Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 596 posts

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#321

Post by takeda »

abnry wrote: post #287
TwoBit wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Russian involvement, but it was clearly a right wing attempt to meddle in the election to achieve a last minute bomb on their opponent like in 2016.

How the heck can an opposing party "meddle" in an election that the very party itself is contending in?

By fabricating a story to be released exactly on October 15 where there's not enough time to verify if it is true or not.

We are here on Hacker News, are you certain that a legally blind person in Delaware. would be the guy to fly to all the way from California to repair water damaged laptop? If you don't know how such repair looks like, I recommend you to search Luis Rosmann on YouTube (actually cool to watch anyway).

I initially thought that the repair maybe involved reinstalling windows or removing viruses (which you could get assistance from text to speech tooling), but it was a water damage.

Edit: https://youtu.be/DoiByFIPgK8?t=468

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#322

Post by dlp211 »

TwoBit wrote: post #220
rootsudo wrote: post #5

I agree, twitter suppression made the story bigger. The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions. Ironic, considering the founder of the NYPost and his opinions on market economies.

It may well have made the story bigger, but also it may have benefitted Joe Biden anyway due to (e.g.) the education many people got regarding this attempt at election meddling. The polls didn't seem to get significantly worse for Biden as this unfolded.

And why should it. According to the WSJ news side, Joe Biden had nothing to do with anything in that story.

If there was an actual story here, the DOJ and FBI are more than capable of launching an investigation. The NYTimes, WaPo, LaTimes, WSJ, would all have no issues reporting on this either through investigation or a leak from those former orgs.

And maybe in the past, this would have mattered, but don't be surprised when after 4 years of norm breaking and corruption, people don't care about this except those with a specific ideology.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#323

Post by chmod600 »

Was anyone besides me surprised that huge payouts to your family creating massive conflicts of interest are normal? And even acceptable for someone running for office?

In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#324

Post by googthrowaway42 »

jounker wrote: post #309
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made copies of the hard drive in the laptop? As a software engineer I can assure you that that it is very easy to make copies of a hard drive and I expect that a computer repair guy would know how. > He had been a senator in Delaware, but no longer lived there at the time. The Bidens have multiple houses in Delaware. There are many pictures leaked from Hunter's laptop that have Delaware in the geocode. If you wa…

The reporters at the New York Post thought the story was so dubious that they refused to be named in the byline, and the basic premise directly contradicts the historical (and easily verifiable) facts surrounding the Shokin’s removal.

The reporters who wrote the story were so skeptical of what they wrote they didn't add their names to their own story... that they themselves wrote.

That's pretty stupid and unlikely. More likely, people were concerned about the real world ramifications of having their names on the story (e.g. getting killed or harassed).

I understand that this is a talking point but use your brain.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#325

Post by pavlov »

jsu32 wrote: post #254
hackyhacky wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation. It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is ea…

It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on). I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.

You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity.

If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#326

Post by [deleted] »

hackyhacky wrote: post #188
kodah wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is something new, as Matt points out. Law enforcement, tech companies, and the news media are operating under on some type of cooperating agreement which is not transparent to users or the creators of content. In normal human society you know the binds that bond, this is a reasonable expectation, and an expectation that even been challenged in the law. As the law infinitely expands, who am I (as a co…

If your point is that the originators of the Biden story are shocked and confused that it's being suppressed in an opaque tech cooperating agreement, they shouldn't be: the story is being suppressed because it's at best illegally obtained data, and at worst deliberately falsified; and in either case, it's now being used by bad actors in an attempt to manipulate the results of the election. There's no mystery here: Tw…

[deleted]

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#327

Post by folleno00 »

dnautics wrote: post #313
mrfusion wrote: post #191

> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz

I have a lot of respect for Aaron swartz, but: > They have no constitution to answer to. Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so? > They’re not elected. Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has auth…

It says answer to, not follows

If the people demand they answer to it, it’s that or off with their heads, usually.

The hard part is getting people to demand they answer.

Lots of cool gadgets and the belief we’re making each other better to dispose of.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#328

Post by skinkestek »

dnautics wrote: post #313
mrfusion wrote: post #191

> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz

I have a lot of respect for Aaron swartz, but: > They have no constitution to answer to. Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so? > They’re not elected. Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has auth…

> Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution?

Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it.

Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance.

> What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?

Courts.

Also it affects politicians directly. There was a petition here to give a mountain on the Finnish border to the Finnish people. Many people advocated for this but in the end it was struck down because politicians aren't even allowed to give away land and they know it.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#329

Post by linuxhansl »

jsu32 wrote: post #273
linuxhansl wrote: post #267

Meh... Call me unimpressed. Twitter refrained from forwarding a story to which there is no factual basis. You can of course still read it with the New York Post if you so desire. That's all there is to it.

Was the story that the NY Post article was the result of Russian 'disinformation' based on facts? Because Twitter did nothing to stop that, not a fact check, not a block, nothing. Twitter was certain that 'story' was true, but the FBI (who said they have no evidence the Russians did it) was clueless? If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective…

> If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective bias this time around. Next time you may not be as lucky tho.

You may. I'm on no one's "side", though.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#330

Post by rantwasp »

chmod600 wrote: post #323

Was anyone besides me surprised that huge payouts to your family creating massive conflicts of interest are normal? And even acceptable for someone running for office? In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)

it depends. as a low level foot soldier definitely. the higher in rank you are the greater the odds that you can actually get away with it w/o being held accountable
Post reply on HN