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Comment by gfdgfdgdfggf | Hacker News Reader

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?

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