Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>Wikileaks likely did spread information which was provided by and served the interests of Russia

There was a strange schizophrenia about those email leaks from DNC media outlets.

They routinely said that it held nothing of any interest (e.g. the story about the recipes - https://www.vox.com/2016/10/12/13253852/wikileaks-john-podes... ) but that it was also done to serve the interests of Russia and derailed the election - https://www.vox.com/2018/7/13/17569030/mueller-indictments-r...

The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.

View on HN

>They routinely said that it held nothing of any interest (e.g. the story about the recipes - https://www.vox.com/2016/10/12/13253852/wikileaks-john-podes... ) but that it was also done to serve the interests of Russia and derailed the election - https://www.vox.com/2018/7/13/17569030/mueller-indictments-r...

Those two are not contradictory because the first one is based off the substance of the documents and the second one is based off the perception of the documents. Nothing too substantial was revealed but the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted and it therefore harmed her chances of winning.

>The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.

Because partial truthfulness isn't that different than lying. Imagine two scenarios:

1. Clinton gets the debate questions ahead of time.

2. Both candidates get the debate questions ahead of time. (Just a hypothetical and not a real accusation)

Story 1 would lead you to believe the Clinton is corrupt and will abuse the system for her advantage. Those two traits were already two of the biggest criticisms of her.

Story 2 would lead you to believe that it is the debate system that is corrupt and no specific candidate was at fault.

Story 2 being true automatically means story 1 is also true. However if you knew that story 2 was true and reported it as story 1, are you still "truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate"? You are reporting facts but in such a way as to bias the story. I think that is certainly reprehensible from a journalistic standpoint.

Many journalists believed that almost everything in the substance of these docs would be true for other candidates, they just didn't have the documents from other candidates as proof.

>Nothing too substantial was revealed

There was the email, if I remember, about expressing a heartfelt desire to see a FTA stretching across the whole continent.

This was right after Hillary decided to rally against the TPP. This undermined that move and made it ring hollow.

>the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted

As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?

Bizarre.

> As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?

Those same emails motivated someone to drive 300 miles to fire a gun in a pizza shop looking for a child sex ring in a basement that didn't exist.

How's that for bizarre?

You are conflating leaks. There was a DNC leak and a Podesta personal email leak. The Podesta leak started the fire, so to speak, while the DNC leak was attributed to Russian meddling.

I understand that there's a long American tradition on blaming shooting sprees on everything BUT easy access to guns, but hear me out:

The fact somebody concocted an utterly absurd story from the leaks and used it to justify a killing spree demonstrates very clearly that the leaks themselves weren't at all necessary for the shooting spree.

They could have concocted pizzagate out of something else. In fact, they probably would have.

And the guy clearly wanted to shoot someone up and was looking for reasons.

A large mass of swing voters can't be expected to behave as irrationally as one crazed Trump supporter with a gun.

I don't think it is unusual for a politician to be in support of a general policy while objecting to a specific implementation and/or expansion of that policy.

And yes, the existence of the emails played a role in how people voted or whether they voted regardless of the content. I mean there was the whole pizzagate thing that was obviously independent of the actual substance of the emails.

You're saying that you think swing voters were probably more influenced by harebrained conspiracy theories pushed by meth addled Trump supporters than... the truth?

That's some hubris.

I don't know what "truth" you are remarking on here and pizzagate was just the most obvious and extreme example.

Clearly there were people who were turned off by the leaks without actually reading the entire collection or even any of documents. These people were more reacting to the perception of the leaks in the zeitgeist than the actual substance of the documents they didn't read. I don't know what to say to you if we can't agree on that.

Those aren't contradictory, and both are supported by the evidence.

Which do you actually disagree with, or do you simply not see how both can be true?

Affecting the outcome of an election is not inherently wrong. Foreign countries affecting the outcome of our elections is dangerous, and has historically been very frowned upon. There's reasons that only Americans are allowed to donate to election campaigns. Our elections are supposed to be for _us_. If whatever countries want a particular outcome start having an outsized voice, our elections will be even less connected to what's best for Americans than they already were.

I disagreed that there was nothing in the emails and explained below.

I also disagree with the notion that a foreign power revealing truths about a candidate is wrong. If you reject a foreign truth over a domestic lie you reject the very heart of democracy itself.

It's all the more ironic given the amount of meddling the US has done in foreign elections, including Russia's.

You didn't really say what was in them that you found valuable, unless I missed it? What important truths did they reveal?

Okay, but then you're welcoming well-funded nations to spend outsized money and effort on attacking whatever candidate they will get the least from. How does that not devolve into our elections just being playthings of our enemies?

What is ironic about this? I also do not think that the US should meddle in foreign elections, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27508549

While the content in the Podesta emails was not of any interest in itself, the existence of the dump suggested there was something being revealed and Wikileaks hype and misleading editorializing around the leaks is how Pizzagate became a thing.

It's not schizophrenic - the reality is that false editorializing about a leak can deeply mislead people even if the real content of the leak is completely innocuous (e.g. someone ordering a pizza).

You seriously think pizzagate is what swung the election? That it was a conspiracy theory that you think resonated with multidinous swing voters as opposed to a core of rabid Trump supporters?

And that they couldn't have come up with something equally harebrained without the emails?

I don't think Pizzagate swung the election, but it shows how Wikileaks approach to disinformation works, and illustrates that despite the fact of there being nothing of any real note in the leaked emails, the mere fact of Wikileaks posting them and posting dishonest editorializing about them did have a real impact on public opinion with Pizzagatge being evidence of that.

It’s also worth asking how it fed into the backdrop of a multi-decade campaign portraying both Clinton as liars engaged in criminal conspiracies. It seems plausible that it wouldn’t have worked on most politicians but still could have been enough to get a few thousand people to stay home thinking that maybe this meant there was more to all of the other make believe tales which have been getting spread since the 1990s. They didn’t need to flip votes or even get a very long effect — a few days was enough.

Pinning pizzagate on wikileaks is like blaming school shootings on video games.

It's dishonest, excessively partisan, wrong and a transparent attempt at redirection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com