We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.

I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.

Disinformation could be tolerated if we, as a society, have the time and means to determine its veracity. But with the ticking clock of an election, disinformation is too easy.

Some countries have laws prohibiting any political news stories in the run-up to an election for precisely this reason.

Have you heard of an October surprise?

"On October 20, 1880, shortly before the 1880 presidential election, a forged letter was published purportedly written by James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the United States. At the time, most white Americans opposed Chinese immigration and both presidential candidates were in favor of immigration restrictions.[3]"

And a list of many more.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise

That's exactly what I propose, precisely because October surprises are not in the best interest of democracy.

Many countries [1] prohibit all political news stories during their election cycle. An added benefit of this policy would be to limit the length of the election cycle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

Years of "sources says" later disproved. Russia this, Russia that. And it's only now that we should stop propagation of unverified stories?

Without your proposed law: Stuff shows up 2 weeks before the election.

With a 10-week blackout: Stuff shows up 12 weeks before the election. (2 weeks before the blackout)

Just an inclination, not sure how much of this would be supported by the literature if there is any

Importance is a social construct. If that email is what it puports to be, then whether it is important is a point of view.

The media don't (mis)lead us by telling us lies, they do so by deciding which parts of the truth are important enough to tell us.

I promise I could argue all day about whether your initial simple statement was true or not. What does received mean? What did the email say, and did it actually mean what you paraphrase? You'd probably view it as bad faith (and you'd be right), but that faith already implies the exact social consensus I'm taking about.

For instance, when the media tell you "you can get reinfected by covid", is it a lie? As of today, there has been only 5 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, out of 50 millions confirmed cases. So it is technically possible but statistically insignificant. Are the media lying when they tell you it could happen to you? I think they do. But technically they don't.

Also most of the lying is lying by omission. I present you one fact but you will never hear about that other fact that completely mitigates the first (the context, or the rest of the sentence, etc). So you can say something factually correct while completely misleading your interlocutor.

I am a bit puzzled that there wouldn't be a log of who comes in and out of government buildings. It should be easy to prove whether the said executives were at least in the building over that period or not.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...

I don't think I'm a genius or anything, but why aren't we putting really smart people on this problem and giving them plenty of funding? I constantly think we're just a few steps away from putting in a small set of technological solutions that would over time solve all our political/criminal problems.

E.g. Just imagine a world where all politicians, CEOs, major figure-heads are safely and securely recorded constantly. Think of all the ridiculous talking points and "Scandals" that would go away, be disproven, or never occur at all.

In my mind, the constructive way to proceed would be, and I'd hope that you or others would indulge me on this: How can we have a tamper-proof evidentiary record of all the conversations that politicians engage in whilst minimizing the potential of it being regularly abused/weaponized and compromising the privacy of the individuals involved?

Even our understanding of Hunter Biden’s existence is a social construct to most of us, since we have never met him and never will. (It’s much easier to make the call on that one, though, based on pictures and it being undisputed.)

Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections?

It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen.

Edit:

> If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage?

My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly.

Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.

People are still doing "but her emails" despite all the investigations into what happened. It's clear that the Hunter Biden story is an attempt to fabricate a "but his emails" narrative; there may be some facts in there, but none that impinge on Joe Biden.

Will we have to resort to signal and other encrypted direct messaging methods to have open discussion?

Or run your own mail server end hope your recipient doesn’t use one that censors?

Creepy stuff.

Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)

Joe Biden is a terrible candidate. He's just not as bad as Trump. The fact that America is in that stupid position is its own fault.

I don't vote for lesser evils. Because of that I never have to regret how I voted.

Just like with DT this is also pulled out of context. I don't like any of them and won't (and can't) vote for any of them so I have no dog in the fight.

That website shouldn't have been blocked, whoever did it should probably been charged with election meddling but it doesn't change my view of Biden.

As for the videos I think many of them shows him (clumsily) trying to comfort people.

Again - I'm also the guy who points out that "fine people on both sides" as presented in mainstream media is a hoax.

I don't like either if them but think we should be fair to both if them.

If I lived in the US my lawn sign would be "Any Reasonable Person".

In three of the videos with younger women, they all seemed to recoil from his "affection". With the young girls, I don't think it would ever be appropriate for a stranger to touch them like he did.

I pointed out it was clumsy ;-)

But I think the larger context is he knew he was on tape so he should know better than to willfully do something that would be taken as sexual harassment.

I honestly think he tried to come off as caring, just failed spectacularly.

I didn't mean the site owner did election meddling, rather than Facebook when thet selectively block sites like this.

But what is the rule then? Manipulating social media in front of an election is only illegal if you are a foreigner?

For example, cohen paying off Trump's mistresses was prosecuted as an illegal campaign contribution.

This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously false and dangerous speech should be suppressed. Twitter (and other sites) is taking a moral stand, not an expedient stand.

The concept that any person or organization should be granted absolute authority to serve as the arbiter of whay constitutes dangerous or false speech, and the power to arbitrarily silence those who utter it offends me, and I consider it to be dangerous in and of itself. We'll not be able to agree on this.

WRT the NYP piece, probably foreign sourced is about right. Even before the media picked up its Russia Trumpet, I remember reading a rumor towards the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine phone call debacle that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's some. Irrespective of the source, the computer shop narrative reeks.

But in spite of information's questionable provenance, it has been accompanied with compromising images of Hunter himself, and beyond stating that a meeting with Burisma execs wasn't on Biden's 'official' schedule, the biden campaign has yet (to my knowledge), to expressly deny the validity of the documents.

If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA. Beyond ambiguous citations of 'anonymous officials', I've yet to read that they've communicated anything to this effect. The Director of National Intelligence has gone so far as to claim that this wasn't a Russian disinformation project. But he's a Trump apparatchik with no history in intelligence outside his appointment, so I generally ignore him.

Probably foreign sourced? My gut says yes.

Possibly disinformation? The juries still out. Possibly's a pretty low bar for stealing someone's voice.

The tech companies took it upon themselves to censor this information. They've not claimed they were compelled or reccommended to by any official bodies any more than they were required to censor the name of the Urkaine whistleblower. But they chose to, of their own accord.

If you want to be treated like a platform, you have to live with the fact that your platform's going to be used to further the aims of anyone who wannts to use it. Bar illegal content and behaviors (things disinformation is not), the most you should do is notify your users, sit back, and take it.

I also try to do the same[1] but crocodiletears did much better.

[1]: you'll find me pointing out the "fine people on both sides" has been debunked and asking questions about the Hunter Biden disk.

This is ridiculously wrong. The FBI and CIA and every other government agency absolutely do not want to comment on something like this, because it just pulls them into this political bullshit. This is exactly the "official" reason James Comey was fired, for an almost identical issue, almost exactly 4 years ago. It is a near 100% certainty that any FBI or CIA official commenting on this issue now will be fired a few months from now.

Questions: why would the Chinese do that? Or do you mean a Chinese billionaire did it without the involvement of the government? Or do you think their recommendation of Biden is a calculated move to get people to vote for Trump?

Whether or not China would support the action is opaque to me. Trump's trade policies have massively reframed our relationship to the country, but whether or not that's been a positive thing for factions within the CCP is well beyond my knowledge or means to learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui#GNews

It's also the only site where I've seen the "BGY Program" mentioned. https://gnews.org/51672/

I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.

I notice they started with their political opponents.

What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?

I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive.

> What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?

You're using the word "criminally released" but that is an unproven fact, the times claims that "all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it". Now I wonder how that can be as well, but at least that's the statement.

So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation, I can see them looking at both article and thinking the first one talks about a hard drive being copied by a shop owner and leaked. While the other is nebulous on the origin but claims it was legally obtained.

This is obviously all speculation. But that be my thoughts, that I can see how the policy might have applied to one and not the other.

I also have to think that it coming from the NY Post must have contributed. I don't assume Twitter reviews every tweet manually, and I can see how NY Post is more likely to get flagged than NY Times.

The NY Post article claims the laptop was abandoned at the repair shop (never picked up) and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner.

>all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it

Notice that The Times does not say the source was legally authorized to release it. I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released. For example, if an IRS employee or an employee at Trump's accountant released it without permission, those would be crimes.

>So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation

I can accept that for the low level employee at the time of moderation. But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.

In that case it wouldn't make it a hack, but just a leak.

> and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner

That's something I'm still fuzzy on. I'm not sure if it's the law in the state, or just the store's contractual policy. Also, I don't know if the laptop becoming property of the shop extends to the information contained within it. And it also didn't specify if the data on the hard drive was password protected or encrypted in any way which meant retrieval would still require hacking into it.

> But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.

I can't speak to that. Now Twitter has a PR issue, and I'm guessing whatever choices they've made or not are based on them trying to mitigate and limit the PR damages.

My guess is, the NY Post is now smearing twitter's own reputation, and possibly twitter doesn't like that, and are worried they'd use their account to further promote anti-twitter rethoric which might be why Twitter is against unblocking their account.

I'm a bit confused how they unblocked the tweet about the email story but kept the account blocked, that's a bit strange.

Another thing I wondered is how likely could Twitter be accountable for if Hunter were to sue them for defamation and libel? Normally it seem fair game to defame and cause libel to politicians, but would that extend to Hunter which isn't directly involved in politics? Or could that be a winning lawsuit from him if he wanted too?

And you thought casino keywords brought in revenue...

You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud.

Which part of it is not believable?

We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away.

The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response).

There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).

Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that.

This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.

Here's my take: When you look from different angles it gets harder to hide things. Fox News wants to hide some things, CNN wants to hide others. Looking at it from both angles you get to see some of the stuff each tries to hide and maybe you can make a reasonable guess on what both tries to hide.

(there's an obvious question about what you'd replace them with, but I think the answer is almost anything would be more informative)

It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.

The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts.

[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha...

[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134...

[2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...

They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties.

Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.

You're just saying that a misinformation campaign aiming at manipulating the US elections quite possibly according to the whims of a totalitarian regime that aims at undermining the US from the top might not have resorted to use totally false and made-up information.

Fundamentally, for me the null hypothesis is that this is typical election year opposition research. Those claiming that this is an elaborate Russian conspiracy have to present a pretty compelling case to convince me otherwise, given the repeated collapse of such narratives over the past few years.

This also results in something related to what the article talks about: any reasonable criticism that goes against mainstream thought (or against mainstream news in general) will immediately be coopted and used as ammo by those mentioned in my first point who will take it and twist it into absurd, conspiracy-level or hate-fueled perspectives thereby minimizing the legitimacy of original criticism in the eyes of the public.

Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against.

I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining beacon of democracy, see their democratic process dragged through the mud by people the likes of you, who are more interested in fabricating propaganda and conduct smear campaigns than actually help out their country rise above their internal problems.

Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote from 4/2019, signed by Hunter Biden: https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hunter%20bi...

And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:

`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`

`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`

`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`

https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden...

It's not a smear campaign. These are facts. The Biden's are political whorebags and don't deserve power.

I'm a 10th generation American. The spirit of liberty runs deep in me. But speaking truth to power is part of the democratic process. Sorry you were mistaken in believing that democracy is all sunshine and rainbows. It's not. It's very messy and imperfect. And like gardening, you have to weed out the corruption by calling it out.

The zerohedge URL is truncated and consequently doesn't work.

> And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:

Show us the DKIM headers and let us verify the authenticity, then we'll talk about the content of the emails.

My understanding is that the purported emails were sent to Biden. He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him, so verifying that these emails were sent doesn't really prove anything. If he had forwarded the emails in a way that indicated his agreement, or if they had been sent by someone else connected to the candidate, that would be a situation in which DKIM would be relevant.

In which case the whole situation is nonsense and moot.

But it appears that some of them are from Biden - "The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire" - in which case the DKIM headers would be a simple check on authenticity, no?

This is part of why institutional trust has collapsed in the US and this will all end violently.

What exactly did the New York Post mischaracterize? I read the article and my general impression was that it was a bit sensationalized, but that's rather typical when it comes to bombshell scoops. My understanding of the term misinformation is that it refers to presenting outright false information as fact, not the (unfortunately typical) narrative framing of factual information that happens in the news every day.

Regarding the provenance of the emails, the FBI subpoenaed the laptop over a year ago, and they've had the original in their possession since then. If their digital forensic experts haven't found evidence of foul play, I'd consider that a good indication that the laptop is indeed Hunter's and was found in the repair shop. Hunter's lawyer allegedly also contacted the repair shop on Oct 13, in an attempt to recover the laptop.

We only know the FBI subpoenaed the laptop because it was leaked to Fox News. The leak itself is presumably accurate, but we have no information about what the FBI did or did not find on the laptop – except for a letter that they have "nothing to add at this time" to an appearance by DNI John Ratcliffe on Fox Business.

In that appearance, Ratcliffe (a highly partisan official) did claim that the laptop was not part of a disinformation campaign, but also said that "I know so little about those emails and what is apparently on Hunter Biden's laptop". So it seems like he was referring to a lack of information about the laptop from the intelligence community rather than inside information from the FBI.

Admittedly, the FBI generally can share information with the intelligence community, and apparently in this case it has not. That does suggest that they probably don't have e.g. evidence that a specific foreign actor was behind things. But we don't know whether they've found evidence that foul play in general occurred or might have occurred. Heck, it's even possible that they found evidence of foul play by a specific entity, but didn't send it to the intelligence community because that entity is American – though I wouldn't say that's likely.

As for the lawyer, the closest we have to hard evidence is a screenshot of an email apparently showing that a lawyer for Hunter Biden spoke with the repair shop owner after Hunter was presumably asked for comment by the Post; it doesn't show any specific claims made by the lawyer. Beyond that we just have Adam Housley and Rudy Giuliani relaying the claims of the repair shop owner. Leaving aside those sources' lack of trustworthiness, Housley himself claimed that the attorney had the wrong year for when Hunter dropped off the laptop and "didn't even know when he left em there" [1]. If anything, that suggests that Hunter doesn't know the provenance, though it's hard to say without more information.

[1] https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/1317319606126604288

This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.”

Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20

In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou...

> The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

> Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

> At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.

Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'.

> has catalogued these at length on his substack.

If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent?

> In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier

Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.)

But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other.

[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

[2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what...

[3] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

As to “White Fragility”—Taibbi’s language is colorful, but that book isn’t mainstream left: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi.... (Podcast version: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-awokening/id....) Whereas Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist” is a book about public policy written in familiar liberal public policy language, “White Fragility” is a bizarre self-help book for white people who read Kendi’s book and didn’t understand it.

Also, while "Hitlerian race theory" is an appropriate description for someone who says white people should "strive to be less white." Picturing someone telling my half-white daughter that makes me think that Taibbi's description is on the nose.

Also you clearly appear to be unfamiliar with Taibbi's writing style. That's how he wrote stories about the war crimes of the previous admins; remember those? Or is GWB now considered a leftist?

There is no inconsistency between a person being left leaning and that person thinking the Democrat party have adopted bad policy/insane rhetoric or that some elements of the radical left are insane and dangerous.

I'm a solid right wing voter; and I'd happily point out that some Republican policies are horrific (their approach to deficits is not acceptable), that their rhetoric is sometimes unhinged and that the fringe elements of the right wing are dangerous lunatics. Still think they are the better of 2 options.

And on White Fragility is exactly the sort of book that would have, in the 1940s, been used to justify Hitlerian race theory. In the 1940s it would be pointing out that Jews are systematically advantaged and as a group trying to downplay race but that one can't claim to be blind to it.

It's hard to follow but his complaint here seems to be kind of a wonkish insider lament about the media reaction he expects to follow the NYT story, not the story itself. And in particular that his own article years earlier in Rolling Stone already told the same basic story about Trump as con man but I guess won't get any credit.

As for the list of bombshells, there a link to another story which steps through many references to news stories in turn, in a narrative style, not an enumerated list.

I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.

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

At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.

Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it.

Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?

"misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this?

I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.

As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?

What I can tell you is that it is absurd to believe it is true given what we know about the details surrounding the "discovery" of the information.

Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will.

I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal.

Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate.

I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda.

I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.

A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.

At the end of the day, you still have a variety of content sources on the internet to consume that same content. Twitter is not the only source of information, and if you believe it is, then we have more serious problems.

I was literally banned from r/conservative for posting a question that folks found very inconvenient. Should they be forced to reverse the ban? How far do you believe is too far?

In my opinion, this is pretty clear cut. If you don’t like Twitter’s policies, don’t use their website.

I’m surprised the free enterprise conservatives are actually the ones so against this. “We want government to get out of the way... unless it furthers our agenda and helps us stay in power, in which case, let’s threaten to regulate or break up private companies.”

On one hand yes, but on the other, does that also apply to other services? Can I open a shop only for <insert skin color> people only and claim that if you don't like it, go somewhere else? How about other categories, protected or otherwise? As a society, we already agree that there are some freedoms that private businesses are denied, and for good reasons, because when taken to the extremes, you end up with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche.

> A social media platform banning certain content is different. Just as we have alt right media sources such as Breitbart, nothing is preventing you from starting your own social media platform, with whatever content you want or don’t want.

Not really - you can start your own media outlet and selectively run the stories you want, that's fine. But if you just regurgitate user-generated content, IMO you better be really careful about applying your own rules consistently and in a transparent manner.

You're missing the fine distinction between protected and non-protected categories. Discrimination based on what you are is banned - those constitute the protected categories. Sex, gender, national origin, race, family status, veteran status, religion, and sexual orientation all fall under things you are.

Business and private organizations however, are allowed to discriminate against their customers based on their actions. It gets fuzzier if those actions intersect with a protected category (e.g. a supermarket probably (IANAL) can't throw out a gay couple for family-friendly PDA if a hetero couple would be allowed to stay). But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.

Imagine if weren't so. Anyone could disrupt religious services by shouting obscenities. You couldn't have a peaceful shopping trip or grocery run. It would be total chaos.

> But by and large, if you do or say something on my premises that I dislike, I can kick you out.

It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement (and I can still discriminate based on what you are, but maintaining plausible deniability).

In reality what they would actually do would depend on what that "something" is. If it's something like "don't eat meat on odd-numbered dates", you're probably fine. On the other hand, you say something harmful or distasteful to other protected categories, you'd be lucky to keep your account. They'd weigh the harm to you of kicking you off versus the harm to others by letting you stay and (of course) the PR liability incurred by doing either.

If the discrimination criteria are broadly found to match up with a protected class you're in legal hot water. IOW using proxies for "plausible deniability" is a risky strategy and businesses have been punished in the past for doing it.

> It cannot be a fuzzy "I dislike what you do", as it is prone to selective enforcement

You're right it can be. But again, consider the alternative on online forums. Anyone could post porn or vulgarity on religious forums, or socialist propaganda on business forums. It would be very disruptive if selective enforcement weren't allowed.

My guess is that any legislation attempting to make social media common carriers would eventually be found to unconstitutionally abridge the first amendment.

2. Neutral doesn't mean "whoever can game the algorithm wins"

3. Less than 50% of Americans are opposed to suppressing sharing of articles like the one suppressed.

Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes.

Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever...

Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.

I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system.

I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.

> How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice-'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings...

> In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?

-- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (The Germans 1933-45)

In the past few decades, the political right served as the watchdog against governmental abuse of power (domestically), while the left was more sensitive to corporate abuses. But with the rise of big tech has come a generation of left-leaning young people willing to give the benefit of the doubt to corporations they see as by- and for- their own generation. At the same time, the right's foray into populism has ushered in a party-wide acceptance of authoritarianism (provided it is wielded against members of out-groups).

I agree with you if we were talking about a decision by HN, or Metafilter, or other small communities. But Twitter/Facebook et. al. do not feel the same. The situation feels more like a company deciding that they can ban certain literature on the grounds that they own all the land in the town [1].

So it seems to me that our watchdogs are in some sense asleep at their traditional posts. It seems to me that we have an instance of a corporation granting itself new and wide ranging powers (regardless of their benevolence) over a wide swath of public discourse. It seems to me that this ought to be resisted as a beginning, though we cannot see the ends.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.