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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

How will this work when reality is partisan? The Hunter Biden laptop story was a debunked conspiracy by the “experts” until it wasn’t, and the recent Chinese election data stolen “conspiracy” (as declared by the NYT) turned out to be true. Yet day after day the stories about Trump and Russia were blasted by major media… until that was totally debunked.

It’s like one side decides what is true and the other side is conspiracy until the facts come out, then it’s forgotten completely into the memory hole.

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I don't know these cases well but if Twitter (or someone) is able to compile the known information at the time & append as new insights become available that would be the most ideal way I can think of.

Hopefully they can be concise & have at minimum, two differing sides sharing non-opinionated references. Or at least stating the leniencies of said references.

Though this can still be very hard & lead to many rabbit holes of "Further reading".

Reality was always partisan like that. The only thing that changed is that now you can see the other ones.

The same way democracy works. Shitty, but less shitty than any other way.

Democracy requires a free press and free distribution of ideas. Censorship of salient, truthful political information by private or public parties is dangerous to democracy.

Some of the conspiracies didn’t conclude the way you say they do, or at least not completely. As far as I can tell, the current “consensus” is that the Hunter Biden laptop, while real, can’t prove any unethical behavior on the part of the president. And the Russian stuff — while Muller couldn’t prove that Trump asked Russia for help (beyond the video of him asking for it in camera, perhaps as a joke), it is still true that Russia played a severe part to helping Trump’s campaign.

So in my opinion the overall narrative of those stories (Russia interfered in the election to help Trump to his delight and Hunter Biden’s laptop doesn’t mean much) are still true to this day.

I think the prevailing narratives when the stories break leaned on facets that were more true: Russia was doing very concerning things. This laptop doesn’t contain proof of much of anything. Trump stated on camera he wanted Russia’s help. Etc.

> As far as I can tell, the current “consensus” is that the Hunter Biden laptop, while real, can’t prove any unethical behavior on the part of the president.

Completely immaterial. Polling shows that -- despite the guilt or involvement of President Biden -- many Americans would have changed their votes had they thought the story was real or been exposed to the story. That's dangerous.

There is no requirement that one ignore the possibility of crime when voting. Americans can base their vote on whatever criteria they want. Biden doesn't need to be indicted or convicted in order for Americans to decide the evidence is too much to vote for him.

So yes, if facebook and twitter's actions led to people not having the information that would have changed their vote and perhaps changed the election results (we can never know), then it is extremely concerning why the information was censored.

I think if it was Donald Jr's laptop rather than Hunter Biden's the mainstream media would be going bananas over it.

Don Jr was a key member of Trump's presidential campaign.

I think your post only highlights the points the parent was making - we pick and choose what "facts" we want to believe and then never change our opinion.

When these "facts" are debunked days, weeks, months or years later, we just move on and pretend it didn't happen or talk out of the side of our mouth about how there's still some sliver truth there. If it doesn't help our team, then it can't possibly be true.

Objectively, Hunter's laptop is a scandal of epic proportions. It's very difficult to view it's content and revelations as anything but deeply unethical - and it's impossible to believe "The Big Guy" is not in fact Joe Biden, our President. We even had one of Hunter's former business partners come out and explicitly state it - yet nobody wants to talk about that either. Additionally, it's impossible to not conclude the FBI was deeply involved in a cover up right at election time to suppress this information.

However, here we are, trying to say it means nothing. We accused the Trump family of everything the Biden family is objectively involved with... except we had zero evidence against the Trump family (despite years of relentless investigations) and have mountains of it against the Biden family... yet nobody cares. Years of investigations catalyzed by a fake dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign... yet nobody wants to talk about that either.

Perhaps we're too far lost at this point...

> We accused the Trump family of everything the Biden family is objectively involved with... except we had zero evidence against the Trump family (despite years of relentless investigations)

Please, this is absurd. No president has had more of his associates go to jail than Trump [1], and Mueller's investigation found that Trump knew about Russian interference, chose to do nothing since it helped him, and obstructed justice [2]. And now we know that he stole Top Secret/SCI documents from the country [3], and has yet to return all of them [4]. These attempts to make "the Biden crime family" a meme are very weak and fall flat on their face.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-of-the-trumpworld-figures-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/trump-mar-a-l...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/us/politics/trump-white-h...

> chose to do nothing since it helped him, and obstructed justice [2]

So then it's totally equivalent to the Hunter Biden laptop in that, while perhaps incriminating, there's no obvious criminal conduct (Mueller didn't press charges).

However, it still led to americans voting one way, which the polls show would have also been the case had Americans known about the laptop.

Either way, people deserve to know. Our vote isn't a criminal conviction.

> Mueller didn't press charges

Fun fact: Mueller had no ability to press charges. He made it clear that it was up to Congress, and would only go as far as to say that "we can't say he didn't obstruct justice", but that it was up to Congress to investigate.

Simple question: by explicitly deciding to censor the hunter biden story, did twitter and facebook prevent americans from learning data that may have changed their vote? The Mueller investigation and its results were widely reported on and disseminated by all media, so it's not equivalent at all. Americans can and did make up their mind regarding that issue.

Simple answer: probably not.

Everything Trumpists were claiming - that the laptop contained evidence of the stolen election, that it contained Biden's child porn stash, evidence he created COVID with Fauci, whatever - was obvious misinformation and character assassination, an attempt to repeat the effect of the DNC leaks with Hillary Clinton in 2016, where just the implications of nefarious dealings and "smoking guns" were enough to suppress Democratic Party turnout, or split the vote.

The actual story, such as it was, was and remains the nothingest of nothingburgers, and it's doubtful many people, much less enough people to swing the election in Trump's favor, would have cared. Evidence to this effect can be observed in that, after the fact, it hasn't created a backlash of outrage among Democrats. They do hate Biden for a number of reasons, but not for anything in hindsight related to the laptop.

Plus, it's absurd to imply that Twitter and Facebook alone comprised the only sources of information or discussion about the laptop, and that Americans were unaware of the story for it having been censored on those platforms. Despite that, it never actually left public discussion as far as I was aware. The laptop failed to gain traction under its own terms, not because it was suppressed by the government.

You're being disingenuous here, and blinded by your own partisanship. Both this story and the Mueller investigation (and whatever other inquiries into Trump) deserve scrutiny in the public eye. It is not absurd to think that Twitter and Facebook, two massive media companies with well-known connections to the democratic party, are major sources of information and huge multiplying factors in the spread of information about a lot of news.

> The laptop failed to gain traction under its own terms, not because it was suppressed by the government.

Simply not true, given that the man is under active FBI investigation.

A few guys going to jail for unpaid taxes decades before does not help your view that the Mueller Investigation was a smashing success. They ruined a bunch of lives for cheap political gain, found zero evidence of collusion with Russia, and proved the insinuation of collusion was fake from the beginning as we now know but won't admit.

You only make this point even stronger.

> And now we know that he stole Top Secret/SCI documents from the country, and has yet to return all of them

This is very much an unfinished story.

But, nothing I say will change your mind, and no real facts coming out will change it either. Which is the point the GP was making... despite reality, we all pretend our team does no wrong.

> This is very much an unfinished story.

And the story about Hunter's laptop isn't? Do you see how you're giving yourself a pass but you want to "wait for the whole story" when the DOJ successfully executed a search warrant for top secret documents on the former president?

No, not at all. We have all of the content from Hunter's Laptop at this time, and there is no investigation that will happen. We know for a fact the story was buried deliberately, we even have the likes of Mark Zuckerberg corroborating as much, indicating the FBI directed Facebook to suppress "misinformation" about the Biden campaign.

We do not have all the content from the Classified Documents story - in fact it's in court right this very second being hammered out.

So no... this isn't a free pass of any sort.

> DOJ successfully executed a search warrant for top secret documents on the former president

I fail to see how this means there was wrong doing. Are we not waiting for the case to actually be litigated, or have we already made up our mind before the facts are known? AKA - what the GP asserted and you have fallen straight into.

Given that you have been complaining about cherrypicking facts/narratives by the other side, you need to acknowledge the fact that you are doing that at this very moment. You are handwaving away one of the biggest stories in the DOJ's history, a search warrant executed against a former president. We know he has top secret documents, we know they were not declassified, and we know they were held negligently while mixed up with magazines in a comically insecure facility.

You have to admit that this is as big if not bigger than "Hunter's laptop", because otherwise all you're really saying is "I want them to talk about MY stories and not THEIRS!"

> We know he has top secret documents

We do.

> we know they were not declassified

We do not know this, actually. That is literally what is being litigated at this very moment.

> and we know they were held negligently while mixed up with magazines in a comically insecure facility

We do not know yet if this even matters...

> a search warrant executed against a former president

Which is extremely shocking and unusual - actually unprecedented. So far the follow-up investigation has been much more lackluster and much less iron-clad as we were initially led to believe.

Political hit job? Perhaps. Malfeasance on part of the former President? Perhaps.

We don't yet know. Yet, if you've made up your mind already then you've stepped on the land mine set for you by the GP of this particular thread.

> You have to admit that this is as big if not bigger than "Hunter's laptop

Not even remotely. Hunter's laptop revealed Hunter sold access and influence to the current president, particularly to nations hostile to this country. We also know Joe Biden not only discussed these business dealings with Hunter, but also received a cut of the payments. He is "The Big Guy".

> We do not know this, actually.

We do. Documents are not declassified by merely "thinking about it" like Trump suggested. There is a process, and declassified documents are still classified until they are marked as such. We've seen the pictures, we know they weren't. So yes, it also matters that they were removed from their folders and mixed up haphazardly with no regard to their security. These are all undeniable facts that Trump's own lawyers have failed to dispute. They won't even say if Trump has returned all the documents as he is required under subpoena, or whether Trump actually declassified them. These are all things he could have done immediately if he was innocent.

> Not even remotely. Hunter's laptop revealed Hunter sold access and influence to the current president, particularly to nations hostile to this country.

Let's use your own attitude against you: where's the official investigation? Do we even know if that's his laptop? Where are the charges? "So far the follow-up investigation has been much more lackluster and much less iron-clad as we were initially led to believe." Namely: nothing.

You are not arguing in good faith. You just want your own narratives to win regardless of merit.

When the dust settles, and Trump still is not in hand cuffs, what will you say then? Start yet another investigation because this time "we've got him!"?

We've heard now for 6 years that there's a clear "smoking gun" and we're just days away from indictment. One investigation ends empty-handed, and another just pops up because "reasons". Good thing we're not holding our breath...

This classified documents thing is 100% unresolved at the moment. That is a very objective fact, despite what you want to believe.

> Let's use your own attitude against you: where's the official investigation?

That was the original point. Trap set, and sprung. That story was squashed to shape an election - extremely effectively. If that is not election meddling, I do not know what is.

> Do we even know if that's his laptop?

They do not even deny it anymore. Plenty of videos of Hunter engaging in illegal activities (which by itself does not implicate the President), plenty of emails, plenty of payments from Chinese organizations and corrupt Ukrainian officials, and even former business partners confirming the validity of the rumors and who the "Big Guy" is.

We have none of this from the Trump family, only rumors started by the Clinton campaign that so far, despite unlimited resources, time and efforts plowed into relentless investigation after investigation, have come up dry.

But... none of these facts matter apparently, because Trump isn't on your team. That was the point the GP post made.

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