However, if someone wants to publish a story and announce it to their followers on a platform, citizens need to think long and hard before agreeing to "whatever the shareholders want goes."
The fact that they do not have a product they sell to the recipients of information at a positive price makes it harder for competitive alternatives to gain any traction at all. So, the fact that once a platform like this achieves a certain reach it is unlikely to be effectively challenged means we need to think hard about how much power we want them to have in terms of shaping the conversation: Both conversation we like and conversation we do not like ... It is not sufficient to think in terms of your affinity to the dominant forces. You have to think about what kind of society you want to be in when you are in the minority.
The republicans have a serious problem, and it isn’t Twitter. Blaming media outlets for not paying attention to things is a well worn if dubious path. It’s hard to give credence to with this story given the provenance of the information and obvious problems.
Cybernature is a new experience. As a species, we are working out what level of moderation we would like.
Explorers tends to be rough-and-ready sorts, and so veer towards the vitality side of things. They know how to make the chaos work for them. For good and/or evil. Since there isn’t the downside of “instadeath” of the physical world, more risk-taking, and thus more chaos, may be justified.
Settlers tend to like fences, highways, channel markings, flight corridors...structure. There are usually eventually more settlers in any area, so their view prevails in the long run.
(You can be an explorer in one area and a settler in another...it’s not some permanent psychological feature. You can demand political content freedom from de facto pseudocarrier monopolies while being happy with a locked-down OS for self-driving cars.)
In computing, the barrier to entry for exploration is so low and it is so new (in the long view) that the percentage of settlers is pretty low, hence the cultural bias toward freedom (including content) rather than control in these forums.
[Personally, I trust the American people to curate their own content. I expect the educational system to educate the citizenry to be skilled enough in critical thinking to be able to curate the content presented.
But I expect the marketplace of ideas to police itself against systematic biases and inaccuracies, either with effective editing of its own content and/or in actively and effectively supporting a “loyal opposition” to its views.
Twitter seems to be doing neither, because it’s much closer to being a de facto common carrier monopoly than a media channel. Common carrier monopolies had been accepted and successful for a hundred years in the US, but only with heavy Federal regulation. The hip, cool alternative: break them up.
Great truths from Gen X, the generation to which you can’t easily mass-market.]
That's a straw man. I never said anything like what you are pretending I said. They obviously could not ban users on the basis of race or religion or a number of other criteria.
But that's not really what's under discussion. The question is should Twitter (or other platforms) lose their right to moderate content when they become successful?
I don't think they should.
In the case of Twitter, in order to maintain their "good samaritan" the extent of their "content moderation" is quite specficic.
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.
The NYPost article was damaging a political opponent to be sure. It was not obscene, lewd, filthy; though clearly twitter allows porn so these are immediately ruled out. It wasn't violent by any means.
Was it harassing or otherwise objectionable? Well I think there's some good debate possible but that debate is cut off immediately because the "content moderation" must be done in good faith. This very clearly is violated.
So Twitter did not content moderate as per the laws they must obey. Therefore we now have 2 options. Twitter loses platform protections and becomes directly liable for any and all content they publish aka any anonymous person posting. OR they stop their censorship.
It pushes mindsets and frames discussions. It precludes discussion. It is coordinated and pushed relentlessly.
You can tell when opinions suddenly shift amongst influence makers. Suddenly others get in line. Welcome to a modernized version of 1984.
Now you know that Twitter and Facebook are party to it as well. So are Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, public broadcasting, etc...
I realized that even supposedly unbiased news was irredeemably compromised when public broadcasting barely reported on the Snowden disclosures. This was after realizing all mainstream media did not fact check the calls for the second Iraq War.
The real news just serves as a skeleton upon which the powers that be drape a narrative to further their causes.
If you can’t tell yet, both Biden and Trump are lying through their teeth.
This isn’t right, ..."
It feels like we're learning again how terrible propaganda is, and how to deal with it in a new medium.
I do not claim to be fair or smart or scalable enough to tackle the problem of propaganda, and in fact, I think at times propaganda can be used for good.
However, Matt Taibbi has failed at least as much as Twitter and Facebook have in handling this.
Propaganda needs context. Twitter and Fb were not prepared to provide the context, and so they removed the story. Matt provides some context, but it is buried deep in his post, in the absolutely least likely place for it to be read: the paragraphs right before the last paragraph.
When dealing with propaganda, provide the context front and center.
---
The answer for bad speech is famously 'more speech'. But what is the answer for poisoning the well of public discourse? I think this is the most important question of our day, the crux of the information age. Information is cheap, speech is cheap. I know society has gotten over it in the past, and I have some faith that we will again, but don't pretend it is easy.
The kind of reporting the WSJ did here is worlds apart from just leaking a bunch of documents without any context, and I'm glad we have real journalists doing it this time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
> A tranche of emails from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden — published exclusively by The Post last week — revealed how the scandal-scarred son tried to leverage his family connections to land lucrative deals overseas and boost his Burisma pay.
> Speaking before reporters at a Marriott hotel near the debate site Thursday evening, Bobulinski claimed he had a falling out with the Biden family when Hunter Biden wanted to pocket $5 million from an initial $10 million cash injection into SinoHawk, ponied up by CEFC.
> “He said, referring to ‘the chairman,’ his father, that CEFC was really investing in the Biden family, that he held the trump card and that he was the one putting his family legacy on the time,” said Bobulinski, who declined to take questions afterward.
> “During these negotiations I repeated to Hunter and others that SinoHawk could not be Hunter’s personal piggy bank,” he went on.
> “CEFC through July 2017 was assuring me the funds would be transferred to SinoHawk, but they were never sent to our company. Instead, I found out from Senator Johnson’s September report that the $5 million was sent in August 2017 to entities affiliated with Hunter,” he said, referring to the Wisconsin senator’s congressional probe into potential corruption in the Biden family.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-ex-partner-tony-bobulin...
In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)
Now, we see the fire in plain sight, and the media is saying it's all fine and normal. That's a new level of "without being held accountable".
And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.)
But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.
"Poroshenko was telling Joe Biden that in order to get an American aid package, he’d gone beyond even what the I.M.F. asked for and raised energy prices for ordinary Ukrainians not by 75%, but by 100%, as well as taking steps to curtail subsidized medicine prices."
Where this is good or bad, this has been common since the 1970s. Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire. Since the 1970s the IMF has demanded similar internal "reforms" in nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. If this is surprising to anyone then I would assume they are young or they have not been paying attention.
Some writers refer to this as helping a country use the IMF as a political crap shield to enact necessary policies that would be otherwise politically nightmares to pull but are absolutely necessary to implement in order to get the state's finances under control.
I lived in a country that was subjected to an IMF intervention after their government bankrupted the state, and the IMF's role on the recovery was done mainly by eliminating heavy subsidies and cash transfers from the state to a few public-in-name-but-private-in-operation companies which were chronically underfinanced and politically unable to change their pricing models to allow them to cover their operational cost. So yeah, the IMF name was used to justify price hikes, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that those reforms didn't had a positive impact on the state's expenditure.
Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published.
Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.
Yes, in a way, but also obviously not. If that was their only/primary driver, they'd go all click bait all the time. They wouldn't report things that aren't loved by the masses.
They clearly do, so clicks/shares/likes can't be their primary things.
I do believe that it's partially right, it's just not number one. Number one is agenda, and within the pool of stories that benefit the agenda of the company, they choose what generates most engagement.
There's certainly a part of "we need money from ads", but being able to influence the political decisions of a nation is power. That's a value in and by itself, it's not just something you wield to sell ads.
Even an individual who posts a blog post wants clicks/shares/likes, even if there's no money involved, to validate their work in putting out a post and to bolster their self-esteem. That highlights why capitalism is not itself the issue; any type of news media would just respond to what its customers want. And what the public wants is infotainment, not well-researched stories.
The real problem is people and that's a problem that can't be solved.
It's having a centralised government (which can be used to obtain a lot of power) that create an incentive for misinformation.
Very wrong, but we both know that. Not the brightest war for leftie tech companies to be provoking though.
Capitalism is trash, but this is traditional kleptocracy. Both sides are conservative; one is literally running to "restore normality."
- was this disinformation (i.e. emails were fake?)
- or, was this hacking (i.e. the emails were real but NY Post shouldn't have them?)
Twitter clearly claimed the latter, in other words they were confident the emails were real as soon as the story broke out (!!!)
Impressive journalism on their behalf, but to put sarcasm aside, this is why it's impossible to censor in real time. There is no time to evaluate a story in minutes so your biases (or, worse, corruption) needs to fill the void.
Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play.
If we're not happy about the moderation we don't have to use the moderating platform.
That may be the latest popular interpretation of the bill of rights, but it is absolutely not in the original spirit of its authors. They were defined as "inalienable rights" granted to all people. In other words, your essential human rights to free expression don't get waived depending on who the offending party is.
What I am saying is that the authors of the bill of rights did not intend for a person's human rights to go away the moment they are persecuted by an entity other than the United States federal government.
People want to use Twitter’s property to spread a message, and Twitter said no. That’s not “persecution”, it just means they have to find some other way to do it. If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
In some countries that would be violation of consumer protection laws. If some service or product is offered to a general public, than arbitrary exclusion of a consumer is illegal in some jurisdictions.
The article never talks about rights. The article is about journalistic failures.
Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a commoner) to know what I did wrong? Do I have the opportunity to change? Do I have the opportunity to face my accusers in a forum?
Our rights, and the framework they reside in, are far too outdated for this sort of problem. The leaders we have in both business and government are too cowardly, weak, or self-interested to directly address the McCarthy-esque patterns that are beginning to emerge that seem to be opportunistically aligned to further narratives.
Congress is currently grilling tech CEOs as to why they aren't banning / censoring QAnon and similar information. It seems Congress has moved to attempt to censor free speech by applying pressure on these private platforms to censor free speech.
>That issue about the functioning of democracy is one where Facebook is in the spotlight right now as a hugely powerful platform for misinformation in the run-up to the US election.
>This week the social media giant moved to shut down groups spreading the Qanon conspiracy theory, which promotes the idea that President Trump is leading a battle against satanic child abuse.
>It was the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who wanted a really tough approach - a minority report from the Republicans agreed there was a problem, but favoured milder solutions.
Congress is grilling tech companies as to why they aren't censoring speech hard enough and are threatening a "really tough approach" if they don't comply. It seems censoring speech is not only government pressured now, but also bipartisan.
If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
I understand you can't 100% define what's fair. That's why judges interpret. But if Jack has to come out to state they screwed up, something's not right. And they're not fixing it, by design: decisions will still be made by highly biased Twitter personnel.
Hunter Biden has a bachelors degree in history and no real life experience. He got himself a very nice position that he clearly didn't earn.
During the primary when this Burisma thing came out originally; NYPost no doubt investigated it and found much more information. Then sat on it until the most damaging moment. Very unlikely that these are lies and really the Biden campaign hasn't denied it. The reality is that Joe Biden was probably too busy to see his son selling his influence. Joe Biden is probably quite innocent, his silver spoon son on the other hand...
Then Twitter pulled the censorship trigger a little too fast. You can see the bias for yourself. Wikipedia calls this whole Burisma thing an unevidenced conspiracy theory. Is it really unevidenced? An objective viewer can see the evidences. Is it really a conspiracy theory? I really don't think so.
MSNBC's response to this burisma ordeal is to assert that the NY Post is a tabloid that regularly reports known false stories. They never really attacked the evidences or story. They just outright attacked the ny post calling it unreliable.
This is such a great story though. You can use it to identify your echo chamber. the polls seem to be saying biden is going to win HUGE. My echo chambers I am in seem to think Trump is literally hitler who is killing mexicans. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-trailing-so...
November 4th is going to be an exciting day to see if my echo chambers are right or wrong.
Common people really do see the two tiers of justice happening here. Anyone who looks will see, especially if they have no dog in the culture war. The connected and political elite do whatever they want. The true whistleblowers and challengers are destroyed, either financially or via character assassination/slander or both.
It can’t be ignored forever, something will give.
> “If you get a piece of information in the hands of the right American, it can absolutely spin out of control and make the national news in a couple of days,”
We laugh about Chinese censorship, but our reliance on a few outlets to get our news has made us no worse.
At what point is it Okay for people to start to die? History has proven (With a few caveats i'm sure) that real change happens with force. Has America lost it's ability to rebel against tyranny?
America was built where small pox had a much higher death % - Were they forced to wear masks and stay inside? People die, it's a fact of life. Now we the people are forced to deal with the economic backlash that any idiot could have told you was going to happen. The media blocked any 'misinformation that relates to corona virus' and labeled them 'Anti-maskers'.
Alot more people are going to die than the corona virus could have ever killed. The amount of mental health problems exacerbated, jobs lost, lives ruined is immesurable, but the one KPI we can all rely on is total number of coronavirus infected. It's a joke and we haven't even gotten to the fun part yet where we have a 34% debt surety rate based on the two massive stimulus' that are going to be passed.
America was built on free-press and if say some entity tried to bury a story, it'd result in people dying, publisher being burned, or boycotted.
Or maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence of people who work for Facebook and Twitter?
Maybe they're not very smart and they think that censoring the Biden story will help Biden.
This is all just so much whining by folks whose ox happened to be gored. GYOFP for cripe's sake.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-in...
Or of course there is always 4chan if you are so concerned about censorship.
Twitter is like a newspaper whose content comes only from its readers. It does not mean it has to publish everything.
It does have a moral prerogative to not spread misinformation. Misinformation hurts the public. Twitter must make the decision about what it thinks is misinformation and should not be publish it.
This has nothing to do with censorship. Because Fox News does not cover certain stories we are not accusing it of censorship. Free Press means the press is free to publish or not.
So, I understand what you say but Twitter would beg to differ with you.
Also network effects are harder to come by in newspapers. Imagine if there was one newspaper that had 100x the readership of the second most popular one. That'd be considered a threat to democracy.
The only legal protection they have is not being held liable for the speech of their users. Newspapers don't have that because the writers are on their payroll.
"By actively utilizing technology and manpower to delete notes from its computer bulletin boards on the basis of offensiveness and "bad taste", for example, PRODIGY is clearly making decisions as to content, and such decisions constitute editorial control. (Id.) That such control is not complete and is enforced both as early as the notes arrive and as late as a complaint is made, does not minimize or eviscerate the simple fact that PRODIGY has uniquely arrogated to itself the role of determining what is proper for its members to post and read on its bulletin boards. Based on the foregoing, this Court is compelled to conclude that for the purposes of Plaintiffs' claims in the action, PRODIGY is a publisher rather than a distributor."
[1] http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch04/Stratton.html
Section 230 was written after that court decision. Yet for the law to be consistent its provisions must agree with this reasoning.
Does it mean "deliver a direct message to one or more named recipients" or does it mean "broadcast/publish a message to the public"
The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions.
Ironic, considering the founder of the NYPost and his opinions on market economies.
Your claim that a failure to issue retractions is an admission of failure in accountability is true - when the reporting needs retractions.
So far, there's no evidence that the reporting does.
Yes, I claim the reason is a lack of accountability. You claim the reason is impeccability of reporting. I think the reputation and style of reporting is relevant to deciding which of those factors is more relevant. You're free to disagree with that.
But please don't call it a clever shift. I'm having your conversation here.
How can you call the lack of a retraction a lack of accountability, when there is no evidence that a retraction is necessary?
It's fairly clear to me that the burden of proof lies with the extraordinary claim that the NY Post is even close to the level of journalistic rigor as the NY Times, let alone so far surpasses it that they issue fewer retractions because of the accuracy of their reporting.
You're asking me to prove water is wet. You're showing me a dog in a trench coat and telling me it's an accomplished neurosurgeon. Have you ever even read the Post or the Times? Have you lived in NY, and are familiar with either publication? I'm pretty sure I'm done arguing because you've presented nothing of substance on your side, besides the claim that I have not provided logical evidence, which is correct, but I reject that burden. Feel free to offer any information of value you might have.
As it stands, there is no evidence that the specific story requires retractions.
You ask for evidence. The evidence is the laptop, and the text messages, and the emails. If you disagree that these things are evidence, the burden of disproof is now on you. That's how it works.
And so far, there have not even been as much as basic denials by the Bidens.
Yes, I have lived in NYC for several years, and I still read the Times more than the Post. But this is, once again, meaningless criteria.
You keep trying to make it about the paper, when the discussion is about this specific story.
And you're wrong.
Wikipedia [1] for example cites several sources critical of the paper's veracity. Here [2]'s an article citing employees of the NY Post complaining about the flimsiness of the reporting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/new-york-post-inside...
Meanwhile, CNN and NYTIMES post content and retract it in higher amounts, and they never were surpressed, locked out of their account or even had twitter force to fix "itself" by now agreeing that they'd "wouldn't" remove content but now just "flag it."
That, is not respect, that is an alliance.
If there was an actual story here, the DOJ and FBI are more than capable of launching an investigation. The NYTimes, WaPo, LaTimes, WSJ, would all have no issues reporting on this either through investigation or a leak from those former orgs.
And maybe in the past, this would have mattered, but don't be surprised when after 4 years of norm breaking and corruption, people don't care about this except those with a specific ideology.
Now I don’t like censorship.
Chinese media censored the COVID-19 outbreak in the beginning, which cost lives.
Right wing media in the west censored ‘liberal bias’ which cost lives.
The left’s censorship here is a recognition that the other side doesn’t play “fair” and they’ll take their chances on this morally grey choice because lives are immediately at stake.
It’s hard to even consider this a scandal. It’s hard to defend censorship here knowing that one might have a better chance of survival in a draconian Orwellian state that is modern China over the bastion of freedoms that is supposedly the United States.
It’s disappointing.
Freedom of speech is not Freedom to lie. The Constitution only states that Congress shall pass no law prohibiting free speech. Corporations can legally choose what is made available on there site. Fox News does it daily. Nobody seems upset about that.
Just don't give a s..t, and twitter will get back to normal in the long run.
If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.
If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal.
Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma...
It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-dimensional spectrum where the left and right poles are liberal and conservative is popular, and it's true that partisans on both sides like to portray the opposing party as more ideologically unified and extreme on that axis than it is, so that if you polled Republicans, they'd probably come close to identifying Democrats as consistently both left and liberal.
It doesn't do any good to introduce jargon to people who are unfamiliar with it without defining your terms.
Probably.
> who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism.
It's impossible to know something that isn't true. From about the late 1980s to sometime in 2016-2017 (the end was more sudden than the beginning), the dominant factions of both parties supported pro-capitalist neoliberalism, it's true, but each has had significant factions not focussed on that position the whole time, and the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party has been weakening for most of the last decade or so, and the neoliberal faction of the Republican Party was overthrown for dominance by a party that, insofar as it has a coherent economic policy at all, would be more populist protectionist than neoliberal (if one is being generous; kleptocratic opportunist if one is less generous.) American political parties are much more diverse than is the case of parties in systems that is typical in either proportional or parliamentary systems (and, especially, systems with both PR and parliamentary systems.)
If that's true, why oppose censorship?
Would you say the same thing about the drug war?
Just because it fails to achieve its goals, doesn’t mean I should support it. There’s destruction in its wake.
Isn't removing it making its point?
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813.
I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.
Just throwing 'em out there.
For comments that may be overly verbose.
The distinction really isn't transparent.
I think the post definitely has some merit on the discussion of free speech on the modern platforms that have become the new town square.
How suppressing :(
Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new - they just become generic hodgepodges.
I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be boring.
Separately, I'll note that this story was submitted yesterday, quickly got to 38 votes and 7 comments, and then was flagged off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000. I vouched for it, which brought it back briefly, but then it was killed again.
Oddly, that version doesn't appear when one clicks on 'past', or with search terms for "taibbi" or "suppression". Any idea why this might be? Are flag killed stories always omitted from searches?
Edit: This post discussing the flagging of this story is flagged as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835. Should it be? It seems like it raises reasonable issues. Vouching for it did nothing.
Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and got lucky with timing, maybe they'd listen? I may have to just accept one of the last decent sites for discussing tech events is going down the same path as the rest of them, though tbh it's been on the path for a long time now (I've noticed at least 15 decent articles in the last year flagged for essentially being "not liberal" despite high quality content).
Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads here than most political commentators. If HN did as you seem to be suggesting and disallowed flags on any articles like this—the ones that you like, plus the ones that everyone else likes, since why should one user be privileged over another?—then the site would consist of nothing but articles like this. That's obviously not its mandate. I don't see how this is "Orwellian", but it's not always easy to know WWOD (what would Orwell do).
[1] Actually it was Fontenelle but Voltaire makes for a better story. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/22/coffee/
I would never and didn’t at all ask for privilege. I set out suggestions to avoid majoritarianism, systemically. One - make flags “cost”, for less brigades. Two, make vouches cost more, but also have more weight, as vouching can protect a minority view.
I never said disallow flags on articles “like that”? I’m not even a big fan of Taibbi, I’m just a bit disgusted by people who would flag away things they just don’t like politically. It’s a problem, but my guess is it suits your politics and your bosses, so it’s not very pressing.
What’s Orwellian is that you can’t seem to grapple with anything I’m saying and instead or twisting it all to totally different arguments, while using quite creative yet generic words to hide behind authority. Read your initial reply: The reason you give for why it’s valid to dismiss an article on simple suggestions to fix flagging was... “it was flagged”, it was “Metadrama”, and it would (in your psychic wisdom) lead to a “generic hodgepodge” discussion. Could literally apply to any HN submission about the site itself, and in this reply you seem to had misread it as some beg for privilege for myself or something weird like that.
I’ve also been on HN for over a decade. I’ve seen a ton of controversies, I never waded in really. I’ve held my tongue for years on the suppression one, it’s been obvious for years. I’ve seen many claiming it went downhill. In fact at my first job a decade ago I remember multiple co-workers warning me how it’s gone downhill. I know it’s always been that way.
But the reasons it was going downhill before and now are categorically different. Before it was due to incessant flame wars, bad faith pedantry, lack of openness to new ideas (but within discussion).
Now - it’s literal flag brigading.
To be honest, this happened near the election last time. People lose sanity, and then they see abuse of power as “popular” and therefore justified, and then after the election the tide will naturally turn and you’ll forget the problem for a bit.
Censorship, majority rule, there aren’t the same as the critiques I’ve seen many many times over the years. Before it was about quality of discussion, now it’s about banning discussion entirely.
It's true that I'm using somewhat generic terms to describe these situations but there's a simple reason for that: there are hundreds of users asking (and sometimes outright demanding) answers and only one of me to answer them. If there's something specific that I said that you feel is unclear I can try to clarify it.
I don't find words like "suppression" super helpful because they mostly just add negative emotional valence to something that's not secret and is rather benign. If we have more political opinion pieces and/or inflammatory political stories on the front page, then we have less room for discussion of the topics that HN primarily exists for. You can call that suppression if you want. Is a florist suppressing chocolate by only offering a small selection of the latter in their flower shop?
Even more ironic is you missed the point of the post anyway, and your core reply here off: it wasn't meta-discussion, it was an entirely different discussion on the overuse of flagging on this site with examples of how it's happening + call for comments specifically on how to change flagging. In fact it was constructive, and the tone tempered.
Not being able to discuss changes to the flag system itself because it gets flagged is a big... red flag.
It's become used for "I personally don't agree with this" instead of "this is off topic, inflammatory, illogical, etc". Once you go down the path of allowing flagging for personal distaste, you've lost.
This is bog standard HN moderation, btw, and has been the same for many years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Even my analogies have been the same for years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Everyone who rushes to post such a thread feels like this is the one that changes everything, but that's the crack talking.
I realize that your intention was good and that what I'm saying here must sound cynical and heavyhanded, but you have to understand what it's like to see these things a hundred times and realize that they're never different and never lead anywhere. If they don't make you feel weary and slightly nauseated, that's because you haven't seen too many of them yet.
I'd actually honestly like to hear your reply on the proposals for flag rule changes. I think they would work, and would improve the discussion quality. We'd get more "out of the box" stuff - far left or right, but also just more out there ideas.
Finally - you spend a ton of time on the meta stuff. I read over a few pages there. You say often you don't have time for it. Perhaps it's time to try making some changes that would reduce the burden? And not ones that further lock it down, but instead add some transparency?
You guys already have vote brigading rules, flag brigading seems natural. Adding cost will improve the quality. Making vouches more precious would improve the quality.
Perhaps add a meta column to the topbar and direct/move all meta discussions there? I know your reply will be "this will only further it" but I doubt it, they could then avoid the home page altogether.
Only trying to help here, but I think you're now so meta-tired you've forgotten that meta discussion can be constructive and there's perhaps really simple changes that would reduce a good chunk of these complains.
Final note - seems like a lot of the complaints are all going the same direction. Maybe they're valid and not just drama.
Edit: let me reframe it in a way that may be helpful: if you could reply to every meta thread with a single link to a static page on HN, a small write up that included a changelog of the latest rule changes you've implemented, a clear policy enumerated, and a link to a "meta" area where you'd automatically move comments/threads, you'd save yourself a ton of time going forward, and I think you'd gain a ton of positive goodwill on the site. You'd conquer the meme thats been building for years as well.
A separate meta section would be a disaster—it would create a dedicated place for the problem to metastasize, and the demands on moderation would go up not down. I once had a conversation with the founder of a forum much larger than HN, who told me that creating a meta section in the hope that it would help contain such complaints was the biggest mistake they ever made.
The meme that HN is declining is more or less as old as HN itself. Maybe HN is declining and we're doomed unless we make major changes (though the prescriptions for such changes are perennially contradictory). I think you're missing a more likely explanation though: internet users just like to complain a lot. Moreover there's a nostalgia bias that always makes it feel like the site was better when you first joined it. (I don't mean you personally, I mean any of us.) Like tree rings, each cohort dates the decline from approximately when they joined the site. It's always the later users, the hoi polloi, who are the invasive species ruining everything—in conjunction with the feckless and ignorant mods.
How about we make this into a positive this way: if there's a specific article that you feel was intellectually interesting, and capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN, and which was flagkilled unfairly, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. So far you've mentioned two. In one case we'd already turned off the flags before we saw your complaint (and I think that was because someone emailed us—which is what the site guidelines ask you to instead of making meta posts). In the other case we simply didn't agree that it was an intellectually interesting article that was capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN.
Moderators have to make these calls in the end because if we don't, the site will be consumed by flamewars. That's a different issue from getting any particular call wrong. If we get one wrong, I'm happy to be persuaded, to admit it, and to correct the error in that case. But I don't agree that the system is malfunctioning and needs an overhaul. I think it's basically functioning the way an immune system has to, which includes being overzealous at times.
I spend a ton of time on the meta stuff and I spend a ton of time on all the other stuffs too. As you'll gather from my several lengthy replies to you, I don't have any problem engaging with specific users' concerns about the site. But I prefer to do it either in situ, or by email. Making meta submissions to complain about downvoting or flagging doesn't have good effects. It just stirs up mobs, in which everyone with a complaint shows up to make it, the discussions turn into the same thing they always do, and it's simply impossible to respond. Don't forget that there's currently only one mod (me) who's in a position to respond publicly.
Is there a place to see flagged-but-highly-upvoted articles? That would be another helpful area to let users check and report false negatives.
When I notice more, I'll just shoot you an email.
I am agreeing on the complaint meme, by the way. As I see it, the meme used to be that it's a bunch of assholes and closed-minded-pedants/contrarianistas (and to be honest, it kind of was for a while, and I think mods have fixed it a bit), and now the meme is that it's getting a bit groupthinky and quick on the flag button (and I suspect that meme is true as well, and can be fixed).
We sometimes turn off flags when an article is able to support a substantive discussion. I don't know if this one can or not but it seems worth a try.
Colour me shocked.
This is pay for play, and corruption at it's finest. After attacking Trump for 4 years for falsehoods, you shy away from addressing issues with the opposing candidate?
What if the shoe were on the other foot?
Twitter refrained from forwarding a story to which there is no factual basis. You can of course still read it with the New York Post if you so desire.
That's all there is to it.
If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective bias this time around. Next time you may not be as lucky tho.
I don't think Twitter ever said that article was Russian disinformation.
If Twitter was honest, every time the figure $750 appeared in a Tweet it should be blocked.
If you feel my statement above is absurd, that just shows how normalized the double standard has become.
ps I think there should be a law that all Presidents disclose tax returns and financial information. If you run for President you deserve a lesser right for privacy. It's not about that though. Twitter shouldn't censor based on its opinions.
The rule is they blocked links to hacked content. They did not block reporting on either issue. Any discussion of Hunter Biden or the hacked content is allowed on Twitter. You just can't link to the actual hacked content.
The NYT has not released Trump's tax returns. They only released an article discussing some of what they found. The New York Post included actual stolen content in their article.
Blocking all tweets mentioning $750 would be like blocking all tweets mentioning Hunter Biden.
You may. I'm on no one's "side", though.
Baudrillard talks about this regarding the Watergate scandal. The word scandal implies this is a one and done thing, you've seen the thing, and there is absolutely nothing else to see. This was an outlier.
But was it? I think this one story itself is a canary in the coal mine. Extrapolate this to the long tail of stories for which their potential suppression won't make enough waves, and this is a much much bigger problem than what your non-tech acquaintances might hear.
This concentrated of a narrative shaping power is certainly not unprecedented but is something we would normally associate with totalitarian regimes. And even then it would be easy for people to assume the suppression from state channels. What we have today is a much knife-edge mixture of truths, non-truths and missing truths, coming from hundreds to thousands of micro channels with people's faces attached to it. I think the grand total of its effects will indeed be unprecedented.
There are emails being released constantly detailing various business dealings with CCP linked companies including undisclosed loans from Chinese banks that the Bidens continually roll forward.
That's not surprising, because it's manufactured and bogus.
I don't think anyone has actually claimed that. What makes you say this?
You're hearing more about the supression than the suppressed story? That suggests the suppression worked.
Ask yourself this: if these same mechanisms, that again are used by autocratic governments, get taken advantage of by a future administration and we somehow defeat them will you be willing to admit accountability and culpability for the outcome? If not, then walk cautiously, because this future is very real and discounting people that raise the flag does not age well.
This.
One must get beyond the idea that one team is unambiguously worse. In a way, Taibbi writes almost exclusively about the tendency of Americans to ignore the misbehavior of their own side and exaggerate that of the other.
There are lots and lots of articles informing the rank-and-file how to interpret contemporary events; how to discuss the Bidens' corruption, for instance (usually: bring up the Trumps' corruption, but often outright denial and shaming anyone who discusses it)
People who appreciate Taibbi are those who can hold at least two narratively contradictory facts in mind at the same time; eg that both the Bidens and the Trumps are corrupt; without leaping to defend one or the other.
We all know corruption happens at all levels in Washington, but if the contents of the laptop are true, it means a serious loss of ground in the culture war (potentially game over). It can’t be true and must not be true. To keep the game going we need to shut our eyes and wait to be rescued by a comfortable escape hatch narrative.
I’m surprised HN keeps this story up given the overlap of philosophies between the tech bubble and Democrat politicians.
That may be unfair but that particular point is not even the subject of the New York Post story.
Companies hire people in useless positions all the time you know.
Yeah, they're called princelings, it's very common in China. If you want to do business, you hire the child of a high-ranking party member, pay them large sums of money for zero work and then you get all the permits you need.
I do agree it’s a bit strange for Twitter to step in and try to apply editorial standards where NYP didn’t when they otherwise disclaim responsibilities of being a publisher. I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
I don't think that's true. The Steele Dossier ("Trump pays Russian Hookers in Moscow to pee on him") wasn't treated special in any way, and it was much more questionable at the time than this story (where the unclear part is what they got for their bribes, not whether they payed his son for access to the VP). Of course, one argument might be "we've learned from our mistakes", but I believe that's a bit too obvious.
> I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.
I don't think it needs a conspiracy theory, the coordination was very public. That there's political corruption in the US is also not news, it's the reason why children of politicians are making giant sums of money, politicians being paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech etc. That's normal, there's not much to be found, I believe.
Discussion of the suppression is not encouraged here: even a story about the suppression of the story was pretty much immediately suppressed on HN.
All the same, I don’t know of any newspapers which published stories treating the dossier as a source. As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes. As corroboration: please share if you have any.
Actually I think what happened is Rudy etc got a little too desperate and excited and blundered tactically: surfacing the contents of the hard drive as continual leaks, like the DNC emails, would’ve allowed for a similar dynamic to 2016. Wouldn’t have mattered politically if the contents were real or not.
By reaching and trying to drop the story as “real news,” the dubiousness of the source material got thrust directly into the spotlight. Blaming twitter, liberals, or whoever, for their poor smear tactics is just a coping mechanism at this point if you ask me.
My impression is that it's less made up than the juicy parts of the dossier. The dossier contained more truth though, but it was lame stuff that nobody cared about or reported on.
> As an object of the story, IE this thing exists, yes.
That's just moving goal posts. It's essentially "Now, I'm not claiming A did Z, but I hear a lot of people saying that A did Z. Did A do Z? What do you think, dear viewer?" Of course they're running the story, even if they throw a "this hasn't been independently confirmed" in the footer. That's the beauty about propaganda, you don't need to claim that it's true for the effect to be achieved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
In the end, I think it's endemic in having human corruptible politicians who can accentrate power. We will minimise this problem only if we decentralise the structure of powers in our society.
Not that any mainstream party has an interest in promoting that (unless you consider Jo Jorgensen and the libertarian party)
It also set off the flamewar detector as as1mov described, but flags were the dominant factor.
This post has been flagged. People don’t want to see or hear about this. HN may, or may not, remove it. Either way, there are HN users who want this removed.
Of course, everybody generally thinks they are the good guys, and once you're going down the road of "everything is allowed because my goals are good", you're not going to stop until somebody else stops you.
Facebook and Twitter are effectively acting as editors for select news organizations.
Freedom of speech is what's great about this country, and big tech is about suppression of it. I look forward to my post getting deleted by the mods, reinforcing the simple truth.
If the media gives credibility for this kind of cheap hack, what morals do they have to criticize QAnon? If they want to have credibility then they should act responsibly.
It is not censorship because it is not imposed by government. It is called editorializing and that is exactly the job of a newspaper editor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
It's astonishing to me that Taibbi (who's work I've always enjoyed) isn't aware that - far from debunked - this has been confirmed. The Republican led Senate Intelligence committee report[1] was released in September and covered this in extensive detail. It's a long read, so reporting from The Intecept's summary[2]:
One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska.
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters.....
The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.”
In Taibbi defense this report was released in September, and there was a lot of news happening then. Prior to this report, I don't think any official source was willing to call Kilimnik an intel officer.
[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-repo...
Suppression is a bigger scandal indeed.
His reelection would be likely to be the end of democracy as we know it as he corrupts the entire apparatus of government on which undoing the damage he has done depends.
Unable to win fairly we have seen unprecedented voter suppression and an entirely expected smear campaign.
Faced with a situation where this smear campaign endangers our nation and its people fighting it isn't scandalous it is noble.
How is this applicable?
That case was hilariously crude attempt at influencing and creating false narratives. The whole thing collapsed quickly but it still had huge impact. Mixing something real and something false makes people accept falsehoods.
Censoring obvious falsehoods like in this case is not the scandal. The lack of policy principles is. Twitter could have reduced the frequency the links show in the feeds dramatically and nobody would notice. It would be there when you look at it, but it would not propagate. In fact, that's what Twitter and Facebook are doing for commercial reasons.
Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trump-revives-false-narrat...
Trump's conspiracy theories thrive in Ukraine, where a young democracy battles corruption and distrust. We talked with two dozen leaders and investigators in Ukraine. They all agree the claims against Joe and Hunter Biden are baseless. Yet they persist. https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2019/10/10/trump...
The facts behind Trump’s bogus accusations about Biden and Ukraine - Trump claims Biden threatened Ukraine to aid his son’s business interests. The facts suggest otherwise. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/23/20879611/j...
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The latest NY Post story is just crazy.
Man Who Reportedly Gave Hunter’s Laptop to Rudy Speaks Out in Bizarre Interview https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...
What we know — and don't know — about Hunter Biden's alleged laptop https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...
If the basic facts of the story are wrong, like the laptop or emails are not genuine, why don’t the Biden’s deny it?
For starters it doesn’t even need to be discredited — it just needs to be denied, which it hasn’t been. I mean the basic facts like the authenticity of the laptop/emails or the meeting.
* The material was provided via two of Trumps henchmen, who may or may not have altered it along the way.
* They gave it to the NYP after Fox News (never one to miss an opportunity to bash the Democrats) turned it down due to lack of provenance.
* It was originally derived from a laptop that may or may not have been dropped off by Hunter Biden or someone associated with him.
* The computer repairman at the centre of this has given contradictory explanations of the timeline, how many laptops were involved, and whether he contacted the FBI or the FBI contacted him.
To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it.
We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it.
As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
You can believe what you like. But don't ask me to believe that a person took 3 laptops to a repair company in a state where he doesn't live; that the said company was operated by a blind person; that the security camera footage of the delivery of the laptops was erased; that the laptops were unintentionally forgotten there; and that they somehow found their way into the hands of one Rudolph Giuliani.
To believe that story, you have to be gullible or complicit.
The repair shop is in Delaware, where Joe Biden was a senator for many decades and where the Bidens have held various political positions for many decades.
I suspect that you really don't understand the story that well. That is understandable considering the insane amount of gaslighting, misinformation, and censorship that is going on around it.
He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. Why would he travel across the country to visit a repair shop in the middle of nowhere with a conveniently blind owner and conveniently erased camera footage. There is no universe in which this story is plausible.
Before accusing me of not understanding the story, please take a moment to read what I wrote. You are contributing to the gaslighting around this topic.
> He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time.
The Bidens have multiple houses in Delaware. There are many pictures leaked from Hunter's laptop that have Delaware in the geocode. If you want to be weird about it you can go look up the Biden family's social media accounts (still up) and see pictures of them at their houses in Delaware.
It really sounds like you just don't want to believe this. Very cult like behavior.
That's pretty stupid and unlikely. More likely, people were concerned about the real world ramifications of having their names on the story (e.g. getting killed or harassed).
I understand that this is a talking point but use your brain.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/new-york-post-inside...
"Use your brain" indeed.