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Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

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Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia definition of censorship: Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship What Facebook did fits the definit…

There is a difference between prevention and not amplifying. Facebook did the latter.

There is no effective difference. It is limiting distribution as much as restricting the number of newspapers the NY Times could sell. Or allowing free speech in a public square, but only allowing one person in at a time to hear the speech. Facebook didn't "not amplify it" they singled it out and suppressed it. They treated it differently, and negatively.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between prevention and not amplifying. Facebook did the latter.

There is no effective difference. It is limiting distribution as much as restricting the number of newspapers the NY Times could sell. Or allowing free speech in a public square, but only allowing one person in at a time to hear the speech. Facebook didn't "not amplify it" they singled it out and suppressed it. They treated it differently, and negatively.

But censorship isn't about treating something differently. They have no duty to be neutral. Censorship is about preventing a certain kind of speech. They did not do this.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#173
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After watching Lex Fridman’s interview with Zuckerberg, I kind of like him. I don’t care what the world thinks of him, from what I saw, he seems like a genuine and nice person. I like him. And it makes me question the demonization of him.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#174
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's NYT telling you it's real. They put it in the 27th paragraph of a low circulation article a year after the election. https://web.archive.org/web/20220826030459/https://www.nytim... >People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache o…

Did you see the word 'appears' there? What does authenticated means in this context? It may well mean 'the emails the times got are those emails' rather than 'the emails were truly between those parties,etc'

sounds to me like the parent is right, the NYtimes is obviously trying to hide the story and avoid using the word real although it s surely implied

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#175
post #12

This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other s…

not really censorship, just a regression to the old norms. mainstream media are biased to the politics of their owners. Same with facebook, it s a mainstream medium now

Zuck claims that he was duped , but lets take everything with a grain of salt

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Prove to me the laptop is real.

Look at any of the pictures of Hunter from it?

Or how some people found a backup of his phone and got videos of Hunter?

You probably never saw those because most of those are suppressed, too, but it's out there. Hunter misreads the scale with the 20g or so of white powder on it.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#177

Very odd that we can discuss Hunter Biden's laptop today but not Trump's affidavit. Don't tell me this comment thread is apolitical.

my take is that the threshold is "amount work the mods need to do to remove comments" . Doesnt really have to do with subject if the convo is not derailed.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prove to me the laptop is real.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... FBI has the laptop and only they can tell you. We know it contained real emails. There is enough evidence that I don't know what it would be besides real.

So the FBI has Hunter Biden's laptop and emails? And what? What is the crime exactly? I also have a laptop with emails on it. What is the proposed crime of Hunter Biden and if the FBI has evidence of a crime, why wasn't he charged?

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#179

Rogan kept putting words in his mouth. He kept insinuating that Facebook and the FBI talked specifically about the Hunter Biden laptop story, when Zuckerberg did not say that at all. Zuckerberg said the FBI warned them to be on high alert for propaganda. Facebook's judgment after that conversation was that the Hunter Biden laptop story fit that profile. As for the story itself, I don't know all of the ins or outs, bu…

> I don't know all of the ins or outs, but my understanding is that it doesn't amount to anything, and certainly nothing in comparison to the entanglements of the Trump family. This is a pretty astounding sentence, but I would let it go, except that I see this all the time. It reads like a dismissal of the importance of the story because there is nothing that matches the unique danger of "the Trump family". Is that f…

Joe Biden had been in the public eye for 50 years, releasing tax returns, etc. Hunter Biden was not running for office.

Perhaps it is possible that this laptop, at the time completely unverified, had some magic smoking gun to bring down a 50 year career, magically showing up in a random place 10 days before the election. But obviously the much, much more likely situation is that it was either fake or insignificant.

If it were my social network and I cared about my responsibility to society, I don’t see why not promoting this story is at all controversial. It isn’t like Facebook is the entire internet, people still were reading about it.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#180
post #161

Very odd that we can discuss Hunter Biden's laptop today but not Trump's affidavit. Don't tell me this comment thread is apolitical.

100% this. The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home, with probable intent to commit espionage against the United States , including disclosure of sensitive human intelligence assets ... And Hacker News has it's knickers in a knot because the FBI warned a social media company that the Hunter Biden story might be a Russian psyops campaign? Seriously people?

> The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home

No, he did not "hide" the documents. As a letter quoted in a recent article in Politico [1] shows, the documents were removed from the White House when the administrations changed on Jan. 20, 2021. Which means whoever was responsible for checking documents that were removed from the White House by the outgoing President and his staff screwed up. And now they're in CYA mode.

> with probable intent to commit espionage

You have no evidence whatever to back up this claim.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/26/trump-mar-a-lago-af...

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