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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Name one document wikileaks published that was shown to be false or retracted.

Then, compare that to the track record of the organizations you compared to. Wikileaks has incredibly high standards.

The issue isn't necessarily that their reports are false, it's that they choose what to release and when and they do so with political bias.

This applies to NY Times, Guardian, ProPublica and Buzzfeed too

That's true, and maybe this my fault, but early interviews with Assange and reporting on WikiLeaks gave me higher expectations for their objectivity.

Can you cite me a single case of a politically-timed release of information from any of those? And I don't just mean that it had a political impact, I mean that editors deliberately held a story until it could have more effect on an election.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-illustrating-ho...

This has always been my reservation. If you have all the knowledge in the world, but only expose the transgressions of people and institutions you have a vendetta against, how does that improve anything?

This is why we have crackpots like Trump, chants of "lock her up", skepticism of established institutions, and skepticism of science moving to the forefront. Assange isn't the only one doing this, but he was a big part of it.

Wikileaks might. Assange flogging the Seth Rich theory is a pretty strong signal that he doesn't.

Whatabout those other flawed journalist? Well, they're flawed. But Wikileaks, high standards? You must have missed the exposes in The Intercept of how they were actually working in 2016!

Steve Jobs's HIV diagnosis:

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/steve-jobs-hiv/steve-jobs-hi...

in context:

> https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_...

> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.

I would encourage anybody to read the source document above to see the whole analysis, but it's pretty impartial and paints a sceptical picture.

And then, as OP requested, "compare that to the track record of the organizations compared to" and try think of a time the NY Times, Guardian, ProPublica or even Buzzfeed published a hoax but decided it was worth publishing so long as they put a disclaimer on it saying "this probably isn't real."

fact-checking organisations like Snopes do that all the time.

I don't see anything wrong with journalists addressing a claim, investigating it and declaring in their opinions that it's probably not true. What, specifically, is wrong with that?

The fact that you posted the image without referencing the article that claims it's probably a hoax makes me think you were intentionally trying to mislead people.

You don't have to lie to disinform or propagandize. In fact it works a lot better if you don't. What you do is selectively reveal only certain truths at select times and in a select order. Deliberately redacted and spun truths can effectively work as lies.

In this case the way it works is that Wikileaks drops select truths in a select order and then other more transparently bad faith actors in the "alternative media" use what Wikileaks drops as the kernels of lies and wild-ass conspiracy theories. All this happens long before good faith actors can manage to even start digesting the information.

I have not seen proof of collusion in this process, but in 2016 it was so well executed that I would not be surprised. I watched all that stuff unfold in real time and it was obviously a propaganda operation... and a really damn slick one. I was kind of impressed.

Edit: here's a somewhat clunky made up example to illustrate the principle:

Lets say you are driving and you accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian who happens to be an ex business partner. Lets say you and this ex business partner had a falling out, but later made up and came to an amicable agreement.

Lets say I leak e-mails showing the disagreement and falling out, but sort of "forget" to leak the make-up and later agreement. I also leak only the most damning e-mails from your side, redacting e-mails from the other side that might cast our accident victim in a bad light.

I can make you look like a murderer when in reality the event was just an accident. I have done nothing but tell the truth.

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