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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

This is far more nuanced (and disputed) than you make it out to be.

> It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016

I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in 2016.

> they successfully suppressed him in 2020

How? He was banned after the election.

> and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.

DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a difference when he had his own social network? We all have our opinions, but is there actual data supporting this for the 2024 election?

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>and I don't think they utilize Twitter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0

> How? He was banned after the election.

By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.

It's a stretch to say this would have made a major impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's bad luck.

Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.

> Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11

Anything but. Trump could have won in 2020 if not for Covid. A lot of turnout was anti-Trump protest vote.

he lost because of covid because everyone watched him fucking botch the response.

'it will go away in two weeks, no one will even remember...'

injecting bleach

getting uv light 'inside the body'

the look on all his health advisors faces whenever he showed up at a press conference.

The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.

Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.

In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.

In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.

> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.

I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.

Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.

Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.

Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"

I agree with everyone else that Covid definitely lost Trump the 2020 election. Saying it would have been a lay-up for someone who isn't Trump is meaningless when we're talking about Trump. When there's a crisis people crave strong leaders who can guide them through it, and Trump completely fucked up his messaging. One day everything will be fine in a few weeks, the next day Covid is extremely serious, then he's trying to get people to use horse medicine from Tractor Supply as a home remedy, etc. Compare that to how people around the nation were paying attention to Andrew Cuomo's daily press conferences. Despite Cuomo making extremely incompetent decisions around Covid (such as using nursing homes as overflow space for Covid patients, causing over 15,000 deaths), he got a huge popularity bump at the time because he appeared strong and competent and Trump didn't.

Ok, yes, taking it from the other perspective, trump being trump he was incapable of handling covid in a way that would get him re-elected.

If he had a chance of being re-elected, it was certainly dead after his attempts at dealing with covid.

> Covid was the definition of an easy layup.

I don't understand this at all.

Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?

wredcoll doesn't mean that COVID-19 was good for the US, any more than they mean that 9/11 was good for the US. They mean (rightly or wrongly) that it should have been easy for the sitting US government to respond to it in a way that made itself look good and helped it get re-elected, just as G W Bush was able to respond to 9/11 in a way that made him look good and helped him get re-elected.

(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...

> The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important

“The story was true but…”

Stopped reading here.

More fool you.

There are two separate "the story"s. One is a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. One is a story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter.

At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.

The linked article argues that (1) there wasn't in fact political interference at Twitter, (2) although Twitter employees (like employees of many many many tech companies) lean left, there was no sign that anything in the company's treatment of the H.B. laptop story was politically motivated, and (3) the fact that Twitter nerfed links to the NY Post's story about H.B.'s laptop for one day (a) more likely increased than decreased interest in that story and (b) had no impact to speak of on the presidential election anyway.

Of course it might be wrong about any or all of those things, but whether the NY Post's story about the laptop was actually true or not has nothing to do with any of them.

(The assertion being made upthread here is that Twitter's handling of the story was a deliberate attempt to "suppress" Donald Trump and that it handed the election to Joe Biden. It's all about the second story, not the first one.)

> At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.

Yes it does.

How?

Twitter worked with the US government to suppress true information during an election to the benefit of one party over the other.

Perhaps you could try once more to actually read the article.

Why does Hunter Biden matter at all in anything?

Because the laptop includes a lot a emails. A lot of those emails include Hunter selling access to his father and suggesting that his father was in the the scheme with him. Whether or not Joe was actually involved vs. Hunter making it up to get these people to give him what he wanted is an open question, but this isn't something that should have been actively suppressed by the media just a few weeks before the election.

Fox News hyped up Hunter to distract people from the immense corruption between Jared Kushner and the Saudis. Kushner got a $2 billion investment fund from the Saudis.

It was the New York Post (not Fox) that broke the story about the laptop, and that got censored by various social media companies acting on the (false) advice of federal agents to do so.

Again, Hunter Biden is completely irrelevant and hyped up by the GOP Propaganda machine to distract people from Trump's blatant corruption. Biden was 1 million times less corrupt as President than Trump. This is a really standard part of the GOP playbook, they did it with Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. They did it with the "migrant caravan of DOOM".

Trump's children are Hunter Biden on crack. There's more of them and they're way worse than Hunter.

We literally have multiple Trump children openly bragging in public about how paying them gives one access to their father.

Nobody cares. Nobody would have cared about Hunter either.

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