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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation.

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.

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According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic.

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-...

I mean it's a false equivalency in the first place to put Hunter in some special bad place while the First Children reap the rewards of nepotism themselves. Misinformation doesn't need to be foreign, just good enough swill to distract some people from the important abuses of power.

Is anyone putting Hunter in some special bad place? We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. I think everyone agrees that nepotism and misinformation are bad, so surely journalists should critically examine all allegations of misconduct, even when it affects their preferred candidate?

> We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail.

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.

The post didn't vet the story at all. It's an op. Nothing more.

It's entirely possible that both parties you mention could be corrupt. The concern of the article is that a large chuck of the entire news industry is trying to bury the story because they want to the election to go a certain way, which makes them just as despicable as the remaining chunk of the news industry. Remember how Tara Reade was handled? Me too.

Tara Reade also left a long trail of disaffected associates including multiple landlords, who told the same story about her being a prolific liar. Now of course you're welcome to believe that their testimonials were coached by the media boogeyman, but that's a conspiracy with far too many moving parts to hold up in my view.

> According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation.

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.

I would assume that the FBI looked into the provenance of the laptop when they subpoenaed it over a year ago. Biden's campaign has also not repudiated the repair shop owner's story of how the laptop came into his possession, and the owner has a signed receipt. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop owner the day before the New York Post published the story. This set of facts indicates to me that the laptop was probably not obtained as part of a misinformation campaign.

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.

It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head and he was dumb enough to drop a laptop off for repair and never come back to pick it up. There is a signed receipt by Hunter. The email dates match up with secret service flight records. Hunter peddles access to his father for millions of dollars. Joe got a piece of the action.

this comment make for a good example of why it is very difficult these days to have a reasonable discussion based in reality: many people have no interest in the truth and just want to see their side "win".

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.

> It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head (...)

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 Politico's Quint Forgey quoting the Director of National Intelligence that the laptop (source of the emails) is in the FBI's possession and that it is authentically Hunter's: https://twitter.com/QuintForgey/status/1318166732419235841 Here's Fox saying the same thing, quoting a Federal Law Enforcement Official: https://twitter.com/SeanLangille?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcam...

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.

Worth noting that DNI Ratcliffe is the most unqualified DNI to be appointed (and only managed to get appointed on his second try by a minority), is a Trump loyalist, lied in his bio (disqualifying, I'd say) and appears to follow QAnon (but that could be for work purposes.)

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.

...DKIM...

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.

> He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him

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?

Sure, if he is alleged to have sent an incriminating email, the headers should be published along with the exact contents so that the public may judge for ourselves. This was done for the Clinton 2016 emails that clearly showed undemocratic interference in the primary elections. So, the fact that they haven't been published in this case does make the whole story less believable. The journalists involved this time probably aren't as smart as Wikileaks, but that's no reason their reporting shouldn't be held to the same standard.

If this is "democracy" I don't see a point to it. I haven't been able to vote on any civilizational matters under "democracy" anyways. This is like the CCP but instead of CCP restrictions it is DNC restrictions.

I suggest you refrain from making such hyperbolized false equivalencies if you want people to seriously consider your perspective. People can empathize with your frustrations around the seeming lack of agency available to individuals in some democratic countries (in the US especially) without you comparing it to some authoritarian country.

It's not hyperbole, and we do live in authoritarian countries across most of the "Western" world. If you question the Leftist narrative in a public manner you will lose your professional job. If you tweet facts that the Left does not like, it will be deleted (and possibly result in the aforementioned termination of your employment). We don't presently have camps, but we absolutely have an undocumented social credit system.

you are clearly super biased and just painting the same old reactionary picture that doesn't actually exist. If you think a few examples of misdirected cancel culture and a couple private companies choosing some very specific sources/articles they don't want on their platform is akin to "authoritarianism" you either need to read up on the definition or you are being completely disingenuous to support your regurgitated narrative.

I don't think my eyes and work email inbox are lying to me. Just because it's a softer form of control does not make it acceptable.

This is part of why institutional trust has collapsed in the US and this will all end violently.

Your article [2] doesn't actually say anything about Bobulinski claiming laptop emails were authentic, though perhaps he did somewhere in the full statement. Even if the emails themselves are authentic, the New York Post article which revealed them (the article that was suppressed) is misinformation in that it mischaracterized them. Their alleged provenance is also probably not authentic.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've changed the link to a different article that has Bobulinski's full statement. He verifies the authenticity of the contentious email referring to a "10% cut for the big guy" in the first paragraph of the full statement.

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.

> If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play

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

> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news.

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.

> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone)

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...

[3] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

I didn’t post the WaPo link because it’s pay-walled. I’m not endorsing the Mercury News article. But the whole “obstruction” debate was really proof of how sideways the media coverage had gone. Obstruction without something else is a pretty bullshit charge: https://reason.com/2019/04/19/in-defense-of-trump-obstructin.... We were promised he was a Russian asset, and when that evaporated we had an excruciating technical debate about Mueller’s assumptions about whether he could indict for obstruction.

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.

"White fragility" appears to legitimately be a shit book, and not just one with a very shit title, according to a lot more self-described leftists than just Taibbi. This is a bizarre and unconvincing argument.

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?

If your test of being "left leaning" ignoring inconvenient facts then I might suggest that your viewpoint will not do well in a debate.

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.

> 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?

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.

No, it's a specific dig at Maddow's dropping the "bombshell" with Trump's tax returns in 2017: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/03/17/rachel-maddow-tr....

It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on).

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.

You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity.

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.

There certainly wasn't a hack. At worst there could be a copyright issue, but political stuff is very strongly protected for fair use. The drive legitimately changed ownership, according to the repair contract, after 90 days of abandonment.

Allegedly.

Almost by definition information that was stolen via hacking is true, unless for some bizarre reason the victim was privately forging documents about themselves, which nobody has ever alleged.

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 wasn't a hack. Hunter dropped his laptop off for repair and never picked it up.

They never provided evidence for this. By their own standards they should censor their own actions.

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?

> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news

"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.

I think the question is, what is the information? The story seems like spaghetti, thrown at the wall to convey a sense of corruption, with no disprovable claims being made.

I personally think the information is a big nothingburger. But that's quite a different thing from saying it's misinformation.

I think it's fair to characterize tone and intent as part of the message. And when the tone of the message is, BREAKING NEWS THERE HAS BEEN A CORRUPTION, having no evidence of it seems worthy of the phrase misinformation.

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?

You may be right in practice, but according to Twitter the claimed reason was hacking/doxing, not misinformation -- in fact, the opposite of misinformation!

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