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Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

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Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the Washington Post isn't releasing possibly faked or hacked emails about Breonna Taylor being shot in her sleep three weeks before an election in a blatant attempt to manufacture an October Surprise. Don't try and create false equivalency here.

> possibly faked or hacked emails What gives you the impression that this is the case? Hunter Biden's receipts from the computer repair shop are public for this too. I think bias might be clouding your judgement. EDIT: Because HN isn't even allowing me to reply to the comment by user heartbreak, I will just edit this here: He was NOT impeached for bribing Ukraine into fabricating exactly this sort of story. He was im…

> He was NOT impeached for bribing Ukraine into fabricating exactly this sort of story.

No, he was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress[1].

> the democrats didn't want Biden's crimes exposed

Biden hadn't even won the presidential nomination then, so this seems quite a stretch. Also there were no allegations against Joe Biden then, and the allegations against Hunter Biden seemed all to be very non-specific.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Donald_Trump

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#712

I don't pay for twitter, I don't have any reasonable expectations for a SLA regarding anything including DMs. Just like I have no responsibility to listen to people on soapboxes on street corners, and soap companies have no responsibility to provide soapboxes to anyone to shout from.

I'm not sure what the analogy is between DMs and soapboxes on street corners. In any case, I have to say censoring DMs is just too far for me to accept. I've put in a decent amount of effort to curate my Twitter feed so that it's useful to me, but I can't keep using a service that will arbitrarily decide what private communications I'm allowed to have on their service. I guess I'm out, as much as I hate to do it.

If you don't like the rules, you are free to make your own platform. Like it or not, twitter can do whatever the hell they like with their website that they pay to host. That being said, if you posted something heinous here on HN and a moderator removed it, as they do every day, would you leave? Why haven't you left hacker news since that is what they do, just like twitter? Why haven't you left the internet entirely since any website owner can do whatever they like on their website?

The idea that social media is some sort of public service beholden to the expectation of not ever touching their platform is just nuts to me, yet it's pervasive here on hackernews. The irony.

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest bet is it changes nobody's opinion. If you're left leaning, you've drowned out Trump's repeatedly false statements --or become numb to them-- no October surprise will have an effect on you. If you're right leaning, this furthers your perspective that Clinton and Deep State are up to no good. Nobody comes across content like this without an existing world view to inspect it, and the lines have been drawn a…

Right, but this is what makes the situation so dangerous in the U.S. If no one’s mind is changed over events like these, then we’re at a point where there are essentially two citizenries which both see the other side as toxic. We’re slouching towards civil war. Most people don’t want war, but do see the other side as harmful, so we have to try hard to avoid it. Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war i…

I had assumed it was just that people were consuming two entirely different media streams. But I’ve had conversations recently where college educated people won’t even concede basic factual points left out of a media narrative. Like, things that can be established just by looking at some publicly available document, which I have given them. They keep just circling back to the narrative. It’s scary.

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#714
post #507

Robert Graham [1] pointed out that if the emails are authentic, they can be trivially verified via DKIM. That the email metadata was not released implies the emails are either inauthentic, or that the post did not contact someone with basic competence in computer forensics. Either possibility seriously undercuts the article's credibility. [1] https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1316407424648179717

Wouldn't DKIM verification require having the public key of Gmail from 2014 on hand? I looked up some old 2014 era emails I got from gmail and it looks like they were using the "20120113" selector at the time, which is no longer available through DNS query.

After some googling, I managed to find the public key corresponding to that selector in a github repo: https://github.com/PaloAltoNetworks/aws-elb-autoscaling/blob...

edit: Seems to be an old test vector for dnslib: https://github.com/paulc/dnslib/blob/d806cfc828d6bbae45c9b4c...

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that the Dems wouldn't like to make social media companies liable for misinfo? That's what I'm trying to say, here. Either way you slice it, 230 is in the crosshairs, it's just a matter of who's holding the gun and for what purpose. I also wouldn't bet a cent of my own money on the GOP being "wholesale evicted". I heard very similar, equally confident talk in 2016.

Democrats haven’t been raising 230 regulation though, that’s been republicans disgruntled that their ads had been fact-checked (by partisan conservatives, it turns out). The proposed regulations coming out of the house have been more about competition and anti-monopoly. It’s hard to see this as anything more than an attempt to change their bet on a losing horse in this race, as the commenter you replied to pointed ou…

I think you are referring to the 2018 election, when the Democratic Party regained majority in the House and there were not many Republican held Senate seats being elected.

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's honestly irrelevant about the credibility of the emails and other data at this point, its the blanket censorship of this article that's now the real story.

But what should be done about tech enabling the spread of false information?

Can't people do their own research and choose whether or not they believe the contents of a story before they retweet it and lose their own credibility?

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#717

This was a shockingly dumb move. Whether or not you think these actions were politically motivated or made in good faith, it just poured liquid oxygen on the "reform section 230" fire you're seeing from both sides of the aisle - one using the censorship reason, the other using the disinformation reason. There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging…

>There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action. If Biden becomes president, his 2018 quid-pro-quo admission to fire a Ukranian prosecutor is all the assurance social media companies need that Biden would likely ignore calls for reform to sec…

I doubt this. Seems far too obvious. Its typical mafia movie activity where they set up some bait or trap.

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Millenials are becoming more conservative as they age, and Republicans have way more kids than Democrats: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/republicans-more-kids-democra...

Rural conservatives who have kids will eventually have those kids leave for good paying jobs in urban areas, or those kids will likely not have a great life expectancy from lack of opportunity in their small community (dying small communities are well documented: https://www.google.com/search?q=dying+small+towns ) and deaths of despair (alcoholism, meth, opioids: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinekee/maps-…

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Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#719
post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously HN readers are going to want to see the emails and decide for themselves. There's zero implication of authenticity (or inauthenticity for that matter). The only thing we care about at our end is having an accurate article (and headline) for the story. Politics isn't completely off-topic for HN—there's overlap and it depends. There's lots of previous explanation about that at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRang…

> see the emails and decide for themselves Using information or skills uniquely possessed by HN readers?

Surely not.

Re: Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest bet is it changes nobody's opinion. If you're left leaning, you've drowned out Trump's repeatedly false statements --or become numb to them-- no October surprise will have an effect on you. If you're right leaning, this furthers your perspective that Clinton and Deep State are up to no good. Nobody comes across content like this without an existing world view to inspect it, and the lines have been drawn a…

Right, but this is what makes the situation so dangerous in the U.S. If no one’s mind is changed over events like these, then we’re at a point where there are essentially two citizenries which both see the other side as toxic. We’re slouching towards civil war. Most people don’t want war, but do see the other side as harmful, so we have to try hard to avoid it. Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war i…

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