Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

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The Hunter Biden laptop story was real. The FBI knew it was real. The FBI lied to corporations like Twitter to stop accounts from legitimate publications from reporting on it right before an election where it certainly could have impacted the outcome.

Twitter went even further and prevented people from exchanging the story with each other in DMs.

I honestly don't see how you could be comfortable with this, unless you're willing to disregard their actions because they happen to protect the party you agree with at the moment; or because you're presuming that the FBI would never use this relationship to operate in bad faith.

Twitter didn't go to the FBI to ask for verification, the FBI on their own accord decided to take their "intelligence" to Twitter for action that they desired. This is obviously backwards.

If Twitter wants to call up the FBI for verification or for information on a particular subject, tweet, or account because they wanted to investigate.. that would obviously be fine. That is clearly not what is happening here.

Revenge porn is not a “real story”

Figures like Rudy Giuliani had direct and personal access to the laptop and yet what bombshell evidence do we have today?

This story is so damning that the tweets people on the right keep spreading are literally just revenge porn.

Some “real story”.

The "real story" from the laptop had notjing to do with any pictures but rather emails that were recovered describing payments that were to be made to Joe Buden via Hunter as a bag man.

Thats the only actually serious thing uncovered by the laptop

> The FBI lied to [...] Twitter to stop [...] reporting on [The Hunder Biden laptop story]

OK, that's the takeaway that Taibbi and Musk wants us to absorb. But... can you link to the actual spot in the (sigh) "Twitter Files" that actually shows this? Because like the grandparent poster did and reported, I looked for it. And it's not there.

There's a bunch of mid-level bland communication that if you squint might be understood as a bunch of underlings carrying out orders in pursuit of that. Or it might just be a bunch of folks trying in good faith not to push a suspect story at a sensitive time.

There is absolutely no evidence of the kind of conspiracy you allege here. It's just not there. Which given the sourcing (the CEO is directing the investigation!) means it probably doesn't exist within Twitter. It's just not there. Where's the meat here?

Ahh yes, all those tweets the FBI reported that Matt forgot to tell you were straight up revenge porn. I really wonder why they were deleted! If only he could have found out using, like, the Web Archive, as many others did afterwards.

(It was the Trump government FBI, by the way. In case your timeline is a bit mixed up?)

> were straight up revenge porn.

Citation needed. Even Wikipedia lists it as an abandoned laptop that was trawled for data. Trash as far as I know is legitimate object of search (e.g. police does it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files thread from Taibbi was a request from the Biden Campaign to look at a list of otherwise-undescribed-and-since-removed tweets. This was strongly implied to be a request for censorship of the laptop story.

Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.

> Then someone found an archived copy of all but one of the tweets, and they all turned out to be pictures of Hunter Biden's penis.

Yes, he left his images on laptop. That's not revenge porn, as far as I know.

> The smoking gun email in the "Part 1" Twitter Files

Don't quote me on that, but from my memory not only were links to Hunter deleted, but so were discussions of it from even reputable journalist. I think it was a Washington Post that discussed Hunter's laptop, and it got buried or deleted.

That's only Part 1.

They also marked Trump tweets as fake, even though they found some exonerating information and vice versa.

Plus the weekly meetings with FBI/OGA (alias for CIA), around misinformation spreading tweets, etc.

You basically have a government agency labeling stuff as misinformation for deranking/deletion. If that doesn't raise any First Amendment issues, I'm not sure what will? Capturing journalist and keeping them in horrible conditions? Water torture and organ transfer of said journalists?

Re-distributing intimate material without the subjects permission is pretty much the definition of revenge porn.

> In late 2020, a controversy emerged involving data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop.[1] The data was subsequently shared with the FBI, Republican operatives, and later the press.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

That's a very strange definition of revenge porn. It was made inadvertently by Hunter Biden, it wasn't used for blackmail and it is related to a bulk of other interesting email.

Revenge porn isn't necessarily always used for blackmail. Why didn't the FBI, Republican operatives, or the press blur Biden Jr.'s penis before making it public? It was obvious political vendetta. What public interest is served by leaking it unredacted?

Definition of revenge porn from a quick googling is:

>Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent

This fits the description 100%.

dictionary.com:

"revenge porn - noun - revealing or sexually explicit images or videos of a person posted on the internet, typically by a former sexual partner, without the consent of the subject and in order to cause them distress or embarrassment."

It's not a question of who took the photos. It's a question of whether the people sharing them had the permission of the subject to share them.

While Blackmail may be a component of some revenge porn, it's not required by this or other definitions.

Ok, but say a public figure is involved in a scummy situation, and left their laptop detailing their shady dealings (along some naked pictures) at repair shop and forgot about it, but a journalist managed to get docs from said laptop including naked pictures, does it invalidate the whole cotnent of laptop as revenge porn?

By point is, having naked pictures on your laptop don't make docs and other stuff found as revenge porn.

You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out.

The Biden campaign in 2020(they were not in power, Trump admin was) sent a list of tweets to Twitter asking them to take a look alleging that they violated Twitter's rules on revenge porn. Twitter took down those tweets. Matt Taibibi implied this was government/Twitter censorship, and the right wing went ape shit over it. People found the archived versions of those tweets, mainly from politician Republican influencers, and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis. Nothing to do with his business dealings or emails on his laptop that were leaked.

The Republican operatives who privately received the leaked laptop contents didn't even blur the private parts. Are they revenge porn? Arguably. Was this an example of government censorship, or censorship of political discourse? No. The Trump Whitehouse was also reporting problematic tweets to Twitter contacts for potential violation of Twitter terms. Nobody is claiming the Biden laptop business dealings, emails etc. were revenge porn.

> You're misunderstanding the thread. So let me lay it out.

You're misrepresenting the story.

One big omission is this:

> On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

> Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831212310601728 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831435288563712

> and they were nothing except pictures of Hunter's penis

It wasn't. https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... Find me a picture of penis in this news or prove that mtaibbi had somehow distorted this.

They treated a legitimate news, that was obtained by gray means as a child porn and de-ranked it.

I am referring to these tweets in the two tweets from Matt Taibbi.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

This shows that they were pornography:

https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1598832424754073601

Yet Matt Taibbi used those to spread baseless propaganda without giving the context behind the removal of those tweets. That clouds the rest of the claims too. Matt isn't interested in the truth. He's being a political hack serving partisan interests.

And even he was forced to concede that he couldn't find anything from the govt about the laptop.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744

> Revenge porn is the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their consent

I don't know man, you could have just googled that yourself.

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