6 ms·

Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? Is it because Wikileaks revealed those Hillary Clinton emails? A

by sedeki 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? Is it because Wikileaks revealed those Hillary Clinton emails? And that’s the ”protagonist” party? Or is it the rape accusations initiated in Sweden?

computerfriend 7y ago
It's certainly the former, given that the rape accusations have been public for a long time.
DanBC 7y ago
Wikileaks changed policy on redacting names. They used to do it, they stopped doing it. People realised that indiscriminately dumping material without any attempt at removing names was dangerous. Assange has released names of gay people who live in countries where they could be killed for that; he's released names of Jewish people in Bagdhad; he's identified rape victims.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
The entire western world is against him, I mean governments with all their power. Aligning with Russia didn't help him, although like Snowden, he had no choice once essentially declaring war to US allies. Never underestimate what nation states can do. They'll bring down your entire economy unless...or they can pay, bribe or blackmail someone into filing rape charges against you. Or plant a bag of cocaine, and then behave like good citizens by calling the equivalent of 911 on you.
akerro 7y ago
WL published papers against Clinton, but not much against Trump, therefore he is a traitor.
- sschueller 7y ago
  The only reason for that is that Trump is too stupid to use email.
  - jayess 7y ago
    I would think that makes him pretty smart.
sschueller 7y ago
Many people in the Unites States not willing to accept the fact that their society elected Trump and not some foreign state. Sure Russia, China etc. medle in elections including the US one but Trump was elected by the American public and no one else.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? I don't think the public has "turned" on him. (That is, I don't think he's more unpopular now than he was a year ago.) It's more like we forgot about him. That took away the teflon coating that let him escape international arrest warrants in a South American embassy, a privilege most of us wouldn't get. This story is best explained by reversion to the mean moreso than extraordinary current events.
- mc32 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure just about everyone would interpret that as pre 2016 and post 2016 attitudes and not an arbitrary last year and this year.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > just about everyone would interpret that as pre 2016 and post 2016 attitudes and not an arbitrary last year and this year A poll last month [1] found 73% of Americans have opinions on Wikileaks. The most common response for Julian Assange, on the other hand, was "don't know" (42%, versus 27% responding similarly for Wikileaks). I'd guess the 38% who find Assange unfavorable is largely unchanged from, say, 2015. I'd also guess his favorability was higher in 2012. (That's what made Correa's political arithmetic around granting Assange asylum stick.) Under this hypothesis, people didn't start hating Assange more in 2016. His base of supporters simply eroded until most didn't care about him either way. That turned him into a normal person. Normal people don't get to hang out in embassies all day. [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/04/11/julian-assange-wikileaks-arrested-poll-survey https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
bjourne 7y ago
Who is the general public? Clearly, him running away from the Swedish police was a bad thing to do. I also don't like him because he supported/supports Trump. However, prosecuting him for his journalistic work is insane!
- turk73 7y ago
  I don't think he supports Trump, I think he knows how evil the Clintons are. Here's what I think the Clintons and their "foundation" were up to: Selling out the US in every way possible. The e-mail server was part of a sophisticated information sell operation that included their own plausible deniability, but basically foreign intelligence agencies paid to get access via numerous charities and other clean-looking channels. The primary beneficiaries were the Chinese, who Clintons were already doing business with even when Bill was President. So we had the Clintons selling out the US at the highest level. Now, knowing that was the case, do you think what Assange did could be characterized as supporting Trump or just trying to put and end to something so utterly corrupt that it defies comprehension? Seriously, the Clintons are the same as the Rosenbergs who, by the way, were executed for their crimes.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
moomin 7y ago
Let’s ignore the facts, or the surmises and ask the following: who do you think he should be popular with? The republicans who think releasing the Manning files means he should be in prison? The Democrats after he did everything he could to sabotage them? The progressives for whom his associations with Putin and Farage are beyond the pale? The tech cognoscenti who were complaining he had ruined WikiLeaks by making it all about him even before the rape allegations came out? Women? I mean, there are still people who are fans, but it’s no mystery why he’s unpopular with many groupings.
- onlydeadheroes 7y ago
  It's shocking to me that in public discourse being caught cheating is now "sabotage".
  - moomin 7y ago
    I’ll accept that my terminology may be overly general (and yours overly specific), but the fact remains: after Assange spent an entire election year dropping new damaging material on them, helping a candidate they profoundly oppose win power, how do you expect them to feel? As I say, I’m not getting into the rights or the wrongs of it, but Assange’s unpopularity is no mystery. Whether or not you think he’s a saint, it’s undeniable he’s annoyed not just a lot of powerful people, but an awful lot of plain people.
    - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
      Underlying your argument is the unspoken assumption that nobody on the left has any integrity or values the truth at all. But that is not true, and is in fact the great schism on the left right now.
turk73 7y ago
Who says the public has turned? Only the media has turned and they are promoting a particular narrative. It's funny that so many powerful people are quaking in their boots over this guy. Guilty much? Assange is still alive. That tells me that what he has much be unbelievable political dynamite.
- teddyh 7y ago
  > Who says the public has turned? Only the media has turned and they are promoting a particular narrative. The media controls the public, so the question of why the public has turned is the same question as asking why the media has turned.
basetop 7y ago
When Assange exposed Bush/right, the journalists and leftists loved him and the right hated him. He won a bunch of journalist/humanitarian prizes. Now that Assange exposed Hillary/left, the journalists and leftists hate him. 24/7 anti-assange propaganda by foxnews, cnn, msnbc, nytimes, wapo, etc and you get the current anti-assange sentiment. Trump hates him, Hillary hates him, the establishment hates him because he exposed corruption. Corrupt people don't like their corruption exposed. Also, the elites want to start wars in venezuela, syria, etc so punishing assange and setting an example and possibly discrediting/getting rid of wikileaks is in their interest. Wouldn't want truth to get in the way of more wars.
coldtea 7y ago
It's because the established media got the message to assassinate his character (and unlike e.g. the 60s with the vibrant counter-culture and anti-establishment stances, today most people just follow what's mainstream).
- amyjess 7y ago
  Oh, there's a counter-culture out there, it's just that none of them are willing to go to bat for Assange. Assange did this to himself, with posting antisemitic tweets and courting the alt-right. And you have Assange's legal defense campaign posting tweets blaming childfree women for white people in Europe being replaced by brown people, which is both disgustingly misogynist and disgustingly racist. The counter-culture is highly feminist and anti-racist, and is generally led by women of color, so there goes any sympathy they might have for Assange.
mikeash 7y ago
Only speaking for myself, my opinion turned when Wikileaks announced that Assange’s internet access had been cut off by a “state actor,” which turned out to be the Ecuadorians kicking him off their WiFi. That’s when I realized he’s an attention-seeking wanker.
jcranmer 7y ago
I haven't had much respect for Assange long before the Podesta/Clinton emails. WikiLeak's big coup was cablegate, the main revelations of which boil down to "diplomats are very frank about people when they're not speaking in public." At the same time, Assange seemed to want it to be compared to the Pentagon Papers leak, which revealed that the US military was covering up the course of the Vietnam War. Instead cablegate was a whole lot of quantity over quality, and don't really merit the comparison. Since then, WikiLeaks has missed out on the big revelations: Snowden's releases, the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, as well as more regionally important leaks such as Lava Jato. There's no trust among leakers that WikiLeaks is a neutral source for divulging information, and the fact that Assange has seemed to have a specifically anti-US tilt which results in him getting cozy with anti-US anti-press-freedom regimes.
- kermitismyhero 7y ago
  >WikiLeak's big coup was cablegate Don't gaslight. Wikileaks' big coup was Collateral Murder, which showed to the entire world how US soldiers enjoy committing war crimes at the behest of senior US military leadership whenever they think they can get away with it.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Escalatory snark and jabs like "Don't gaslight" don't belong here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - kermitismyhero 7y ago
      Forgive me for getting angry at the wilful ignorance of so many useful idiots. I'm just kinda done with being "nice". Over a decade of vetted, verifiable leaks exposing the unbridled evil of the US military-industrial complex, and most Americans are just as lazy and stupid and cowed as ever. Wikileaks releases video of American helicopter pilots laughing while they gun down journalists, and Americans shrug. So let me get banned for speaking my piece in a disrespectful manner. I welcome it. Frankly, if I could find a "delete my account" button, I'd hit it in a heartbeat. Sheep, the whole goddamn lot of you.
sneak 7y ago
Because the CIA is good at their job. He demonstrated himself to be an enemy of the US any exposing US government crimes, and the US didn’t want to bust into an embassy in London to assassinate him, so this is plan B. They couldn’t make him dead, so they opted to make him irrelevant instead.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? The US center to right hated him from the beginning, with leading figures inside and outside of government, aligned with both major parties, calling for his head. There was some sympathy for him (or at least WikiLeaks ostensible mission) on the left. Being somewhere between a tool and a collaborator in the Russian influence and spinning partisan lies about the source of the information on top of that to conceal that it was a Russian influence op (which itself tends to create the impression that he was more collaborator than tool) soured that, without durably mitigating the hatred the center to right already had for him. The rape accusations don't help, especially given where what little sympathy he had had was located.
mcv 7y ago
I used to support Wikileaks and Assange. I think the collateral murder video was very important to release. Assange lost my trust when he seemed to go mad with power due to the impact of the Manning leaks, when he get increasingly irresponsible with releasing unredacted stuff, and with the rape case. Mostly he gives me the impression that he's in it for his personal glory, and he believes himself above accountability. I still support the original goal of Wikileaks, but I hate how they squandered their credibility due to Assange's antics. Clinton has nothing to do with it for me.

by sedeki 7y ago

computerfriend 7y ago

It's certainly the former, given that the rape accusations have been public for a long time.

DanBC 7y ago

Wikileaks changed policy on redacting names. They used to do it, they stopped doing it. People realised that indiscriminately dumping material without any attempt at removing names was dangerous. Assange has released names of gay people who live in countries where they could be killed for that; he's released names of Jewish people in Bagdhad; he's identified rape victims.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

The entire western world is against him, I mean governments with all their power. Aligning with Russia didn't help him, although like Snowden, he had no choice once essentially declaring war to US allies. Never underestimate what nation states can do. They'll bring down your entire economy unless...or they can pay, bribe or blackmail someone into filing rape charges against you. Or plant a bag of cocaine, and then behave like good citizens by calling the equivalent of 911 on you.

akerro 7y ago

WL published papers against Clinton, but not much against Trump, therefore he is a traitor.

sschueller 7y ago
The only reason for that is that Trump is too stupid to use email.
- jayess 7y ago
  I would think that makes him pretty smart.

sschueller 7y ago

Many people in the Unites States not willing to accept the fact that their society elected Trump and not some foreign state. Sure Russia, China etc. medle in elections including the US one but Trump was elected by the American public and no one else.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? I don't think the public has "turned" on him. (That is, I don't think he's more unpopular now than he was a year ago.) It's more like we forgot about him. That took away the teflon coating that let him escape international arrest warrants in a South American embassy, a privilege most of us wouldn't get. This story is best explained by reversion to the mean moreso than extraordinary current events.

mc32 7y ago
I’m pretty sure just about everyone would interpret that as pre 2016 and post 2016 attitudes and not an arbitrary last year and this year.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > just about everyone would interpret that as pre 2016 and post 2016 attitudes and not an arbitrary last year and this year A poll last month [1] found 73% of Americans have opinions on Wikileaks. The most common response for Julian Assange, on the other hand, was "don't know" (42%, versus 27% responding similarly for Wikileaks). I'd guess the 38% who find Assange unfavorable is largely unchanged from, say, 2015. I'd also guess his favorability was higher in 2012. (That's what made Correa's political arithmetic around granting Assange asylum stick.) Under this hypothesis, people didn't start hating Assange more in 2016. His base of supporters simply eroded until most didn't care about him either way. That turned him into a normal person. Normal people don't get to hang out in embassies all day. [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/04/11/julian-assange-wikileaks-arrested-poll-survey https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

bjourne 7y ago

Who is the general public? Clearly, him running away from the Swedish police was a bad thing to do. I also don't like him because he supported/supports Trump. However, prosecuting him for his journalistic work is insane!

turk73 7y ago
I don't think he supports Trump, I think he knows how evil the Clintons are. Here's what I think the Clintons and their "foundation" were up to: Selling out the US in every way possible. The e-mail server was part of a sophisticated information sell operation that included their own plausible deniability, but basically foreign intelligence agencies paid to get access via numerous charities and other clean-looking channels. The primary beneficiaries were the Chinese, who Clintons were already doing business with even when Bill was President. So we had the Clintons selling out the US at the highest level. Now, knowing that was the case, do you think what Assange did could be characterized as supporting Trump or just trying to put and end to something so utterly corrupt that it defies comprehension? Seriously, the Clintons are the same as the Rosenbergs who, by the way, were executed for their crimes.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

moomin 7y ago

Let’s ignore the facts, or the surmises and ask the following: who do you think he should be popular with? The republicans who think releasing the Manning files means he should be in prison? The Democrats after he did everything he could to sabotage them? The progressives for whom his associations with Putin and Farage are beyond the pale? The tech cognoscenti who were complaining he had ruined WikiLeaks by making it all about him even before the rape allegations came out? Women? I mean, there are still people who are fans, but it’s no mystery why he’s unpopular with many groupings.

onlydeadheroes 7y ago
It's shocking to me that in public discourse being caught cheating is now "sabotage".
- moomin 7y ago
  I’ll accept that my terminology may be overly general (and yours overly specific), but the fact remains: after Assange spent an entire election year dropping new damaging material on them, helping a candidate they profoundly oppose win power, how do you expect them to feel? As I say, I’m not getting into the rights or the wrongs of it, but Assange’s unpopularity is no mystery. Whether or not you think he’s a saint, it’s undeniable he’s annoyed not just a lot of powerful people, but an awful lot of plain people.
  - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
    Underlying your argument is the unspoken assumption that nobody on the left has any integrity or values the truth at all. But that is not true, and is in fact the great schism on the left right now.

turk73 7y ago

Who says the public has turned? Only the media has turned and they are promoting a particular narrative. It's funny that so many powerful people are quaking in their boots over this guy. Guilty much? Assange is still alive. That tells me that what he has much be unbelievable political dynamite.

teddyh 7y ago
> Who says the public has turned? Only the media has turned and they are promoting a particular narrative. The media controls the public, so the question of why the public has turned is the same question as asking why the media has turned.

basetop 7y ago

When Assange exposed Bush/right, the journalists and leftists loved him and the right hated him. He won a bunch of journalist/humanitarian prizes. Now that Assange exposed Hillary/left, the journalists and leftists hate him. 24/7 anti-assange propaganda by foxnews, cnn, msnbc, nytimes, wapo, etc and you get the current anti-assange sentiment. Trump hates him, Hillary hates him, the establishment hates him because he exposed corruption. Corrupt people don't like their corruption exposed. Also, the elites want to start wars in venezuela, syria, etc so punishing assange and setting an example and possibly discrediting/getting rid of wikileaks is in their interest. Wouldn't want truth to get in the way of more wars.

coldtea 7y ago

It's because the established media got the message to assassinate his character (and unlike e.g. the 60s with the vibrant counter-culture and anti-establishment stances, today most people just follow what's mainstream).

amyjess 7y ago
Oh, there's a counter-culture out there, it's just that none of them are willing to go to bat for Assange. Assange did this to himself, with posting antisemitic tweets and courting the alt-right. And you have Assange's legal defense campaign posting tweets blaming childfree women for white people in Europe being replaced by brown people, which is both disgustingly misogynist and disgustingly racist. The counter-culture is highly feminist and anti-racist, and is generally led by women of color, so there goes any sympathy they might have for Assange.

mikeash 7y ago

Only speaking for myself, my opinion turned when Wikileaks announced that Assange’s internet access had been cut off by a “state actor,” which turned out to be the Ecuadorians kicking him off their WiFi. That’s when I realized he’s an attention-seeking wanker.

jcranmer 7y ago

I haven't had much respect for Assange long before the Podesta/Clinton emails. WikiLeak's big coup was cablegate, the main revelations of which boil down to "diplomats are very frank about people when they're not speaking in public." At the same time, Assange seemed to want it to be compared to the Pentagon Papers leak, which revealed that the US military was covering up the course of the Vietnam War. Instead cablegate was a whole lot of quantity over quality, and don't really merit the comparison. Since then, WikiLeaks has missed out on the big revelations: Snowden's releases, the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, as well as more regionally important leaks such as Lava Jato. There's no trust among leakers that WikiLeaks is a neutral source for divulging information, and the fact that Assange has seemed to have a specifically anti-US tilt which results in him getting cozy with anti-US anti-press-freedom regimes.

kermitismyhero 7y ago
>WikiLeak's big coup was cablegate Don't gaslight. Wikileaks' big coup was Collateral Murder, which showed to the entire world how US soldiers enjoy committing war crimes at the behest of senior US military leadership whenever they think they can get away with it.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Escalatory snark and jabs like "Don't gaslight" don't belong here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - kermitismyhero 7y ago
    Forgive me for getting angry at the wilful ignorance of so many useful idiots. I'm just kinda done with being "nice". Over a decade of vetted, verifiable leaks exposing the unbridled evil of the US military-industrial complex, and most Americans are just as lazy and stupid and cowed as ever. Wikileaks releases video of American helicopter pilots laughing while they gun down journalists, and Americans shrug. So let me get banned for speaking my piece in a disrespectful manner. I welcome it. Frankly, if I could find a "delete my account" button, I'd hit it in a heartbeat. Sheep, the whole goddamn lot of you.

sneak 7y ago

Because the CIA is good at their job. He demonstrated himself to be an enemy of the US any exposing US government crimes, and the US didn’t want to bust into an embassy in London to assassinate him, so this is plan B. They couldn’t make him dead, so they opted to make him irrelevant instead.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Can someone explain to me why the general public has ”turned” on Assange in the last few years? The US center to right hated him from the beginning, with leading figures inside and outside of government, aligned with both major parties, calling for his head. There was some sympathy for him (or at least WikiLeaks ostensible mission) on the left. Being somewhere between a tool and a collaborator in the Russian influence and spinning partisan lies about the source of the information on top of that to conceal that it was a Russian influence op (which itself tends to create the impression that he was more collaborator than tool) soured that, without durably mitigating the hatred the center to right already had for him. The rape accusations don't help, especially given where what little sympathy he had had was located.

mcv 7y ago

I used to support Wikileaks and Assange. I think the collateral murder video was very important to release. Assange lost my trust when he seemed to go mad with power due to the impact of the Manning leaks, when he get increasingly irresponsible with releasing unredacted stuff, and with the rape case. Mostly he gives me the impression that he's in it for his personal glory, and he believes himself above accountability. I still support the original goal of Wikileaks, but I hate how they squandered their credibility due to Assange's antics. Clinton has nothing to do with it for me.