And I fully understand the issues with my statement, the hypocrisy of it and the slippery slope nature of the act, but I do think some extreme cases do require bending the rules.
If anything, I think the lesson is that social media should be handicapped before elections for all stories.
I don’t agree this event was justified. Further I think it caused a lot of damage to our country by very significantly lessening institutional and societal trust: fairness of elections (not questioning here the actual vote counting, but the seemingly-partisan silencing of damaging info on one favored candidate), whether politically biased individuals can be trusted to treat those in other camps honestly and fairly.
There is evidence that the hard drives were manipulated on it. There's no evidence Hunter put any of the data on the hard drive there. And beyond all that, nothing there shows Joe Biden did anything wrong.
Even the guy who _found_ the laptop doesn't think the information on it is necessarily legitimate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/12/now-warni...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controve...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Please revisit your own sources, they say "some files" were authentic, meaning not all were authenticated. My source is 2 years newer than yours and confirms that the laptop contents were handled and modified by multiple people over the course of several years.
Additionally from your source:
"An analysis by Distributed Denial of Secrets of 128,755 emails allegedly copied from the laptop and circulated by allies and former staff of President Donald Trump showed "signs of tampering" including 145 modification dates and emails created more than a year after Hunter Biden allegedly had the laptop."
Here is a quote from the source I posted earlier:
“[An expert] also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.”
“Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, ‘Mail,' ‘Salacious Pics Package’ and ‘Big Guy File’ — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.”
...
In other words, Mac Isaac [note: the guy who was given the laptop] says that he has seen claims about what the laptop contains that don’t actually reflect what he saw on the laptop at the outset.