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 the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action.
The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting.
I agree they blundered here. They don't want to be hijacked by another "leaks" story days before the election but now the suppression of this has become the entire story, and its convinced a lot of people the story is true and dangerous to Biden. Even if the email is true I don't see how its dangerous and if the only media carrying the story are the NY Post and Fox it doesn't hurt Biden.
That's an angle I hadn't even considered, but I'm surprised Twitter didn't. SV social media companies, of all the organizations in the world, should understand the implications of a Streisanding.
If they had just left it alone, maybe attached the standard "this might be false" disclaimer, it would likely have passed as yet another partisan thing, but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
In the grand scheme of things, the Pandora's box Twitter and Facebook might have opened today seems minute next to the Pandora’s box the Bush administration opened after the 9-11 attacks, the homeland security and all.
I think after the election we will have completely forgotten about this conduct while we still have to live with the spying on innocent people, non-sense travel restriction, and human-rights violating immigration system for years to come.
Making a scene of this decision just seems like stirring a storm inside a teacup, all the while we are experiencing a hurricane from the patriot act.
We can't discuss human rights in absolute worldwide terms while looking at immigration systems, because there's no universally agreed set of human rights to discuss, as far as I know.
But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.
Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:
- The right of young children to be with their parents
- The right of spouses to be together and start a family
- The right to get married
- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation
- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine
- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter
- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)
- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else
- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised
- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
> because there's no universally agreed set of human rights to discuss
This statement might be technically true in legal terms (I am not a lawyer so I don’t know), but there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], ratified by all 193 members of the United Nations. That is a good place to start. Additionally the UN has more in depth declarations (e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child[2]; which my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them).
PS. I truly encourage everyone to read the Declaration of Human Rights[1] in their native language. It is such a beautiful read and gives you a sense of shared humanity. It is not that long, and has over 500 translations. In my native language the translation is really clear and easy to follow.
I agree with you, I think it's beautiful too. I'm a strong advocate for universal human rights - and for improving on the set of rights that we agree on.
> my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them
A fine example answer to "How does the immigration system violate human rights?"
not GP, but most immigration systems violate human rights all the time by treating people as if they were people without these rights - or not people at all. Most of the time the legal leeway is based upon them not being citizens (yet). What is the path to immigration in your country?
It begins with a legal dilemma: E.g. asylum is a human right, but how to determine who is eligible? In a timely manner that is. Especially if you have thousands of applicants and (almost) no documents. How do you house people in the meantime? What rights do they have?
Of course there's a right to freely cross borders. Borders are just imaginary lines on a map.
Just as any bird has the "right" to go wherever it wants and any other animal hat the right to go wherever it wants, I have the natural right to go wherever I want.
I'm a free human. As I'm born on this planet, it's my right to go wherever I want to go on this planet.
That governments want to take away that right of mine, that liberty, is just one example of how governments are using the tyranny of power to force people to their will.
That governments are just the thugs with the best weapons is just Realpolitik. This still doesn't invalidate my right to freely cross borders. I never signed away these rights.
Asylum is a human right, that doesn't mean everyone can successfully claim it!
It means everyone has a right to put in a claim to asylum and have it assessed properly by the authorities.
> There is no right to freely cross borders.
In some circumstances, yes there is.
If there's a war in country A, and non-combatants flee to neighbouring country B out of genuine necessity for safety, yes that border crossing is widely regarded as a human right.
Most countries do, although there is a difference between immigrant and refugee. Immigrant can be you Saudi Prince with billions in the bank. Somehow they never have problems of not being let in anywhere.
Immigrant have no right to just live in another country, refugees fleeing war have that right as long as the danger remains.
I’m not a historian but I would have thought that open borders were the norm not that long ago. I would guess that immigration restrictions wouldn’t have started to be commonplace until at least industrialization.
But regardless if that is right or not, siblings have pointed out that open borders are in fact common-place in many parts of the world today, e.g. EU and USA’s internal borders are open. And (as sibling has also pointed out) historic precedent or existing examples are not necessary to justify any belief. Abolishing slavery did not need a historic precedent, neither did gay rights, and theoretically neither does open borders.
Many of the immigration restrictions in america started around the time the first welfare programs were introduced. Before that, it was a bit of a free for all. I don't know if the same pattern holds anywhere else, but I'm suspicious that might not be a coincidence.
Isn't every human right without historical precedent at first, until it becomes established?
Doesn't that always happen step by step, with "early adopters" arguing on grounds of morality and other arguments, until eventually enough people start to believe something has a high moral value and should be raised to the level of a human right, enshrined in law?
Those who would argue for open borders as a human right are like "early adopters" of that idea.
World wide safety net: Open borders isn't the same thing as everyone having the same safety net in whichever destination they travel to. Though related, they are distinct issues that can exist independently.
That said a world wide safety net would be a good thing to advocate for on moral grounds, no?
The EU has open borders for all EU citizens, and for the most part it's faring ok. There has not been a Europe-wide social safety net crisis as a result of this freedom, and crucially for this argument: there isn't an EU wide social safety net. It has freedom of movement without a universal safety net.
The USA's states are effectively countries. All USA citizens have open borders to travel between states in the USA. For the most part, it's faring ok and there has not been a USA-wide social safety net crisis caused by this freedom either.
But I believe most participating countries in the EU have pretty strong social safety nets. And the US' social safety net system is at the federal level. How would a world safety net be financed?
>>but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
I don't know. I think the people that are going to believe these kinds of stories at face value would have found this story on their own regardless. It is not like the NY Post is some obscure paper. It may make this story stronger with those that are already inclined to believe this stuff.
I think by this time people have already made their decision on whom they are going to vote and they will use any story that agrees with their decision as proof that they are right.
What about the story should I not be taking at face value? I just read the email, seems pretty clearcut that the Burisma bigshot asked Hunter to "use your influence" to fight off the "general prosecutor". Ultimately Biden did get the prosecutor general fired by withholding foreign aid, and bragged about it on camera.
IIRC Trump was impeached for supposedly threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine unless they investigated this incident.
Well first off, is the email real? Even if it is real, do we know if Hunter Biden actually used "his influence"? What indications are there that Hunter Biden's supposed actions were critical to Shokin's firing anyway?
Several governments and other organizations were concerned because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma properly, having laid the investigation he inherited from his predecessor dormant. The demand to fire him wasn't something that Joe Biden came up with himself out of the blue, and at the end of the day it was most likely to Burisma's detriment.
It's not an impeachable offense to threaten to withhold foreign aid for valid reasons that further the interests of the United States. It was (and should be) an impeachable offense to illegally withhold aid that was already meant to have been delivered, and to do so for personal gain.
Not even the Biden campaign disputes the emails being real.
They just said they checked his calendar and could find no such meeting, then later backpedaled and said they couldn't discount the possibly that it happened and just wasn't on the official schedule.
Well let’s keep in mind Biden has denied any such interaction with Burisma, has denied any wrongdoing in his son’s appointment, has denied any implication of graft. Despite information that at least warrants some hard questioning. Now this comes out and Biden’s team has not denied its legitimacy. And this from a candidate who’s last bid for President tanked because of his own admitted lying and plagiarizing. Judge it how you like but I don’t think you can extend Biden a benefit of the doubt — quite the opposite should be the default position, probably for any politician.
So is this where he steps down and Harris steps up? Let’s be honest, upcoming elections are going to be 100% about Trump. It doesn’t matter who his opponent is. Attacking Biden is pointless, and Twitters reaction was self destructive blunder that will cost them no matter who wins in November
The part where a sloppily fabricated email was put onto a bogus laptop (probably by foreign intelligence agents), and then “coincidentally” made its way right back to Rudy Giuliani (who was at the time neck deep in the effort to extort a foreign leader into announcing a fake investigation into the same non-scandal, for which the President has already been impeached). Giuliani passed the emails via Steve Bannon (Trump’s former campaign manager and “Chief Strategist”, since indicted for mail fraud and money laundering) to a hack “journalist” (former Hannity producer) at the NY Post who did zero fact checking, because no credible journalist or news organization would ever touch such a flimsy story. Someone in the chain made a PDF of these fake emails a year ago but then sat on it, before releasing it in the last 3 weeks before an election, without releasing enough forensic evidence for any third party to do even the most basic check.
You want a real corruption scandal? How about the $10 million bribe paid to the Trump campaign by a state-owned Egyptian bank right before the 2016 election (and immediately after candidate Trump met privately with President Sisi). Which the DOJ never finished investigating because Trump-appointed officials instructed them not to. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donat...
None of the things you're describing have any effect on the plausibility of the story because they're all exactly what you would expect to happen either way. If a Trump supporter became aware of this sort of thing, he would bring it to someone like Giuliani, who would bring it to someone like Bannon and so on. Then they would sit on it until now because that's standard procedure in politics, because damaging information has more impact when released just before the election.
It tells you that the story is being maneuvered for political advantage, because obviously. It tells you nothing at all about whether or not it's true.
To anyone credulous enough to believe any part of this story, I have a bridge to sell you. You should probably stop watching Fox or reading Facebook and the NY Post for your “news”. These same characters have been selling various similar stories for the last 4+ years, and every one has turned out to be complete bullshit when given the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
What this story demonstrates more than anything is that Giuliani and Trump are getting pathetically desperate, because it is looking likely they will lose and both are facing significant criminal liability once they aren’t shielded by the Barr DOJ’s position that a GOP president enjoys absolute impunity and by the pardon power (which has already been corruptly used to let other Trump henchmen off the hook for crimes committed in his name).
Perhaps they did understand, or perhaps they do but the decision was made by someone who didn't.
If Twitter et al really want to be public resources they need transparency in their decision making and possibly independent oversight. If they want to just be regular businesses they need to take responsibility for the bullshit they propogate.
Straddling these two lanes hasn't been working for society and it seems like regulation or breakups are close to inevitable.
Clearly their partisan activism got the best of them. No longer can they merely label trump's tweets as misinfo, they have to start full-on censoring. They were probably trying to find a way to call this hate speech or racism to justify it.
I worked at a large media company and we held internal meetings essentially telling people how to vote. The media we promoted was aligned with this: all extreme left wing. It’s just as bad as trump. We’ve all lost.
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 long time ago.
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 increases shareholder value for Facebook? Because the way they went about this is another escalation. Nothing drives engagement like military engagements, right?
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.
It is a "bad faith" problem. Bad faith arguments are made on all sides of the political spectrum, but anecdotally, it feels like one side is a little more fact challenged and relies on them fairly heavily. And the amount of arguments being made in bad faith means it is often more productive to just ignore or dismiss the other sides arguments outright.
Here is a good example. Right wing media likes to point at the homelessness problem in CA and claim that that is proof that Democrats are bad at governing. The homeless issue is a fact, supported by data. And CA being a Democratic state is also a fact supported by data. But pointing to both those facts and claiming it as proof that Democrats==bad is a bad faith argument. Blue states have higher GDP, higher levels of education attainment, and lower poverty rates than red states. And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars. I could make a similarly bad faith argument, and point out that West Virginia has the highest number of opioid overdoses per capita, therefore Republicans==bad. But I don't need to do that because the statistics that most reasonable people would agree to use as an arbiter of state level success are already in agreement with my position.
As you can see from the length of the above paragraph. These bad faith arguments require a decent amount of effort and/or knowledge to effectively counter. So as we move into this post-fact world, can you really blame people for just sticking to the 'narratives'?
> anecdotally, it feels like one side is a little more fact challenged and relies on them fairly heavily.
This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Stephen Colbert's perception of reality has a known liberal bias.
> And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars.
But the overheated housing market is the criticism, and is completely valid. California is correctly criticized for letting housing costs get so bad that people who are making twice the US median income are nonetheless sleeping in their cars.
And California may be the worst, but it is actually a problem which is more severe in blue states than red states on average. Housing costs more in NYC than Austin, and more in Chicago than Charlotte, despite having a lower median income.
So sticking to the "narratives" doesn't get you there. It causes you to ignore the problems in your own back yard. You have to look at the facts, even when they're inconvenient, and admit it when it's your team making a mistake.
> This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.
However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
> When half the country disagrees with the other half
Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.
There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.
There is a distinct anti-correlation between the people who think CNN is full of liars and the people who think Fox is full of liars. The truth is that they both are, but that is the real minority opinion.
And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
> And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
That's not a thing I said.
I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.
Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.
> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.
But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
My point is that from the perspective of someone outside of both tribes, there's no reason why one has to accept the conclusion that each of those tribes is equally enlightened or ignorant. I realize of course that they disagree with each other on a number of issues, but... so what? I'm not evaluating them as a member.
To a member of one of the tribes, that tribe's beliefs are obviously the correct ones. To an outside observer, you have to evaluate the individual beliefs.
Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.
School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.
Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.
You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.
Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.
I'm not even talking about policy. I'm talking about basic factual matters.
Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.
This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.
I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.
What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.
You're supplying an instance of Republicans denying reality, but nobody was claiming that they never did that.
The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.
Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.
No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:
"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."
There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.
It’s less dramatic than you might think. For example, both Republicans (82%) and Democrats (91%) trust scientists: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mis... (Even that question is politically loaded. “Science” is a spectrum, and as the reproducibility crisis shows, they’re often wrong. Conservatives by definition are more likely to be skeptical of people who say they have new insights into age-old problems, while liberals are by definition always looking for new approaches and don’t mind much when they don’t pan out. So this 10 point gap isn’t either bad or good, necessarily.)
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow.
I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.
The IPCC report received plenty of criticism. The report summary left out some of the more alarming findings [1] (which were conveniently not addressed in your reason article) and there was valid criticism about the consensus model that was used[2].
In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
The large uncertainties in climate modeling have only been getting smaller, as we've made progress on estimating cloud feedback lately. Fundamentally, there is a lot of guesswork (aka parameterizations) but these are all tuned with as much data as we can get. Projections made in 1980 and 1990 have been pretty accurate so far, and show the warming world we live in now, so it should count for something.
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
I think it's telling that conservatives seem to have shifted from sowing doubt regarding the very existence of climate change to now "there's no point, it's already too late!". The primary goal of status-quo remains.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
Homeless is not a weird metric to use. It's absolutely a failure of government in the worst possible way. Democrats deserve all the criticism in the world for tolerating that situation.
Still, you're correct that there is bad faith: the bad faith is that Republicans care about homelessness, which they generally do not either.
Democrats deserve criticism for the failures of Democratic-controlled governments, and Republicans deserve criticism for the failures of Republican-controlled governments. In my opinion, they're both bad. Are they "equally bad"? Maybe not, but I won't accept that homelessness is a weird metric. There's a lot of bad faith is ignoring one's own faults.
I think people need to come to terms with the fact that the USA isn’t immutable and no government lasts forever. A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
There might be something like a civil war, but it won't look anything at all like the last one. Don't look for two armies marching on fields against each other. Do look for dozens of shadowy groups practicing guerilla warfare against each other and the state, with actions gradually escalating in intensity.
You can make a pretty decent argument that this is already happening.
Can't wait for the 2AM knock on my door, and finding an armed group on my front porch demanding to know how I voted in the last election (I'm surprised people are still putting campaign signs on their lawns or stickers on their cars).
Oh yeah. More likely they'd come based on you going to an event they don't like, or having a hobby they don't like. And they probably won't be interested in any claims that you weren't there or didn't do that or aren't who they're looking for.
Actual police mostly have better procedures for this sort of thing, but still sometimes get the wrong guy or go to the wrong address. Somehow I doubt such groups will do better than them.
From an external position, I'd say theoretically yes. It is enough when a political rift goes through society and also the military. This rift could lead to failure of command coehesion, split of the military and ultimately infighting.
Which could, if you ask me, be a risk in case trump wins but it is rather clear that the election was fradulent (not saying it will be, but let's assume for the arguments sake it was). In which case the military would have to decide which "president" to follow, or to follow congress, or the senate, or someone else. Which could tear the military appart, let alone to speak of the national guard.
As a former Army officer, I completely agree with the CJCS recent statement that the military will play no role in the election process.
Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).
As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
I was affraid that people with actual US military experience would share that sentiment. Also the international impact that would have. just thinking about a situation in which the US military would have any real role in who the next President will be gives me the chills. And it kind of would force every country with a US military presence to basically pick a side. Scary thought.
I just hope that the outcome will be chrystal clear, hopefully democrat. And that if it is not unit cohesion is strong enough to prevent the US forces from falling apart.
I agree on those firmly in either camp. But there is a big chunk of voters who aren't firmly in either camp. That's why you have Bush Jr. winning some years, Obama others and then Trump.
I'm curious why didn't they just choose to shadow block it or de-prioritize it on the newsfeed? It would achieve the same thing w/o discretely taking a side.
Maybe because I suggested Facebook and Twitter are concerned with the news hurting Biden. A better way to phrase would be - "is the story consequential to the election". I think it was not until they took this action, and it is a very strange hill to die on.
Eh, I don't think it's going to have the impact you think it will.
The major criticism for S230 is that social media companies are rampant with fake news, and not doing enough to combat misinformation. If anything, it gives FB and Twitter a defense against an accusation of spreading political misinformation.
The only thing that terrifies me more than Trump is the number of my tech industry colleagues who seem to think we can and should abuse our power to shape public discourse.
You already do, don't you? Social Media created an algorithm based add industry that was and is easily highjacked for bad-faith propaganda purposes. A system that at its core is designed to exploit human psychology in ways and scales we never saw before. You cannot create such things, keep them under your control and just ignore the consequences.
The only way Facebook has to not "use its power to shape public discourse" is to turn itself off. Having the platform up shapes the discourse. Algorithmic timelines shape the discourse. Adverts, whether political or not, shape the discourse.
Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
That was a specific reference to a famous speech of Orson Welles in The Third Man:
> You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> In Italy under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed and warfare. And they produced indigestible noodles, boring operas and the FIAT. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world and Heidi!
Being a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views is an oxymoron. Defending free speech by definition means defending people's right to say things you disagree with. If you only defend people's right to agree with you then you're not a free speech advocate.
I think that's precisely what they're saying: a lot of people talk about "free speech" because free speech benefits them. When you're in a dominant position, free speech doesn't threaten you. Or at least, you think it doesn't.
Few free speech advocates think you should be free to call for violence. That's free speech that does threaten them. Speech that calls for discrimination against groups they don't belong to, however, is perfectly fine -- they know that they're too important to be threatened by it.
So practically all self-described free speech advocates do put limits on free speech, and there aren't any True Scotsmen.
That's a very cynical take. You don't need to have your own speech rights threatened to care about free speech, and many, many people are capable of defending free speech even if their own views aren't being "suppresed".
My political opinions are reasonably mainstream, but I'll happily defend the free speech rights of groups I disagree with (e.g. pro-lifers.)
Was the NY Post article actually filled with disinformation?
If the roles were reversed and a similar story came out about Trump and his son, would Twitter and Facebook have taken it down as part of a misinformation campaign?
> Was the NY Post article actually filled with disinformation?
Yes.
Parroting Russian disinformation during an election campaign because your owners don't like the politics of said disinformation target should be removed.
There needs to be more censorship on FB and YouTube which are in addition to Fox News doing WAY more damage to the United States than any foreign terrorists could ever dream.
> There was no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails that the Post obtained, but its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at the 2020 election.
So the only proof that it comes from Russia is basically "that's the kind of thing the Russians would do." Aren't you spreading disinformation yourself by claiming that it is Russian disinformation?
This has been repeatedly debunked. Crowdstrike, who was hired for the security audit, states very explicitly that their IR team had proof that COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR had breached the network.[0]
> To reference, CrowdStrike’s account of their DNC investigation, published on June 14, 2016, “CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR…. At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016.”
There were extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Even the (bipartisan) Senate report on this states that much. There is nothing nonsense about it.
No, the intelligence agencies already have said this is a Russian disinfo campaign and the Post should be mocked and shunned for knowingly propagating it.
YouTube has spent the summer censoring doctors because their views didn't match the WHO. The WHO has changed its own views so much that it's now contradicted itself many times, showing how terribly naive Google's policies are on this. Google never used to be naive, but clearly, times have changed.
The real problem is that YouTube inexplicably chose to base its public health "ground truth" on WHO guidelines, when as a US company their appropriate source would have been the CDC. The two were often in conflict, particularly with regard to civilian usage of masks.
The WHO spent a lot of time being wrong -- or, at best, confusing -- and a lot of people got sick unnecessarily as a result.
No. If there is damage done to United States, then it happens with the hands of people who suggest that undermining US tradition ( and constitution ) is the way to go. The will of the people to accept an invisible tyrant, who will allow only acceptable thoughts and punish wrongthink is terrifying and those clamor for it do more damage than any foreign terrorist could dream of.
Twitter, FB et al made a mistake ( calculated or otherwise ) and it is now hard to argue in good faith that tech companies are neutral arbiters.
To address your specific claim, if you showed me, say, RT post prior to yesterday that said what NY post posted, you would have a point. Instead, you have claims from Biden campaign staff and thanks to FB, Twitter, you now have a perceived bias in tech community that diminishes credibility of all those publications.
The fact that you seem to suggest that more like bias is needed, is, and I put it mildly, counter productive.
The story is already in full swing streisand effect mode.
No, there does not need to be more censorship.
You should realize by now the Russian boogeyman narrative has no power anymore.
Not everything that favors Trump is a Russian initiative. Far from it.
Their coverage in the lead up to the Iraq Invasion did more damage to this country, Her military, and the rest of the world than some mean tweets or made up BS about Russia. Should we ban the NYT, too?
If the roles were reversed, the story would be on the lead story of every major left-leaning media outlet (which is all of them except Fox) in the nation for days: CNN, Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, USA Today, Reuters, AP; all of them would carry it non-stop and beat it to death, covering every possible aspect and angle. Which is what they do any time there has been a hint of a story against Trump in the past four years.
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists and fake journalists completely in bed with the Democrats and very willing to conspire to throw an election and commit election interference.
The barely existent election interference by the Russians is trivial compared to what big tech is doing out in the open (hell, they're practically bragging about it at this point it's so brazen).
Several executives at big tech need to be put in prison for election interference. Start with Dorsey.
People are amazingly biased, perhaps dishonest, when it comes to this. Of course the same media that propagated the Russia hoax(among others) would behave totally different if the roles were reversed. The fact that they all have acted in unison, and along with social media's draconian measures, only suggests that there's actual merit to the story.
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists
Yeah, I remember when the editor-in-chief at WaPo settled a Federal suit for $20M to avoid facing charges for his role in running a fraudulent university. Good times. Then there was the NYT board member whose namesake cancer charity foundation was shut down by the state attorney general's office because it turned out to be a front for his own business and political interests. What a con artist, huh. Not to forget the time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee stiffed his contractors for $70 million on a casino project that later went bankrupt. There oughta be a law.
I especially like how I'm guilty of an ad-hominem fallacy, while the person calling their opponents "con artists" while citing no evidence whatsoever wasn't.
I'm simply pointing out your argument was cognitive dissonance and completely ineffective.
I'm sure you could engage with it directly and without fallacy, you're obviously bright, but your replies were very low-brow ad hominem and tu quoque.
PS I don't invest "moral authority" in almost any leading politician today, though I certainly rank Biden higher than Trump in the "personal morality" stakes.
Yes, they were. The PDFs with the emails were created long after the laptop was allegedly dropped off and abandoned, and the tech store owner claims they only copied the hard drive. This is on top of obvious formatting errors and the removal of the email headers.
Companies which spend millions on counsel every year are not going to blunder. They either have anterior motives (boost the story through censorship) or they had no choice.
I don’t know what to think anymore because I don’t understand how this censorship will have any effect other than causing the story to spread like fire.
I would not characterize this story as speech but as carefully designed viral marketing content. If one is in the business of attracting people speaking with each other and selling that access to companies and political parties then dealing with viral content intended to undermine your sales is a continuous struggle. This one was deemed over the line and a case of potentially Russian disinformation laundering.
When looking at the legalities keep in mind that these companies have been explicitly warned by the F.B.I. of such possibilities and have spent time combing through their own databases and have identified such events.
> I would not characterize this story as speech but as carefully designed viral marketing content.
God. I’m on the Left, but can you all not see the blatant paternalism behind stances like this? It’s a pretty explicit: “we know best, don’t worry your pretty little head about this misleading content, we will take care of it”
Various tweets from affected people, including screenshots, were all over last night. This isn't new, though. When Twitter blocks a URL, it applies even to DMs.
Didn't Twitter and Google already stated they want regulation? They are one of the few companies that actually can facilitate any form of large scale content scanning. Such mechanisms take years to develop if you even get the critical data needed.
Saying you want regulation is a classic of DC lobbying. Exxon wants “regulation” too. What it means in practice is that they want to be part of the conversation in choosing what regulations get passed, so actual serious regulations don’t make their way through.
> 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
The GOP is prioritizing § 230 reform. Given their likely fall from power and prioritization of the SCOTUS confirmation, as well as Democrat control of the House and its focus on stimulus bills, the short-term threat is minute.
From an amoral government relations perspective, heavier moderation makes sense. A Biden spoof going viral during the election would attract the attention of incoming Democrat legislators. That creates a medium-term threat where there isn't one.
That said, I'm surprised they chose to block the content over de-prioritise it algorithmically and flag it with a warning.
I'm curious why you seem so confident in a widespread democratic victory when the republicans did so well in 2016?
EDIT: for those unaware, not only did the republican party take control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2016. They also made big gains in state elections. In fact, the republican party had a 'trifecta' (house, senate, and executive) in 25/50 states. It was a very significant shift in power: https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016
> why you seem so confident in a widespread democratic victory
I’m not. The above analysis only depends on a lack of confidence in a GOP trifecta. That’s the only case where pissing them off could result in unilateral action and thus consequences for these moves.
The party that is "behind" always does well in the mid terms, this is a very well documentes phenomenon. In fact, I think the Dems did much worse in 2018 than expected
By 'expected' I don't mean the models where wrong, I mean the country is on fire and the Democratic party could/should have run away with the election. Instead they lost seats in the senate and did not gain back all the ground they lost in the state governments.
For comparison, the Republicans did very well in the 2014 mid term, convincingly taking over both houses of congress.
The democratic party had every advantage for a convincing win in 2018 and they instead had a very poor showing. The party is not good at elections and I don't see a reason why we expect this election to be different.
The senate stayed red because there were basically zero unsafe red seats open and lots of unsafe blue seats open. If, by coincidence, zero republicans were up for reelection in the senate it would be impossible for the dems to gain seats even in the biggest wave possible. Any analysis which ignores this issue is just foolish.
They did well in the House, but lost seats in the Senate. Midterm elections are an imperfect signal, like you're suggesting, but it's not true that the democrats won a landslide or something in 2018.
No. It is a good datapoint that one should consider the seats in play when making claims about the senate. The map this time is much less unfavorable for the Democrats.
Many polls are showing a Biden win is above 80% probability, the House is solidly Dem, and a possible sweep in the Senate. Make of that what you will.
Its a fair point that polls missed in 2016. 2020 has kicked the hornet’s nest (rather, the last four years), voter turnout appears to be higher than previous years, and I’d bet an expensive bottle of bourbon current polls align close to what results will be (with modeling lessons learned from 2016).
Tangentially, quite a few Trump voters have simply aged out over the last four years (roughly 1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die each year). Broadly speaking, much older voters skew conservative compared to younger cohorts (per Pew Research), hence the confidence in a shift towards the left across branches in government representation during this election cycle. GOP support is quite literally dying out.
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-despai...). As long as prospects for women continue to increase (education and earning potential), and the data shows well off educated women prefer a partner on equal footing, conservative birth rates will eventually converge with that of other ideologies (this can be inferred from the total fertility rate trend for religious vs non religious women of childbearing age).
While your point about ideology drift over time has some merit, I don’t believe it to be significant enough to materially consider.
“Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.”
>Many polls are showing a Biden win is above 80% probability, the House is solidly Dem, and a possible sweep in the Senate. Make of that what you will.
I'd point out that it's not the polls that are predicting such things. Rather it's people who are interpreting those polls.
Polls are just a snapshot of opinion in time. They are useful and can provide information about public opinion, but they certainly aren't predictive in the way you're stating.
Making predictions like "Biden is 80% likely to win" is a guess. Possibly based on polling data, but are not a poll.
A poll reporting[0] that the respondents of that poll prefer one candidate over another is not a prediction, rather it's data.
The polls are way off because they oversample democrats, which can be seen when you start looking at results by counties.
Some rural counties that are know to be republican strong holds by a huge margin are favouring Biden by ridiculous amounts. Its not going to happen. Its obviously an error, and the accumulation of these errors are the final polls.
(Source https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YqKDpqkYBOKV)
Its true that the democrats are winning the early mail in voting.
But since republicans don't trust mail in voting, as Trump told them to vote in person. They will come out on election night, by a large margin.
“Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.
More than 26 million people had voted as of Saturday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. That's more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016.”
Young voters outnumber older voters, but this is mutually exclusive from an aging populace and a declining birth rate. You can chalk it up to population momentum and previously higher levels of immigration. It does mean Millennials will hold on to their electorate influence longer though.
GOP is talking big about Section 230 reform, but it is absurd on its face.
Prior to Section 230, if you censor ANY content (say, child pornography) then you are "moderating" the discussion and are liable for ALL content. If Twitter deletes a death threat tweet, why didn't they delete the defamatory tweet against Hunter Biden or whomever? Biden could sue. So Section 230 allows websites to delete the kiddie porn without becoming a "publisher" of everything that gets posted. Biden can sue the poster but not Twitter.
Reforming (weakening) 230 would force Facebook, Twitter, etc. to choose between allowing all content, and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit. Of course Facebook and Twitter are not going to become an 8chan free-for-all, so they would be forced to crack down harder, censoring much more aggressively.
Also far-right sites (e.g. InfoWars) very much do not want increased liability here.
So "230 reform" is a useful rallying cry for conservatives who feel censored (rightly or wrongly) by social media giants, but the idea is so obviously bad that I can't imagine they'll go beyond minor tweaks.
> and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit.
Almost. That is the situation it would create for small venues like Hacker News-- extreme liability issues and heavy handed moves to mitigate them (if not just a shutdown as would probably be the case for many non-for-profit venues).
But Facebook, Google? These multibillion dollar companies have very little to fear from a lawsuit by the likes of me or you.
They could just staff up their legal team and work anyone who sues them into bankruptcy-- they already do. It isn't like litigation against parties for content they post in the US is easy to begin with even when you're not going after a 900 lb guerilla.
It would be bad news for them but ultimately just a cost of doing business. It might even ultimately be the best for their businesses as the ability to endure lawsuits would be one hell of a moat.
This is has the right idea. Both politicians and tech companies are in on it. Politicians get to silence people and control the narrative. Tech companies turn into publishing houses and now have a moat (moderation and legal costs, political connections).
I have figured it out why this move was done despite being stupidly obvious. It is done to provide cover for the next thing Section 230 repealed. Section 230 provides immunity for website publishers from third party content. By repealing section 230, big social media tech gets an even larger monopoly but that's not the reason why this happened. There are lot of people on these social media platforms who are behind the scenes worker type of people. They know how things work and run their mouth freely. Somebody predicted Kamala Harris as VP 1 and 1/2 years out. The politicians can't risk losing control.
hacker news shouldn’t be allowed to censor legitimate information or dissenting political opinions, which is what is covered by the 1st amendment. It doesn’t mean you can literally say whatever you want, e.g. flood sites with spam.
No. Congress makes a law that declares the right to free speech to be a civil right. Judges would naturally step in when there is a contested violation of that right, as they currently do in all civil rights disputes .
I agree with you in principle, however in practice this has been hijacked to spread misinformation with potentially deadly results. This is a very nuanced issue IMO and the answers are not trivial.
I believe in the protection of civil rights, but I also believe in the devastating effects of misinformation. We need to find a way to protect against the latter while affecting very little the former, but we're just not there yet.
What devastating effects of misinformation are you referring to? I see no devastating effects of misinformation at all. Your negative worldview is not a reason to allow the civil rights of others to be violated.
If you’re being sincere that’s a false characterization of the freedom of speech. It is not the ability to say whatever you want but it is the ability to share legitimate information or dissenting opinions, the former being the topic of OP. Employers should not be able to deny people their rights.
Employers fire people all the time for comments on social media and they are well within their right to do so. Any suggestion otherwise is a violation of the company's freedom of speech.
Employers have just the same rights. Take the case of an owner with one employee.
If I own my own business and I'm the only employee, let's say a plumbing business. For years I did my own work, own accounting, own taxes, etc. I decide to add an apprentice who I hire in full time. This apprentice starts evangelizing his political views while on jobs. This turns off customers and doesn't agree with my political views. I don't want my employee to do this. It is not my point of view and it's affecting business. Now in your world, I can't fire this person, or tell him to stop. But by not being allowed to fire this person, and allowing his speech to continue via my company, the government is forcing me and my property to endorse his speech. Why stop there? Why can't I put a Trump sign in my neighbors yard?
Now we're in a contradiction. Who's right to speech matters more in a private setting? Typically the owner of said private setting. By and large, this is true. Does this lead to sticky situations where people are profiled racially? Yes. But I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
Do you think it making it legal for an employee to bark racist words towards their minority colleagues all day at work is a good idea? Because under your free speech rule, that would be OK. Oh look, another contradiction. In any case, we have laws for these scenarios that are largely constitutional because the constitution largely ignores these private settings, thus it is up to us to legislate, hence we have laws on discrimination.
There is no contradiction except in the black and white strawman that you’re projecting. As all debates around civil rights, there is a reasonable middle ground that maximizes everyone’s freedom while minimizing the amount of restriction.
In “my world” where free speech is protected as a civil right, you would be allowed to fire an employee who is using his position to evangelize instead of doing his job. In my world the employee is simply protected from being fired for having a dissenting view when sharing their view in a forum where that would be otherwise appropriate. Or people cannot be censored on social networks for sharing inconvenient truths to any political side.
We already have laws that restrict discrimination in the workplace, setting it up so that protecting free speech in the work place necessarily contradicts that is either intentionally dishonest or an unintentional demonstration of lack of imagination.
The reality is that it’s possible and moral to legislate the protection of free speech civil rights without harmfully violating the employers’ rights. You just don’t believe in free speech civil rights.
> Employers should not be able to deny people their rights
Freedom of speech means the government will not target you for expressing your opinion. It does not mean that your employer has to tolerate it. If I write an op-ed about how my employer makes a shoddy product, they are well within their legal rights to conduct their business how they see fit and terminate their business relationship with me. You seem to confuse freedom of speech with freedom from consequence of speech.
Yes this is why my OP is about making freedom of speech a civil right and extending its protections to private entities. Similar to how anti-discrimination protections are currently extended to private entities.
Free speech is already a civil right. You are not talking about free speech. So employees would not be allowed to quit working for an employer because that employer used their free speech to support a position they were morally opposed to? Anti-discrimination laws almost exclusively protect who you are i.e. race, gender, nationality, religion, physical ability. Free speech is about the viewpoints you choose to express and the actions you choose to take. You have the freedom to speak and act how you choose, but I also have the freedom hear you and choose how I interact with you or choose not to at all. You can’t legislate that person A is free to speak but person B is not free to react to that speech, as you are restricting the basic freedom of person B. Of course, when B uses their speech and A is not free to react, you are now restricting everyone’s freedom and everyone loses their freedom. As opposed to not legislating the speech or the reactions to that speech and individuals have the freedom to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
I dont understand the shock.Just 4 years a staffer suspended Donald Trumps account and was considered a hero.
So it is not at all surprising that twitter does this sort of policing.
Have it removed so no other company can get to their scale? We have to always have a way to defer liability to the user who posted the content.
If a website is always responsible for whatever the users post you won't have much of a free internet anymore. However I think the issue with FB and Twitter is that they haven't had any repercussions for breaking the law in the first place.
If you violate rules, you will be banned. They were found to be violating rules, but were treated leniently compared to lower profile users who distribute illegal materials.
This is not new. You will be censored or banned on Hacker News for not following rules. You will not see the distribution of the NY Post's material on this site.
I applaud them for enforcing rules, but not for being lenient with these actors. Free Speech has limits especially in someone elses' house, you should all know this.
Furthermore Reform Section 230 is political crap going nowhere. Any invokation of that here is political nonsense.
There won't be legislative blow back, the GOP is days away from being wholesale evicted from controlling anything at all in DC.
As a legislative move, this is changing their bet to the horse that's about to win. The social media companies are clearly more afraid longterm of what happens if they let this kind of stunt spread than they are afraid of the lame duck.
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 out.
And I’m not sure if we’re remembering the same 2016 election. We’re both talking about the same election, that resulted in the largest win for an American political party in history, right? 2016 was absolutely horrendous for conservatives and their saving grace was the senate cycle was particularly bad for democrats. If there’s a similar performance this election there’s a good chance that they take both branches.
> Democrats haven’t been raising 230 regulation though
They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
Arguably, anti-trust breakup of major tech companies would be much more destructive to those tech companies, than merely removing some tech companies ability to moderate content.
> They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
My comment that you replied to says that democrats in the house have been bringing up anti-trust concerns. Anti-trust and 230 regulation are two separate things done for different reasons. They are not equivalent actions nor do are they being pursued out of the same concerns. Trying to conflate them is wrong.
Is it really your opinion that the richest and most powerful industry in the world has no ability to defend itself? And that we need to fight back and encourage monopoly and stifle competition?
And sorry, they are still not conflatable - you’re still trying to create a false equivalence. They are not the same thing, the desire here to misrepresent facts to fit into a narrative is intellectually dishonest.
Well, in the legislative bodies, they have much less ability to defend itself, than in the past, due to both parties having significant, albeit different, problems with these companies.
> trying to create a false equivalence.
They are equivalent in the specific aspect of them having less allies in congress, and that this makes them more vulnerable than in the past.
IE, less people in our legislative bodies will be willing to stick their neck out to defend them.
> to fit into a narrative
It is absolutely accurate to say that these companies have less allies in congress, than in the past, and that being hit, from both sides, on these 2 issues, hurts these companies.
I can promise you that the major tech companies have no shortage of people in Washington preaching the benefits their companies provide. I wouldn’t say they have less allies than I would say that people don’t use the same rose-tinted glasses when it comes to these companies and their effects on the markets they participate in. It’d be perverse to have a congress that allows what it sees as monopolistic behavior just because their friends are the ones profiting from it.
The only people who expected democrats to defend monopolies because they were ‘friends’ has either a very cynical or naive view of the influence of business on the Democratic Party, and very little historical perspective.
Arguments that would essentially allow monopolistic behavior has pretty much always been firmly inside republican laissez-faire circles, and those allies are still very much there. Railing against tech elites may play great for tv, but let’s be honest - Peter Thiel, strong advocate of monopoly, still spoke at the Republican national convention. There’s a good reason they overruled fact-checkers when conservatives violated their prescribed rules, they know where their bread is buttered.
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.
Democrats’ victory will be built on purple House seats, COVID blowback, and suburban women and seniors getting cold on Trump. That’s not going to last forever. The “demographic destiny” thing is looking increasingly dubious as Trump continues to outperform expectations among Latinos, even after, well, four years of Trump and COVID and everything. Meanwhile, there is no bench of strong moderates behind Biden. Republicans will be back in office sooner than folks think.
Nonwhite Democrats are culturally far more conservative than white progressives on every issue except for racial issues. This will come to bite Democrats in a big way probably, as I’m almost sure the republicans will sooner or later nominate a nonwhite candidate (Nikki Haley??) and Democrats won’t get the ‘demographic’ vote they were hoping for.
There's research suggesting it's not this simple, and that Black voting is highly coordinated and communitarian. Already, we have strong indicators that most voting is about personal identification and not about fitting candidates to a personal ideological profile (Achen and Bartels). Combine that with White And Laird's observations about the dynamics of Black voting (heavily identified with the Democratic party, and with an awareness of the influence in the party their bloc voting gets them), and I don't think you can just run a Black Republican and peel off that cohort of Democratic voters.
What's more likely to happen is that the progressive dream of celebrity politicians in places like NYC will run aground of what the party is actually game for, because, as you observe, huge portions of the Democratic coalition are far more conservative than the Take Factory gives them credit for.
> In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
Trump has plumbed the bottom of the non-white vote. The protests rankled many Latinos. In recent YouGov polling, a narrow majority of Latinos rated “the breakdown of law and order” as a “bigger problem” then “systemic racism.”
> The data collected from April 2-May 13 by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, an initiative that conducted weekly surveys of thousands of potential voters for nearly a year, found that 29% of percent of black voters ages 30-44 and 21% ages 18-29 have a "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" view of President Trump. This compares to just 14% of black voters 45-64 and 9% of those 65 and older.
It’s not going to be Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. But Democrats shouldn’t be popping champagne corks assuming that the opposing party will never be in power again.
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.
It wouldn’t prove they were authentic. It would just prove they were sent through gmail’s servers. If you trusted gmail then it would prove the username, time and content was legitimate.
All it looks like to me is some Russian username. I don’t see how it ties to a real person. I haven’t read the article so maybe the post explains that bit.
It could prove it was sent through gmails servers on April 17, 2015. There aren’t many people who would know the importance of the meeting five years ago. It would narrow the list of possible senders.
That information would still be meaningless unless we could prove that this e-mail is authentic. `v.pozharskyi.ukraine@gmail.com` - why would an Ukrainian citizen have "ukraine" in their e-mail address?
There are so many other red flags (in addition whether this e-mail was really send, and the account belongs to that person) for example if Hunter responded to it (if they had his laptop surely they could get that from outbox? Why somebody who cares enough about their laptop to get it to repair (if you have plenty of money, more likely you'll get a new one) not care about getting it back?
This would prove that gmail indeed sent the e-mail, but it wouldn't prove that the e-mail wasn't created few minutes earlier.
It would be immediately obvious if they were a poor quality fake though. Like if someone typed it up in Word and exported it to PDF they wouldn’t be able to produce the DKIM signature.
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.
There are historical DNS data vendors, as there are historical WHOIS data vendors. Also, Google would almost certainly respond to a journalistic inquiry about a cryptographic signature. Follow-up of this kind is what we should expect from journalists.
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.
Is it? Because the factuality of the story seems like a pretty big deal here. If it's completely bogus, how is it different from any of those Russian trollfarm posts that the US government was worried about?
Of course the factuality is a big deal. But Twitter didn’t discover the story was false and then remove it. Rather they decided that because the information came from a hack that it couldn’t be posted on their site. If anything they confirmed it was true by doing this.
There are two possibilities: Either it's really a hack or it's a felonious attempt to manipulate an election. Or it's both -- a hack of personal private photos and also fake emails feloniously manipulating an election. Either way, a ban is appropriate.
Saying "if it's true, it's ban able for X" without out bothering to say that obviously it's bannable if it's false, isn't saying it's true. How could Twitter even know?
I’m not sure what you’re arguing for. If we had ignored everyone claiming there were WMDs then a million people would still be alive, not to mention the trillions of dollars saved.
they did learn from their mistakes.
they learned that there's zero consequence in trafficking the right lies for the right people and were professionally rewarded for doing so. it should be no surprise that the exact same people latched so heavily onto the steele dossier and the cult of mueller-ism
WMD information was provided by government officials and it was official government position on it, the news were reporting what officials said and provided.
The factuality is what we should be debating. When Twitter bans its dissemination that becomes as big a story and - like it or not - makes folks believe there’s more truth to the story than they perhaps would have in absence of such blatant, double-standard censorship.
The New York Post is not a serious newspaper; it is a sensationalist tabloid. Sometimes the NYPost will report on real news, but I believe absolutely nothing they report until it is verified by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, or other major broadcast outlet with actual journalistic standards.
> New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, or other major broadcast outlet with actual journalistic standards.
"Actual journalistic standards" yeah right! They literally carried out a fake news story about Nick Sandmann without any sort of verification. CNN settled 250 million $ lawsuit followed by Washington Post. Other publications are in the line next. They have zero credibility... especially after causing irreparable damage to a child's reputation by labelling him a racist when he was anything but. The real racists at the rally were those who accused this kid of racism. For full video of the actual altercation you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyOD8FIQk and decide for yourself.
The instinct some people have to preserve themselves from cognitive dissonance is extremely powerful. Rather than re-examine their own beliefs, it's easier to find reasons to dismiss that which is creating the conflict.
Calling all the downvoters assholes isn't especially productive.
I'll explain mine.
The New York Post has produced valid journalism. The Washington Post has produced bad journalism. Individual examples of these are not useful for making broad claims about the merits of these organizations because they produce such a huge volume of journalism. Continuing to complain about the Covington case until the end of time is not a productive way of arguing that all media outlets are garbage and doubling down by insisting that people who disagree are just sheep crushes any possibility of useful discussion here.
> The New York Post has produced valid journalism. The Washington Post has produced bad journalism. Individual examples of these are not useful for making broad claims about the merits of these organizations because they produce such a huge volume of journalism. Continuing to complain about the Covington case until the end of time is not a productive way of arguing that all media outlets are garbage and doubling down by insisting that people who disagree are just sheep crushes any possibility of useful discussion here.
I would 100% agree with you if the same feeling is accorded to outlets like New York Post or any other right leaning media organization. I am not saying that the right leaning organizations are epitome of journalistic credibility. I am just like you calling bullshit as bullshit. But when you start standing on a high pedestal and start claiming "journalistic credibility" as some sort of differentiating factor while at the same time peddle in blatantly false news I will call you out. No matter if it hurts sentiments. I am not saying that New York Times or Washington Post did not produce valid journalism. They perhaps did a good 60% of the time. I will give them that. But to say they follow "actual journalistic standards" is straight out false. "Actual journalistic standards" entails that you verify your source of information before putting it out. That is for every story. No exceptions. If you have some stories that are going out being fact checked and some not then where is the "journalistic standard"? You set a standard to ensure that you never waver from it nor do you apply it selectively.
You fact check any information you put out. Not pull it down after others have fact checked you. Then what is the reason for your existence? I can get unverified news from social media directly! Why do I need a media organization then? I want to rely on media because it is a publisher which verifies stuff it puts out. That is the main job for media. If media is itself indulging in propaganda then what is the need for media? Especially in this social media age?
In that all organizations have failed. Not just left wing but right wing too. Sensationalism always triumphs. But there are some who take it too far: calling a kid racist without verification of facts. This is where I draw the line. You want to do politics do so between yourselves. Fight it out as adults. Don't involve children in your fights. This is a big red line that I don't want anyone crossing. I hope we both can agree on that. Anytime I see children being used as props for propaganda it turns me the F-off. Even if the Covington case was racial in nature it should not have been shown on TV let alone live TV. This is something that must have been dealt with at the school level. This is an age where the child is still growing. And while growing you make stupid decisions too. You have to give that benefit of doubt. To make him a media spectacle for your own benefits is not the way. You are causing mental trauma to the child. And in this case it is far worse because the kid was not racist at all! I have watched the 1.5 hours video in full length and couldn't find even 1 place where the Covington kids were racist. In fact, the kid actually stops his friend from arguing with the Native American and asks his friend to shut up while the Native American speaks. And we have media which turns around and makes this innocent kid into a racist and we should all be okay with it? No effing ways! I'll speak up even if I am in the minority!
Btw, Covington case is not an isolated one. We all know too well what happened to the Russian collusion hoax. None of it could be proved conclusively and moreover it ultimately resulted in the opposite: now we have evidence being unearthed that it was literally a planted story. Look up on what is happening with the Steele Dossier. Why is no one talking about it now? Because it was complete fabricated nonsense that was peddled by the media. A proper witch-hunt not based on any fact. Only innuendos.
True. But I am happy the mod un-flagged and brought your comment back. At least the mod here is unbiased. It just saddens me that people are so blind. Sitting here in India I can see the fake stories for what they are but so many American citizens are unable to see it. It is unbelievable really.
They settled the lawsuits but there is no indication it was anything like $250M (more like $25K!). And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
> And notably none of the organisations was required to retract or apologize as part of the settlement.
Because that is the settlement. To save themselves from embarrassment and having to admit they faked the entire thing. I give credit to Nick Sandmann for being the bigger man here and settling instead of taking it all the way and making sure these media houses get crippled.
Anyways, the point here is not the amount of money settled. The point is that they faked the news and labelled an innocent boy a racist. You still haven't given a reply on that. Not that you are required to, but that is what is the crux of the matter here, not the money.
Do not dismiss tabloid journalism. There's a long and happy history of Democrats being undone by lurid tabloids. Think Drudge Report breaking the (Bill) Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, or National Enquirer breaking the John Edwards affair, or NYPost breaking the Anthony Weiner sexting. This is tabloid journalism at its best.
The difference is those stories had supporting details, with the reporters attempting to follow up.
None of them are serious. NY Times made a big deal out of trumps taxes when everyone knows depreciation offsets revenue in real estate, its 101 stuff. You get taxed when you sell the asset which happens infrequently but in large magnitude. Most people in the industry were laughing at the gaslighting they did on that story but they fooled their little pawn readers. Just one example out of many. Every news source is full of shit even the ones that are supposed to be reputable.
I feel sorry for you for getting downvoted, anyone with a basic understanding of accounting and tax should know this. Also the issue picked on in later comments, yes you absolutely can report different valuations to different entities, in the US, UK, and probably everywhere else too.
Tax accounting is completely different to accounting you show to a bank for a loan. This is normal because they are used for different things, and are accounting for different things. For example - the tax rate and taxes paid have a real impact on cashflows which would impact your eligibility for a loan. In tax returns taxes paid are not included in profit and loss, because that would lower the tax paid by businesses.
No it is not. Inventory, for example, can have two basis values, taxable inventory, and fixed asset inventory value. One is what the IRS requires via GAAP reporting, and the other is used to secure lines of credit.
Yeah, that’s not true, though you may wish it were. Many industries operate essentially three sets of books - one for the IRS, one for regulators, and one for the street. The requirements for valuation and burdening can be different based on audience. I don’t know whether it applies in trumps case but the headlines and righteous talking points got pretty silly. “Trump offset gains by losses” - yep. Meanwhile let’s talk about how many of these senators (particularly some of the most self-righteous) after decades of only federal employment have somehow become multimillionaires.
We have no information on this except what the NYT's reports in half truth. For instance if there was a time gap between reporting that could cause a mismatch as finances change over time. You can also have retroactive amendments as almost every major company has which are reported in different years. I havent dug deep into this as its not an important topic for me but I just wouldnt take the around the edges reporting at face value from a source as biased as the times.
One way to get a more complete picture of the tax situations would be for Trump to release his tax returns, as he had promised repeatedly in 2016, and as every other president since Nixon has done.
You realize the real story re: Trump's asset depreciation is that he reported one valuation to the govt and one to his banks when seeking loans, right?
In my tax report I think my house is valued at 400 000 NOK.
When I talk to the bank it will probably be worth 4 200 000 NOK.
Tax authorities here know as banks update them every year.
Also in accounting it is common. I remember asking my teacher about it when we had basic accounting and it is simple: if you depreciate (?) an item to less than it is worth you just have to report a profit when you sell a "worthless" asset. (I'm not an accountant and English is not my first language but I think it should be possible to understand.)
I am fairly sure that is tax fraud lol. I don't think I could take out a loan on a property by giving one valuation and in the same year give a vastly different one for my taxes.
No, it is even the tax office who came up with the much lower number in my case.
It is like this for everyone!
Same with depreciation rules, when I learned the rules here my teacher was actually working with the tax authorities.
Depreciation in accounting is a technicality. And if you happen to sell a thing that is technically worth 0 in the books that just becomes an extra inflow of money to the company, which is taxable and so the tax authorities get their money.
Unless you have learned accounting, be careful :-)
The story headline that was coordinated and gaslight was "trump didnt pay any tax". Everything else was anecdotal, I didnt look into this specific matter because I was rolling my eyes from the start. If they cant be honest about the main story I'm not following them for the rest of the allegations.
The three outlets you cited lean left and regularly avoid articles inconvenient to the left (and paint much of the remainder as "Republicans pounce on reports that..."). Consider balancing with centre-right outlets like National Review.
Centre-right, National Review.... You made me spit out my tea when I read that. I'd ask you to go to the op-ed section, and tell me it's even close to "centre-right" and not fully right.
They lost an editor for posting a mainstream opinion by an elected Republican... Note that they then shared the same sentiment about supporting police cracking down on protests in Hong Kong and received no internal pushback whatsoever.
The op-ed section isn't the news section. NYT is centre-left, NR is centre-right.
Anyway it won't hurt you to read things from the other perspective. The truth is often "in the middle" or only something you can triangulate after reading both sides.
If you look at the NYT op-ed section, there are right wingers on there too, see Ross Douthat, et. al, as well as plenty of centrists, and lefties. National Review does not have the same diversity, and only features prominent right wingers.
Maybe I'm getting too bogged down in the op-ed section, like you say; but, it does make you think about the effect an op-ed section has on the news content as well.
It could be easily argued while they are not rewriting the story they selectively choose the facts they present as "fact checked" information. In the recent past both FB and Twitter have linked to "fact checked" articles/sources that represented only the narrative they wanted you to read. If they wanted to show neutral behavior they could have linked to articles that represented both sides of an argument which would keep their independence and educate their audience better since rarely is one side 100% correct.
Democrats base their arguments on some bombshell mistruths. Like trillion dollar mistruths. The idea that America underinvests in schools and social welfare, for example, when we spend more than European countries per person on both metrics.
Democrats argue we need to spend more and pay teachers more. The argument that we need to do a better job making sure the money we spend actually benefits kids, that’s a different argument, and will get you branded a Republican.
Yes, and it might be very reasonable that some areas of those are underfunded while other are wasteful. The reasons for this discrepancy might very well be policies that are upheld by republicans, like inflated healthcare costs, who knows? You're just providing a generalization. The meager output with the same input suggests that there's too many middle men and I wouldn't just assume that Republicans are more willing to stop the siphoning of taxes into private pockets.
Problem is that both sides see the other as exactly this. I’m sure I can argue the point on behalf of either side selected by a coin toss. In today’s example though we have the side that dominates academia, media, big labor, healthcare, public sector workers, and big tech using that dominance to censor a story harmful to their candidate with very disingenuous reasoning.
I know a dozen people who would agree with you and thirteen who would argue the opposite and cite sources. You might not be as objective as you think here.
What's even the point of this "one should be more balanced, both sides!" etc etc. From my EU/Nordic perspective the US right-wing are more or less "crazy-right" (I mean just look at the Trump administration?!). I can't see why one should need to be somewhere in-between just because there are two parties.
It's one of those papers in the strange intersection of "mainstream tabloid". It's clearly not serious, as you can see from a quick glance at their typical cover pages, but it's also not one of the papers everyone knows is untrustworthy schlock.
Is information being gated by private universities, that only the elite have access to? This may have had validity in the pre-internet era, but information is everywhere now. There's nothing wrong with "public education".
Limiting distribution to filter out what you don't want to rise to the top has the same effect as explicitly picking winners.
Think of it like shooting the tires of all the cars you want to lose in a race. Sure you didn't push the winner across the finish line, but you made it damn near impossible for anyone else to even get there.
Yeah, but that's still not editorial control. And maybe we do actually want Twitter to pick some winners. I don't think the platform needs any more death threats, Russian-backed misinformation campaigns or other bullshit.
And this is exactly what social media does all the time, or rather their recommendation algorithms. Which, for some reason, is no problem at all. Now that the bias of these algorithms is changing, also by directly intervening, it is a big problem.
I don't think so. You could perhaps make an argument that banning all NY Post articles would be distribution control, although even then I'm skeptical. But if I picked up a physical copy of the New York Post, and found that the newsstand had snipped just this one article out with a pair of scissors, I'd call that an unambiguous act of editorial control and censorship.
Both are important. Censoring something important without knowing whether it's true or not is pretty worrisome. If it does turn out to be true then it's much worse. If it turns out to be false, the censor got lucky or knows something we don't.
One thing I'm wondering is how can they censor it without getting either some evidence that it's fake or at least a clear denial? (Biden's campaign released a statement refuting it, but that's not the same as Biden himself publicly denying the claims.)
Thin evidence (someone found some damaging-looking emails) can be dismissed with thin counter-evidence (a denial). But it can't be dismissed with nothing.
twitter and the journo sphere launder misinformation every single day with no consequence. the russian bounty story had little relation to factuality but it was still widespread with no objections or even much if any in the way of post facto correction. it's entirely permissible to write complete fiction just as long as you preface it with 'intelligence sources indicate...'
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?
The problem here that this "bombshell" article did not provide enough information to do any kind of verification.
The main evidence is a PDF file of a print of an e-mail (without even providing a header information).
- we don't know if it's Hunter's laptop as claimed (kind of odd that somebody bothers with laptop repair (let's be honest, a lot people here probably buy a new one) and then leaves it there?
- we don't know if this is a real e-mail (headers could be used to prove that)
- we don't know that the sender e-mail is an e-mail connected to the person Hunter is accused talking to (the ".ukraine" in e-mail is very odd, who would put their country in an e-mail address, it's long and is not like he has a super common name)
- we don't know Hunter responded to it (since they have his laptop, you would think they would have his e-mails as well)
- we don't know the meeting actually happened
- this story is obviously an October surprise (the time is picked exactly to impact voting, there's also not enough time to prove it is false)
I agree with all of your points but why is it Twitter or Facebook's responsibility to check all of those things for every article posted to their platform? Why is the onus not on you as the reader to do your own fact checking?
Because the timing of this piece (if you look at the PDF was created a year ago, but published just in middle of October). It is clear that it is timed to affect election results.
They are not responsible, to check all things. But it's mostly ethics and self preservation. I don't think anyone will deny that they actually have real impact now (even greater than MSM now) and I believe if Democrats win, there will be some laws passed adding some checks. I also believe trump with executive order about section 230 also probably contributed.
In a normal situation, publication would be followed by scrutiny, possibly correction, more information. Incorrect information isn’t such a big problem then.
One major problem right now is that it’s 3 weeks from an election. Scrutiny and fact checks would risking being only after the election. I’m happy to see the requirements for credibility tightened right now, for issues related to the election.
Considering many people have already voted and probably do not care about this issue it would be unlikely to affect the outcome of the election anyway.
Oh, i definitely agree that as a private company Twitter is well within its rights to censor what it believes is "misinformation" but an important line has been crossed today by Twitter and Facebook.
A story about potential corruption of a candidate for the US president has been censored by two of the largest information brokers in the world. Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true? lol
>Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true?
If i was Joe Biden and the yellow press came after me honestly I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
If people like Biden or Clinton responded every time someone tries to capitalise on some bullshit attached to their name they'd not be doing anything else
> I'd do exactly what Joe Biden does and ignore them rather than giving them oxygen.
Joe Biden ignored the reports? The article says Joe Biden responded, saying the meeting didn't take place:
> In a Thursday afternoon statement, the Biden campaign said the paper “never asked . . . about the critical elements of this story,” and that a review of “Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time” show that “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” The Biden campaign did not dispute the veracity of the emails, though no other media outlet has confirmed the Post’s story so far.
That reply seems eerily similar to their response to Tara Reid’s allegations - “we have no official record of that in our boxes of records that we looked through”
In his official statement[0], the campaign stated that the meeting didn’t happen as the second clause of a sentence that began with the contextual announcement that they had reviewed his official schedule. There is an implicit dependency in those two halves of the same sentence. If you think that is just a casual wordsmithing mistake you have no idea how PR works. I guarantee that is carefully crafted. The release went on to say that they do not exclude the possibility that some informal meeting may have taken place.
[0] “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
> Also interestingly, no denial from Joe Biden about the authenticity of these emails. Wouldnt that be the first thing you'd do if this wasnt true?
I assume most politicians at the presidential candidate level have some sort of PR team that works to come up with some official response to these sorts of controversies
"JOE BIDEN SPOKESMAN ANDREW BATES hits back at the N.Y. POST STORY, via NATASHA BERTRAND and KYLE CHENEY: “Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani - whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported - claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
Why would they have documented illegal/potentially illegal activity in the "official schedule" anyway? The claim that the official schedule somehow supports the rebuttal is pretty flimsy.
yeah exactly, that's what I was trying to convey. Like why include this qualifying language about "checking the official schedule" but for some funny business being afoot?
It's just a kinda legalistic answer, you'd give in a deposition but is kind of besides the point now.
I mean I don't particularly have much stake in whether its true or not, I'm just saying I'm not shocked he's not responding to it immediately for vaguely similar reasons to why people tell you not to talk to the police without a lawyer, whether you're innocent or not.
that's a fair point, just if its not true its pretty easy to say "not true, fake news" instead, what the answer that's provided is "we checked the schedule and didn't see it there" which is kinda suspicious.
Like the censorship of "misinformation" would be more persuasive then I think.
> we checked the schedule and didn't see it there"
That's not what Biden said.
Biden said "and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place." That clearly is a denial that a meeting took place. It's not conditioned on a calendar entry. It's not saying "the calendar says no meeting took place", or "according to the calendar no meeting took place".
When a politician is ambushed with a question like "when did you stop beating your wife" the politician can't respond to the allegations because that ads to the story ("politician denies beating his wife").
Isn't some press person for Biden speaking on his behalf basically the same as Biden saying it himself?
>And you'll note they didn't engage in discussing the specific allegations.
He addressed some parts of the specific allegations (whether a meeting took place), without addressing other parts (whether the emails are real). This immediately makes people think the email is real, which is what throwawa3495 was pointing out.
The official statement predicates the denial on their search for an official record of it. “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
There’s an implicit dependency between these two clauses - we looked at the official schedule (there was no record, so,) no meeting took place.
Sentence construction in crisis management publications like this is poured over and very deliberate. Do not imagine this is just sloppy sentence construction.
> just if its not true its pretty easy to say "not true, fake news" instead, what the answer that's provided is "we checked the schedule and didn't see it there" which is kinda suspicious.
Wait, so you're saying that providing an alibi as to why the claim is impossible is more suspicious than dismissing it as fake news without a defense? I'm not sure how else to interpret what you're saying, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but that position is mindboggling to me.
Just because it wasn't on Biden's "official" schedule, doesn't mean it didn't happen. My point is that saying "the meeting didnt happen" is less suspicious than saying "We checked the official schedule and find no record that the meeting happened"
Bc, of course, light bribery probably does not go down when you're on the official schedule
Meeting with someone isn't illegal in anyway - it's normally a good thing! And there's probably a good chance that Joe Biden did meet Pozharskyi at some point.
But they didn't have some kind of scheduled meeting, so it seems unlikely that any business was done.
The Post story included a screenshot of what the paper said was a 2015 email from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” But the email doesn’t indicate whether Pozharskyi was describing a meeting that had already occurred or one intended to occur in the future. Nevertheless, the Post reported that the existence of such a meeting undercut Biden’s long-held assertions that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory.
Notably:
Burisma’s website lists at least some of Pozharskyi’s meetings with U.S. officials, including a meeting in November 2017 with then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and a series of meetings with members of Congress, though the company lists only Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) by name. It lists no meetings with Joe Biden. Pozharskyi also reportedly met in 2018 with Kurt Volker
Absolutely this can be trivially verified and needs to be. Release the emails if they're real so they can be verified. But also, isn't it the same thing with Trump's tax returns? All I've found so far is that the New York Times obtained copies, but they haven't actually released them to the public to be verified. If anyone can find the actual copies I'd like to see.
We need to take all of the press releases about "leaks" with a grain of salt, because I keep seeing "leaks" without actual content or verification. It's bullshit and why places that provide the actual contents of leaks are so important. Yes, certain publications are more trustworthy than others historically, but that doesn't mean they get an indefinite pass on providing verified information.
One thing that can be verified (as at least a unique release) after looking into the NY Post article more are the pictures they released. When I reverse image search them on Google and tineye, there are no other matches. This doesn't mean that they are necessarily real (they'd have to be verified as not being fakes), but they are certainly newly released.
The political machine is more sophisticated than using a public image. If anything it looks like an iCloud hack. Last week was a top HN article about finding an XSS vulnerability in iCloud. Not unreasonable to assume Biden’s crackhead sons iCloud was owned by operatives. Especially since the subject is a main topic of Trumps impeachment.
The FBI referred questions about its seizure of the laptop and hard drive to the Delaware US Attorney’s Office, where a spokesperson said, “My office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”
I think the work of Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi and others illustrating how the media just become pawns of the intelligence community is the right way to regard many of the developments, bombshells, and similar media stories that we’ve seen for decades.
I would think the financial risk for libel would be serious if it were true that the emails are fabrications and so made with intent to harm. Similarly, I would expect attorneys or all involved would be aware of this and were not sufficiently concerned.
That "something" is almost certainly "the NY Post story has profound credibility problems, to the point that it may very well be a hoax, and Jack Dorsey is still reeling from his personal moral complicity in the flawed 2016 election."
I also felt more comfortable with yahoo.com than with a politicized site like NR. The intention here is simply to be accurate and neutral to the extent possible.
But it's the same article, so it doesn't make sense to pretend that it comes from a different source, besides which the HN guidelines say "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If there's a more neutral and accurate article we can change it again.
I understand the moderation decisions made today, but I'm alienated by them.
A political article like this one would ordinarily get flagged off the HN front page. The subject matter of Twitter and Facebook imposing constraints on distribution is germane, but this article goes way beyond that by propagating the suspect email content.
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/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
We turn off user flags sometimes when a story contains interesting (in HN's sense) new information and the probability of a substantive discussion clears a certain threshold.
It goes much before that. Isikoff met Steele on Sept 22, 2016, and published a story about Carter Page the next day. He didn’t verify a thing. All he did was get an anon government official to say FBI had the dossier. And that kind of journalism happens all the time and never gets called out. The double standards are amazing.
It's hard to find a non-right-wing source promoting extraordinary right-wing campaign claims that are not accompanied by evidence or a credible background story.
The story from an HN point of view is not the campaign claim—that would probably be off topic—but the actions taken by Twitter and Facebook, which are significant new information [1] about an interesting new phenomenon [2].
I kept the headline from one of the previous articles because it seemed the most neutral. If anyone wants to suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
Crux of the issue is that everyone knows there’s a double standard. Why do they co-ordinate to block this story and not the countless other “unverified” scoops? Because it threatens a protected politician.
I see ridiculous (even virulent) hot takes blasted out by overwhelmingly left-leaning major media orgs with near zero consequences on twitter and facebook. Half the time, this stuff proves to be incomplete - borderline maliciously so - or even factually incorrect, within days.
I'm still hearing daily from people who think Breonna Taylor was shot in her sleep.
Regardless of how you lean politically, this behavior should scare you. People with more power than you can censor at will while the public has basically no recourse.
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.
The Washington Post released unsubstantiated reports from anonymous sources that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia and released through Wikileaks. This is an extraordinary claim, and the evidence should be likewise extraordinary
4 years later, however, these remain allegations only, the lack of which drives the idea of a deep state conspiracy in conservative circles
If you're inclined to believe the Russia hacking allegations, this story will seem like a completely different, false equivalence, because one is true (the hacking allegations) and the other is false (the Hunter Biden allegation). But consider: there is as much hard evidence for one as the other, and both are damaging, destabilizing allegations
> 4 years later, however, these remain allegations only, the lack of which drives the idea of a deep state conspiracy in conservative circles
There was an indictment by the federal government[1][2]. That's certainly more reliable than a computer repairman finding an email on a hard drive on an abandoned computer.
An indictment is an allegation, as I said. An allegation is not proof
If you are indicted for a crime, the prosecutor must prove the allegations
If you are inclined to believe the allegation, your bar for proof will be quite low. Perhaps the accusation is enough.
For me, a destabilizing accusation like that requires more proof than anonymous CIA sources saying its true. I wish more Americans would put their dislike of Trump aside and demand that proof. It's not about Trump, it's about a destabilizing accusation from a government department. If they can do that about the President you don't like, they can do it about the President you do like
Again, the hard evidence, tangible and verifiable, is about the same for both
I am open to be proven wrong, believe me, but links to indictments is not proof
> unsubstantiated reports from anonymous sources that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia and released through Wikileaks.
A US government report is not anonymous. That's very clear who the source of that report is. It's the US government. I would also hesitate to call is unsubstantiated. There's a lot of substance in the indictment, including specific dates and times of actions, and names of the attackers.
> there is as much hard evidence for one as the other, and both are damaging, destabilizing allegations
No, there is more hard evidence for the DNC hack. If you want more hard evidence, see CrowdStrike's analysis[1], Google Search logs[2][3], ThreatConnect's analysis of email headers[4][5], Secureworks's analysis[6], Fidelis's analysis[7], FireEye's analysis[8].
I know that you believe it's true, and so your bar for hard evidence is lower than if you were skeptical, but I personally don't find affidavits on "The Smoking Gun" convincing; neither am I impressed by Crowdstrike's blog saying they have evidence, and then providing a bunch of links to other people who also say they have evidence, much as you have done here
[8] mentions "forensic details in the malware". Great! I want to be convinced! That is hard evidence! However, [8] does not contain details.
What specific forensic details, though? I have followed that rabbit hole. There was a limited release of the forensic details: the unclassified, public forensic evidence does not and cannot show the allegations to be true. It doesn't refute them, either, but it only shows that someone used (outdated!) malware that is available to any script kiddie, not state-level superhackerware. Stuxnet it ain't.
There are allusions to classified evidence that irrefutably demonstrates that Russia and Putin were involved. So, again, if you are inclined to believe the story, then "The CIA and NSA have evidence, but it's classified" is enough. Maybe it's true? Unknown.
If you are disinclined to believe it, or want hard evidence before you decide, then it looks suspicious. Destabilizing governments and throwing FUD is what the CIA does. This is documented. That's its expertise. That's its hammer. It doesn't mean that they are lying this time, but ... I mean, come on, it's the CIA. Reasonable people can be suspicious that the spooks are lying, here. Perhaps they are partisan Democrats, distracting from the content of the emails. Perhaps they are never-Trump Republicans. Perhaps Trump is a Russian asset indeed. Who knows? They don't show their hand. Nor hard evidence.
Hard evidence is not "Trust us, we have names, dates and credible intelligence" with lots and lots of footnotes
Now that you know what hard evidence would convince me, would you mind going through that list of links and finding it? If it's not there, consider that hard evidence does not exist. So, to recap: specific forensic evidence is great! Specifically "forensic details in the malware". That. Show me that. Or something equivalent
Links to people saying they have reviewed the forensic evidence and concluded Russians were involved, testimony before Congress, CIA reports without that forensic evidence, HN discussions, affidavits and such are not it.
>but I personally don't find affidavits on "The Smoking Gun" convincing
Are you saying you think the affidavit is fake? Or that the info in the affidavit is not a strong indicator of Russia's involvement?
> but it only shows that someone used (outdated!) malware that is available to any script kiddie, not state-level superhackerware. Stuxnet it ain't.
Russia sometimes intentionally uses unsophisticated malware because it helps to make attribution harder.[1]
> Destabilizing governments and throwing FUD is what the CIA does.
Yes, but it's not what CrowdStrike, ThreatConnect, Secureworks, Fidelis, or FireEye do. Their business is to perform computer security investigations. Why would they jeopardize their business by publishing lies?
> Perhaps [the CIA] are partisan Democrats, distracting from the content of the emails. Perhaps they are never-Trump Republicans.
(a) Just because you're a partisan Democrat doesn't mean you do your job entirely wrong and fill your reports with lies. Same for never-Trump Republicans.
(b) The CIA is not a homogeneous unit. There are people there of various political backgrounds.
(c) Senator Richard Burr, who endorsed Trump[2], who was chosen by Trump to be a national security advisor[3], and who was accused of being "too close to Trump to lead an impartial investigation"[4], led a Senate committee that unanimously said the report was correct:
> A three-year review by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found that the intelligence community assessment, pinning blame on Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, was fundamentally sound and untainted by politics.
> “The I.C.A. reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the panel’s chairman. “The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”[5]
Also, the CIA wasn't the only federal organization involved, the FBI was as well. That would make it harder for the CIA to introduce any lies into the investigation. And the DHS and ODNI agree with the conclusion.[6]
So you want a list of specific hard pieces of evidence. Here are some:
(a) The attackers registered a domain (misdepatrment.com) and pointed it to a known APT-28 command and control IP: 45.32.129.185.[7]
(b) The domain shared an https certificate with a previous attack by Russian APT-28, on Germany.[7]
(c) The malware contained a hardcoded IP (176.31.112.10) that was previously hardcoded in malware used in that attack on Germany.[7][8][9]
(d) A Guccifer 2.0 document contained metadata with the name of a famous Russian person.[7]
(e) A Guccifer 2.0 document contained a message indicating it was edited by a computer with Russian language settings.[7][10][11]
(f) The way Guccifer 2.0 spoke to reporters indicated he was a team of people, because his English skills changed.[7][12]
(g) APT-28 beginning in 2015 launched phishing attacks using a bit.ly account to target 1,800 Google accounts. In 2016, they used that exact same bit.ly account to target Hillary Clinton's campaign.[13][14]
(h) APT-28 previously had created false hacker personas, similar to Guccifer 2.0.[15]
(i) The SeaDaddy malware from the DNC had nearly identical code obfuscation techniques and methods to SeaDuke malware previously attributed to APT-29.[8][16][17]
(j) Guccifer 2.0 used a Russian VPN with a custom config. Possibly an indication that it's a custom government-only deployment of the VPN.[18][19]
(k) Guccifer 2.0 once didn't use the VPN, and the IP was from Moscow.[19]
I've barely scratched the surface here, and intend to continue, but it's been awhile and I want to honor your efforts here with a progress report.
While I am critical, I have not yet come to any overall conclusion about everything you have presented here. These are just some observations and comments about one article, the Vice article. I really want to stress that my pushback is not a refutation of the argument as a whole.
>> Yes, but it's not what CrowdStrike, ThreatConnect, Secureworks, Fidelis, or FireEye do. Their business is to perform computer security investigations. Why would they jeopardize their business by publishing lies? <<
This is not very convincing, to me. I don't think speculating on why someone would lie is fruitful. People and organizations lie or are mistaken all the time. In following the rabbit-hole of the vice article ([7], above) I found this [1] "A security firm made headlines earlier this month when it boasted it had thwarted plans by organized Russian cyber criminals to launch an attack against multiple US-based banks. But a closer look at the details behind that report suggests the actors in question were relatively unsophisticated Nigerian phishers who’d simply registered a bunch of new fake bank Web sites.... Colorado Springs, Colo.-based security vendor root9B, which touts a number of former National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Defense cybersecurity experts among its ranks." Why would a security firm with NSA and DoD experts exaggerate or be mistaken about a Russian hacking intrusion? Again, I don't care to speculate, but for our purposes it's enough to note that people and organizations do lie, or exaggerate, or are mistaken, and get headlines anyway from credulous media outlets
Speaking of rabbit holes, let's compare the coverage of the DNC hack to the coverage of the German Bundestag attack. This article [2] is very straight-forward. The investigator lays out the report clearly without lots and lots and lots of footnotes and testimonials and circumstantial, distracting links. I urge you do read it. It's quite short. The evidence is there, in the report. The language is simple. Russian hackers may have been behind the malware used in the attack on the Bundestag left. Could I read a such a clear and unadorned report about the DNC hack?
Let us contrast it to the link-flood above, and in the Vice article ([7], above) and in all of the coverage of the DNC hack. Perhaps there is a simple report like [2] that lays out the evidence clearly, but if so it is buried beneath baffling bullshit. It's almost as if the analogy of [2] does not actually exist anywhere, and the link-flood is an attempt to convince us that where there is smoke there's fire, and somewhere there must be hard evidence.
Specifically, let's unpack the Vice article a little bit. It takes 11 or so paragraphs to get to this, which arguably should have led the article:
"One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was hard coded [a] in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers. Russian military intelligence was identified [b] by the German domestic security agency BfV as the actor responsible [c] for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a shared [d] SSL certificate."
(I use letters, because I want to make a clear distinction between my links/footnotes versus those of Vice)
(Note that the shared SSL certificate, mentioned in Vice and [2], is also mentioned in Krebs On Security [1] - and rejected there as evidence of Russian hackers)
It should have led with its strongest evidence. Why didn't it?
I have supplied three footnotes, one of them to a very clear example of the kind of evidence or report I am looking for. This single Vice article, by contrast, provides no less than four in this single paragraph alone, never mind the entire article which is replete with them. Let's go through them
[This comment is a continuation from a previous comment. Please read that one before reading this one]
[... continued]
[a] is to a Twitter post, itself a reply to a now-deleted Twitter post. It's a person looking for clarification from the now-deleted OP! This is "one of the strongest pieces of evidence" that Vice (and yourself, apparently?) can muster, and it's a Twitter reply, seeking clarification, from a deleted tweet.
[b] is a German-language report from BfV about, as far as I can tell, Russian cyber attacks on Germany, and not relevant to the DNC attack.
[c] an article about the Russian attack on the German bundestag and the German response. Not relevant to the DNC attack.
[d] is the to the same thread as in [a], the fellow looking for clarification from the now deleted OP
Why would Vice provide so many links to only peripherally related material? Why didn't it link directly to [2]? The author must have seen it, and it far more supports the assertion than [a]-[d]
Could it be to bolster the appearance of overwhelming evidence when there actually is very little?
Let's evaluate that actual claim itself, the strongest evidence: "a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was hard coded in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers"
First, from the Bundestag report [2]:
"While attribution of malware attacks is rarely simple or conclusive , during the course of this investigation I uncovered evidence that suggests the attacker might be affiliated with the state-sponsored group known as Sofacy Group (also known as APT28 or Operation Pawn Storm). Although we are unable to provide details in support of such attribution, previous work by security vendor FireEye [i] suggests the group might be of Russian origin, however no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country. " (emph. mine)
The researcher is much less certain that the attack was from Russia than Vice is, apparently. Cannot provide details, literally says "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country"
From [i] "SOURFACE: This downloader is typically called Sofacy within the cyber security community. However because we have observed the name “Sofacy” used to refer to APT28 malware generally (to include the SOURFACE dropper, EVILTOSS, CHOPSTICK, and the credential harvester OLDBAIT), we are using the name SOURFACE to precisely refer to a specific downloader."
This is the only mention of Sofacy in the entire report, which goes on to link SOURFACE to Russia. The link to Russia, and it's a fair point, is that SOURFACE has been deployed in niche situations that support Russian interests. So SOURFACE is Russian. Russian state? Perhaps.
The evidence is even more tenuous: The FireEye report links Russia to SOURFACE, a piece of malware, and not Sofacy. But let's grant it. SOURFACE is Russian State, and we now know that Russia engages in cyber attacks.
What about "the strongest piece of evidence", that hard-coded C&C IP address `176.31.112[.]10`? I'm not rejecting the evidence, but am going to push back on it. I don't know enough to evaluate this claim: "Those servers were dead at the time, so at best these would be leftover artifacts, not in-use infrastructure" [3]
Is it not possible that the Bundestag attack and DNC servers were attacked by script kiddies, using outdated malware? I have a feeling the Bundestag researcher [2] would shrug and say "It's possible". Not Vice though.
If "those servers were dead at the time" is true, it wouldn't just be misdirection from Russian state actors, it would bespeak profound incompetence. It might even be evidence against Russian state actors at least, in these cases.
Why do I give a shit? Why spend an hour and a half writing this already too-long response, evaluating what's turning out not to be the hard evidence I asked for?
Remember: the original claim is that the DNC was definitely attacked by Russia, that Russia helped Trump to win with both the collusion of the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. In support of this claim were quotes from anonymous sources and a baffling maze of links designed to obfuscate the fact that it's far from definite.
Because of this dubious claim (again presented as definitely proven without a doubt):
* The legitimacy of the Office of the Presidency has been destabilized. I don't think most Americans understand how dangerous this is. It's more dangerous than an actual terrible, shitty President. It's more dangerous than Pol Pot himself being elected President, because checks and balances would reign in a genocidal maniacs worst impulses. Once that legitimacy is destabilized, all bets are off: peaceful transfer of power is destabilized and all hell breaks loose. The stability and prosperity that Americans have enjoyed for 150 years becomes civil war, strongmen, competing Presidents, ruin. This is not within living American experience, so people can be cavalier about saying "I know the President is a Russian asset" and then pass off a maze of nonsense as "proof". I don't get it, I really don't.
* With respect to Julian Assange, the erstwhile leader of WikiLeaks, the rule of law and inalienable human rights are being egregiously violated, with the encouragement of rank-and-file Democrats, because of this dubious claim that WikiLeaks colluded with Russia to get Trump elected. If it can happen to Assange, it can happen to any journalist, if the accusation is terrible enough. If it can happen to any journalist, it can happen to anyone.
I really do want to see the strongest evidence, not get worn down by looking at Twitter feeds and irrelevant German-language reports and such
So, please, for the love of everything you care about, don't make me dig through a flood of nonsense to find that one gem of [2] with falsifiable information. Link directly to the report, the strongest piece of evidence, if you can. Please, supply one link. If you keep flooding me with a maze of links, that will take me hours and hours to go through, it will make me think that you don't actually read what you're sending me, or that you don't have evidence.
In any case, I will continue to look more in detail at everything you have here. Maybe something there is that gem.
>4 years later, however, these remain allegations only
As the other user already pointed out this was has been proven. And they also have the exact unit and names of the Russian intelligence officers who did the hacking.
How are you going to convict Russian intelligence officers? You think Russia will hand them over?
Again the hard evidence that you are dying to see is classified and would reveal American hacking capabilities. If Putin is not willing to send over his officers who did that hacking, then why should the US government give up the evidence for nothing in return?
Revealing how America identified the Russian hackers would be extremely valuable for Putin and his KGB/GRU operatives. They can use this information to better their hacking operations in the future.
> Again the hard evidence that you are dying to see is classified and would reveal American hacking capabilities. <
Then we are back to exactly what I said at the start: they remain allegations only. Nothing has been proven, as you said. One either believes anonymous sources within the CIA and the people who believe them, or one wants evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
Remember: it's not just about Russians, but the original allegation was that the Trump campaign was involved. That has been very quietly walked back.
The DNC was definitely hacked and the content of the emails were embarrassing to powerful people, but whenever the content of the emails are discussed, people start shouting about Russians and Trump's love of Putin. This is very convenient to these same powerful people
The email exposure could have been a revelatory renaissance for the DNC, a real moment of self-aware house-cleaning. I was really hoping they would slim down and become a truly effective opposition party. Instead, it's Russians.
Given the lack of evidence and the unprecedented political climate, particularly the distraction from the emails themselves, I would like more evidence than "Trust the DNC and the CIA and the NSA when we say: Trump colluded with Russians to get elected!"
Do new Presidents have a meeting with Head Spook who says "Support our illegal, unethical mass surveillance program or we'll make everyone think you like to get peed on"?
Every single American should demand that evidence even if they despise Trump. The same destabilizing allegation can be made against anyone without that requirement for evidence irrespective of political persuasion. I would be this oppositional on behalf of Clinton, Biden, Obama, anyone. You should too.
>Remember: it's not just about Russians, but the original allegation was that the Trump campaign was involved. That has been very quietly walked back.
Well considering that Trump's attorney general William Barr shut down the investigation and is reversing Mueller's charges that is not surprising. So not only was there never a full investigation done but the mediocre investigation we had is being undone. We will never know the truth of Trump's and Putin's secret relationship until a proper investigation is done. Including Trump's finances.
No one walked back on anything. It was simply not investigated since Republicans (especially people like Mitch McConnell) are putting party over country and not holding the president accountable.
DNC has many problems including mediocre security and treating candidates differently and picking favorites but that is not the topic of the discussion.
>Every single American should demand that evidence even if they despise Trump.
The problem with your entire premise of demanding evidence is that it's a red herring. This is not about producing evidence because any evidence produced you can label as fake or made up or false flag. Once evidence is provided the goal post is moved to evidence being made up or not credible. There is absolutely no benefit in the US government revealing evidence except for making Putin's team of hackers smarter. The people who believed that Russia did it --- will continue to believe it and that people who didn't --- well they will find new excuses for themselves.
>> any evidence produced you can label as fake or made up or false flag... Once evidence is provided the goal post is moved to evidence being made up or not credible. <<
There was no goal-post moving here, and accusing others of bad faith is against the guidelines. Accusing me of bad faith here is unfair and inaccurate. I ask for evidence that matches the magnitude of the assertion and that has never changed. Evidence I would accept is falsifiable: the forensic footprints of the malware, or equivalent
Can I see the evidence myself and evaluate it on its own terms? The answer, after 4 years, is a hard no. Lots of articles; lots of partisans saying it's true; lots of people such as yourself who are convinced, accusing others of moving goalposts; but nothing tangible
My original assertion is that this all remains an allegation. In response, you and the other user posted lots of links to people affirming that they know it to be true.
Your original assertion was that it has been proven and to claim otherwise is "disinformation", but so far, and bear with me please: so far, you have people telling you that it's true. Only. And that's okay! It doesn't mean they are lying or misinformed. They could be telling us the truth. At the end of the day, if you trust those people not to be lying or misinformed, then it's good enough
I would hope that you see here that principled people can disagree, even if you find all the affidavits for it compelling and convincing.
>> No one walked back on anything. It was simply not investigated since Republicans (especially people like Mitch McConnell) are putting party over country and not holding the president accountable. <<
It could be that they are cynical, perhaps a bit evil, and know in their hearts the President is working against the interests of the country, but just gain too much personal benefit from looking too closely. Or, and stay with me here, perhaps at least some of them truly and reasonably believe that the evidence is not strong enough
I'm most likely done with this thread, but I do appreciate your contribution. If you would like to have the last word, know that I will read it and consider carefully what you have to say. I would love one link to the evidence you personally found most compelling. I will open-mindedly look at it
>perhaps at least some of them truly and reasonably believe that the evidence is not strong enough
Again this is why we need a thorough investigation into the matter. So far there has not been one. You of all people need to be demanding this since you want to get to the bottom of this and see the evidence.
Furthermore senate republicans have walked of committee hearings, they refuse to call witnesses, and they refuse to listen to witnesses. This shows you that they don't care about the evidence. And that answers your last question.
It is a straight-forward report on what the malware found on the German parliament's computers. The researcher is clear about what is known for certain and what is speculation.
No editorializing, no committees, no VIPs testifying before Congress, no confusing arrays of links to other links to other links ending up at broken links.
Does such a thing exist regarding the DNC hack? If you cannot find it (as I cannot, after 4 years), consider that it does not exist. And if it does not exist, why not?
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 impeached because the democrats didn't want Biden's crimes exposed. “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime you’re being ruled by criminals” - Edward Snowden
The emails came from Hunter Biden’s laptop that he dropped off to get fixed. He never came back to get it therefore it became property of the shop. They spent money fixing it, waited for him to pick it up, he didn’t so by the terms of the agreement the shop owned it. All Hunter had to do is pay $85 and pick up his laptop. The NYT published illegally obtained tax returns of Trump. Why weren’t they censored?
> 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.
> Hunter Biden's receipts from the computer repair shop are public for this too.
Where? I didn’t see those. How does he have public receipts for something he never paid for?
Edit: Never mind. I saw it. It’s a quote, not a receipt. I just can’t believe someone would take a laptop to a random, low quality based on the price, repair shop for data recovery like that. “Hi. Can you get my sex tape, crack smoking video, and incriminating, politically sensitive emails off this thing?”
Maybe the companies that have been accused of allowing misinformation to spread and disrupt the democratic process are making an active effort to "do something" rather than further contribute to the problem.
One relevant example is the Steele Dossier, which Mother Jones reported on a week before the 2016 election. It was published without permission, and its more sensational claims remain unverified or have since been disproven.
That's not at all the same thing as what's happening here by a long shot though. Not even in the same arena. Can you truly not see that? Also, not countless. i can count that quite easily. I want droves of links showing this horrid double standard I keep hearing about.
The NYTimes just had a big scoop on Trump's tax returns.
Would it be considered a hack if somebody within the IRS gave those documents to the press? What if the source was a foreign entity working through an intermediary?
That is to say, what distinguishes a source vs a hack is a function of the press' investigation into the authenticity of the materials.
I'm not sure blocking the NYPost is the right call here, much as I hate to say it.
What's the definition of hack? If we believe NY Post's story, did a hack happen? Or are we assuming NY Post's story is false, and the materials came from an unreported hack?
I was just going by Twitter's statement in response. Hadn't looked into it beyond that.
"Twitter blocked users from sharing an article that indicated Hunter Biden introduced his father Joe to a Ukranian businessman — charging that “hacked materials” were used in the story."
the zimmerman telegraph and the pentegon papers could both be roughly described as 'hacked materials' i think most would agree they still fell firmly within the public interest.
The NY Post states no hacking occurred and this allegation is itself "baseless". It appears Twitter/FB simply assumed it must be hacking so they could use trigger their anti-doxxing policies, as otherwise they'd have had no policies to block it, as it's clearly journalism. But if the NY Post are telling the truth then it's actually FB/Twitter spreading misinformation.
Very, very bad move by Twitter and Facebook. The partisan rule-bending is clear.
No it’s not. Had it been leaks concerning Trump collusion with Russian to rig previous election (you know, that fake news that runned for 4 years), it would have been placed in trending topic instead. GP is right, there is a very obvious double standard at play, and this is not happening only in the IS.
So they used a misleading photo in the header of an article and, when called out for it, immediately replaced it and acknowledged their mistake? Come on now. I wish other news sources showed this level of journalistic integrity.
The right wing media has been manufacturing bullshit for 4 years, and allowing the President to gaslight the public that it's the left wing that is fake news, and somehow in the last 6 months hackernews started to eat the bullshit?
Witchhunt stories about Child Pornography Pizza Parlors is fake news.
Stories that are inconvenient to the Republican leadership is not fake news.
I can't tell what is going on with this Hunter Biden story because the NY Post abandoned all journalistic credibility since it's been owned by Rupert Murdoch, so maybe there's something there.
But other than this story, the right wing media has been allowed to spread and perpetuate aggressively dangerous misinformation for YEARS on these platforms without repercussions.
Before you downvote me, read https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter... and tell me if this story of conservatives finally getting SOME resistance to the spread of lies and bullshit should incite any sympathy from any logically-minded person on HN.
They are a private company and are under no obligation to be fair or unbiased, the same way the NY Post has no obligation (and isn't) fair or unbiased.
Given that the administration has no qualms about using the DOJ to persecute tech companies in a politically motivated manner, I see no reason why Twitter and Facebook can't play dirty and fight back using underhanded means.
Whatever your perspective, directly verifiable censorship like this is just begging for legal trouble and monopoly investigations. Tactically speaking, I would say this is a massive mistake from Twitter.
This is what I don't get. People are screaming for digital channels to not allow disinformation even though they are just a passive communication channel. Is anyone screaming at printing presses for printing the NY Post? It's a garbage publication and this information is at least suspicious, but why are we holding Twitter to such a high standard of integrity and not actually journalists?
> why are we holding Twitter to such a high standard of integrity and not actually journalists?
Virality. Information spreads in a fundamentally different way over print [1] versus social media. It spreads faster. It spreads more insidiously. And it mutates--not per se, but in the context attached to it.
There is also social media's concentration. Before cable news, broadcast television was held to stringent standards. As competition emerged that went away. Facebook and Twitter are singular in their domains. Holding them to a higher standard while an election is underway seems reasonable.
[1] A newspaper on a website still behaves like print media. It has to be explicitly shared.
I think new things do have the potential to vastly change the status quo in a way that well understood institutions like the news media don't. Social media and recommendation algorithms are a truly new thing. We're just starting to understand how they intersect with society. Mass media has to be widely palatable to spread. The flat earth society would struggle to pay to run national newspaper let alone a TV station, but you can find hours of "quality" flat earth videos on the intent. We now have systems that can pick out for you exactly the group that agrees with you. Where before you'd only get exposed to the opinions of your surrounding community now, it's easy to find that there are thousands of people who agree with the little bits of racism that you subscribe to.
I think I agree that this article shouldn't have been blocked partially because it don't fit perfectly into this distinction
Bonus second reason why people might feel differently. People know and treat the NY Post as suspect. People like me don't read it. Probably some advertisers won't touch it, but I do use Twitter and FB. Most people do. They are arguably natural monopolies
I think it is crazy that twitter has gone down this path. Being the arbiter of truth makes their job much harder and doesn’t seem to have a big upside. If they have an agenda they want to push the upside might be there but otherwise it’s just a perpetual shitshow.
"If" they have an agenda? Really? Jack Dorsey admitted his bias. In the Joe Rogan interview he couldn't address any of the examples of biased censorship.
Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to Ibram Kendi, a man who wants to create an unelected and unaccountable "department of anti-racism" with the power to veto any federal bill that doesn't conform to Kendi's specific, contentious political agenda.
In other words, Jack Dorsey supports totalitarians.
To whom are they the arbiter of truth? Not to anyone with half a brain I hope. It's a private website and they can do what they like with it, same as you or I. If I go on your blog and post something dumb, you'd probably delete it too.
I mean, their previous path was "it's fine for us to profit handsomely from dishonest propaganda since we're not personally responsible for it, even if that propaganda gets implicated in the theft of an election or a genocide campaign." This turns out to have its own issues! And it's not specifically about a leftist/progressive agenda: it is plain unethical to profit off propaganda which you know to be deceitful and dangerous, regardless of what political intent.
While it is true that Twitter has cracked the whip against the right far more than the left since they started regulation of misinformation, this is reflective of Twitter being unbiased - the problem is the 21st-century Western right.
It has a clear upside. I don't think it's a secret at this point that the values of Silicon Valley are in sync with those of the right wing of the Democratic party. These companies are acting in their self interest.
We can make appeals to the ideal of free speech or point out instances of hypocrisy all we want, but it's a futile and demoralizing thing to focus on. It probably makes more sense to view Facebook and Twitter as media outlets with their own editorial agendas, just like the Washington Post, Economist, Daily Mail, etc. And then disengage if their agenda is at odds with yours.
Agreed. I can’t believe they didn’t see the writing on the wall. It doesn’t matter what their decision is (demeaning content misinformation or truth) they are going to be taking a ton of shit in perpetuity.
There's a recurring argument on social media censorship that goes: "you wouldn't want the telephone company censoring phone conversations would you?" And the response is along the lines: "these are hardly private conversations, any tweet can go viral and be seen by millions".
This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM. If you think that's OK for Twitter on its platform, is it also OK for AT&T on its phone network? For Google on Gmail?
Actually, that's a great idea, there should be a spam folder or something similar on facebook and twitter as well, and instead of blocking, it should just all go there. Then it be similar to Gmail and Phone Carrier. Users who would like to go check the spam themselves in case something that isn't spam made it there by accident could, and normal people who just don't want to see garbage posts at the cost of a few false positives would have a much better experience.
That is also a matter for interpretation, I believe. This cuts to the heart of the raging platform vs publisher debate (section 230).
From my understanding, the current status quo is:
1. A platform can not moderate its content beyond removing illegal content that is brought to their attention;
2. A publisher can moderate and selectively cull what ever user content they like, but is held liable for any infringing content that breaks its ToS or the law.
This is a matter I strongly believe requires an update to relevant legislation and a clear / strong precedent that can be pointed to. It feels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is trying to be both a platform and publisher when it suits them.
EDIT: Made the language a bit more neutral and closer alined to the current than the "should be". A child reply linked an article that is worth reading [1], however take it with a grain of salt, seeing as it's more opinion and interpretation of intent than a reading on application of the law as it is written. This issue has been simmering away long before 2016. It's only started to come to the foreground as the social media giants started moving closer to "publisher" than "platform". It would have been unthinkable to see Twitter, Facebook and Youtube "fact checking" and adding content below posts ten years ago.
I see this less as a partisan issue and more of a civil rights issue. I don't want to imagine a future where we have untouchable arbitrers of truth.
Your summary of the "current status quo" is a reasonably accurate summary of the legal situation BEFORE S230 was passed, and is exactly what S230 was designed to remedy.
The current status quo, as I understand it, is:
1. Everybody (newspapers, social media) can be held liable for their OWN content (e.g. the NYT for their articles).
2. Nobody can be held liable for disseminating OTHER people's content (letters to the editor, tweets), whether or not they decide to filter some of that content out of their own volition.
3. (This is where my understanding gets murky) Once the disseminating entity has been made aware that something they disseminate is illegal (copyright violation, illegal pornography, etc), they bear some responsibility for stopping the further dissemination.
You're going to need to be a bit more specific as your article offers a very similar interpretaiton of platform vs publisher (without using those terms), to what I presented. The only thing of note I see in your article is a "deep dive" into figuring out the "original intention" behind the law.
I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
> I believe modern application of a law should matter more than what the writers of the law were potentially thinking at the time.
Section 230 has never been applied this way. Some people want to change it, but they haven't yet. There is no legal precedent that those people have to stand behind.
You're asking the courts to change the law based on executive preference. That's dangerous for a wide variety of reasons (ex-post-facto-ness, separation of powers, etc.)
In case you didn't understand the parent, section 230 was written to fix the issue that prodigy had. All section 230 does is protect people who moderate content from civil liability. That's it. The law itself doesn't distinguish platforms or publishers. It distinguishes first-party and third-party content (and gives you protection for third party content, even if you publish first party content and moderate the third party content). That's all.
Nothing about platforms or publishers, and nothing about categorizing a company as one or the other. Only protection around certain kinds of content.
>Then we get to these early internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the early ‘90s. CompuServe is like the Wild West. It basically says, “We’re not going to moderate anything.” Prodigy says, “We’re going to have moderators, and we’re going to prohibit bad stuff from being online.” They’re both, not surprisingly, sued for defamation based on third-party content.
>CompuServe’s lawsuit is dismissed because what the judge says is, yeah, CompuServe is the electronic equivalent of a newsstand or bookstore. The court rules that Prodigy doesn’t get the same immunity because Prodigy actually did moderate content, so Prodigy is more like a newspaper’s letter to the editor page. So you get this really weird rule where these online platforms can reduce their liability by not moderating content.
There is precedent, but you are right in that the whole space has been allowed to act unchalleneged for so long. This is something that needs to change and we need a modern precedent to point at.
That basically all says that the provider can't be held liable even if they moderate things, due to 230, the most recent in that list is from 2011, but there are more recent rulings that exist.
Your understanding is the new interpretation of Section 230 being pushed by the ruling party in the US as justification for rewriting it and expanding the scope of what is actually a pretty targeted regulation. There's nothing in the actual text of Section 230 (which you can read in about a minute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 sections C and F are the relevant bits) about fairness or equality of enforcement.
It is technically a "matter of interpretation" in that one major political party is reading things into the law that don't exist and so it's a very common interpretation, but ... they don't exist.
Thank you for the link. It had been a while since I had read the specifics of section 230, and the Overton Window certainly has shifted since then, when it comes to this topic.
The key part that stands out to me and after refreshing my memory of the particulars, should be interpreting where "good faith" ends with respect to censoring topics and people, and what the bounds of "objectionable content" is.
Deciding that some news articles cannont be shared or talked about (even privately via the platform) while allowing others in similar circumstances to be distributed, is surely far from ideal.
Correct. US progressives and the major tech services recently argued that it should be treated as a utility, because of precisely this sort of problem, and they were opposed by US conservatives and ISPs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#United_States I'd say it's ironic, but it isn't really if you look at what the progressive and conservative movements and "big tech" have really been advocating for (which is off-topic for this site).
I think it is bigger news that Trump operatives are trying to inject misinformation into the last few weeks of the election. They have no respect for democracy.
But these problems will still be here post-Trump, or even if he wins re-election. We need to have reasoned debate on how to deal with our new world with social media.
> This story breaks that mold in that it involves social media censoring private conversations via DM.
This isn't a new behaviour.
I've experienced it personally: Back in 2011, when I published the big archive of paywalled but copyright expired Jstor documents with attached manifesto facebook silently vanished any message containing a link to it or the title of it, even in private messages.
One reason you haven't heard more about this behaviour is because the fact of the matter is that its extremely effective.
Google already censors tons of inbound messages, rendering them invisible in your spam folder simply because you didn't pay the deliverability cartel (Mailgun et al) to ensure that you don't get spam-flagged, even if your message isn't spam.
I think it's absolutely okay for AT&T to censor what it wants on its phone network, provided I have the freedom to use a competitor. Back in the day, we broke up AT&T for precisely the reason that people didn't have that freedom. And then we let them merge back together, for some reason.
I also think that not only is it legally permissible for Gmail to censor links, they do so already. Try reliably delivering a newsletter from a brand-new domain name (I have). Censorship isn't any better when it's the emergent effects of unknowable spam filtering and abuse algorithms than a decision by a human. (I'd say it's worse, because at least you can ask the human what they were thinking.) But the solution there is for consumers to stop using products that don't do what they want, not for big government to tell companies how to implement technical systems.
Twitter is a social media platform that engages in content management - they have always been moderating content, since day 1, managing identities etc..
AT&T is not in the business of content.
That's a very material distinction.
That says nothing about how/who/what Twitter should or should not be doing in this case, other than to say the moment you dip your toe into content management, it's going to get very complicated, as we now see on a daily basis in the news.
>I really hope AT&T starts censoring these damn spam calls. I've had 5 today.
I got one (Verizon) just as I started reading the comments for this post. :(
There are solutions[1], but you'll need to wait until next July[0],at least in the US. It's not a complete solution, but it should take care of the vast majority of scam calls.
Truecaller works even though the app is hard to stomach privacy-wise.
Google recently unveiled plans for its "verified calls" feature, so that might help if you're on an Android 11 device.
I personally do not answer any calls from numbers not on my contact list. If a call was urgent, I'd normally recieve a text message (if informal) or an email (if formal, like the bank, for example) from the caller eventually.
Some government call centers got mistakenly labeled ‘Spam Likely’. People were denied food stamps and other benefits for missing phone interviews from these numbers.
They do, my local politician robo-calls all his constituents with info, and T-Mobile always flags his calls as spam.
I guess in a way it's spam since it's unsolicited? But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling, and keeping people informed is part of his job.
Yeah that sounds like spam. If info needs to get sent out, try email. Robo-calls are intrusive, and generally the wrong medium for transmitting information.
Edit: Obtrusive -> intrusive. Although I guess both are technically correct.
> But it's real info, and relevant to the local people he's calling
That's the way pretty much every spammer justifies their existence and somehow manages to sleep at night.
The only reason robocalling by politicians is not illegal is because it's them who get to make the laws. They should all get in the sea, alongside all the other spammers.
I have been getting unsolicited e-mail from my local state rep, and I actually appreciate it. It's not campaign-type stuff, it's actual info about what's happening in this district and resources that are being provided.
Granted that feels different than a phone call, but the intent may be the same.
Although with email, you have the spam filter. It's just that those emails are not being picked up by it.
Also, usually, you can unsubscribe to email lists/sender. While you can't do that for phone calls. You might block a specific number, but those robo-calls might use many different numbers
Nope, it's because they added caller ID spoofing capabilities that nobody asked for, and regulators didn't stop them because Republicans installed telecom lobbyists to be the regulators.
Yeah, I think it's necessary and honestly overdue. The problem with these attempted defenses of the race to the bottom we are witnessing in online communication is they step back from the direct examination of specific harms to the abstraction of "speech."
Once the subject is switched, we can comfortably speak in generalities about the abstract value of speech. It reminds me of what Keats said about a certain way of thinking about economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
We're dealing with something that most reasonable people agree is a genuine crisis of democracy, and it's sheltered by a naiive conception of speech that doesn't have anything specific to say directly about Qanon, Covid, the 2020 election. It's a view from 10,000 feet generality that works when the ocean is flat again.
The difference between the telephone company and Twitter is that the phone company was (historically) a monopoly - the only game in town. Use their wires or get lost. It required common carrier neutrality by regulation.
Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service. It's not a public utility.
It's not just Twitter, it's also Facebook. (I believe Facebook was actually the first to take action.) What if Google does it too?
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
> In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
I was responding to "Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all."
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
(Unfortunately HN put me in the "You're replying too fast, please slow down" state last night so I was unable to reply, and so I'm not sure if anyone will see this reply now. I wonder if that should be called censorship?)
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
> As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
> The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
I don't really care about Twitter or Facebook to be honest. It's not the only game in town.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
That was a completely different situation. The Wikileaks cables contain marked classified government information that is still considered classified by the US government. (I will not debate whether or not the basis for their classification is valid.)
AWS provides service to the USG, and having unsecured classified anywhere on their servers likely violates the terms of service (between the USG and AWS).
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
that's precisely why I think journalists and the public sector ought to put their money where their mouth is. Open web standards can be adopted today with the effect of turning any of these groups into their own Twitter. That particular genie is impossible to push back into its own bottle. They had better catch up or get left behind.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
We should make sure that the media landscape contains a wide range of political thought, including ideas that you or I might individually find wrong-headed and offensive. That's how we ended up with the Fairness Doctrine from the 50s to the 80s, when broadcast media was monopolized to a comparable degree as social media today.
Sure. But that presumably does not mean requiring that The National Review carries articles providing a strong case for "cultural Marxism" or that Marxism Today carries articles supporting neoliberal trade policies. In fact, it presumably doesn't mean requiring that any particular medium or outlet carries anything in particular at all.
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
Another reply more or less had the same response I had, which is that it's entirely possible for you to start blogging about certain topics (some could be approached from a capitalism/socialism discussion starting point, even) and be shut down by AWS. I'd like to add a bit more though. Deplatforming is commonplace, by all parties with a platform, and its causes aren't just written comments but also artwork and legal commercial goods.
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
I will add one more thing, although not directly related to your comment about deplatforming being commonplace. In banking, we call it derisking ( closing customer's account due to <reason> ).
you know what, that's absolutely true. But you have a better chance of remaining online with your wrongthink than by remaining on a platform such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
If they're really being collusive, then you investigate them for violations of antitrust law or otherwise figure out what they're doing that's breaking the free market, and you fix it.
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
This is not the scenario described. The scenario is that all of these web sites allow 419 scams for years, and then all of the sudden in the same week they all decide to ban 419 scams. That would be really strange, don't you think?
>How would you feel if they had banned all talk of russian conspiracies the last few years? Would you be making the property rights argument still?
Yes. Because otherwise the Russians (or anyone else) could do so on my property and I would have no recourse.
The appropriate way to handle this is to vote with your feet/wallet.
Besides, Twitter and Facebook's revenue model is so incredibly evil and exploitative, folks should leave there even if they weren't blocking whatever it is that you think is important.
I did nearly seven years ago and I'm much happier for it.
This seems like an incomplete summary. Shipping companies are subject to similar common carrier regulations, even though they're not monopolies, because "just hire some random guy to drive your packages around" isn't a feasible replacement. In a country where almost everyone with any serious media presence is on Twitter, it's unreasonable to tell certain arbitrary subsets of the media that their thoughts are off limits.
> Twitter (and every single commercial social media space) is not the above, and can do what it wants on its service.
Not exactly. The public has the right to have all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh private company".
Yet you have no rights on a private platform. Is the New York Times forced to publish the same article? No, and they are a publisher. Their existence doesn't suddenly give you a right to use it and 'publish' what you'd like.
Every forum online has rules about what you can and cannot post; there is no law stating they have to leave whatever you post up.
actually there are rules. Clearly, a TV network with 1B viewers would not be allowed to give unlimited free airtime to one party; but somehow Twitter seems to be immune (so far) to campaign finance laws
Phone companies are natural monopolies on account of the cost of building out a physical network and network effects. Social media has similar dynamics. The only difference is there is no requisite physical layer.
> Did MySpace, Friendster, AOL, CompuServe etc have those first mover advantages as well?
They had the same first-mover advantages. They never achieved Facebook's scale and network advantage. In the early days, Ma Bell also faced competition.
It's gone so far now that nothing can surprise me anymore. If Facebook and Twitter made a joint announcement that Zuckerberg won the 2020 election and that Jack Dorsey will be his vp, and that anyone disputing this, whether in public or private or off platform will be banned - even that would not surprise me. If people went along with it so as not to be cut off from their likes and "influence", even that would not surprise me.
This kind of mess is why I respected Wikileaks so much for all those years including the 2016 leaks. Leaking is an art that requires dumping verifiable and irrefutable documents to as many people as possible so they can independently investigate them. These plant jobs in partisan media will never be received credibly.
What a bizarre story. Unidentified person drops off a damaged computer at a repair shop and never comes back. Hard drive contains lots of salacious info about Hunter Biden. Repair shop decides the correct course of action is to give it to Rudy Giuliani. That is fishy as hell.
> Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
I said I want to see the raw emails. That would be enough to determine if it’s purely made up or if _someone_ actually sent those emails. Raw emails would provide a lot of extra information for almost no effort.
Gawker ultimately settled for $31M which would be about 2% of what has been raised for Trump's reelection bid. The NY Post is still owned by the Murdoch family who would consider that a worthwhile investment.
Why is this being downvoted? As far as I can tell from reading the article, this is an accurate summary. The provided evidence that said laptop is genuinely connected with Hunter Biden is 1) a Biden sticker on the laptop, 2) the fact that it's a Delaware repair shop, and 3) a pornographic video featuring somebody who "appears to be" Hunter Biden. What about this is convincing evidence?
They're also declaring a "smoking gun" of Hunter peddling influence when the only data point is an email from a Ukrainian to Hunter saying that he was looking forward to meeting the Vice President. There doesn't seem to be any message from Hunter, and Joe has already said his official schedule is public record and no meeting ever happened.
I think what’s considered the smoking gun here is the direct contradiction of what Biden has publicly attested to. This, in the context of Hunter’s questionable nexus of high compensation, dearth of professional qualification, and familial connections. All of this in context of Biden’s last failed presidential run.
It is definitely not a direct contradiction. It's very indirect. We have an email thanking Hunter for a potential meeting. We have no confirmation from Hunter. We have no confirmation the meeting happened. We have no confirmation any quid pro quo was offered. We have no confirmation Hunter said anything to his father.
The laptop was supposedly dropped off a few years ago. Giuliani, Bannon and the FBI have seen the data at least months ago. The NY Post has had it in their possession. None of these details are confirmed. Which means they either failed to verify any of it or they may even know it's a scam.
What's amusing about this whole thing to me is that Facebook and Twitter dropping the ban hammer on this piece will Streisand the hell out of it. If they'd left it alone, it would've been lost in the news cycle with everything else going on and no one would remember it in a week. Now the story is, once again, "Big Tech censors conservatives".
Twitter is dominated by SC hearings and baseball, Google News is SC hearings and Barron Trump having covid, and other random stuff like rabid enthusiasm for early voting below the fold. I'm not seeing a single reference to this story on either of those sites headlines, and I'm also in an incognito window.
This thing didn't even survive the first half of the day.
This post has some 700 comments at the time I’m reading it, and has blown up compared to the coverage it had this morning. No doubt it will get lost eventually, but I think the ham-handed, nakedly political actions of twitter’s censors have become a story in their own right now.
I think the other points are that the laptop had pictures of Hunter Biden, the FBI allegedly confiscated the laptop, and that Hunter Biden's lawyer didn't deny that it was Hunter's.
IMO it's relevant that twitter is blocking the story due to their rules about releasing hacked material, not misinformation. If the hard drive is a hoax, I think it's important to have an open discussion to shine a light on it. Banning the article in a way that appears to validate its claims will only embolden claims of a conspiracy.
I think it's also interesting that the "hacking" ban doesn't have an exemption for the press. Even though the NY Post is fairly partisan even by tabloid standards,it seems like a double standard if I can still link to an NY Times article containing information about classified government activities that were revealed via hacking
As Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
In normal circumstances, that doesn't matter. Talk about it, let it fly around the internet and then in a week or so we'll hear the authoritative rebuttal.
However, we are 20 days from the election. People are literally lined up and voting as we speak.
Which is to say that Twitter and Facebook seem to have learned something and probably have telemetry telling them when a claim like this is getting legs.
My feelings on this are mixed. It's effectively restoring the "old media" order where random trolls can't steal elections. But it's naturally preventing "the truth" from stealing an election too.
I see your “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and raise you a “lies spread faster than the truth”. If you allow the article, the article goes viral, then the retraction a day later gets no attention (because it’s not as interesting) well then now a ton of people are gonna be walking around thinking “didn’t they get Biden’s son’s emails and catch him in a crime or something?”
There’s no cool cosmic justice here, where the Post loses readership because they publish lies or that politicians will be punished for promoting lies from sources they knew to be bad. There’s just this hazy miasma, where the Post is vaguely not credible but also not totally distrusted, and people forget which politician promoted which story a couple days later.
That means the best way to play the game isn’t to research the truth but to drum up the most fantastical lies you can. That game has nothing but bad outcomes for humanity in the long term, and I don’t blame the platforms for trying extremely flawed approaches to prevent it.
I think it would make sense to distinguish between some random jerk posting a photo hacked from his ex-girlfriend's iCloud account vs a news article containing a hacked photo of a slide detailing NSA's PRISM program. Twitter already makes "public interest exemptions" for their other rules
Are you just speculating, or is there actual proof that the article is fake? Twitter seems to think it contains at least some authentic material that was obtained illicitly.
The FBI has confirmed the authenticity of subpoenas in the past and I'm confident that they'd be able to do so before November. Determining if the pictures are photoshopped is trickier but could probably also be done relatively quickly
The supposed leaker has contradicted his own claims about the material, has refused to release evidence (like cryptographic signatures) that might prove whether the emails actually passed through email servers, and he is a zealous Trump booster, (supposedly) hid the information from the public for a year in order to maximize campaigns impact instead of sharing it immediately upon discovery, and none of the Republican Senators not Republican DOJ, who supposedly had this material for a year already, have mentioned its existence, despite having recently published reports investigating this exact issue.
The purported facts beggar belief -- that an extremely famous person took his laptop, full of extremely damaging material, to a repair shop and then simply forgot about it. That a Mac repair shop owner violated all ethical standards to spy on a customer laptop.
That after stealing the customer's laptop and data and finding supposedly treasonous data on it, he gave it to Trump's campaign team instead of the FBI.
There's no evidence that it's true and substantial evidence that it's false.
> That a Mac repair shop owner violated all ethical standards to spy on a customer laptop.
Repair shops look through equipment all the time-- they're one of the largest sources of reports for child pornography.
> instead of the FBI.
I think you've just proved you didn't even read the NY POST article? It claims he gave the laptop to the FBI and includes a supposed "federal subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI". The continues, "before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello"
I have no idea if this stuff is bullshit or not-- presumably the FBI will come out and debunk it completely shortly.
But I don't think the discourse is furthered by opinionated comments from people who don't even give an appearance of having read the article.
Reading the article, nothing in the repair shop owner's interview strikes me as incorrect or inconsistent. It seems to me that the man is just inarticulate and has never been put on the stage by a reporter before, especially a stage large enough to put a presidential candidate's campaign at risk.
That article had a lot of ads so I’m not sure if I actually got to the end when scrolling, but there really aren’t many direct quotes, just assertions by the reporter. To my eyes it looks like he is suffering from anxiety and confusion after this thing blew up. It’s unfair to blame him for anxiety. I have “crazy” worries sometimes too and being involved in a national scandal is probably enough to trigger that.
That's what it sounds like when you interview a normal human being at the center of something so politically sensitive and dealing with such high level corruption.
“When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”
To be honest it sounds like a regular end of the election craziness. To all those people, who think this is somehow special and deserves special new set of rules, I can only point to 2016 ( Comey saga that also included Guliani ). It is not special. It is not new. It is still speech. It may be lies ( and I am sure we will find out soon enough ) and I get that a lot of people can be influenced. I get it. And it still think it is risky to the existing system that RELIES on lies flowing freely.
What I do not get is why some people honestly do believe that an average person needs to be protected from lies by a censor? And who ensures censor is not a liar? Who guards the guards? The question is important as people seem to be clamoring for rather powerful guards of 'what is true truth'.
"What I do not get is why some people honestly do believe that an average person needs to be protected from lies by a censor?"
I was a Chomsky style free speech ultimatist.
Unfortunately, humans aren't rational.
Lying is super effective, its effects pernicious. They activate identity and trigger negative partisanship. Simply trying to refute lies only embeds them further. Profiting from the outrage machine (dopamine addiction) has created a vicious cycle, and worse every year.
Is this really what we want?
The founders had the notion that democracy requires an informed populace. When the audience of NY Post, Fox News, OANN, and others are objectively, stubbornly anti-informed, how is democracy served?
What's the alternative to censorship? How does Truth prevail in the public square?
Even Good Samaritan Chomsky has no response to the Paradox of Tolerance.
--
For my part, I think it's hysterical that Facebook and Twitter censored a NY Post. That's like the biggest dealer of crack cocaine indignantly tossing a hit of molly in the trash, because that crap ain't no good for y'all.
I'm still baffled why any one would get their news from NY Post, Facebook, or Twitter. It's quite a stretch to call any of that "news". So I don't see how allegations of censorship even apply.
I don't think you are wrong. I would not dare to suggest there are easy answers here. My initial reaction was to attempt to argue that we are not, in fact a democracy, completely derailing the conversation in an attempt simply to 'win' an argument. I am oddly surprised with myself over this. There is no ego here. Nothing to prove. And yet, the need to be right on the internet prevails. This agrees with your note that humans are not rational.
I definitely agree that lying is effective. I agree that outrage machine is getting really annoying, but I also found a way to deal with it in an imperfect way. Stop consuming this information and, eventually, stop internalizing this overwhelming pile of crap that is shoved into our minds 24/7.
There is a reason we are a republic. There is a reason we protect ( or at least give lip service to protecting ) minority voices. And that's usually, because popular opinions don't need defenders. And I want those voices protected even if they are unpopular, ill-informed, dishonest, or even just lying.
The alternative is that we ban lying. Period. No cute ads that dance on the edge of misrepresentation. No white lies. You had a shitty day. Say so. No lie of omission. Your company uses child labor, disclose it in 10-k ( oi, all material facts should be available for investors ). No politician talk. We usher a new world where dictionary police is king and every single one of us has to weigh each word carefully..
I feel I should apologize. This post may be now coming across as snarky. I think that fact that I don't really have a good answer makes me frustrated.
I chose to reply to you, specifically, because you were discussing ideas and principles, avoiding getting caught up by personalities and the food fight.
I've been obsessing about rhetoric, persuasion, discourse for way too long. I've tried any thing and every thing suggested. Stuff like David Domke and heroesnarrative.org. I've spent 100s of hours working on framing, wordsmithing, resolutions, whitepapers.
Nothing I've tried has made a lasting difference. Most of it was probably counter productive.
Of course there are some obvious things we (society) can do, short of banning falsehoods.
- Add friction to, and sometimes break, feedback loops to thwart the dopamine rush.
- Decouple (unbundle) activities to create opportunities for competition.
- Prohibit self dealing and other conflicts of interest.
- Ban toxic incentives (targeted ads, freemium).
You may note these remedies have some overlap with the adjacent issues of monopolies and privacy.
Of course, no silver bullets. People smarter than me will surely add to this list. (I barely understand the debates about Section 230.) And I'm still find a response to algorithmic newsfeeds.
All of these measures limit, deny, thwart.
But I want to find positive alternatives. Role models for better behavior. In the marketplace for ideas, I want to be selling the best ideas.
--
Have you listened to KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle (kexp.org) lately? In response to COVID-19, they're now doing mass psychiatry, group therapy with their "You are Not Alone" campaign.
I think this might be one antidote to the outrage machine.
It's a synthesis of many aspects and features you'll recognize. And most of the time these kinds of things backfire. Perceived as insincere empathy and saccharin positivity.
But KEXP somehow makes it work. A slow metamorphosis over years. They're now fulfilling a yearning need for connection and community and calmness that, frankly, is mostly missing in media.
One example of their genius: In response to the ridiculous assaults on the USPS, KEXP did the "Support The Post Office" event, encouraging listeners to send their song requests via USPS. Then one morning they played those requests and read the cards.
Not once did KEXP engage in the food fight. They didn't have to. They only said positive things and encouraged positive actions.
KEXP said what they're for, not what they're against.
Of course KEXP is listener funded, and therefore directly incentivized to do positivity and outreach. Versus ad based outrage machines.
(A few years ago, KEXP canceled their weekend morning shows on politics and current events. I had listened for decades and really liked those programs. But the format and strategy practiced by aging hippies, standard public radio fare, was long past being constructive.)
I'm now wondering how the KEXP experiment can be replicated. Done many many times vs scaled larger.
I'm also wondering if this strategy can reconnect people, help reduce our hyper polarization. Stock advice for cult deprogramming is unconditional acceptance, no judgement. Just be glad your friend or family member is back and listen listen listen.
I like the thought about positive alternatives. I have not heard of KEXP, but I will look into it now. Based on how your describe it, I think we need to stop relying on 'free' sources. If we sufficiently care about information, we should pay for it ( mostly because then we can at least demand value for the money ). The ad supported web does not work well for society as a whole.
I am not against doing the things you mentioned ( adding friction, limiting conflict of interest and so on ). There is a clear need for that. And there are real business interest that would put up a big fight if there was a real threat of implementation.
Freedom of speech doesn't rely on the belief that humans are rational, it relies on the belief that there's no fundamental difference between some enlightened, rational circle of censors and the irrational masses.
WTF does this question have to do with the paradox of intolerance? There's nothing intolerant about the claim that the Bidens are corrupt.
> It's quite a stretch to call any of that "news". So I don't see how allegations of censorship even apply.
Freedom of speech isn't restricted to news and the idea that you can censor anything which doesn't fall into a narrowly defined category such as "news", with the censor deciding what counts as news and not, would completely kill the point of freedom of speech.
> The founders had the notion that democracy requires an informed populace.
I often see this claim but I'm not aware of any evidence that either the founders believed this, nor for the belief itself. It's also often used to argue for voting restrictions. It's kind of parallel to the idea that freedom of speech requires that people are rational, where again my question is: What's the alternative? What is the rational informed group that we should entrust restrictions to?
In your view some elite group should decide that NY Post, Fox News and OAnn are anti-informing people, not serving democracy. Well if we trust that elite group, why bother with democracy in the first place?
"... it relies on the belief that there's no fundamental difference between some enlightened, rational circle of censors and the irrational masses."
This is a very excellent point.
While bingeing on HOPWAG, it finally occurred to me that our current food fight (fake news, cancel culture, censoring, trolling) might be due to very different ideas of What Is Truth.
If we can't even agree that the universe is knowable and someone somewhere probably has the correct answer, then the whole fight is pointless.
"In your view some elite group should decide..."
That's the exact opposite of my view.
We'll always have more falsehoods than truth. Even when we're trying to find the truth. The challenge of mitigating the replication crisis (in science) is proof of that.
Plus, I no longer care what the truth is. Because my opponents don't care. So further debate is pointless.
At this point I only want two things.
#1
Unplug the outrage machine.
#2
To be left alone.
I'd like to go ONE FULL DAY without having to think about this stuff. I shouldn't have to completely unplug from the world and actively defend my filter bubble just to do normal people stuff.
"...have to do with the paradox of intolerance? There's nothing intolerant about the claim that the Bidens are corrupt."
Honestly, I'm not quite sure yet. It certainly seems "flood the zone with bullshit" strategy is related to triggering identity and radicalization.
The average person isn't aware of the very intentional acts to subtly shift their perspective and world view. You're aware of its presence, which to some degree, inoculates you from its effects. Whenever you see any news, you ask yourself: "What actors might be trying to influence me to believe this, and why?" and I assert the average person does not offer that level of introspection when consuming content.
The solution is media blackouts for a period of N days to weeks before elections. It's what other democracies do. But, during critical periods of time, we temporarily restrict speech. That's how you handle it. Is it a perfect solution, no, but it offers some benefit with not too much restriction.
Our imperfect species often draws a line in the sand and says you're either on this side or that. Sometimes that line is a fucked up line and we go to war over it. And other times, we accept it (yes there are other states), internalize it and move along collectively as consciously elevated apes with a new feather in our culture-cap.
That you might not feel a sliver of moral dignity in the line that was drawn by globally dominant companies today, fighting disinformation before an election, saddens me deeply.
Like, yea, your logical brain might be short circuiting right now but can't you see the bigger issue at play?
I'm reminded of the post circulating on HN a few days ago about how FB shut down some Holocaust Denier groups, and the commentary thread just blew up about "violating free speech" etc. That really messed me up, and made me lose faith in this community.
One's man disinformation is another man's propaganda.
What is the bigger issue at play? I honestly cannot see a bigger issue than a society wide decree on what can and cannot be uttered. To me, the notion of being able to say what I want to say without the reprisal of "globally dominant companies today"/government/we, is so ingrained that it is possible that I genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees.
Great. And now I feel like a Boy Scout reciting badly written essay about why I love America.
At a moment where people are scared of meeting to discuss things in person. Which makes it orders of magnitudes worse. This is the only voice people had.
LOL I read Sohrab pretty regularly but have not seen him advocate for a Christian Monarchy in the US (though would love to read that piece). He had a pretty big dust-up with David French over, among other things, whether conservatives should continue being nice to the left as a sort of game theoretical experiment. Other than that, he's kind of boring.
Often Twitter will lock the creation of new tweets, and require the manual deletion of the offending tweet before you can continue posting. I suspect that's what happened in this case, rather than an outright account suspension.
I 'm really glad that social media are discrediting themselves. Censorship has been going on for years but the blatant covid-powered covert misinformation along with the blatant suppression of competitors might finally turn off enough people away from them. I always though of them as the continuation of reality-show trash TV , which always had an audience but nowhere near to the proportions it has today (even if it's dressed up with makeup and ironed suits). If people learn to finally shut up and listen instead of shouting it will be a good thing for public life. Or they may just realize there's no way to agree and everyone goes their own way. Both are better than a fruitless stalemate.
(easy with the flagging guys. half the comments here are flagged. You re supposed to flag spam not anything that you wish wasnt there. wishful thinking isnt gonna help your cause)
One might even argue that Facebook/Twitter are doing this explicitly to ensure a party is put in power that won't try to reform them in any way. Their actions show it, and their political donations show it. That's my putting on the tin foil, but I think you could make such an argument. We always talk about Big Oil, etc being friends to Republicans, but often ignore Big Tech's close ties to Democrats.
I would expect it has less to do with who they want to be elected than who they think will be elected.
If the polls are anywhere close to real, they’re going to see both houses of Congress plus the executive in Democratic hands. That is the same party publicly calling for their breakup.
The reality is that once you’re as big as FB, Google and the rest you have enough money to play both sides of the aisle. Doesn’t matter who is in power, you’ve got them both under control.
Those are small outliers, when it comes to actual public donations that the company, it's board, and it's employees make they all swing heavily to Democrats, not Republicans. Eric Schmidt was helping the Obama campaign while he was a Google board member. Out of all the companies, Facebook has handled this all the best, and you can tell because they are getting flack from both sides.
EDIT: dang, I understand my political views don't align with vast majority of HN but me replying to correct false info keeps giving me this error on HN:
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
I think HN keeps turning into an echo chamber and any opposing view point on a specific political topic gets censored/throttled here too. How can you expect me to have a proper discussion when I am not even allowed to reply?
----
96% of the donations from Big Tech went to Democrats. This is a verifiable fact.
The first censorship of this story came from Facebook and the statement from them was this by Andy Stone, FB communications. Andy Stone is a former DCCC (DCCC: Committed to electing Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives)
when you mean "Big Tech" do you mean employees, the companies themselves, and / or the executives that lead those companies. Looking around, I only see some statements says only 96% employees of tech firms and media orgs back Democrats.
Looking at companies themselves it seems like they readily back Republicans as much as Democrats. I didn't do any super deep digging, but this is what I am basing my statements on.
(you're not being censored for your political views, it's because you're posting too many times in one thread. I get the same alert sometimes)
Again, my point isn't that there are no Democratic Facebook execs, it's that they play both sides. To whit:
> Indeed, the three top leaders of Facebook's DC office all have extensive backgrounds in Republican politics: Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan; Vice President for U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin; and Public Policy Director for Global Elections Katie Harbath.
That article also outlines a number of right-wing friendly moves that Facebook has made in recent years, just as a counterpoint to the example being discussed here.
I agree with you that the vast majority of staff at these tech companies are Democrats, but I'm talking about the top-level execs. And once you reach that level you see the top tech companies play both sides of the political aisle as best they can.
Are there any examples when big tech has "made a mistake" or "banned" someone on the lefty leaning side by mistake? I have countless examples of right leaning views get banned and censored "by mistake". When mistakes always happen to one side, the right loses faith in the system.
Simply pointing out a couple executives being republican doesn't have anything of value. This isn't about democrat vs republican. This is about democrats + RINOs vs Trump supporters. Having people like Mitt Romney or John McCain type republicans is of no value. Vast majority of Trump supporters dislike them.
I will give a couple examples - the Biden campaign keeps tweeting the same lie again and again about Trump not condemning white nationalists at the Charlottesville incident. This is an easily verifiable lie. Yet twitter nor Facebook ever marks this as "debunked".
Another example - In October 2016 and October 2020, NYTimes put out articles claiming to have the tax data for Trump. They didn't disclose any sources, nor was it verified. And if the data they had was correct, they obtained it illegally. Yet Twitter nor Facebook banned this on their platform.
Another example - last week, media ran stories with secretly recorded audio of Melania Trump. This wasn't banned either.
Here's an example from a few hour ago where FB deleted a post and restricted monetization by BabylonBee (satire) for "violating our Community Standards.":
Yet these platforms are now claiming the NYPost story cannot be allowed because it's "hacked" data. It's not hacked data plus even if it was, they don't apply the same standard to news which might hurt Trump.
As for not being able to comment on the same thread, if that's the case, then this is a very poor UX. Not being able to interact at all (I wasn't able to for at least a day) on a topic you are passionate about makes the site pointless.
EDIT:
It's strange how someone seems to be monitoring this 3 day old post on HN and flagging and downvoting my comments instantly.
You're absolutely right. The idea that a corporation's board would decide collectively what political stances to take is not groundbreaking. However this kind of critical thinking seems to be so rarely applied to organisations trafficking in information, such as those making up 'big-tech'.
I was speaking elsewhere on Hacker News recently about how the attitude towards trusting corporations seems to have shifted so dramatically. Distrusting the motivations of large corporations was once a pillar of liberal thought in the west. Now many liberals seem to be willing to empower these corporations absolutely as long as they control online discourse in a way that largely benefits the liberal establishment.
I would encourage people to consider for a moment the financial incentives for organisations at the scale of Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. to support globalist political agendas. This isn't 'conspiracy theory' thinking, it's shareholder primacy, it's simple politics. Anyone who thinks that these organisations support liberal causes out of the goodness of their hearts needs a reality check. They pursue these choices for their own gain.
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.
Yes you do. You pay with your attention and with your ability to understand the world around you.
Twitter is an extremely powerful bit of technology that can basically make you believe anything. As a trade for entertainment/dopamine: you are allowing it to.
Can you prove algorithmic based information from a Twitter feed does not influence your behavior or opinions?
Twitter itself as a organization is not making you believe anything specifically. However the information presented to you may influence your ideas and potentially your behavior.
everything influences your behaviors or options, do you sue your childhood neighbour for setting a bad example? Ultimately it's you who's responsible for your behaviors and if there's something wrong with you the only way to fix it is you learning to discern truth from lie, NOT everyone else shielding you from lies.
The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption. In human history, we've never before had individual companies like Facebook and Twitter that are so enormous and have so much control over our public speech. (2.7 billion and 330 million monthly active users, respectively.) They have become "the town square of the world", so to speak. Facebook and Twitter are not literally governments, but they're actually larger than many governments, with a larger population and more wealth than many nations. There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech. That assumption is no longer true. Indeed, the whole motivation behind this particular act of censorship is the idea that these platforms are so powerful that they can change the outcome of the election of one of the largest nations on Earth. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's clear in any case that Facebook and Twitter are not just normal "private companies". They're not little moderated discussion forums. They have effectively (unfortunately) become the public sphere.
Twitter once locked me out of my account because I made a joke about bitcoin. Their stupid "algorithms" got me. And the only reason I was able to get my account unlocked was that I personally knew a Twitter engineer. I don't trust Jack or Zuck even one tiny bit to exercise the vast power they have to silence millions of people. It's not even a question of whether I agree with the NY Post article: the story is probably bullshit. But so were the news stories about Iraq having WMD. How about suspending the NY Times account too? How about suspending every news outlet that has published a debunked story? "Anonymous sources tell us that yadda yadda."
By design, Facebook and Twitter allow everyone in the world to post anything they want. That includes lies. If they can't accept the consequences of the platform they created, then they should shut down. But as long as they exist, with the size of their user base, they are simply too big and too powerful to be allowed to restrict our freedom of speech.
Regardless of how good you believe your argument is philosophically there is no law that supposes they are limited to choosing supporting unrestricted speech or shutting down and any attempt to create such a law would in fact be a violation of their legally defined rights.
The change you desire would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment to allow the government to compel the speech of a corporation in order to protect the speech of their customers. It would be complex, challenging, hard to predict, and almost certainly impossible even if people on average agreed it was needed.
You would have an easier time forcing payment processors, cdns, hosts, not to discriminate against alternative social networks. They at least ARE infrastructure. The challenge with those alternative networks is the only content that absolutely must use it is often odious leaving such networks with little of the desirable often uncontroversional content produced by the rest of the population of users and lots of the bullcrap nobody else wanted.
For example technically voat is more "free" than reddit but a brief look at the frontpage suggests that this freedom is mostly used to be the kind of offensive jerks nobody else wants to be around.
Jack and Zuck have zero incentive to discourage anything that limits communication or discourages both sides from buying as many ads as possible.
I would go so far as to say that Trump could not have been elected without misinformation promoted on Facebook and Twitter and the net result has been a massive probably irreparable rift in our nation and will ultimately when the dust settled have aided in killing addition hundreds of thousands of people that didn't have to die.
An trivially manipulable echo chamber designed to magnify lies and hate is not a matter of minor import without clear real world consequences.
It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later. Is this a trend you see reversing soon?
> It's possible that they are apt to desire to do a little self regulation now in order to avoid a heavier hand doing it for them later.
Whose heavy hand do you mean? It appears to me that the 2 major parties have very different ideas about what Facebook and Twitter should and shouldn't do.
>The standard argument is that freedom of speech only applies to governments, but that's based on an outdated assumption.
>There's nothing special about governments with regard to freedom of speech except that it has always been assumed governments are the only entities with enough individual power to significantly restrict free speech.
The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property. The government can. It's an extraordinary power wielded exclusively by the government.
Consider this: If you think Twitter should be restrained from censoring their platform because the extent of their power is on par with the government, who will enforce any violations of that restraint?
> The difference is that Twitter can't put you in prison and it can't seize your property.
I specifically said I was talking about freedom of speech. There are many different kinds of freedom, and these aren't specifically free speech issues.
The power to imprison and seize property is the core free speech issue. If the government can't enforce the law by putting you in prison or seizing your property, the entire issue is moot.
> The power to imprison and seize property is the core free speech issue.
There are more ways to control participation in public discourse than imprisonment and seizures of printing presses. Times have moved on. Instead of imprisonment, we have banning and filtering, with no independent oversight or appeal process. Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies can do more to restrict the spread of certain information than most governments in the world have ever been able, so why shouldn't at least the same standard apply to them?
Their virtual town squares are nowadays larger than any square ever under government control, and they have absolute control over who can and cannot participate. They are the absolute monarchies of 21st century, more powerful than ever.
The freedom of speech means that government can't prosecute you for having an opinion. It doesn't require anyone too listen to you. It also only applies to the government.
To think that your personal transactionality with Twitter, whether you pay for your SLAs or DMs etc, is what matters here is myopic at best. Because this soapbox found itself to be used at planet scale, 24/7 available and proven to be increasingly influential, even consequential, on our institutions that depend on healthy public discourse. Not only your analogy doesn’t follow, trying to apply market based normativities on problems of democratic processes is very misleading.
'planet-scale soapbox' is an even better argument for them to be limited in what they allow... just because they found themselves popular doesn't suddenly make them a public utility
If it turns out monopolies of market-based high-throughput public communication channels put societies in a tailspin and render democratic processes highly vulnerable to information warfare, I don’t care whether we call it a public utility or a soapbox, it is a collective liability and we would ignore it at our own peril.
It's not just that, they (Twitter) were actively suspending people that were posting the article from Google/Bing cached pages. They have also seemingly prevented the story from trending very high or very long.
weird that there is actually no mention of these materials being hacked from anywhere though, or did I miss that?
It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
>It seems like this computer shop fellow voluntarily gave over this hard drive only after the computer in question became his property (as a result of someone not collecting the computer and not paying the bill)
To say this strains credulity would be be a massive understatement.
Also, people routinely abuse their privileges to snoop on others, and computer repair shops copying disks and having a looksie is no exception.
On the email remark, are you aware of any mainstream news org (wikileaks doesn't count) who has posted a full raw email with DKIMs as part of their story's evidence? I'd honestly be surprised if you can show me one, double so if it's commonplace, since it's one of those things I just sort of consider nearly impossible for the media to actually do.
It's worth noting that HN flags are user-sourced, so unlike on Twitter that doesn't necessarily reflect administrators stepping in to kill the discussion.
It likely is BS, but not definitely. Even some of the points in the TPM article aren't very strong (I'm sorry, but journalists mocking the story isn't a point.) But, even if it is, it's not the role of Facebook to decide it is or isn't, when it is not verify-ably false. Instead they should just elevate critics of the article/scoop like the article you linked.
> Even some of the points in the TPM article aren't very strong
The people who wrote the NY Post piece had plenty of time to prepare. Now the story is rocketing around at the speed of the internet; but it takes time to refute authoritatively.
Twitter, Facebook, HN, and similar channels will have spread the story regardless of its truth or untruth. They are vulnerable to propaganda, similar to how open relays are to spreading spam.
So by your logic we should just delay any posting of news so that it can be vetted by other outlets, which defeats the entire purpose of getting scoops. Plenty of false stories have been spread by big outlets, including CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, etc...no one has said we should censor those stories. Who gets to draw the line and when? So far -every- proposal I've seen targets one group and isn't broadly applied.
Wrong. I pointed out a problem, but I did not suggest a remedy.
It's a hard problem. There's a saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." It goes back centuries: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
Extraordinary times calls for extraordinary actions. The coming US election is no small deal, and we have seen in past elections how bad actors have been using social media to undermine democracy (including but not limited to influencing elections). You really can’t blame Twitter and Facebook here for taking the more radical step against an obvious smear campaign that blatantly fails the smell test. I’m sure if this story turns out to be true, we will hear about it from more reliable media, at which point the social media companies can offer an apology and release the links to this article.
You would expect Twitter and Facebook to articulate standards in advance and adhere to them consistently, but in this case we have individuals who have literally been on the payroll of one political side making exceptional judgements on behalf of the platforms that nakedly favor one side over another, consistently.
Also the point about the backstory not making sense. It basically says "The Biden Campaign checked Biden's schedule, and said that Biden didn't attend an illegal meeting at that time". The rush to cover and dismiss the story makes it seem more likely that it's true (I have no idea either way), than if people could just write it off as another crackpot story from the NY Post.
A rush could just as likely be a realization that a story like this, whether true or not, can sow massive doubt. Just look at what happened with Comey and Clinton in 2016. Rushing to get ahead of a story doesn't only happen when the story is true, but when you expect a sizable subset of the population to believe the story is true.
> But, even if it is, it's not the role of Facebook to decide it is or isn't, when it is not verify-ably false. Instead they should just elevate critics of the article/scoop like the article you linked.
Facebook will do whatever provides the greatest return for their shareholders - they have no duty to Constitutional values. That is the only thing that will drive their decision making, so obviously they decided the long term risks of letting Trump abuse their platform with propaganda outweighs the short-term blow back from conservatives, who appear likely to be out of power in 4 months anyways.
If the public wants a role in how Facebook should handle this type of thing, then Congress needs to stop play-acting and starting writing legislation.
Email headers would trivially prove if that was actually an email sent via gmail. The rest of the email account would do a lot to back up the claim it was actually his laptop.
Ok, but I've never seen the media ever publicly discuss document verification in a story.
Stories about Trump's tax returns don't include any sort of explanation about verification. They wouldn't even publish the documents in order to keep the source secret.
So I don't think its reasonable to assume the lack of easy confirmation means it is necessarily fake.
Perhaps you just haven't read the newspaper much. "So-and-so McOfficial confirmed the authenticity of the documents" is standard copy. This is a result for just googling "confirmed the authenticity of the emails":
Yet the pattern of the last four years for bombshell stories has been more to the tune of “unnamed intelligence official”, “high-level anonymous source”. That’s anything but verification.
Tax returns would be harder to verify I think. Email is super simple and cryptographic (virtually tamper proof). Just publish the full, raw email with all the headers.
And it’s not a lack of easy confirmation. It’s trivial to say conclusively whether or not that email was processed by Gmail. If it wasn’t it’s 100% guaranteed to be a really poor quality fake.
If it went through Gmail and has the proper signatures, then it’s not as easy to confirm or refute because you’d need a lot more info from the mail providers.
A few things take make these emails a bit more credible:
1. "And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."
Biden simply gave them the message from the Obama administration and the EU
They wanted the prosecutor fired because he was ridiculously corrupt and protecting/ not prosecuting corrupt companies including Burisima (I repeat he dropped the investigation into Burisima). All of this is old news and was reported on during the impeachment trial
Biden asked for a prosecutor to be fired because he wasn't investigating the company his crackhead son received large payouts from enough huh? That's George Washington chopping down the cherry tree level of honesty and equally rooted in reality.
> "Shokin played the role of protecting the vested interest in the Ukrainian system," said Carpenter, who traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015. "He never went after any corrupt individuals at all, never prosecuted any high-profile cases of corruption."
>That demonstrated that Poroshenko's administration was not sincere about tackling corruption and building strong, independent law enforcement agencies, said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank.
> In July 2015, Shokin's office became mired in scandal after authorities raided homes belonging to two high-ranking prosecutors. Police seized millions of dollars worth of diamonds and cash, suggesting the pair had been taking bribes.
> It became known as the "diamond prosecutors" case. Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko, who said he tried to investigate it, resigned months later, calling the prosecutor's office a "hotbed of corruption" and an "instrument of political pressure."
> Shokin's office also stepped in to help Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma.
> British authorities had frozen $23 million in a money-laundering probe, but Shokin's office failed to send documents British authorities needed to prosecute Zlochevsky. The case eventually unraveled and the assets were unfrozen.
In October 2015, Ukrainians staged a protest outside Poroshenko's home calling for Shokin's removal.
Biden's son hunter didn't play a role in it. Oh I'm sure that the company hired Biden's son in hopes of getting influence and that sort of soft corruption sucks, even if it isn't illegal (I wouldn't be opposed to trying to make it illegal even though I imagine it would be pretty difficult), but there is 0 evidence that this had any effect on Joe Biden or US policy, especially since this guy was protecting Burisima.
And it wasn't just Biden but Obama and most of the foreign policy guys in the US and EU that wanted Shokin dismissed because of his corruption, Biden was just the guy who got to deliver the message.
Later Trump and his allies were happy to buy into whatever lies the corrupt prosecutor Shokin was willing to make up abut Biden. Did they know it wasn't true? I don't know but I imagine they didn't care
Basically, you can encrypt a message over any medium (facebook, twitter, email, etc.). Wasn't super secure by any means, but the media companies wouldn't know what's being shared.
Honestly, I might rework it (not utilizing keybase). I think I can make it decentralized and / or super easy to use. It's already pretty much plug-and-play provided you know the recipients email.
I've always thought this might be a great approach in limited situations (using encryption over unencrypted public "channels"). Kudos to you for the project, even if it didn't get much traction.
The fact that this article is flagged is alarming. This is a relevant news story directly related to how technology companies influence public perception.
Like it or not, the New York Post is a widely distributed newspaper in the US.
Once the precedent for censoring a newspaper has been established there is nothing stopping facebook for censoring more "upscale" conservative newspapers like the WaLl Street Journal or the Financial Times.
I can't comment on their system, and as a long-time HN user overall I find it a great place to have discussion on varied topics. That said, I'm working on a new alternative site and welcome you to check it out. It's called sqwok.im and it's a sort of hybrid between Twitter & Slack/Discord, where each post has a chatroom instead of a comment thread. In beta mode and welcome feedback.
When one side says it's raining and the other says it's sunny, it's not 'losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue' when you look outside and report to the public that one side is lying.
If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
The NY Post story pushes the repeatedly-debunked claim that Biden pushed for the Ukraine prosecutor to be fired in order to protect his son. It has been fact-checked to death and found to be a lie. One side (the Trump campaign) continues to push this lie. The NY Post, owned by Trump henchman Rupert Murdoch, is pushing that lie in the article.
I don't see why Twitter and Facebook have to be neutral on their platforms when it comes to spreading lies in the run-up to a major election. The NY Post is a tabloid and this story has not been verified by any reputable news site. Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians. It's a net good.
> If only every case of lying were so simple for the public to understand.
> Banning this story is on par with banning a tabloid story that Biden is conspiring with Martians.
This is the contradiction that I'm trying to get at: To justify censorship by claiming at the same time that something is obviously wrong (like the claim that Biden is conspiring with Martians) and that the public can't understand that it's wrong (though it presumably could understand that Biden isn't conspiring with Martians).
Ok, let's try something easier to understand: Let's say that rather than conspiring with aliens, the Post was ginning up a story that Biden conspired with bin Laden and was secretly behind 9/11, and they produced some highly suspect documents to back this up. No reputable news outlets verify the story. The Biden campaign produced evidence contradicting the story. And let's say the Post did this not just any random time, but as millions of people are actively voting in an election.
That's what this is - a pretty blatantly false tabloid story being pushed by Rupert Murdoch, the closest thing the world has to a cartoon villain, during the voting process in a major election. In the time it would take to conclusively debunk the story to the public, the damage would already be done. This is straight out of the 2016 election playbook, where disinformation was pushed as voting was happening.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to clutch pearls over a disreputable tabloid being treated like a disreputable tabloid. If anything it would be good for journalism if they banned the Post from the site forever.
The inescapable premise here is that there's something that's obviously wrong to "us" (some enlightened circle of censors), so obviously wrong that we don't to discuss it further, but not obviously wrong to the masses who might fall for it. And that might well be true in any specific case, but the historical record of people with this attitude isn't great.
No platform has banned discussion of the story or the reasons for deplatforming it, so that's a moot point. The story is freely available on the internet and anyone who wishes can go read it right now.
They did the right thing in this specific case, seems a little alarmist to launch right into slippery slope prognostications about deplatforming. We're on the slippery slope right now when it comes to electioneering disinformation.
>We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue
Seems to be long gone, to be honest. We're now at a point where people are de-humanizing those on a different side of an issue to themselves. We unfortunately know what the next step is.
I can't really wrap my head around about how shortsighted of a move this is.
Just two weeks ago(!) there was a hearing about Section 230 and Facebook and Twitter were saying it was necessary, and they submitted testimony about misinformation at that hearing.
They've now blown any credibility they had left with half of Congress, possibly more, and have attracted 10x the attention and 10x the perceived credibility to the article.
How did they not expect this to blow up in their face?
Well, for one S230 has nothing to do with this. You could revoke S230 today and they would be still completely free to do this... you'd just make it much more likely that not-for-profit and smaller venues like HN which allow users to share links to the NY post article couldn't stay in operation.
Yet I don't recall anyone questioning Buzzfeed News when they dropped their bombshell story years back. I remember the defenders saying something along the lines of "If the news is newsworthy and constitutes journalism, then the publication it was produced in shouldn't matter"
As HN audience mostly claim to be full of "independent thinkers" we should have no problem with this being published by the Post if it indeed is legitimate, correct?
Buzzfeed was previously famous for apolitical clickbait articles and quizzes, they practically invented the genre. New York Post, meanwhile, has been a tabloid-level spreader of pro-conservative and anti-progressive misinformation. It's smart to be skeptical of obviously politically motivated reporting from any outlet, but especially so when one has such a concerning track record.
Buzzfeed has been deemed left, which is a category beyond left-leaning, by an objective fact-checker [1].
As one example of why:
> In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical.
I don't think having more positive stories about a Democratic president makes a publication left-leaning, especially given that Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.
This is coming from someone who did not agree with most of Obama's policy decisions but at least could respect his integrity.
> Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.
Uhhhhh... Not involved in scandalous behavior that you knew of, perhaps. Fast&Furious [0] would have been a major scandal in a Republican administration (despite the fact that it was started by a previous president), and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was a massive step in the erosion of civil liberties in the US. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others.
Not to say that Obama was a bad president, but "no scandals I've heard of" and "no scandals" aren't quite the same thing.
Or using the IRS to target conservative organisations. Or spying on journalists to identify leakers. Plus the attempts to further destabilise the middle east and its disastrous effects.
Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).
Read the primary sources - the investigative reports and the material (notes, texts, etc.). The reports have on more than one occasion stated that nobody involved is talking about their actions or behavior so we have no case, but the preponderance of evidence points to some seriously bad stuff going on. If your understanding of happened is based on a quick summary from CNN, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Don’t forget - the reason we don’t want this crap to happen is because the shoe always ends up on the other foot.
> Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).
Obama might be a political opponent of Trump’s (despite not being on the ballot that year); but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things? The Russian interference / collusion was real and lead to multiple charges and convictions
There are a lot of primary sources detailing what happened in late 2016, early 2017, and we have no excuse not to read them to understand what happened. It’s shocking. Wikipedia is not going to be a reliable source on this, I’m afraid.
Regardless of what you think about the veracity of Wikipedia here, the list of references at the end of that article formed a tidy way to link to multiple court case primary sources.
"but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things?"
They did. They concluded that the Steele dossier was probably not reliable. They investigated anyway because their agenda was to get Trump out and throw Flynn in jail.
They investigated anyways because there were plenty of other reasons to suspect that Flynn was on the payroll of foreign powers, given that he was paid by the Russian state through their state run media RT in 2014 and accepted at least one paid speaking engagement from the Russian state in 2015 without seeking US government approval. Flynn later plead guilty to having lied to the government about some of these engagements (though he recently retracted his plea agreement).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-flynn-id...
> I don't think having more positive stories about a Democratic president makes a publication left-leaning, especially given that Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.
This gave me a real chuckle.
It’s easy to not be “actively involved in scandalous behavior” when the media refuses to consider anything you do scandalous or investigate it further. It’s a self fulfilling prophesy.
How about when the ACLU "sued the Obama administration for detaining asylum seekers as intimidation tactic"? This was in 2014... Where was the uproar then?
Fast & Furious was a scandal (albeit a small one). There's a couple of other posters that outline things that should have been scandals but it's not that the media never reported it, it's that the public didn't get outraged.
Not enough people cared about the extra-judicial assassination of a US citizen because he was probably a terrorist so it only lasted one news cycle, that could have been a scandal but it was not. If people don't care about the behavior as being wrong then the event won't be a scandal.
Obama had his share of scandals (and I am not saying that to downplay the clusterfuck that is the Trump admin; Obama's pale in comparison, but they are still there), like IRS targeting of right wing orgs, Operation Fast and Furious, drone-ing (of US citizens), all the Snowden revelations, and "Obama's war on whistleblowers" (as The Guardian called it), for example.
Or other things like the "De-Ba'athification" policy in Iraq which most likely played a major role in the empowerment of ISIS (not really a scandal, more of a failed policy, but yet something that can be criticized).
Point being, there was a lot of things to rightfully criticize about the Obama admin, and therefore Obama himself ("the buck stops here").
Fast & Furious was indeed a scandal as you and others have rightly pointed out but other than that I think we disagree on what a scandal is, I think there needs to be general public outrage for a scandal and we didn't see that except for with Fast & Furious. Sadly, our society didn't care about the US killing one of its citizens extrajudicially. I'm sure we'll look back on that behavior with regret as a nation in the future but I don't see that regret now.
The IRS targeting of right wing orgs was indeed a scandal but it turned out to not be true [0].
In 2010, left-leaning media agencies would post left-friendly news and not post right-friendly news. And right-leaning media agencies would post right-friendly news and not post left-friendly news.
In 2020, left-leaning media posts left-friendly news, and doesn't post right-friendly news.
And right-leaning media posts right-friendly news AND STRAIGHT UP FALSEHOODS AND LIES DENYING RIGHT-UNFRIENDLY-NEWS, OR LIGHT-FRIENDLY NEWS.
What value to the Oscars have or the Emmy? Peer-awards mean that your competitors think you've done a good job and recognize that.
But even if you toss out peer-awards, Buzzfeed News has also won the Sydney award, which is awarded by the The Sidney Hillman Foundation, and was founded by the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, hardly a "journalistic" venture.
I don't consider any of their posts "award winning". They have had award winning reporting, including the National Press, the Sydney, and the Online Journalism Awards. They have also had reporting that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prizes in International Reporting. [1]
It's hilarious to me that the Post is now viewed as pro conservative. Framing the Post as pro-conservative is like calling Joe Rogan alt right. Finding some of the progressivism that has performed a hostile takeover of the democratic party hilarious, contradictory, and satire-friendly automatically makes you pro-conservative.
Well in that case, let me just clear my schedule to spend all of tomorrow performing an exhaustive fact check of the credibility of this story. /s
It turns out that journalism is hard to do correctly. As an "independent thinker" I'm going to independently decide to not trust a publication with the reputation of the NY Post until it's been corroborated.
So glad I see this sentiment on here. I am still blown away by HN readers inability to critically analyze news sources. If this was some research paper it would have been put under the microscope by HN readers.
It helps that research papers on scientific domains have relatively easily verifiable data. It is much harder to claim ( not impossible ) that 1 is actually 0 if looked at from the right distance. Once we get to news ( assuming we bypass the whole conversation over how what passes for news is often opinion, or clickbait these days... ) you find out that 1s could indeed become 0s, you might not know all the facts, writers have bias, editors have bias, culture won't allow certain things to be said, polite society won't have a given phrase used.. the list just goes on and on.
It is not inability. It is just a ridiculous exercise in futility. Chomsky can barely do it. And he has way better memory, command of language and reasoning skills than I do.
How was that a lie? The statement from Mueller's team was vague and hardly a real rebuttal. It just says that it's not accurate and provides no clarification at all.
They had two independent government sources, which doesn't even come close to comparing to this story where the entire source is a single repairman who can't even get their story straight.
And there's a very big difference between being fed wrong information from two sources and not doing enough to verify it, in a time where said information could be crucial, vs "lying" as you imply, which is what NY Post is doing.
>As HN audience mostly claim to be full of "independent thinkers" we should have no problem with this being published by the Post if it indeed is legitimate, correct?
I've not read any comments on HN that claims that they have a problem with "this being published by the Post" whether it's legitimate or not.
It's possible that I missed such comments, but I don't think so.
I would be grateful if you could point me at a few of them.
Nobody questioned NYPost when they broke the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal either [1]. That's because the reporting was incredibly solid. But this story is incredibly flimsy.
Can someone explain why it even matters. I know HN isn't for politics but I don't understand why having dinner with your son's work friend is that big of a deal. Trump, who is the President (not VP), meets regularly with all sorts of people who spend money at his resort and other businesses and no one cares about that.
> Trump, who is the President (not VP), meets regularly with all sorts of people who spend money at his resort and other businesses and no one cares about that.
I hear people (rightly) complain about this all the time.
> Can someone explain why it even matters.
I think it matters because Joe has denied any participation at all with his sons business dealings. The emails explicitly mention using influence, buying time with the VP, etc. If the emails are real, they would prove joe a liar.
You could say "but Trump is a liar" and you'd be right. You'd also be openly admitting that Joe is no better.
> You'd also be openly admitting that Joe is no better.
Nah. Everyone lies from time to time, or bends the truth to make themselves look better. Frequency and magnitude are the important factors.
Also, Joe could have had dinner with this guy and still never talked with his son deeply about work. Joe having eaten with this dude would call into question his claim, but it wouldn't be proof he was telling a falsehood.
I don’t know why we give politicians the benefit of the doubt. You and I knew that CGI was a pay for play scheme before the emails confirmed it. We also know that nobody pays a crackhead son of the VP of the US with zero industry or qualifying professional experience $50k/mo. without expecting something in return that said cracky is uniquely positioned to deliver.
For the record, I don’t hate crackheads. Also, yeah this cynicism goes for Trump too. It should be how we regard all politicians, as the profession overwhelmingly shows a high preponderance towards deceit, graft, rent-seeking, kickbacks, etc.
> I hear people (rightly) complain about this all the time.
Sure, and you can complain, but Trump has already called for Biden and even Obama to be jailed. I could see this turning into "lock him up" chants in a few days.
> Joe has denied any participation at all with his sons business dealings
Having dinner with someone doesn't imply that. If there was anything actionable that came out of that meeting, then yes, but there's no proof of that. Just having dinner with someone proves nothing.
Journalists write and publish (or sometimes don’t) articles in collaboration with campaigns and other "interested" parties with an agenda all the time, and rarely mention it or make it obvious. If anything, that’s the norm. So what's different about this than those stories?
Because a sitting president has a personal influence and stake in the articles creation and publication, used as a tool to undermine an opposition candidate. Its plain obvious election interference, and the repercussions are staggering, thats the difference.
That is not on the slightest bit strange or unusual. It’s what every President, campaigning nominee, and various administration official have been doing with the press for centuries. Indeed if anything, this President and his campaign have been at this rather less than usual, probably because of his extremely adversarial attitude toward the press.
Even if it's not strange to you, are you not atleast bothered that it's so common and accepted, as you seem to suggest? You come across as being totally ok with that...an attitude I don't understand
Should campaigns be banned from conducting opposition research? Should we demand that journalist sources not have agendas? (Then who would speak to the press?) Should we require journalists to refuse assistance with their work?
I'm not a great fan of access journalism, but the reality too is that journalists will publish puff pieces or shaky misinformation pieces to curry favor for more solid news from that source in the future. That's why you see journalists even at institutions like the NY Times repeatedly publish stories from "anonymous" sources that turn out to be completely wrong but which advances some cause of the source - this has become an epidemic in the Trump era, given that a lot of political figures and career civil servants do not like the administration, and mass layoffs in the news industry have meant the replacement of veterans with younger reporters who have to curry more favor. I would prefer they not do that, but as long as you read the news with a critical eye, it's not a major problem.
Paraphrasing for a HN comment I saw a while back. A reverse chronological feed of your friends’ posts is a platform. A recommendation engine is a publisher. That makes a lot of sense to me.
The entire point of a recommendation engine is to not be neutral, but to induce some kind of bias. Otherwise, you'd be seeing random entries, not recommended ones.
A neutral recommendation engine is one that simply recommends things that I'll probably like, based on other things I liked without any human interference.
This is a colossal failure of a scam to discredit Biden. There was no chain of custody, the proported email had tons of tell tale signs of being faked, and NYPost posted exif data that undermined their whole claim. They even used ints for ids allowing a lot of unpublished docs out.
The screenshot of the email being displayed by the Apple Mail client does look a bit odd. May have been edited by the NYPost to show the names along with the email address?
/edit: actually, it does format in that way, but only when you export the mail as PDF from Apple Mail, not in the client itself
Anyway, my 2 cents having worked with many Russians and Ukranians: the overall tone, writing style and vocabulary used does not read like its from a native russian speaker.
The ActivityPub standard and network exists. Nothing (absolutely nothing) is stopping the tabloid from running its own instance on nypost.com
edit: and I wanted to reply to a comment here referring to section 230 but their comment got flagged and I am unable to reply to them. Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
My reply to that commenter would be that there is nothing stopping Congress-critters from standing up their own ActivityPub infra as well. A 'congress.gov' presence on the Fediverse would look pretty spiffy.
> Not really sure why it was flagged but whatever, HN does what it does.
If you truly beleive the comment didn't deserve to be flagged (this does unfortunately happen sometimes, especially on threads like this) you can vouch for it if you have showdead on
This isn't inviting Section 230 reform, as some are arguing. It's a move to get out ahead of it.
From the DOJ's proposed 230 legislation[0]:
>>The second category of amendments is aimed at incentivizing platforms to address the growing amount of illicit content online, while preserving the core of Section 230’s immunity for defamation claims.
>>Section 230 immunity is meant to incentivize and protect online Good Samaritans. Platforms that purposely solicit and facilitate harmful criminal activity — in effect, online Bad Samaritans — should not receive the benefit of this immunity. Nor should a platform receive blanket immunity for continuing to host known criminal content on its services, despite repeated pleas from victims to take action.
Enforcing a hacked materials policy is fully consistent with the DOJ's proposed change. It's a classic strategy to curb potential regulation - clean up your act to show that you don't need to be regulated.
Whatever it takes to get rid of a tyrant. The guy has repeatedly shown that he has no appreciation for the institutions, the unity of the nation, democracy or the election process itself. He will do whatever he can to stay in power. We should make sure he does not succeed.
I don’t think that any other US political player comes even close to the dangerous rhetoric of Trump. Democrat, Republican, or independent. The attack on the election itself that he started should be the biggest red flag for the citizens that none of his rants are normal.
'Normal' is a state of duplicity where politicians present a veneer of respectability but actually betray their constituents by pursuing their own financial agendas behind the scenes. Trump at least somewhere wears his heart on his sleeve.
Works for me on the desktop version, i.e. it isn't censored, I haven't checked though in their direct Facebook Messenger app. Also, am not from the US, have sent the joebiden.info link for testing to my gf who's also not from the US.
This seems like an interesting corollary to the Streisand Effect, where shutting down means of spreading information makes the information spread further.
If the president of the USA is allowed to keep posts up that are internally labelled as having broken their terms of service (generally regarding misinformation), and the posts are kept up in the name of public interest, I don't see how blocking the #8 newspaper in the USA benefits the public interest in any way. An obvious argument could be made that it detriments the public interest.
Aside from the censorship issue, Twitter is making a mockery of its own policy. Twitter is ostensibly blocking this article under their, "no hacks or leaks may be linked to" policy, while only a couple of weeks ago the story about the Trump tax returns (derived from a leak) was all over Twitter without being suppressed at all. If Twitter is going to arbitrarily choose which news to censor it should do so without using the fig leaf of a policy that Twitter itself openly violates.
Twitter isnt required to be impartial, they are allowed to editorialize to their preference like all the media does. There's a certain anomaly in the US that doesn't provide other media with the same legal protections, but that's something to work on
Twitter isn't required to be impartial, but you'd think they'd want to avoid openly painting themselves as lying hypocrites. If they are going to censor news they don't like, they'd be better off just censoring it rather than putting on the patently false charade of pretending they have a standard which is being violated. A simple, "we reserve the right to remove any and all content posted" would suffice, instead of pretending to be impartial arbiters of truth.
I’ve said before and I will continue saying: twitter CANNOT be the arbiter if truth. It will NEVER work, and trying to do so will be their undoing, but not before they make the problem they think they’re solving infinitely worse.
Absolutely agree, but I don't think this is the tipping point yet. An important line was crossed, but it will probably take a bit more before there is enough political capital to do something.
On the other hand, if the party benefiting from this move gets into power, that might be enough to stop any change from happening.
Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar. It's predictable and nasty. We want curious conversation about unpredictable things, which is kind of the total opposite of that.
This comment is indicative of the absolute sea change that has happened over the last four years with how we treat speech and journalism.
Gone are the days when if you read a story and thought it was BS, you ignored it and moved on. Or when a politician says something dumb, that's obviously untrue or a distortion, you just laughed and said "what an idiot".
Today, these things are "disinformation" and are "an attack on our democracy". This is a severe escalation, and I think what it's priming us all to do is reject Free Speech as a principle wholesale and replace it with an "official" narrative that is approved ahead of time (approved by who exactly, that remains to be seen).
All politicians spread "disinformation". That's the nature of politics: framing the facts of a story, or distorting them, to support your preferred narrative to get elected. Same goes for all partisan journalism, and the same goes for "mainstream" outlets that still have their own narrative they like to push for their own reasons. Somehow we're still so shell-shocked from 2016 that we've escalated every little bit of political tomfoolery to be a literal attack on the democratic institution itself. It's just bizarre.
It's been argued time and again, from one side that Facebook and Twitter are private companies and that free speech doesn't apply on their sites, and from another side that what we're talking about is an abstract principal of free speech, not the legal definition.
But if you remove the loaded term of "free speech", what's actually being discussed here is "website moderation policies". With that framing, what is the expectation for Facebook and Twitter? To devolve into 4chan?
Personally, I like well moderated sites. That's why I'm here! It's bizarre to me that so many other people who chose to spend their time here expect Facebook and Twitter to be laissez faire about moderation.
You can redefine the discussion all you want, but my comment was related to how people have changed their views on speech in the age of social media and the internet (and especially since 2016). I don't really care to rabbit hole right now about TOS policies on these websites, but I do care about how we collectively think about principles like free speech and what constitutes a "threat" to democracy.
So, to directly respond to what you're bringing up, laissez faire moderation policies are not a threat to democracy.
There's a difference between framing events vs fabricating them from whole cloth.
The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information. Injecting completely false information into the public discourse is a direct attack on democracy.
> The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information.
Let’s review the history of the oldest democracy on the planet. And then the history of the second, the third, etc. Who gets to decide what information is real? CDC? WHO? NYT? Fox? Who’s the final authority if not each of us? Your statement implies incredibly low expectations for the people and inflated expectations for “authorities”. It is ultimately an _authoritarian_ view, quite the opposite of democracy.
I'm not sure there's a sufficient difference between those things to make the point you're trying to make stick. There's a non-trivial amount of people in this country (and on this website, it seems) who think Trump is, literally not metaphorically, an agent of the Kremlin. Are those people a threat to democracy? I certainly don't think so. I think they're idiots, but I don't think they're literally threatening democracy.
>Injecting completely false information into the public discourse is a direct attack on democracy.
The line you are drawing here is very very close to accusing people who share false information of treason. Are we sure we want to walk up to that line? I'm not. I think it's frankly pretty silly. It's also interesting that you assume there is some neutral arbiter that can decide what is "real" and what is "true" and what is "fact" (all different things, btw).
>The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information.
It's also interesting that you think this was ever the state of democracy, and not the status quo.
I don't believe the source because they're known liars. I definitely don't believe the story that a laptop with Ukrainian emails was left in a DC repair shop and then given to Trump's personal propagandist lawyer Rudy Guliani. Also they're not publishing the emails headers as explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780927
Even if Guliani got the source from Russian intelligence, that does not mean the emails are automatically not authentic. Does it mean the Russians are interfering? Probably. Does it mean their evidence of corruption is void? Not really.
If this is the Russians (unproven speculation on your part), it does not mean the emails are not authentic.
Two organizations have these supposed emails, Fox and NYPost. They could mathematically prove their legitimacy by simply posting the entire raw messages, with headers. DKIM was active at the time these messages were supposedly sent, so if the signatures match up, authenticity is confirmed.
The fact that this hasn't been done is concerning, unless it's being sat on for future impact.. the "drip drip drip" method of political bombshell news isn't a new tactic. If we're still here in a week with nothing other than screenshots, we can probably write the messages off as frauds. I'm withholding my judgement for a few days.
I think you might be overestimating the level of technical sophistication at play here—if you asked me “how can we verify that these emails are real,” I might’ve been able to come up with this idea, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that jumped into my head reading the article, and I doubt NYPost has anyone on staff who thought to do this either (unless perhaps verifying leaked emails is something they do regularly?).
There is no indication of ANY attempt (technical or not) to verify that the emails were real. They did not even perform the basic due diligence of asking the Biden campaign to comment prior to publication.
You're assuming they have the emails in the raw form. It's possible they just have PDFs and not the full content. You're also assuming Fox and NY Post have journalists on staff who know what DKIM is, let alone how to verify it's genuine. They're journalists, not CompSci majors.
The "drip drip" is an intentional strategy, of course. This smells like a setup to me. They leak the lukewarm email, get a denial from Biden, then leak a smoking gun that cannot be denied (speculation).
There is one source of information, Rudy Giuliani. Someone with known ties to Russian intelligence claiming that his lawyer received a surprise hard drive from a computer repairman who has an utterly implausible explanation for his acquisition of said drive. Someone who has been known to spread false allegations and conspiracy theories including the claim that Joe Biden is suffering from dementia.
The Biden campaign has records to that time indicating no such meeting took place.
So far, without further corroboration, it's an allegation with no basis. Especially given justice department investigations into the purported impropriety that the supposed emails revolve around did not reveal any evidence of involvement of Joe Biden in his son's dealings.
>The Biden campaign has records to that time indicating no such meeting took place.
This isn't true. They made the specific denial that according to his official schedules from the time, the meeting never happened. And then later quietly also said they "would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule". [0]
Most news articles based on leaks are uncorroborated allegations.
Even if the source was Putin himself, shouldn't the question be "are the emails authentic" rather than "who leaked the emails"?
Wikileaks has had questionable sources in the past, but they've generally been authentic leaks (for example the DNC email leaks had authentic and signed email headers).
I'm not saying the emails are authentic, I'm saying the question of whether they are authentic is unanswered and that should be your primary concern over who the source is.
Theoretically, if Russia had proof of corruption would you not want to see it on the basis that it's Russia and it's close to an election?
My primary concern is about whether the information I'm looking at is factual or not.
If Russia had proof of corruption on the candidate they did not excessively favor then I would be interested. When historic propagandists have "proof" I need corroboration otherwise I'm being controlled by the propaganda as it was intended.
Remember Benghazi? How confident everyone was, for years? Nothing came from it because nothing was there. The people that were talking about Benghazi were only people that benefited from it politically. Remember Al Franken? Remember when people that didn't benefit from it politically agreed he should step down after his behavior?
Not finding anyone they can indict is not the same as “no scandal”. You and I knew when they were trying to blame the fiasco on a YouTube video and trotted the poor director out in a hooded perp walk on tv that it was complete. utter. BS., and then we watched Rice run around talking about it on talk shows trying to shamelessly prop up this narrative. That itself is a scandal. When you start asking more critical questions about why a government does crap like that you’ll find it’s scandals all the way down. The best you can say from the Benghazi debacle is that we had/have a bunch of nincompoops running the show. _That’s_ a scandal. It only gets worse when you attempt to defend their qualifications. Don’t get me started on Libya as a whole - it’s executors only years earlier still criticizing the lack of an exit plan for Iraq.
Russia, a known bad actor, who has been openly trying to destabilize America for years does not get the benefit of the doubt on literally anything.
Everything that Russia "has" should be outright considered purposeful disinformation until it is clearly and widely proven otherwise. They have lost all credibility to provide proof of anything. Particularly in an election year.
- Russia Wikileaks (the Atlantic article is a good intro)
- Sergei Magnitsky, the Magnitsky Act, Russian Meeting at Trump Tower (in that order tells the story)
- Russian Disinformation Campaign (there are stories dating to shortly after the 2016 election)
There's probably more but this is all the top of my mind. Litvinenko was my wake-up to the realities of global politics and the potential dangers Russia poses.
We can be clear eyed about this. "Are the emails authentic" is exactly the question they (NYPost) should have asked and were best positioned to answer, but they did not even try.
They presented screenshots (!) uncritically, with no suggestion of doubt regarding the emails' provenance. They did not even bother asking the Biden campaign about the story prior to publication.
It's a transparent attempt to get to "just asking questions" which is where we are today.
Bad idea. I agree with others here saying that this is not enough to change minds at this point (either direction) but I think that SM platforms are in no position to censor news content from a trusted publication.
They should focus their efforts elsewhere. All of this feels like a publicity play to help with their current situation, which is yet to be resolved.
When I was in high school, our network had software, perfectly branded as "Net Nanny" installed which prevented us from visiting certain websites. It was totally lame.
I can't understand why my generation wants to recreate Net Nanny on facebook and twitter. It just adds to the 2020 feeling that everything, all at once, is completely falling apart.
If a free and open Internet was a threat to media gatekeepers, walled gardens have neutralized this threat. Outrage over this latest incident isn't misplaced, but regulation will only further entrench these platforms.
Is this censorship? My understanding is they held it for review, that just seems responsible? Also it seems like the NY Post article is highly suspect, so again, this seems responsible. Especially given echoes of a previous email "bombshell" that proved to be absolutely nothing after the damage was done? I just don't know what people want, they want FB to stop misinformation, but not step on anyone's speech? Also I see lots of cries this is partisan, but not seeing many credible examples, so if you're going to what-about on this please give sources. This thread is filled with claims of double standards and no links.
We always hear the adage about free speech and screaming fire in a crowded theater; facebook is a crowded theater and we have a lot of people trying to yell fire.
a. They had the same information as everyone else, so what would they figure out in their ‘review’ that readers wouldn’t?
B. It’s really the double standard that is the problem here. If you do it do it for this then do it for everything else, including the myriad stories about Trump that are posted based on ‘rumors’, ‘leaks’, anonymous sources etc. Whether you like Trump or not should not matter if you are honest with yourself!
Funny thing is, this story was not ‘trending’ on twitter but the meta story (totally with no evidence) that this was the result of Russian hackers who gave the content to Rudy was trending! That tells you everything about why this is so inconsistent and thus either grossly incompetent or malicious.
a) its the nypost, a tabloid.
b) what stories? I keep seeing this. I see very little printed about trump that doesn't end up true. I also don't belong to FB so I legitimately have no idea what you're talking about. As I said in my reply, please supply links to any double standards cited.
I'm very surprised so many people have a problem with this.
I'm even more surprised people are demanding that forums and social media be stripped of the ability to moderate porn, spam, and vile personal attacks (ie not be able to moderate anything not illegal). Oh plus conspiracies and racism. This would likely turn most forums including HN into trash
> I'm even more surprised people are demanding that forums and social media be stripped of the ability to moderate porn, spam, and vile personal attacks (ie not be able to moderate anything not illegal). Oh plus conspiracies and racism. This would likely turn most forums including HN into trash
Have you... seen Twitter? It's full of porn, spam, vile personal attacks, conspiracies, and racism. These things are mostly not moderated on Twitter.
Maybe Twitter claims to moderate them, but the reality does not reflect that at all. The main reason we see controversy over social media censorship is that it's extremely selective, haphazard, inconsistent, and often misdirected. There's no apparent general principles behind the individual decisions, though principles are often trotted out ex post facto when required for PR.
Wait, the FBI got a laptop for an investigation, it happened to end up dumped at a repair shop, which happened to search it for files and publish them?
Its either lies or some pretty damming conspiracy, right?
It's remarkable that just weeks ago all the same actors had zero problems with illegally leaked tax returns from the other candidate. Hmm. I wonder why. Giuliani is promising to publish much more, including a photo in which Biden junior is having sex with a hooker while smoking crack. This is the same media companies that for 4 years told us that "the walls are closing in" due to the completely discredited "pee dossier".
They been steadily ramping up their efforts to silence voices. It starts with the people you dont like, the Alex Jones and the Richard Spencers. And now it's come to censoring news, while using Orwellian excuses like "fact-checking" and "harmful content".
This must be stopped and it must be stopped now. Trump is right, we should remove their special FCC protections.
The American People do not need Silicon Valley to tell us what we can and cannot read.
> Twitter said Thursday that it censored a New York Post article based on emails between Hunter Biden and a Burisma executive in accordance with its “hacked materials policy.”
This is a joke. Nothing was hacked. The laptop was left at a repair shop and not reclaimed. The repair shop almost certainly retains ownership of unclaimed machines after some period of time. The shop owns the laptop.
Maybe the emails were forged. Idk. But nothing was hacked.
> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.
NPR reporter:
> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
>> From Twitter spox: "In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter."
that's a huge lie. the brazilian version of the intercept got actual hacked info from federal judges/prosecutor's cellphones and twitter did absolutely nothing -- hell, it was on our trending topics for weeks (search for "vaza jato").
we know it was hacked because brazil's federal police got the hackers.
seems like twitter really loves to pick-and-choose when to apply their hacked material policy.
Yes, I agree. Twitter is clearly acting politically here; a consistent application of these rules would prohibit linking to the Trump's leaked tax-returns, among many, many other things.
It's happening to me, although I heard from a friend that a few people can still post the link for some reason. I get an error message saying the link is banned when I try to tweet it myself, and an interstitial warning me it's unsafe when I click on any existing link to it.
If you look at the screenshots, Twitter notes that the reason her account is locked is because they do not allow their service to be used to distribute "content obtained through hacking that contains private information..."
Why is this rule applicable to the NY Post's story, but not to stories from the New York Times concerning Trump's financial records, which were also illegally obtained? This seems like clear evidence of a politically-biased double-standard.
If I was a Twitter or Facebook investor, I have one question:
What did you expect was going to happen?
Honestly. Did nobody have the foresight at Facebook or Twitter to think that this wouldn't blow up? Did nobody think, just once, that this might invite regulatory action or be in news headlines?
And if honestly nobody thought this might happen, I'd want the entire management and "safety" team replaced for having no foresight for their actions whatsoever.
This post has a very odd tone, as if a private company enforcing their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence of a private citizen is some unquestionable moral wrongdoing that's apparently going to blow up. Surprised to see this as at the top, on HN.
National Review is a conservative wing-nut website trying to turn this non-story into fuel for their censorship culture war.
The media commonly relies on second hand accounts of leaked documents ("persons familiar with the contents of [X] document"), including private documents.
Something like this has never been censored before.
It's not like they are taking down a post from a nobody. The NY Post is a major publication.
It's twitter saying they know better than the NY Post. That is a major step that I don't think has ever been taken before.
Not only that, but IMO context matters here. We are 20 days away from the election. People are standing in lines to vote as we speak.
If this was published at any other time (and the material for the story has apparently existed since December) the public and the professional media would have had time to scrutinize it, discuss its shortcomings, etc.
But, as Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." We can't do that and being complicit in spreading misinformation in the middle of an election is, I'm sure, still a strong memory that social media companies have from the 2016 election.
My guess as to how this will go is that it will take a week or two to authoritatively discredit the article, but by then, if left unchecked, the article will have already done its damage. The cynic in me says that the originators of the article already know that there isn't much truth here and that this is the point of releasing it while people are voting.
Love the downvotes for this. Anyone who thinks for a second that Twitter and FB have some kind of set of principles that this story and only this story have crossed is deluded.
Did twitter censor all stories regarding the claim that Trump paid $750 in taxes?
In case the point I’m making isn’t obvious: the NYT never published their source for that, and still haven’t. If twitter is removing stories for having dubious sources, then that story should not pass muster either.
If they’re removing stories for having “hacked” (or in the case of both this story about Hunter Biden, or Trumps taxes: “leaked”) sources, then discussion of BOTH of these stories should be banned.
That's a bizarre comparison, because Trump has repeatedly lies about being willing but unable to release his own copy of his tax returns. And the NY Times didn't publish personal documents, they published facts about a certain class of personal documents (tax documents of a Presidential candidate) which for decades have been considered public information by all major corners of the political arena.
Those weren't hacked or leaked. The story is much simpler, and the provenance of the files is not in question:
By falsely claiming the records were hacked, rather than the legal property of the repair shop following payment default by Hunter Biden, Twitter is itself deliberately spreading false information to justify its illegal election interference. [1]
The provenance of the files is not questioned by far-right political operatives like Sean Davis who are pushing this story in the first place, but to anybody with half a brain cell and an ounce of skepticism the whole story stinks. Just listen to this interview with the owner of the repair shop these files purportedly came from, who changes his story about a half-dozen times in the span of sixty minutes:
My pick - Daily Mail: a newspaper headquartered in London, UK - a 3rd party country, independent from the ongoing US election. Over 120 years long history of investigative journalism.
Your pick - The Daily Beast: a 12 years old opinion website in USA, directly interested in the ongoing US election.
Compare and contrast the opening - your choice focused on "character assassination" via conspiracy theory; my source focused on giving a broad background & overview as facts. The difference in quality of reporting is palpable.
> Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail's editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.[44][45] Rothermere's 1933 leader "Youth Triumphant" praised the new Nazi regime's accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by them.[46] In it, Rothermere predicted that "The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany". Journalist John Simpson, in a book on journalism, suggested that Rothermere was referring to the violence against Jews and Communists rather than the detention of political prisoners.[47][page needed]
> Rothermere and the Mail were also editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.[48] Rothermere wrote an article titled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" published in the Daily Mail on 15 January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine",[49] and pointing out that: "Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London, S.W."[50]
People can down vote all they want, but doing so just confirms that the only way to satisfy them is for Twitter to pick sides and apply its rules evenly unfairly on behalf of one political party.
They probably have been doing this for a while, and this was just the first time they got called out for it.
Regulatory action has been in the works for some time. Whether or not it goes through depends only on politics. The mainstream media already doesn't like them for eating their lunch. Twitter has nothing to lose by doing this. It will damage Facebook's brand identity as being a "free speech" platform, but that's about as factual as Google's "don't be evil" brand or Apple's "privacy first" brand.
Actually, Twitter has one massive thing to lose: Section 230. Already, senators are taking this as the perfect reason to repeal or reform 230, and that would directly impact twitter.
Remember how there were hearings about 230 just two weeks ago? Twitter just shot themselves and their arguments for 230 in the foot with this. Which again begs the question from an investor's point of view: What did you expect was going to happen? Did you seriously not think this would affect the 230 debate?
Which is why we need reform: 230 liability protection needs to be extended only to those entities that only remove illegal content and nothing else, period.
So if I ran a chess forum, I could not remove posts about horse racing without losing my section 230 protection? Or posts advertising boner pills? Once I decide to allow people to post on my forum, for any reason, I have to allow every single post that does not violate the law, or I lose 230 protection?
Perhaps Twitter is being set up as a sacrificial lamb to quell the Techlash. In that case, I'm wrong.
But I don't think Section 230 will be repealed. The US government doesn't want to destroy the tech giants. It wants to use them to expand its global influence.
Ya, they have. Every major social network censors constantly and they get called out all the time but because the censoring favors a liberal agenda the mainstream media doesn't want to talk about it because they're also hugely biased (as are tech companies). Read Left Turn by Tim Groseclose or watch one of many people who talk about. I always like Larry Elder's perspective [1][2].
This time they went too far though. Banning Alex Jones? He's a crackpot. Banning Mila Yannipopoulus? He trolled people. Censoring Trump tweets? Ok... Censoring the very much anticipated October surprise involving Hunter Biden? No way.
I don't think anyone either on the left or the right thinks this move was a good idea. It will just make the Hunter Biden story blow up even harder.
Historically all media sources were directly compared by individuals and groups. You used to get the paper from a news stand/paper boy and could glance at all the headlines in comparison to each other, your colleagues knew what the tabloids were running and what the different takes on the headlines were. In the radio and TV age, a small number of commentators were directly compared by channel surfers on the nightly news.
We're now in an unfortunate scenario where individuals only see algorithmically curated bubbles of news and facts that reinforce their world views regardless of those facts correspondence to reality. They've elected politicians that parrot those facts and world views back to them.
Breaking down these bubbles or removing the peddlers of alternate facts is required for a functional society (as well as a healthy platform). Neither of these actions is likely to be well received by all parties.
History does not look kindly on governments that denied reality.
I don't have a compelling argument for why you're wrong, but it really seems like this is a weightier claim than you're giving it credit for. If social harmony is a sufficient reason for censorship, is there any basis left for objecting to the Great Firewall?
I don't believe social harmony is a sufficient reason for censorship or that censorship is the correct approach. There are many potential remedies including.
- Mandatory content identifiers tags on content/claims for unfactual or unverified reporting reaching more than X people.
- Identifying frequent reporters of misinformation and identifying them as such when presenting/resharing information.
- Reducing the spread of misinformation in algorithmic sources such as newsfeeds/search rankings.
None of these approaches removes or censors the content, but they do identify it and help place it in the appropriate context. In the 90s I had to go looking for claims that the president had dinner with aliens every Tuesday, today such news articles are pushed via feeds.
(n.b. "gloating" is interpretation — if it is not the case that this is gloating then a key problem is that this tweet leaves itself very open to this interpretation.)
What's the probability that the story they're blocking is 100% bullshit? And if they have evidence or signals of that, does that weigh in to your opinion on their intervention?
The majority of things on Twitter and Facebook are bullshit. How many politicians and "pundits" are allowed to blatantly lie on Twitter? Not sure why this is different.
It's a newspaper collaborating with the president's personal lawyer, who is already the subject of investigations into persons in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, during the run up to an incredibly contentious election after these networks - Facebook and Twitter- have already been accused of allowing rampant disinformation campaigns. If they had reason to believe that the information was part of a malicious campaign, I can see why that might spur them to action.
Evidently Twitter feels that gives him special privileges, but they've been flagging his posts as possible misinformation for months. Clearly they're trying to find a way to navigate a difficult situation. I think they should be erring toward better control of disinformation, certainly not being more laissez-faire about a problem that is destroying the world.
> I think they should be erring toward better control of disinformation,
Maybe Twitter should just shut down for a month. That's my point, there's so much untruth on Twitter, even specifically related to politics and the election, that it's just impossible to intelligently "curate" the platform. There's no apparent principle in what they allow and what they don't.
> certainly not being more laissez-faire about a problem that is destroying the world.
It wasn't a story about climate change, or nuclear proliferation.
He published a video (still on YouTube) with a unifying message after the death of George Floyd. Jack Dorsey on Twitter deleted it on the basis of copyright claims. If copyright had been truly infringed, it would have been taken down from YouTube.
Twitter is just an extreme example of a social media platform acting like a publisher and applying blatant censorship.
Is that Cohen when you say Trump’s lawyer? Do you have a source for that out of interest? It smells a bit like that National Review article Cohen planted about Cruz’s dad killing JFK or something in 2016.
I'm referring to Giuliani, who is the New York Post's source for these alleged emails and photos, acting as a supposed intermediary for a repair shop employee. Giuliani has been tasked for two years with digging up dirt on Biden, and every single story he has pushed has in my view, been outright fabricated agenda pushing based on narratives spun by dubious third parties.
I was just looking it up to correct myself, looks like Cohen is back in prison so.. probably not him :) yea Giuliani, makes sense, I’d be amazed if it’s not just an outright fabrication.
Pitchforks are out, once current election circus is over, they will come for FB, Twitter and YouTube. Politicians on either side are scared and don’t want such strong entities have control over information.
They probably expected it would go over like the Alex Jones thing or the warning messages on Trump's tweets, with a brief burst of interest followed by adjustment to the new consensus that some censorship is justified for the sake of social harmony. (And they may yet be right - there were headlines about those two things too.)
The just consequence should be that they should be considered publishers, rather than the republishers. And thus lose their 230 protection from civil litigation.
No, the point was to allow platforms to republish user content and moderate it without bearing civil liability for the content. Case law prior to section 230 had established that platforms only had liability if they engaged in moderation, but had no liability if they did not moderate in any way. Section 230 was created to address that absurd result of existing law. Protecting platforms that engage in moderation is the whole point, platforms that don’t moderate are already protected. This is why nobody has suggested that AT&T would have civil liability for posts on Facebook even though their wires carry the post to you. Dumb pipes don’t accrue liability.
Relying on the case law is much more expensive than relying on the US Code, since 230 allows to immediately go for the summary judgement, even if somebody still files a civil case. So the then smaller ISPs lobbied for that.
The moderation clause was historically added because at that time, the failed CDA (Communication Decency Act) was likely to pass (later partially struck down by the Supreme Court). so the COngress added it as the implementation mechanism for the CDA. When the CDA was weakened, the moderation language was still left in 230.
These latest chilling developments make me think it's better to revert to case law.
i believed every American can agree that Hunter Biden won't get a seat on a gas company's board and China investment if his last name is Smith. is it a corruption? maybe not but its cronyism. this NY Post story touch on this sore spot. i have no love for big tech. if Section 230 is on the chopping block. Big tech did this to themselves.
Let's be honest, the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left. Controlling "disinformation" is a dog whistle for censorship, hoping that average citizens don't realize what they're really after. We all know who is going to be the moderators in flagging "disinformation" and we all know which ideology they overwhelmingly favor. I'd sooner trust a pyromaniac as fire chief of my local county than I would trust big tech companies to manage "disinformation" on my behalf.
"Fake news" is a call to criticism. The amount of people bringing up "fake news" and calling for say, CNN, to not be able to report at all is minimal. Comparatively you can't have a conversation about "disinformation" without talking about social media companies' responsibility to delete or hide content.
Ah ok, when Trump says a negative article about him is "fake news" it's criticism, but when "disinformation" comes out about Biden it's a call for censorship?
>One of them is saying “it’s not true” and one of them is saying “we should stop the public from seeing that”.
In this case, who is saying "we should stop the public from seeing that?" Not Biden. His campaign folks said "it's not true." I'm unaware of any calls from Biden to censor anything. Ever.
I am agreeing with refurb's comment below you. Most people calling "fake news" are trying to convince you to not watch something. Most people calling "disinformation" are trying to convince you that you should not be able to watch something. I'm not taking the side of Trump or anyone at all by saying that criticism is different than censorship, that's just a fact. Your argument is not in good faith if bringing that up to you is considered an implicit support for Trump, or anyone really.
>I am agreeing with refurb's comment below you. Most people calling "fake news" are trying to convince you to not watch something. Most people calling "disinformation" are trying to convince you that you should not be able to watch something.
Huh?
You state that criticism is different than censorship. I agree.
However, I don't get the connection here. Calling something "fake news" or calling it "disinformation" are both criticisms. In fact, those terms are pretty much synonymous.
Which is irrelevant to the issue.
Twitter and Facebook are limiting distribution of this particular piece. Which is certainly akin to censorship. However, It's Twitter and Facebook taking these actions, not "most people."
Based on the details I've read (and thanks to this post, I've read quite a few), this story doesn't really pass the smell test, and may well be "disinformation."
Will you now accuse me of advocating censorship?
What if I'd said it was "fake news" instead? Am I advocating censorship now?
Calling for censorship would be something like "Don't let anyone see that!" Or "These monsters need to be silenced!"
There's a difference.
Unfortunately, we're all wrapped so tightly because, you guessed it, Twitter and Facebook (and others) use exactly those sorts of tricks to rile us up, to boost engagement and make more advertising dollars.
Which leaves us fighting each other over which synonym is worse.
In truth, most people are kind, decent human beings who just want to have a decent life. Sure, we disagree about a few of the details concerning how to have a decent life, but we agree about many more details.
The interactions of a bunch of really small groups who want to influence us for their benefit (whether that be for political power, profit or both) are laughing all the way to the bank as we tear each other apart.
Let's not let them do that any more, as we're only hurting ourselves.
>Most people calling "disinformation" are trying to convince you that you should not be able to watch something.
I know it's been an insane 4 years, but, for Trump, this isn't true. He said, in his first year, he wanted to stated to take NBC off the air[1]. It's a message that he's been saying since before he took office. Understandably, taking a billion dollar corporation off the air is a lot more difficult than wiping an anonymous poster online, but to imply that "Fake News" is entirely just criticism is just complete ignorance of what the man has been saying for years.
>I'm not taking the side of Trump or anyone at all by saying that criticism is different than censorship, that's just a fact. Your argument is not in good faith if bringing that up to you is considered an implicit support for Trump, or anyone really.
If someone says the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left, how am I supposed to argue that point without focusing on Trump?
I'm not bringing this up because I want you to vote Biden or not vote for Trump, but to dispel this notion that "censorship" is exclusively some far left/right tool of oppression. My personal view is that these platform should do whatever they want, just like how HN mods run Hn the way they feel, and no private platform is "obliged" to give you a platform no matter how large they are. Regardless the _government_ should be limited in power to tell private companies in what they should and should not publish. To this day, there has been no _US government_ pressure to "censor" legal political posts - it's been entirely private actors who have taken censorship action. However to suggest that one side is 100% free speech and the other side are coming to take your "free speech" is misrepresenting what both sides.
Do you not know what "demonstrably false" means? Here is a simple proof by contradiction:
Claim: Let's be honest, the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left
Contradiction: Trump, as I've shown in other comments, has also been calling for censorship for several news organizations.
The only way you believe this claim is not demonstrably false, is if you believe Trump is firmly left, which is ridiculous, but if he is, then I guess you got me.
The vast majority of censorship cases are from the left. Cancel culture - the left.
This whole thing is a problem of the left (and I speak as a man of the left, thoroughly disgusted with the affair), and that is what I read from the "screaming" statement, and your counter as a denial of a very clear and shameful phenomenon.
It was actually a fairly bipartisan term used to identify trivially disprovable stories.
The right wing tended to be more political ("Obama is a muslim communist who wants your guns") while left wing fake news tended to lean more towards new age, non-evidence-based "wellness" ("this juice cleanse will prevent cancer").
Trump, in what was quite frankly the smartest political move he's ever made, turned it on it's head and basically started using it to discredit actual stories that painted him in a bad light (inauguration numbers, etc).
Alex Jones touts a lot of nonsense but that doesn't mean the merits of what he's ranting about don't have value.
Also as a comedic medium, it's an art form nobody else is doing. He isnt even indecent compared to just full of themselves types. He's just rants on hypothetical nonsense.
There are more leftists that take what he says seriously than his own fans. People like him because he's willing to tout nonsense but seem serious.
He's literally the Jim Cramer of conservative voices. Everybody who listens to him listens with the foresight that there can both be positive and negative repercussions depending on how much of what they say you'll believe.
I don't think that's a fair judgement at all. Not when the right is actively attacking honest journalism at its source while also screaming about anti-conservative bias on social media every time they filter disinformation. I would also not at all categorize deplatforming disinformation as censorship either. Nor incitement to violence. I only agree in that it's not a job that any of these companies are setup to handle.
> What is with all these people talking as if the American right and left are just two regular sides of the same political coin without addressing the massive elephant in the room.
The (GOP) elephant in the room uses 'both sides bad, vote for the Republican' as a strategy with the more educated segment of the electorate. Except for people who criticize both parties from the hard left (well left of Bernie Sanders) and the very hard right (the few people who think Trump isn't extreme enough), 'both sides bad' talking points generally come from Republicans who aren't open about their party affiliation. It's not an honest argument--indeed it's a form of subjective disinformation in and of itself--but it's effective with a certain demographic that is over-represented in the STEM sector.
in response to mild suggestions that, just maybe, some of the benefits of the past 75 years of economic and technological progress should be shared a little more evenly.
> Let's be honest, the only people screaming for censorship are firmly on the left.
This year the president has sued to stop publication of two books because they embarrassed him, one from John Bolton and another from Mary Trump.
This year police in cities across the country have opened fire on journalists.
These are legal and physical attacks, on journalists and publishers, coming from government officials. Social media moderation policies are interesting and important. But if you see censorship and attacks on free speech only coming from one side, you should probably diversify your media diet.
I suspect the original statement is referring to sheer volume, where your examples are more few and far between, particularly where it concerns violence.
"Only" could have been left out of the sentence for greater accuracy.
Right wing district attorneys are currently suing Netflix over Cuties, in a throwback to early-90s moral outrage arguments by people who have not actually watched a film and understood anything about it: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2556282/netflixs-cuties-bac...
People have just gotten so used to conservative calls for censorship that they escape all notice.
The only reason measures to curb disinformation would have a partisan impact is because conservative parties (throughout the industrialized world, not just in the US) use disinformation strategies far, far more than do other parties.
Center-left/left parties use reality to galvanize their base voters into action. Their voters are people who aren't pleased with what's happening in their countries and want to change it for the better. There's no need for center-left parties to lie that their electoral opponents eat babies when their electoral opponents actually put children in cages.
In contrast, right wing parties overcome the inherent unpopularity of their revealed policy platforms (running on platforms of cutting taxes on the very rich while making life harder for the average person is not popular) by using disinformation to make a stated platform based on fabricated wedge issues. Hence, the imaginary convoys of South American migrants that were about to storm the US-Mexico border in 2018.
As such, restricting disinformation will have a partisan impact. Within the US, there is no Democratic equivalent to Qanon, so anti-disinformation measures that impact the likes of Qanon will have no impact on the Democratic party whatsoever. This, however, isn't a bad thing.
Functioning societies can have zero tolerance for 'alternative facts.' Disagree over goals and interpretations, but facts must be accepted by all. Democracy requires an informed electorate and there can be no functioning democracy when one side is free to invent its own version of reality.
Here's the problem. A fact can be stated in a variety of different ways with different implications. A fact is also a fairly confined data point, and excludes any extrapolation, modeling, hypothesis, root cause analysis or policy prescription. Pretty much nothing worthy of discussion is a fact.
Debating facts is pointless. People debate opinions, interpretations, implications. You cannot declare an implication from a fact as itself a fact. Nor can you claim people disagreeing with an implication are lying about facts.
As an aside - right wing platforms as you put it generally include a variety of popular proposals with the lower and middle class. These include immigration protectionism, lowering consumption taxes like gas taxes, taking a conservative stance on societally expensive government policies, and lowering unemployment rate through encouraging business growth. You may not agree with these policies, but to claim they are disinformation and thus not worthy of consideration is blatant biased censorship.
The only reason measures to curb disinformation would have a partisan impact is because conservative parties (throughout the industrialized world, not just in the US) use disinformation strategies far, far more than do other parties.
Center-left/left parties use reality to galvanize their base voters into action. Their voters are people who aren't pleased with what's happening in their countries and want to change it for the better. There's no need for center-left parties to lie that their electoral opponents eat babies when their electoral opponents actually put children in cages.
In contrast, right wing parties overcome the inherent unpopularity of their revealed policy platforms (running on platforms of cutting taxes on the very rich while making life harder for the average person is not popular) by using disinformation to make a stated platform based on fabricated wedge issues. Hence, the imaginary convoys of South American migrants that were about to storm the US-Mexico border in 2018.
As such, restricting disinformation will have a partisan impact. Within the US, there is no Democratic equivalent to Qanon, so anti-disinformation measures that impact the likes of Qanon will have no impact on the Democratic party whatsoever.
Functioning societies must have zero tolerance for 'alternative facts.' Disagree over goals and interpretations, but facts must be accepted by all. Democracy requires an informed electorate and there can be no functioning democracy when one side is free to invent its own version of reality.
Well yea, the left wants misinformation to be labeled/censored because they're no willing to lie like the right does. Once the left catches on to the need o create their own fake news you'll see this from both sides.
I remember this, he clearly refers to how he acted quickly to stop the flow of people from overseas and how few cases of COVID there were at that time. The "Hoax" was how Democrats were claiming Trump was xenophobic and/or accusing him of overreacting, if you remember Nancy Pelosi out walking around in Chinatown without a mask etc around this time. But how quickly the winds can shift.
This and the Charlottesville "fine people hoax" that Biden himself keeps repeating is fake news that just won't die, nor does Twitter seem too keen on helping kill it off either.
He literally didn't stop any flow. He's still talking about how he closed the border to China. False, he closed the border to Chinese nationals. Anyone else coming from China was fine. Trump lies constantly. Incessantly. It's legitimately ruined public discourse which is why people keep pushing social media to label/censor misinformation. Trump literally said "fine people" too, referring to literal white supremacists. I don't give a fuck if he walked it back or said something else first. Trump starting with a prepared statement before telling us how he really feels has happened over and over. Remember when Trump totally didn't leak classified info to Russia. Until he admitted himself that he had.
Text from the transcript (it's all caps on the site):
PRES. TRUMP: THEY HAVE SPENT THE LAST THREE YEARS, AND I CAN EVEN GO FURTHER THAN THAT THREE YEARS SINCE THE ELECTION BUT WE GO BEFORE THE ELECTION, WORKING TO ERASE YOUR BALLOTS AND OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY. BUT WITH YOUR HELP WE HAVE EXPOSE THE FAR-LEFT'S CORRUPTION AND DEFEATED THEIR SINISTER SCHEMES. LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN THE COMING MONTHS. LET'S WATCH. LET'S JSUT -- JUST WATCH. VERY DISHONEST PEOPLE. NOW THE DEMOCRATS ARE POLITICIZING THE CORONAVIRUS. CORONAVIRUS. THEY ARE POLITICIZING IT. WE DID ONE OF THE GREAT JOBS -- HOW'S PRESIDENT TRUMP DOING? THEY GO, NOT GOOD. THEY DO NOT HAVE ANY CLUE. THEY CANNOT EVEN COUNT THE VOTES IN IOWA. NO, THEY CAN'T. THEY CAN'T COUNT THEIR VOTES. ONE OF MY PEOPLE CAME UP TO ME AND SAID, MR. PRESIDENT, THEY TRIED TO BEAT YOU ON RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIAN. THAT DID NOT WORK OUT TOO WELL. THEY COULD NOT DO IT. THEY TRIED THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX. THAT WAS ON A PERFECT CONVERSATION. THEY TRIED ANYTHING. THEY TRIED IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THEY LOST. IT IS ALL TURNING. THINK OF IT. AND THIS IS THEIR NEW HOAX. WE DID SOMETHING THAT HAS BEEN PRETTY AMAZING. WE HAVE 15 PEOPLE IN THIS MASSIVE COUNTRY AND BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT WE WENT EARLY, WE COULD'VE HAD A LOT MORE THAN THAT. WE'RE DOING GREAT. OUR COUNTRY IS DOING SO GREAT. WE ARE SO UNIFIED. WE ARE SO UNIFIED. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS NEVER EVER BEEN UNIFIED LIKE IT IS NOW. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A MOVEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY LIKE WE HAVE NOW. NEVER BEEN
I'm struck by how this is almost a perfect example of the rorschach test that is Trump.
You could easily read this as saying that [COVID] is a hoax.
You could just as easily read this as saying that [the democrats saying he is doing a bad job with COVID] is a hoax.
Are you absolutely sure you would notice when the left 'catches on' and starts creating their own fake news?
You might be able to spot it when there is a constant parade of anonymous sources that never seem to provide any actual proof for bombshell claims meant to hurt Trump etc.
Or maybe various newspapers and cable outlets will run hundreds of stories and thousands upon thousands of hours of ill-sourced coverage into the opposite allegations against Trump, that he would be colluding with some foreign actor, say, i don't know, Russia?
Maybe prominent Democrat house members might make claims again and again to the media that they had seen first hand evidence of collusion with Russia. Maybe the jig would be up when, under oath they would be asked the same questions and they were suddenly not so sure, nor could they produce any evidence.
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et. al. are now in Orwell's land of "Ministry of Truth" .. they are telling the people what is reliable "news" and what is not.
The Ministry of Truth and the protagonist of 1984, it’s employee, were engaged in revising the written record to make it match what the Party wanted in the present.
They were also the only source of information.
Twitter is not doing the former and isn’t the latter, so equating it with Minitrue is 100% factually incorrect.
Sure not everything matches up. The Ministry of Truth was government, but in America the same type of group exists and it's private. They don't have to rewrite history. They're rewriting the present.
That’s typically referred to, at its most specific: fact checking, less specifically: news reporting, and most generally: making a claim of fact... when one disagrees with the check, report, or claim.
> America the same type of group exists and it's private
You gotta admire the genius of it all. The state gets to control speech and the press via willing private citizens and corporations, whilst keeping its hands clean.
So I'd certainly say Reddit is at least comparable. Additionally, I see fact checks on tons of conservative posts on Facebook and Twitter (rightfully so most of the time). But the same procedure isn't followed for liberal posts.
I haven't seen any possible misinformation warnings on Facebook or Twitter for something like: people claiming the BLEXIT supporters at Trump's recent speech were paid. According to ABC News, some supporters travel and room/board were paid (but they didn't release any of the emails, just allegedly quoted them). So it would be misleading to say that BLEXIT supporters were paid to attend the speech, it should be labeled as a "possibly misleading" statement like the claims from the right typically are. I mean, the emails haven't even been released and/or verified as existing and people are just running with it because it's ABC?
Edit: would love to know why I'm getting downvotes for providing a comment with a source and a different viewpoint?
Offering to cover someone's travel expenses is different than offering to pay someone to attend the speech. For anyone who has contracted before, that's an explicit difference that is usually discussed and agreed upon before the contract is signed by both parties.
If a contracting client offered to pay for your room and board and travel expenses, but not for your time in the office to work on the project, it's a bad deal. Or they could pay for your time in the office but not travel expenses. Or they can pay for everything. Those are three separate situations. By not clarifying which one it is, it's misleading. So if the client said we'll pay you to come work on this project and you'd have to travel to it, then you get there and they only pay for room and board, you'd be pretty pissed.
The lack of specificity is the same thing happening here in the reporting. Therefore it's misleading.
That's only true if they are doing it in bad faith. And if they were controlling information at the source. You can still easily find this story on nypost.com. I agree this is dangerous territory for Twitter, but it's 100% within their rights to do so. They can censor content completely arbitrarily if they want. Consumers will vote with their feet. Either they like this or they don't.
>That's only true if they are doing it in bad faith.
Every tyrant ever thought they were doing what was good. Nobody ever does bad things just to be evil. They do them because they honestly believe the end justifies the means. We tend to give a pass to actions taken toward ends we agree with. Everybody is the hero of their own story. Nobody is acting in bad faith. They just believe that based on the information they have and their experience that the course they are choosing is correct. Those guys firing AGTMS at each other in the videos we get out of Syria are all trying to create a better world for the next generation. They just happen to disagree on the details.
Yet another example of our society having a massive, oppressive double-standard about which worldviews should benefit from freedom of express, and of course the beneficiaries ardently refuse to admit there's anything like that going on.
Twitter is handing out week long bans to people retweeting the information 'because it is against our hacking rules'
But there is no evidence the information was hacked - the shop owner says Hunter Biden signed the data and computer over to him via the 90 day unpaid clause.
So Twitter is selectively enforcing their rules to suit their preferred narrative?
Did they do the right thing? By engaging in the censorship of a large newspaper and at least one politician, the resulting streisand effect amplified the message far beyond what it would have gotten had they left it alone.
If the goal was to suppress disinformation, they failed miserably.
I think the goal was to minimize the impact of news without adequate sourcing on the US presidential election, and I think that goal was achieved. The conversation is about censorship and truth, not really Hunter Biden and Burisma.
Admittedly, there may be a cost to pay for that, and it's possible it was a long-term bad decision, but their goal seems to have been met.
That news is now being hosted directly by the house judiciary committee on a .gov site. I don't think they did a very good job of preventing the spread, nor do I think this would have happened had they just kept their hands off.
I'm struggling to see how this story is evidence of anything.
Steve Bannon—one of Trump's chief cronies—provided a mixed bag of allegedly stolen content from a laptop with some easily contrived "evidence" against Biden and Trump.
There don't seem to be any direct ties even to Hunter Biden, let alone his dad. Publishing this is a gift to Trump.
History may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
I have a feeling that Facebook wants Trump to be elected. I think Mark Zuckerberg may have discovered how to play "Good cop, bad cop" this year.
First, he played good cop trying to protect free speech while his employees played bad cop trying to censor. That was just a test to see how people reacted. To see if people perceived Mark Zuckerberg better after this.
Now Facebook is playing bad cop so that Trump can be the good cop and win the election.
Facebook is benefiting from inflationary monetary policy and Trump being eyeballs deep in debt will ensure that inflationary policy continues. Trump is not going to let the economy tank on his watch.
If Biden wins, he will let the economy tank early in his term and blame it on Trump.
BTW, Spotify also played "Good cop, bad cop" with its employees this year related to Joe Rogan. Again, Spotify management playing good cop letting Joe Rogan express himself and Spotify employees playing bad cop wanting him censored.
Now votes started going back up after I posted this second comment. Again, as predicted.
I should have worked for Facebook. Trump would already be Supreme World Dictator by now and the Federal Reserve Bank would have been merged into Facebook.
I think the NY Post story is going to be discredited pretty quickly, and even if it is true, it's nothing new.
That said, I think Twitter massively overreached on their efforts regarding this particular story. It would have been far more effective to just label these tweets as containing potentially misleading information. The story would have died out tomorrow and life would've gone on. Instead this has blown up in their face spectacularly and directly lends credibility to the idea that they have their finger on the scale for Biden. If Trump wins reelection I imagine that he will immediately use the full force of the DOJ against Twitter.
At this point, Twitter might as well just lean into it, and go all out for Biden. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't, so might as well pick a side and hope that you're on the winning side.
FB might get off here for only "slowing down" the spread of the article, but maybe not.
> By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Post, and many others for retweeting the story.
Twitter and Facebook decided to prove their critics right. Censorship was supposed to be for Russian bot-generated fake news. The New York Post may be a shitty tabloid, but it’s a real organization with a Manhattan office building and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
As far as I can tell, it’s unclear whether the laptop the New York Post sourced it’s emails from really belonged to Hunter Biden. That’s an ordinary question of a news article’s credibility. It’s insane to make that the bar for sharing an article on social media.
Matt Taibbi has catalogued how many New York Times stories about Trump ultimately proved unfounded: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 (paid). The Times is a hell of a lot more credible than the Post, but again, the fact that an article from a real source may prove to be wrong can’t be a justification for censoring it on social media.
they should ban the NYT trump tax return story as presumably those records were hacked or gotten in an illegal method as well. Oh wait, these decisions only ever happen one way...
not to mention the countless “russia” stories that have been debunked
I think at this point it might be easier for Twitter and Facebook to just provide a list of pre-approved messages you're allowed to send to their platforms.
I don't know how I feel about it given how blatantly the current administration lies and the lengths they are willing to go to manufacture lies. Given that scenario, should we not just assume that everything they say is a lie until proven otherwise?
There is a lot of circumstantial evidence here. Why would Hunter biden be paid thousands of dollars a month to work at a random Ukrainian energy company other than to provide access to Joe Biden. Hunter Biden has no expertise running a energy utility.
Isn't the likeliest explanation that 1) random Ukrainian energy company paid Hunter Biden for access to Joe Biden, and 2) the payments were not useful in actually getting access to Joe Biden? "Thousands of dollars a month" doesn't seem like "get close to a former VP/future presidential candidate" money.
(Of course, this explanation isn't exactly a good look either, but at this point it's a choice between imperfection options, and one seems a lot less imperfect.)
Do companies pay princelings large sums of money without getting anything in return? I believe it's usually understood that they get something in return, even if that something is just not getting into trouble (as is the way in China, if you want no road blocks in your enterprise, you better hire some high official's kid).
Much like the HN thread that applauded FB getting rid of some thousands of accounts related to “right wingers”, QAnon, et cetera, I equally applaud this admirable move.
I hope that FB, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare and others continue to block and close accounts to prevent the intervention of democracy as much as possible.
A similar case to this may have been the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016. So these are all parties who are trying to right the wrongs here done by destructive state actors from abroad.
These are all companies who own the servers that this content sits on, and it’s well within their rights to get rid of it if and when they wish to.
If you don’t want your content removed from there, then don’t post there and don’t use their services. Simple as that.
Right, but what if the story is 100% legit, and the people interfering in democracy are actually FB, Twitter, Google and Cloudflare? All of which are heavy lobbyists, and have their own interests at heart. Shouldn't they just be elevating journalists that are casting doubts on it, or going in to try to confirm or refute the story...instead of just outright blocking something that isn't verifiably false? This isn't remotely the same as QAnon or antivaxxing, as that are verifiably false.
I've wondered if it might be strategic, if there is any truth to it, to withhold proof and get the opposition busy denying it entirely... then present the proof and shoot their credibility completely and cause a bigger backlash.
Just step back a little and consider the alternatives here. NYP is pretty obviously smearing for a major civil event here, a civil event that has the potential of causing serious harm to the second largest democracy in the world. If the social media companies would just allow this smearing to go unhindered, they are basically saying: “We don’t care if bad actors use our platform to undermine our democracy,” which is nuts.
We live in a country where we have elected officials and laws to deal with individuals and organizations that undermine our democracy. I don't need some random collective of people headquarted in a random state to decide those things for me.
> We live in a country where we have elected officials and laws to deal with individuals and organizations that undermine our democracy.
This is not entirely true. I’m not sure what the law is on slander (which would be the law in question here, I believe), and if social media companies would be breaking the law if they allow slander to be distributed on their platform.
But regardless if it turns out that the story is bogus, and the NYP is charged with slander, but this article had a widespread distribution and is successful in swaying voters on a false claim. Then the damage to democracy is quite significant, but the NYP gets away with a fairly minor charge of slander.
Social media companies would not be breaking the law in this case, because of section 230. The slandered party can seek a court order to compel the disclosure of the poster's identity and sue them directly, and another to get the slanderous post yanked, but the platform is explicitly immune.
Literally the opposite of the case. Due to the power of Section 230, the online platforms are shielded from the normal liability, which gives them an inherent advantage. Section 230 distorts the market, making it non-free.
See also: the excellent "Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly"[1] story from earlier on today.
Moreover, the Section 230 was specifically created to distort the market, to help kickstart the online communications and commerce, by giving it an edge over the other businesses. Now that it has done its job, we can revoke the Section 230, and return to actual free market. Where a tortious interference would be sorted out by a lawsuit.
> Now that it has done its job, we can revoke the Section 230, and return to actual free market. Where a tortious interference would be sorted out by a lawsuit.
I think you spelled, "where posters freely waive their right to sue the forum as part of their publishing contract" wrong
1. The sensationalism of the original title. The accusation here is that the candidate’s son introduced a Ukrainian businessman to him. This is hardly a smoking gun evidence against the father doing anything wrong.
2. There is no evidence that the emails are in fact real, and nothing is even offered to that extent.
3. The article does not come from a reputable news source. In fact it comes from a news source with serious damage to it’s reputation.
4. No other major news outlet is picking this story up, further undermining the credibility of the article.
If I was a social media company I wouldn’t want to touch this with a 10 meter pole.
Major news outlets differ greatly on which stories the give attention to based on their biases. And their reputation depends on your personal political bias.
You're asking for evidence the emails are real but no such evidence was demanded when NYT posted findings from what they claim are Trump's financial records.
If you're a social media company, your job isn't to decide what's true or untrue or what is permissible to share or not share. It is to facilitate communication and get out of the way. Instead, we're seeing companies that control the digital public square enact severely biased policies that favor their employee's politics. That's dangerous and unacceptable.
Facebook is NOT blocking the Post from posting. They are limiting sharing. This headline is a good example of way it may have been the right move. Misinformation spreads fast.
It's highly ironic that the so-called defenders of free speech have torn through this HN thread downvoting and flagging posts that support Twitter's specific actions or anti-disinformation efforts in general.
Free speech for me but not for thee, much?
To those of you who have done this, or don't have a problem with it, or are about to downvote and/or flag this post, think carefully about if you're actually defending free speech or only speech that you agree with.
I'm not sure what argument you're making here. Twitter is a public forum akin to a government institution and is now censoring political viewpoints it disagrees with. You shouldn't be surprised that free speech advocates are livid about this and perplexed at those who would defend such a thing.
>Twitter is a public forum akin to a government institution and is now censoring political viewpoints it disagrees with.
No it isn't. It's a platform run by a private company for its own ends that offers membership under terms of service which grant it absolute, universal, irrevocable and arbitrary rights over user content and accounts. Terms of service that everyone with an account agreed to beforehand.
That it has global reach no more makes it a public forum than CNN, the BBC or the Wall Street Journal, and "akin to a government institution" is just an attempt to muddy the waters between the definitions of public and private enterprise.
If you or anyone wants to make this a free speech issue, don't misrepresent the nature of the problem. State that you want the government to take over social media platforms, restrict their free speech rights and force them to publish content against their will. Even if it's racist, even if it's false, even if they're not a general purpose forum, the men with guns should force them to.
People who claim, for instance, that it should be a crime for websites to moderate any content, in any way, that isn't strictly illegal, or that all moderation should be subject to judicial review (both positions I've seen repeatedly here) should realize just how radical and potentially authoritarian such moves would be, particularly given their correlation with the current atmosphere of anti-leftist panic.
People who advocate that Twitter should not exercise editorial control over content are hypocrites for using HN's community editorial control tools to suppress, or remove, content that they don't agree with on HN.
People who value free speech as an absolute right in virtually all contexts have no business curtailing what they argue is an absolute right when it is exercised by people who have views they disagree with.
.
.
.
.
As a substantive question, I agree that Twitter is large enough that it should be regarded as an infrastructure platform, akin to the phone carriers, and should not be expected to unilaterally decide on the fair bounds of political speech. That much power does not belong in the hands of any one CEO. Absent a more suitable long-term legal framework to combat propaganda, however, unilateral action is the best of a set of very bad choices. The political situation in America is far too dangerous for potential disinformation to spread unchecked.
If there is truth to the NY Post story, it will be corroborated by other news outlets and will eventually find its way to Twitter via that route. Until that happens, however, October surprises of potentially dubious validity should not be allowed to spread unchecked.
It's refusing to spread likely BS propoganda. And he is correctly implying that many people who claim to be free speech advocates are in no way free speech advocates and merely are upset that racist and conspiratorial speech is being censored and are fine censoring viewpoints they disagree with
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.
The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting.