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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#61

Post by nextstep »

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #34

The left is obsessed with suppressing anything that’s “dangerous” cause they think the lowly under-class can’t be trusted to review information and form opinions. If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.

I think you’re confused about what or who “the left” is; corporate media and the liberal party in the US (the Democrats) are not leftist in anyway; a writer like Matt Taibbi is a leftist or has leftist leanings. But as is very clear from this article, there is clear disagreement between leftists and the party they are forced to vote with if they want any semblance of representation.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#62

Post by jokethrowaway »

gotoeleven wrote: post #8

Yeah the censorship is bad and further reduces trust in the media and tech companies (though its already at zero for many people). But isn't the story here that the vice presidents son was being paid millions of dollars by chinese, ukrainian, and other companies for .. something? It's not his business accumen, right? What could they possibly be paying him for other than access to his dad? Is there any other reasonabl…

I doubt anyone is surprised by another plausible case of corruption (or depravation / or pedophilia if you address the other allegations). There is also the story that the FBI was sitting on this since December (potential for blackmail in case Biden is elected? who knows) which is scary as well.

In the end, I think it's endemic in having human corruptible politicians who can accentrate power. We will minimise this problem only if we decentralise the structure of powers in our society.

Not that any mainstream party has an interest in promoting that (unless you consider Jo Jorgensen and the libertarian party)

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#63

Post by joejohnson »

dragonwriter wrote: post #60
akvadrako wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terms are not well enough defined in common language to claim what you’re claiming. If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal.

> If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal. Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma... It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-d…

It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism. But left and right political spectrum and the corresponding terms have meaning outside of the limited political window of centre-right US mainstream discussion.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#64

Post by jokethrowaway »

__float wrote: post #7

At what point do we look to capitalism as a driving factor for misinformation spreading? Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published. Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.

It's not capitalism, is the lack of capitalism.

It's having a centralised government (which can be used to obtain a lot of power) that create an incentive for misinformation.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#65

Post by beaner »

darkerside wrote: post #55
beaner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, or, of course, the Post's original reporting has been more accurate.

Sounds like software with no bugs, if you ask me

Sure, but people mostly only say this when they don't like that the other guy has written better software.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#66

Post by luckylion »

chowchowchow wrote: post #57
luckylion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, of course. Just as Mercedes paying Chinese princelings millions doesn't prove that there's corruption in China.

Well there’s other evidence of that! And the trouble here is the evidence from the story is not verified (the FBI has not confirmed its HB’s laptop, has it? The screenshots of the Russian blackberry seem... dubious...). And that’s the sort of thing that most news organizations would gate reporting on. I do agree it’s a bit strange for Twitter to step in and try to apply editorial standards where NYP didn’t when they…

> And that’s the sort of thing that most news organizations would gate reporting on.

I don't think that's true. The Steele Dossier ("Trump pays Russian Hookers in Moscow to pee on him") wasn't treated special in any way, and it was much more questionable at the time than this story (where the unclear part is what they got for their bribes, not whether they payed his son for access to the VP). Of course, one argument might be "we've learned from our mistakes", but I believe that's a bit too obvious.

> I dunno; there’s an interesting discussion here if you can tone down the fire in your belly about conspiracies.

I don't think it needs a conspiracy theory, the coordination was very public. That there's political corruption in the US is also not news, it's the reason why children of politicians are making giant sums of money, politicians being paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech etc. That's normal, there's not much to be found, I believe.

Discussion of the suppression is not encouraged here: even a story about the suppression of the story was pretty much immediately suppressed on HN.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#67

Post by akvadrako »

joejohnson wrote: post #63
dragonwriter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal. Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma... It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-d…

It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism. But left and right political spectrum and the corresponding terms have meaning outside of the limited political window of centre-right US mainstream discussion.

They don't have meaning in terms of "liberal media" vs "left media" though, at least how the poster you replied to was using the term.

It doesn't do any good to introduce jargon to people who are unfamiliar with it without defining your terms.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#68

Post by tracer4201 »

missedthecue wrote: post #33
tracer4201 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liberal wing was upset that state and non state actors influenced the 2016 election by manipulating social media. Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will. I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal. Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write what…

Should T Mobile or Verizon be able to censor your phone calls and text messages if they don't like the content? After all, they're private companies as well.

I would say yes. If they censor my calls, I would switch providers. But more importantly, if we as a country believe that’s wrong, we should pass legislation

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#69

Post by barrkel »

PaulAJ wrote: post #38
darkerside wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions. We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more m…

The truth is not a social construct. Either Hunter Biden received that "thanks for the meeting with your father" email or he didn't. Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view. The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.

The accepted narrative is a social construct, and most people's understanding of the truth is closer to a narrative than a series of facts.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

joejohnson wrote: post #63
dragonwriter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal. Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma... It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-d…

It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism. But left and right political spectrum and the corresponding terms have meaning outside of the limited political window of centre-right US mainstream discussion.

> It would seem the commenters on this site are mostly Americans

Probably.

> who don’t know that their two-party system only represents two flavors of pro-capitalist neoliberalism.

It's impossible to know something that isn't true. From about the late 1980s to sometime in 2016-2017 (the end was more sudden than the beginning), the dominant factions of both parties supported pro-capitalist neoliberalism, it's true, but each has had significant factions not focussed on that position the whole time, and the neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party has been weakening for most of the last decade or so, and the neoliberal faction of the Republican Party was overthrown for dominance by a party that, insofar as it has a coherent economic policy at all, would be more populist protectionist than neoliberal (if one is being generous; kleptocratic opportunist if one is less generous.) American political parties are much more diverse than is the case of parties in systems that is typical in either proportional or parliamentary systems (and, especially, systems with both PR and parliamentary systems.)

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