"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why suppress a story if you believe it to be false and you did nothing wrong?
Correct me if I got that wrong.