if you listen to trueanon they had to open multiple overflow rooms becuase press agents from all over the world are lining up hours early to get it, it's not low profile.

Front page of all the news site is not all that low profile.

I just opened the front pages of CNN, Fox News, BBC News and NBC News and found the Maxwell case either completely uncovered on the front pages, opinion-only coverage, coverage of only this particular Twitter story, tabloid nonsense or coverage buried so far down the page in a sidebar it may as well not be there.

That seems pretty poor to me for such a high profile case.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/78aNg1b

Funny it’s getting huge coverage in UK media

You can pay money for followers. You don't need the means of a nation state or shadowy cabal. I'm right there with you on the Maxwell/Epstein story being far more significant though.

But an analogy is, if you have a legitimate criticism of the security state/"deep state" (a phrase I use and have no aversion to), it's not useful to buy into Qanon nonsense just because they criticize some of the same people. I know nothing directly about "patriot one" so I'm not saying it's Qanon level nonsense, but I'll defer to TrueAnon that it was probably counter-productive as a source. And making that judgment doesn't put anyone in league with the devil.

Just follow better informed and more scrupulous sources. TrueAnon are flippant and mischievous in ways that diminish them slightly, but on the whole, they're excellent. And they're at the trial every day.

Please don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Should post encouraging dangerous conspiracy theories be given the same level of care as math questions?

It's not about caring for the posts, it's about caring for the community you're participating in.

I care deeply about the hacker news community, but engaging a conspiracy theorist on a standard discussion is destructive and dangerous to the overall community because such a conversation is a grounds to express more "facts" and reach a broader market. My response quickly points out the connection to existing dangerous communities and reinforces our reality as people casually browsing an internet forum and preempts further discussion and replies of ("I'm just saying")

Since you care deeply about the HN community, you should refrain from posting low-quality comments and breaking the site guidelines. As they point out, the way to deal with egregious comments is to not reply, to downvote/flag, and possibly email us at [email protected] so we can take a look. Otherwise we just end up in a tedious, offtopic spiral.

The discussion here focused on a single spam account being banned from Twitter, flagging comments and suspecting accounts promoting conspiracy theories validates that disgusting worldview (that big tech has a nefarious connection to underaged trafficking). But as the other comment said I do appreciate your civility. I would like to point out this tedious off topic spiral has the benefit of refusing the engage the dangerous ideas we were originally responding too, and instead pivoting the topic.

Ok, but the cost of tedious downward spirals greatly exceeds the benefit. Much better is not to feed them. We all need to just accept wrongness on the internet as a cost of doing internet on the internet. Fighting it amplifies it.

I think that's the fundamental disagreement. I think fighting it through dressing down is most effective. Conspiracy theories thrive on politeness, and masking harmful leaps of faith as innocent conversation. Mockery quickly points out the inherent bad faith of the premise. I don't think open platforms have to cater to such extremism.

The site guidelines are clear on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is one kind of site (the kind where that's not ok) and not the other. I get that not everyone agrees with the guidelines or would design a community to be this way, and that's fine—there's room for many different kinds of community, including many that haven't been created yet. We're going to enforce the rules of this one, though.

That's a valid perspective and I find this community to be a place of interesting content and discussion the majority of the time. Obviously my comment was flagged, and looking at the original parent I replies reveals a vast array of discussion circling around dangerous speculation and paranoia, so whatever goals I aimed to accomplish failed.

Oh well, it's ultimately just the internet, I have to believe people are good enough not to become radicalized. Worrying about these issues is more likely to get me banned then to generate anything productive.

Someday I hope to have half the composure and calm you continue to maintain and nurture, dang.

i know, this just makes the conspiracy crowd more on edge about the whole thing

it is in fact very easy to not fully believe conspiracy theories, those who do go all in with those are not the primary demographic that enjoys thinking about conspiracy theories. It is primarily an activity practiced by people who are capable of entertaining wild ideas without believing them as truth, aka skeptics. I never understood the massive public stigma around being able to have a wild imagination but stay grounded regardless.

Nobody prominent is involved. This case is so larded with misplaced expectations. We as of yet have no real proof any prominent people besides Prince Andrew may be tangentially implicated and no reason to think Maxwell has any compromising information if they were. And even if both those assumptions are true there's no reason they'd be pertinent to her trial. Her trial which is happening likely because the prosecutor couldn't force a plea.

> Nobody prominent is involved.

I don't know how you operate, but when I hear that the royal family is implicated, I immediately start to wonder who else is involved and not dismiss the case all together.

Epstein's murder and subsequent cover-up strongly imply that other prominent people were involved

What makes you so confident that Epstein was murdered?

Have you looked into it? I mean even the author of Skeptic magazine went through it and thought it was very credible that he was murdered.

Yes. I have read about it. I have skepticism about it. I am wondering how anyone could be so confident.

I mean....

Again. Zero proof. Think about all the dots to connect for it to be a murder and how few for it to be a suicide. He had absolutely every reason to be suicidal and the evidence says it's very likely. For it to be murder we have to assumed a giant chain of events for which we have proof of none.

* Very powerful people procured his services for something illegal <- Maybe, no proof

* Epstein had incriminating evidence on those powerful people proving their illegal activities <- Maybe, no proof, requires above unproven point to be true

* Powerful people knew what evidence he had, believed he would leverage it to reduce his punishment <- Maybe, no proof, requires all above unproven points to be true

* Powerful people hired ninjas to invade the detention center, evade all the cameras (all but one camera was working and recorded the approaches to his cell), murder Epstein to make it look exactly like a suicide, leave no traces, no witnesses <- Maybe, getting pretty ludicrous by now

You just added another several levels of speculation. Could the CIA pull off an Op like this? Maybe. Have they ever assassinated an American citizen on American soil? Not that we know of. Would they take orders from a president looking to cover up his involvement in sex trafficking and obey without question and leak no details? No. That's pure fantasy.

I understand the uncertainty and skepticism over the claims of the prison. I am intrigued by the confident assessment.

> We as of yet have no real proof any prominent people besides Prince Andrew may be tangentially implicated

Isn’t that a reason to follow the case?

Not in the US. The US audience doesn't really care about the UK royal family.

And in the UK, the media is constrained by stronger libel laws such that they'll sit on their haunches in terms of reporting on things in the case until they are considered factual enough to withstand a UK libel suit. Allegations thrown about in a foreign court of law don't meet that bar.

What? This case is all over Uk media

We don't know if there are prominent people involved in every case in every courtroom in the world. Maybe Bill Clinton has been stalking Bushwick stealing bikes for the last 5 years. Probably not though. Meanwhile the most recent ex-president is directly implicated in trying to upend democracy and lying about deliberately spreading covid at the White House.

Okay, then there is no reason to ban this twitter user at all, because there are plenty of ways to follow this trial and have the public decide for themselves what they think.