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Comment by shadowfiend | Hacker News Reader

> They later reversed the decision long after the election when they could no longer deny they censored the truth.

> With just a few weeks to go before the Nov. 3 vote, […] Twitter underlined just how fluid its policies were when it began letting users share links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden that it had previously blocked from its service.

This link literally says the opposite of what you are saying.

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You're right. I'm wrong about the timing after hastily re-reading this article.

They allowed the article to be shared a few weeks before the election. They kept the NY Post account banned until October 31st. 1 week before the election.[1]

This was meaningful censorship of a right-leaning news organization. It would not have happened were the shoe on the other foot at a liberal bastion like Twitter.

The solution to the problem is to greatly pare back the type of moderation allowed by the platform. Elon seems to be implementing this.[2]

1. https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-y...

2. https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/elon-musk-says-suspending-ny-p...

Eh, not obvious at all it wouldn’t have happened the other direction. There are obviously hairy questions with deciding whether to propagate material that’s 1) definitely hacked and 2) potentially tampered with by an adversary.

I think Twitter made the wrong call but it’s not like this was the Pentagon Papers or the Lewinsky story.

Imagine if Twitter had suspended Vox, the NYT, or any other beloved liberal news org. You can't. Impossible. How much unsubstantiated stuff about Donald Trump was propagated by these outlets for years? What's the fundamental difference between opposition research like the Steele Dossier, and "hacking"?

Imagine the outrage if Elon tomorrow decided to suspend one of these news orgs, even with only a few days to go before the election. Compare that to the crickets we hear about the NY Post.

They didn’t suspend the Post, did they? I remember them banning that article. And could I imagine them banning a Vox or NYT article? Well no, because for better or worse, not being an actual tabloid tends to impart more trust than being an actual tabloid does. NYPost is broadly regarded as a tabloid and NYT is broadly regarded as the paper of record. Should it be this way? Will it stay this way? I don’t know.

If there’s a left wing analog to NYPost, I can definitely imagine an article getting deboosted or banned under similar conditions.

They suspended the NY Post account for over 2 weeks. (only lifting the suspension as their policy evolved).

Prior to that Twitter had never taken such action against a news outlet.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/30/twitter-n...

Eh, it’s kind of between banning the article and banning the account I suppose. They froze the account until the Post deleted the 6 offending tweets, and the Post declined to do that. Again would be a very believable standoff with any publisher once the story was in question.

Twitter can delete the tweets themselves, that whole policy is a farce and is nothing but trying to extract a coercive confession.

Are you seriously claiming if it had been Don Juniors laptop it wouldn’t have been different? If that’s your claim you’re living in a fool’s paradise.

Twitter permabanned DDOSecrets (a left wing org) when they started distributing leaked police files in 2020, due to their "distribution of hacked materials policy." Not that any facts are going to change your victimhood. Source: https://twitter.com/natsecgeek/status/1275573681507500032

There's zero proof that it even was Hunter Bidens laptop.

There's no reason to think it was hacked or tampered with. Most of it has been substantiated as valid so no indication of tampering.

It honestly takes a lot of belief in fantasy to think an entity capable of hacking multiple 2FA services, major corporations and multiple governments, did so and planted evidence on a laptop. Then gave that laptop away on the hope that the shop owner would discover it and give it to the news.

It seems far more likely that the incestuous child molester who filters millions of dollars in bribes annually dropped off one of his connected laptops then forgot about it and failed to pay because he has abused cocaine for 3+ decades.

It does not seem more likely to me that he handed his laptop to a blind computer repair guy, identified himself as Hunter Biden, and then that repair guy saw (?) what was on the laptop and reached out to Rudy Giuliani. It’s a really bizarre story.

The whole motivation of these rules is to avoid consequences of letting false information spread unhindered. Actually, it was the abuse of twitter (and facebook's, etc) liberal content policies that allowed the disinformation campaigns of 2016 to be so effective. The policies were enacted BECAUSE of bad actors.

So I think your claim that 'it would not have happened if the shoe were on the other foot' is false -- because it did happen in a significant way, and not one favourable to your imagined 'Liberal Establishment'.

What was the 2016 disinformation that spread against the liberal establishment??

You mean, like Pizza Gate?

Wiki has a well-cited article on the topic that's probably worth your attention: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_... -- specifically the social media section.

OTOH, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to enforce the terms of service as a front man for oligarchs became candidate for candidate for president became candidate for president became president became ex-president encouraging violence to stay in power. The manager of a string of chain restaraunts would have been kicked off years earlier for the same behaviour.

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