Hacker News Reader

Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

It seems like something like this will never hit the HN frontpage. I ponder if its really just due to the upvote/downvote + flag ratio.

Edit: It seems to have been unflagged manually.

View on HN

I love drama and chaos as much as any nerd with too much time on their hands… but this story has not a single compelling nugget to it. Like, the tweets so far are so un-juicy that I would like to ensure this doesn’t ever go to the frontpage so nobody else wastes their time reading this boring non-story. I wish it was worth reading.

Social media executives manipulating narratives to support their favored presidential candidate is a non-story?

There’s zero evidence of that, so far at least. The emails show nothing of the sort: they show a bunch of people ham-fistedly trying to enforce policies designed to protect the company. I look forward to seeing some evidence that people at Twitter were in cahoots in order to support Joe Biden, but thus far, there’s zero evidence of that — it’s the most mundane behaviour you could imagine.

Matt Taibbi tweeted evidence of it.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896

That’s evidence that they applied their policies. There is no evidence that they applied these policies in order to favour Biden. I will happily accept evidence that they did it to favour Biden, if some is shown… but that has not happened yet.

In their emails, they seemed to be be brainstorming ways of insisting that they were only applying their policies as normal, but not everybody agreed that this was the case.

I don't think we need to read between the lines here. There were people in Twitter that felt they were overstepping things and emails from various people in the US government, but the communications team were very careful to ensure that they pointed towards their policy about hacked materials and to give themselves leeway by claiming that they were just applying an abundance of caution to the situation.

At first glance, that doesn't seem to support your claim. Could you point out why you think it does?

This looks much more like evidence of Republicans trying and failing to shape a political narrative right before an election. And yes, I have dug through the contents of the laptop. Dysfunctional heir takes a lot of drugs, has a lot of sex, and has a lot of daddy issues, big whoop.

Twitter's grounds for suppressing it were kinda bullshit, but they rightly suspected they were being used as the launchpad for a PR campaign and and didn't want to find themselves in a Cambridge Analytica-type situation and decided not to touch the hot potato.

At least put more effort into naming your throwaway account next time.

They want so bad for this to be Biden's Watergate.

It's also possible that some people just don't like the suppression of speech and ideas.

No, this is just an attempt to get the stink of a scandal to stick to Biden during election season because calling him a dementia-ridden pedophile wasn't resonating with the public as well as they had hoped.

At best, this is a story of Twitter being over-cautious about handling potential misinformation - which is a valid criticism to make and a conversation worth having - but the narrative that the government and Twitter collaborated to suppress "the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop" in order to manipulate the election is plain BS.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing. Given that it was indeed Hunter Biden's laptop, why isn't it fair to say that their overly-cautious approach to handling potential misinformation led to them attempting to suppress the truth about it? (It's also worth noting that much of the discussion - both the reporting in this thread and Twitter's original public responses - was not about misinformation but about whether the information gathered from the laptop should be considered "hacked" and therefore prohibited regardless of whether it's true.)

By "the truth" I don't mean the literal truth of the laptop's existence or ownership, but to refer facetiously to the various conspiracy theories surrounding the laptop's contents, such as proof of Biden having stolen the election, child pornography, video of him doing drugs with Hunter, evidence that he and Fauci manufactured COVID, etc. Something damning that the Democrats and Twitter (being puppets of the DNC) desperately wanted suppressed because it would immediately disqualify Biden as a candidate if it got out.

But as far as is known, the laptop contained nothing of the sort. Hunter Biden being a drug-using fuckup who trades on his father's fame isn't a scandal, it's basic rich kid behavior.

I'd add that at least AFAICT, Twitter's ban of the NY Post's tweet about the laptop story, which hyped the article posted on the NY Post's website, gave the story even more visibility than if they'd just ignored it.

As I recall, the entire media world had to weigh in, telling many more folks about the story than would have heard about it without the controversy over the tweet.

In fact, I don't use Twitter and generally don't read the NY Post. Yet I heard about the tweet and the story based on the uproar that the tweet had been removed. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have heard much about it unless there were actual indictments.

And AFAIK, at no time was the NY Post website impeded from serving the story.

If censorship was the goal, it was completely misdirected and, unsurprisingly, ineffective.

Nope, clearly you're in the other political camp if you want twats at Twitter to not manipulate voting /s

So far I file this as another in the long line of very handwavy scandals that Democrats did. I'd be more willing to consider merits when someone writes an article and explains what the accusation is instead of the hypey tone with not very clear emails. Seems like more "this is huge! gamechanging" type of story that was used for Benghazi where I couldn't even figure out who was being accused of what.

I don't doubt there are some individuals who acted too politically at Twitter, but of course many people are going to insist this should be the only thing discussed in the media and should invalidate Biden and make everything anyone has ever said in the media false.

Several Republicans, particularly Kevin McCarthy, have already admitted the real purpose of the Benghazi hearings was to hurt Hillary Clinton's poll numbers, so yeah. Same shit, different Democrat.

And it’s pretty clear how much the Biden team wants to suppress the story.

Why suppress a story if you believe it to be false and you did nothing wrong?

Because at the end of the day people chose what they want to believe in based on their own beliefs, values and biases, making the poop stick. Like how there were (are?) people who believed that there's a secret basement in a pizza restaurant used by politicians to hurt children.

Wait, you're suggesting because "people chose what they want to believe in based on their own beliefs, values and biases, making the poop stick", politicians are justified in suppressing truthful news stories?

Correct me if I got that wrong.

What story? The tweets in question that they requested to be deleted are photos of other Binden’s penis that he was keeping on his device?

I feel like it might be of relevance to the hacker community in what way social media companies attempt to shape our views and opinions. The mere fact that this may be seen as targeted at one party or another really shouldn't matter (I'm not American and so luckily don't have to choose between Democrats/Republicans, as I find them both pretty dreadful - Republicans more so.)

But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.

The hacker culture of the 90s and 00s is dead.

Many in the community now fully support censorship as long as it's of the opposing team.

This would be unheard of 20 years ago.

Except so far none of the emails have talked about political allegiance, they’ve all talked about Twitter policies.

It's definitely not dead; there are some amazing projects being hacked on right now.

But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story).

I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space.

(And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)

"Corporate coders" is such a perfect, succinct phrase; the antithesis of what I remember from the early days of Linux. It's so well said it requires no further description.

I can't speak for everyone who flagged it, but I routinely flag Twitter threads on nontechnical topics because in my experience they're almost always a vector for shoddily sourced news that confirms the readers' biases. Matt Taibbi in particular is someone who I personally find trustworthy enough to tell a story like this. But if I hadn't clicked into this thread already convinced that the broad outline of his story was true, I'd be asking a lot of questions about where Taibbi got his information from and how he knows it wasn't a selective leak to misrepresent the discussions.

Why would you "routinely flag Twitter threads" if they are not obvious spam, dupes, or egregiously off-topic? You are not a guest curator. There is a reason you cannot downvote submissions on HN and the flag button is not a substitute for that.

If you don't like something, ignore it and move on. Someone else may find it interesting. It's not your duty to prevent the rest of the community from reading something you don't like.

It’s not a question of personal dislike. There are plenty of news articles, blog posts, etc. whose positions I think are nonsensical or wrongheaded yet clearly align with HN’s mission of intellectual curiosity. But with Twitter threads on nontechnical topics, in my experience, the intent and effect of posting them is to whip people up into a rage. This not particularly civil comments section is one of the better ones I’ve seen - the top comment as of when im posting this only has two angry exclamation points.

This sounds exactly like the typical response to Snowden's release

"Of course we knew the NSA was reading our emails, who cares?"

Seeing how the sausage gets made is critically important to stopping it in the future.

Maybe I’m not deep enough in the weeds on the laptop story to understand the bigger picture, but so far, all the emails have shown are that members of the US government (which regulates Twitter) have the ability to contact Twitter and Twitter (as an organisation) does what it thinks will best ensure the survival of the company. This is a company that has executives forced to sit in front of and answer to congress, of course they would behave this way? What other possible outcome could there be? The problem here is, surely, using the NSA example, that the government has the power to regulate Twitter (which in turn puts pressure on Twitter to comply with the government). But that’s not what the story is apparently about, apparently the story is about the democrats?

The US government regulates Twitter? News to me.

I guess you could try to massage the word “regulate” to make it untrue but given Twitter has literally been fined by the FTC multiple times and is subject to a consent decree which applies legal culpability to Twitter executives unless they do what the FTC require… they are absolutely at the behest of the US government.

They also have to obey fire codes and file extensive reports to the IRS about each employee!

Twitter censoring at the behest of political party operatives is pretty sketchy if true. The claim was made in the thread, I'm curious if there will be more evidence in this thread to substantiate it.

I agree with you, and I’m surprised Matt glossed over it. I think the question for me as a more government trusting person is;

What is the difference between the government providing unique information, because of its potential Intelligence insights, and what is the government trying to get things taken down that are not against twitters policies

> what is the government trying to get things taken down that are not against twitters policies

Twitter's policies being the basis of credibility in this question?

If this story showed us anything it's clear they were censoring at the whims of the moderators feelings, not based on some predefined set of rules or conditions. Even when multiple people brought up the fact the hacking angle was mere speculation, the Twitter execs glossed over it and said to say it's true in public communiqués anyway (until they have time to find out if it is true).

As long as there's a strong culture of censorship, all that matters is who has influence on the gatekeepers. Not what arbitrary rules they set for themselves.

A day of deliberation is not a strong culture of censorship.

Are you saying they were expecting to get proof it was a hack within the next day and simply jumped the gun? What happened after those 24hrs of “deliberation” then? Did they backtrack?

It took almost a year to find out it wasn’t hacked and it was bullshit like everyone thought it might be from day 1 (including we found out today even Twitter employees). Plenty of time to deliberate I guess.

Well if you're drama starved "just" confirmation that they purposefully manipulated public opinion, the thing that was already obvious, isn't exactly another drama to watch but nonetheless it's good to get confirmation of that

How about the fact that they knew their justified reason for blocking the content, hacked materials, was an utter farce, and yet they kept on trucking along with bald faced lies?

What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?

Same as it is now with Elon in charge

This comment illustrates why it's a good idea to prune these kinds of stories from the homepage. No one learns anything new or surprising from discussing this stuff here, at this point we could have the same political nerdfight in our sleep.

I think if your focus is on the discourse, you’re right.

But I bet you the majority of people who saw this item on the front page aren’t interested in comments and this is a form of news. To be aware that this is a thing.

My belief is this kind of news is hard to miss elsewhere, so no one is harmed if it's culled from here. But I'm open to correction on that point; everyone has their own surfing habits.

It's awfully stupid, but as a meta point, take a step back and see how well HN's moderation focuses it all on this one dumb thread, and preserves the rest of the home page for a bunch of random tech stories, to the point where there's still room for "Roman Egypt was a strange province".

It's pretty impressive. It wasn't always this good! Back during Snowdonia, the whole front page would be 11 different flavors of NSA stories.

> No one learns anything new or surprising from discussing this stuff here

It was surprising to me to see that the various political parties are in direct contact with people at Twitter to remove stuff, and I consider myself fairly well informed.

Everybody reports everything to everybody. If that surprises you, reconsider how well informed you are. "Competitors work refs; film at 11."

I've run a forum for almost 20 years. There are reporting tools that most people use, but regular reporters (either a contentious personality or just a regular and conscientious user) often just contact me directly after the email address was revealed previously. Seems completely obvious that media reps from every political party would have some direct line or priority tool to report things. They have this with newspapers and TV networks as well. They plead their case or make a legal threat, or appeal on personal grounds.

As another "VIP contact" example, look at Musk supposedly directly contacting Kanye regarding his ban. The average user just sees a block screen. That seems fairly unremarkable to me.

Do you actually care about what happens on this website or is this just a good chance for you to emerge randomly and make some arch point about how stupid everyone is for falling for this garbage?

I don't have a particular attachment to this website, but I admire 'dang for doing the hard work of moderating it, and for doing so in an honest and transparent way for a very long time now. So it bugs me to see people disparage that work by insinuating darker motives.

And he's pretty transparent about wanting discussions satisfying intellectual curiosity. I'd guess that a lot of Twitter discussions are dampened (e.g., from hitting the front page) because the chance that they'll engender that sort of discussion is very, very low. I think the idea is that Hacker News isn't the place where you discuss anything tech in any way you want, but where you have that certain mode of discussion (rather than certain bias of viewpoint).

No, this will almost certainly not hit the frontpage. The dupe detector has already started removing all the threads, even though on other topics it only engages after a topic actually gets picked up.

Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)

None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)

edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698592

edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang: I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.

idk, maybe the dupe detector is removing threads because there are multiple people posting it.

Normally, the dupe detector only detects dupes that have actually been "seen"

edit: here's dang himself on how the dupe detector ignores things that haven't had their chance in the sun yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33824482

This thread has been "flagged" multiple times too.

[removed]

for sure.

It'll be really interesting tomorrow to see how much tech and media end up suppressing this story too.

Presumably, just like with the story this is all about, they'll just ban all mention of it and delete everybody's accounts because of "safety" or something.

I'm actively watching a variety of mainstream press to see if any of them cover the story, but honestly I doubt they will, other than maybe to have an AP fact check that says that the whole thing is false and that Elon made it all up.

If what you say about dang is true, he needs to be fired.

You're posting on a site where I'd guess that even the figurehead (PG) is so sick of the petty squabbling that he now almost never posts here himself. I imagine PG has confidence in how @dang attempts to moderate HN.

My suggestion is that instead of thinking about the moderating preventing certain topics being discussed, understand that it's trying to discourage things that engender certain styles of discussions. @dang talks consistently and clearly about wanting posts that satisfy intellectual curiosity. There are other sites for that.

As one example to hopefully demonstrate this isn't some political bias: while other sites seem forever covered with articles and threads about negative Musk/Twitter stories, they very rarely make it from New to Front here, because I'd say moderators have little confidence they ever lead to HN-style discussions.

Why stop there?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Seems pretty silly to cherry-pick one comment as if it's a gotcha when I've posted such things a thousand times or more and none of it is secret. HN is a moderated/curated site—it always has been, and no one has ever claimed otherwise.

> edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang

You're allowed to reply to me just fine. Your account is rate-limited because you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. That's against the rules for good reason: it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, and you know what else? despite every ideologue's passionate perception, we do so regardless of which ideology they're wedded to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618426 (Nov 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267514 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976185 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32505278 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31873013 (June 2022)

Normally I'd take the rate limit off, at least temporarily, since there's nothing you're saying that doesn't have a straightforward refutation, and I like answering criticisms and trusting readers to make up their own minds. However, I have to meet a friend for dinner in 5 minutes and probably won't be able to look in on this thread for a few hours. Since you've already posted a bunch of false and/or misleading things (starting with "Every effort will be taken to suppress this story" and downhill from there), I think it prudent to wait until I'm free to respond.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com