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Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

seattletimes.com

41–50 of 139 posts

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#41
post #9

> The Post publicizes material obtained through hacking with caution, only after verifying its authenticity and ascertaining that there is news value in bringing such information to light. Sure you do. So let me just check here: Political purity as an employment requirement... Firing people for this is fine, right? What happens when the popular politics change? The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be…

I think criticizing people for running websites like “theholocaustisfake” is less like “attacking people for having bad thoughts” and a bit more like “attacking people for poisoning the well”.

Violating their expected privacy, fostering moralistic vigilante justice against them, and creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions -- that's "poisoning the well" in a far worse way.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> To me it is rather the demand that certain beliefs may not be questioned that enables things like fascists rising to power Holocaust is not a belief, it is a historical event that has already happened.

[flagged]

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#43
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am old enough to remember when a year ago, these same media companies censored the hunter Biden story falsely claiming it was Russian disinfo and result of hacking and thus didn't report it. Do you really believe this is about data breach and not about only political vendetta? The article is doing a lot of cheering if you read the article.

"After a scandal narrative [about Hunter Biden] failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

"failed to gain traction in the mainstream press" is an incredibly misleading way to relate what happened. The New York Post broke the story, and Twitter locked their account, ostensibly due to a "hacked materials" policy. But nobody ever actually thought that the materials were hacked.

The MSM first said they weren't covering the story because it was Russian disinformation. Later they tried to rewrite history so that the story had simply escaped notice at the time. That's all completely false. It was an ongoing scandal for weeks on Twitter that the NY Post was locked out, and other news outlets were getting hammered on a daily basis for refusing to cover the story.

So the story was successfully suppressed in the days leading up to the election. How'd it end up? The story was completely vindicated. It really was Hunter Biden's laptop, those really were his emails. They even had a witness who was a party to the email exchanges explaining who was who. Genuine story of great importance, buried.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#44
Let's get the facts straight:

- The Epik leak contains 15 million records [1], including scraped data of people who have never had any relation to Epik whatsoever.

- Epik has operated as a seemingly ordinary domain registrar since 2009, and controls over half a million domains [2]. Their rise to infamy over far right wing hosting did not occur until around 2018 [3]. Despite this, the leak contains their entire historical user database.

This is a case of doxxing millions of innocent people to expose a couple of assholes. The way I see it, if you celebrate this hack, you truly are a scumbag no better than any of the people behind "theholocaustisfake.com".

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#Epik

[2] https://www.domainstate.com/top-registrars.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)#Hosting_of_far-...

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#45
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I think it should be possible to discuss even the details of the holocaust Details of Holocaust are allowed to be discussed and are discussed regularly. Discussing details of holocaust and holocaust denier are two different things, turns out.

[flagged]

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Paradox of tolerance; the only way to have a tolerant society is to be intolerant of intolerance. You have to make that exception or you lose the entire thing. Very much a “sorry not sorry” about “cancel culture”.

Yeah that "paradox of tolerance" is just bullshit. You may as well admit that tolerance in general is not attainable.

I understand why you people want to censor other people. But don't claim you do it in the name of tolerance. It's all just a power game.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#47
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am old enough to remember when a year ago, these same media companies censored the hunter Biden story falsely claiming it was Russian disinfo and result of hacking and thus didn't report it. Do you really believe this is about data breach and not about only political vendetta? The article is doing a lot of cheering if you read the article.

"After a scandal narrative [about Hunter Biden] failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

Social media platforms literally were suppressing news of the story. That's literally, verifiably true, and the suppression was indeed a bigger scandal than the original story. All of the reasons other media outlets touted for not covering it, and social media touted for suppressing it, are obviously nonsense, as is clear by coverage of literally any other story based on leaked or hacked materials over the past 20 years, including this one.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#48
post #33

Oddly enough, my data is also in this set (thanks to HIBP I know about that...) - and also thanks to HIBP, I know the domain trader that made me appear in this dataset. It's unfortunate, as I'd consider myself "leftist".

That's one of the issues - the "far-right", depending on who is using the term, can range from someone advocating for genocide of anyone without blue eyes and blond hair, all the way to someone who says that Donald Trump wasn't that bad as a president.

or just having an account on a forum because they feel that blocking everyone with a different view doesn't help a single thing.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#49

> The Post publicizes material obtained through hacking with caution, only after verifying its authenticity and ascertaining that there is news value in bringing such information to light. Sure you do. So let me just check here: Political purity as an employment requirement... Firing people for this is fine, right? What happens when the popular politics change? The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be…

>What happens when the popular politics change?

Either you're happy with them, or go to war. This isn't really a new problem.

Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret

#50

> The Post publicizes material obtained through hacking with caution, only after verifying its authenticity and ascertaining that there is news value in bringing such information to light. Sure you do. So let me just check here: Political purity as an employment requirement... Firing people for this is fine, right? What happens when the popular politics change? The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be…

It's been the case for a very long time that a sufficiently offensive political opinion would get you fired if brought to the attention of your boss. I think the difference between "business as usual" and McCarthyism or the current purges is how much more effort people are willing to put in to dig up dirt, and how much less offensive the dirt has to be.

That being said, the examples given in the article aren't very sympathetic. Back in 2013, Donglegate[0] was absolutely baffling for me, because I wasn't aware anyone could get fired for an overheard dick joke. Getting fired for running an actual Holocaust denial site seems fine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667

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