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Jeffrey Epstein's Death Was on 4Chan Before Officials Announced It
- holstvoogd 7y agoAnd that was on reddit before buzzfeed found out :P
- techntoke 7y agoJeffrey Epstein's death was predicted by 50% of the population before officials announced it.
- BubRoss 7y agoThis wasn't a prediction, it was someone saying what happened when it happened before it was reported in the media.
- pacoWebConsult 7y agoWith details of medical treatment that would be administered in the case of a heart attack. Interesting that we have no details of what induced said heart attack.
- misiti3780 7y agoso one of the 1st responders has a 4chan account. what exactly is the big deal here (besides the fact he/she probably broke the law)
- jordigh 7y agoNot sure if you're aware, but we all "have" a 4chan account. Meaning, you don't need an account to post there. It's kind of the point of chan-like boards.
- misiti3780 7y agoi was not aware of that. honestly - i have tried to check out the site multiple times but the layout of the conversation is so confusing to me i give up every time.
- catacombs 7y agoNo one has a 4chan account. Anyone can post.
- mlb_hn 7y agoFor those that don't read the article, someone posted about the medical response to Epstein's suicide on 4Chan before the news picked it up. A lot of people had access to that information at the time.
- joncrane 7y agoSo some 4channer was presumably listening to police/EMS scanners for the area of the prison Epstein was in and "got the scoop" that way?
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYeah, the idea that a 4chan user would either be a first responder or be listening in on first responder channels isn't particularly surprising. I don't know what implication people are reading into this.
- matt-attack 7y agoOr the 4chan user was one of the medical staff, EMT, prison guard, prison employee, ambulance driver, anything. All this is about is a HIPPA violation but I’m not sure why HIPPA would apply when the person is dead. How can you wrong a dead person? Are the dead still guaranteed privacy rights? Seems a bit odd to me.
- adchari 7y agoWas it during the process of trying to revive him or afterwards? Epstein might be dead now, but by releasing information while doctors were trying to revive him, I believe that would be a violation
- dole 7y ago"The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual." https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/health-information-of-deceased-individuals/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
- whenchamenia 7y agoSo is unregulated news the real reason they want the rest of the chans shut down? It seems 4chan at least, already capitulates to all LE demands.
- michannne 7y agoImprobable. Liveleak, Abovetopsecret, WorldStarHipHop, and Twitter (to some extent) all have unregulated news feeds, are pretty popular, and have "in-groups". They all have content moderation to stay on LE's good side and despite hosting violent content, actively try to prune content that violates laws. This includes 4Chan. 8Chan was a different story though, there was almost 0 effort to moderate content. Few people seem to remember a couple of the largest boards on 8Chan for some time were pro-pedophilia boards, and they stayed up for quite some time. Of course, the actual underbelly of those boards were composed of creating and sharing material through other sites and applications, and announcing this through 8chan. They could not take down the board without defeating the purpose of the site, and could not keep it up without voluntarily allowing for a breeding ground for illegal material, so many of their vendors wanted them off their platform for a while because they could not be moderated effectively. I think it boils down to - can you reasonably catch illegal content being routed through your platform? 4chan, LiveLeak, WorldStar, ATS, and Twitter all have ways of doing this, 4chan's may be more crude because there are certain things you cannot do on 4chan because of the way the site is designed (for instance, webm's with sound are isolated to a few boards, so you lose a channel of communication when posting them outside of those boards, and you cannot upload documents directly except through labyrinthine methods, many users don't want to click a link and be taken to a different site so you lose that population, etc.), but it does the job to LE's standards. Many people hate it, but there is no benefit in taking it down because the culture would simply migrate elsewhere.
- irishboyo 7y agoAll those politicians who run this world are in secret societies. think masons, skull of bones, hundreds more all interconnected. And to join the club you take an oath to keep your mouth shut, Hence you can google alot of famous peoples photos with one finger on their mouth as if to say shhhh. Epstein was going to sing and so he break his oath and they killed him. Anyway, We all know this and that 911 was an inside job and none of us, including myself can do anything about it There is a worldwide conspiracy going on at so many levels it boggles the mind, even the bbc the very next day was talking about don't listen to conspiracy theories ..... mmmmh
- sgammon 7y agoI absolutely love that hn doesn’t buy this bs
- raldi 7y agoI can't tell if you're referring to the suicide report it or the idea it was actually a murder.
- michannne 7y agoIt was predicted by almost everyone that he would die somehow before revealing whatever information he may have had, so it was not surprising in the least. Further, 4chan is not a secret club -- you go to the site and you can create however many threads you wish, and reply to whoever, however, and however many times you want, no registration or signup process exists, so it's not surprising that Epstein's death, conspiracies of which run rampant on 4chan, would be leaked randomly by someone involved in dealing with the situation, it happens all the time actually.
- rwc 7y agoRead beyond the headline. Specifics about attempts to revive him (including drugs used) were also shared before they were public information.
- jordigh 7y agoBut also, generic information, as the expert reviewing the post remarked. On the other hand, the apparent correct use of jargon does seem to indicate that the poster could be an EMT themselves.
- michannne 7y agoI don't see what this has to do with what I said. I specifically stated it is not surprising the post was made "..randomly by someone involved in dealing with the situation"
- marsRoverDev 7y ago4chan is basically a million monkeys on typewriters, so it's unsurprising they've managed to predict the death of Epstein. Let's not forget that every man and his dog on reddit and elsewhere immediately predicted this guy would get suicided. It was as predictable as the tide going in and out.
- matt-attack 7y agoWhy is is hard to believe that any of the probably 20 or 30 people involved in managing his death went it 4chan to post about it? There were many people who knew of his death beforehand from jail personnel, prison guards, EMT, hospital nurses, Doctors, other hospital staff. Why wouldn’t one of them have just broken the news? Frankly I don’t see how it’s worse for them to break the news to 4chan than for the prison to break it to ABC news. He was dead and they announced it. Why does everything have to be “official”?
- catacombs 7y ago> Why does everything have to be “official”? Because institutions, like the Bureau of Prison, Fortune 500 companies or your county school district, are responsible for how information is distilled to the public. That is why almost all are concerned about their image and invest heavily into public relations. If people leaked information all the time from those institutions, then a certain level trust will be lost and could be detrimental.
- Amezarak 7y agoBecause mainstream corporate media has trained us to believe “journalism” consists of a media conglomerate regurgitating official press releases, access journalism, and every now and then some intrepid reporter backed by a multimillion dollar company discovering some scoop. The idea that regular folks can disseminate true information on their own is very disturbing to a lot of people.
- billiam 7y agowho cares? Why is this at all surprising or interesting?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 7y agoThis was posted on HN yesterday, but was flagged for some reason. Does anyone know why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20687284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20687284
- jordigh 7y agoHN users are typically the ones choosing to flag stories. I imagine the usual reason stories like this are flagged are because they attract a lot of discussion in bad faith.
- gnicholas 7y agoYeah I’m aware of that, but it was flagged before there was much discussion at all. I would have thought that flagged stories with dozens of upvotes would be looked at by a mod. And given the lack of objectionable comments, I’d have expected the flag to be removed in this case. Regardless, glad to see this submission gaining steam and generating civil discussion as well.
- excalibur 7y agoProbably because it's too mainstream, which is actually against the rules (◔_◔) > Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Also because anybody can flag something for any arbitrary reason, regardless of what the rules say.
- prashnts 7y agoOff topic, but on phone the « flag » link is super tiny and close to date (permalink). I have accidentally tapped it while scrolling more often than I realise.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoA lot of people are stepping out to defend 4chan, but the article isn't about 4chan. It's a detail in the story. The story is that someone close to the situation leaked details in violation of HIPAA on an internet message board. And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess. edit: spelling
- maxerickson 7y agoPrison rape is treated as a hilarious joke in the US. Why would you expect strict compliance with some dumb privacy law?
- one2zero 7y agoPREA was designed to reduce the number of prison rapes.
- turtlegrids 7y ago> HIPPA HIPAA
- magduf 7y ago>The story is that someone close to the situation leaked details in violation of HIPPA on an internet message board. >And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess. I don't really see the problem here. You can't expect adherence to the law, or even upholding of basic human rights, from a correctional facility in America. Just look at how migrants have been treated lately in "detention centers" (concentration camps). As the other responder said, prison rape is treated as a hilarious joke in the US, and is condoned by correctional staff, so why would you expect adherence to HIPAA?
- rhacker 7y agoAre they a hospital or a covered entity. I don't think HIPAA would apply to a federal lockup. Also death certificates are not covered by HIPAA and can't prevent the release of them. Even if this isn't a death certificate. If anything shady happened it wasn't a hipaa violation. It can still be shady, but not a hipaa violation.
- malvosenior 7y agoThis really shows the value of anonymity on the internet. Buzzfeed may try to label 4chan a “haven for far-right trolls and white nationalists” but it’s exactly the type of platform we need right now. It’s at the very least a check on mainstream media, which has proven itself very untrustworthy.
- joshuamorton 7y agoHow does this show any of that? That reported by the channer wasn't materially different than what was reported by the mainstream, they just broke the story earlier and, as mentioned, possibly by doing something illegal. To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anonymity on the internet. But anonymity on the internet, this story showing the value of that anonymity, and this relating the the mainstream media aren't at all related, at least in my mind. Mind clarifying? As I see it, one can be anonymous on, say, twitter, which is still moderated, and therefore has (less) open organization of "far-right trolls and white nationalists". So its not clear to me what unique anonymity 4chan provides.
- jchw 7y agoNitpick: Twitter doesn’t allow anonymity, all posts are associated with at least a pseudonym.
- malvosenior 7y agoIt’s valuable because you can compare what the media reports to what was posted on 4chan and look for discrepancies. It may also keep the media reporting more honest as they know the story broke on 4chan and deviations will be noticed. Twitter is an ultra short form platform that has already demonstrated political censorship. It also requires account verification through email and sometimes phone number. I don’t think it compares to 4chan for something like this.
- joshuamorton 7y ago> It’s valuable because you can compare what the media reports to what was posted on 4chan and look for discrepancies. This only works if you hold 4chan to be more reliable than the media. Given its history (think, like, QAnon) and love of trolling, this doesn't really work. This story was notable mostly because 4chan is notoriously unreliable. > Twitter is an ultra short form platform that has already demonstrated political censorship. Right, but you said that anonymity was important, not censorship. Is anonymity important, or is lack of censorship what matters? They're not the same thing.
- rdtsc 7y ago> We looked at the information provided by [a BuzzFeed News] reporter Buzzfeed is worried about HIPAA violations. Good thing to worry about in general, but perhaps this is not the best case to champion that cause... They could look into the type of plea deal he got previously and why he got it. Or, say, comb through all the recently unsealed evidence and compile a spreadsheet of who flew to his island and how often. Now, that would make some good investigative reporting.
- malvosenior 7y agoIndeed that would offer much more for public good. I don’t see how going after the whistleblower here helps at all.
- parliament32 7y agoBuzzfeed is not bound by HIPAA, because they are not medical personnel nor a medical institution.
- rdtsc 7y agoSure, but they made sure to investigate this worrying case of HIPAA violation by asking department heads for comments and seeing if they are looking to find the leaker. In other words, amongst all the things to investigate around Epstein that particular one seems like an odd choice.
- uxp 7y agoThe media is generally regarded the same when publishing both medical history information and classified materials. If they obtain the information during their regular course of business and report on that obtained material, then they are protected as reporting on a story that is beneficial to the public. If they coerce others or help to obtain protected information, whether classified materials or PHI/PII, then they can be held liable for the release against the existing laws regulating disclosure.
- dooglius 7y agoAnd this fact was pointed out on 4chan several days ago
- gist 7y agoUnclear to me why people seem to think that a major station announcing something that they got (very generally) from some official release makes the same info (obtained some other way) nefarious in nature. Could be as simple as someone at the prison who saw what happened (employee or guard) and relaying it to someone by cell phone. I would find it hard to believe that doing so would break a law that would involve a significant penalty or risk. For that matter even the ME office driver (or whatever was used) might have had early wind of what was going on and relayed it to a third party. Who cares? I am sure they don't sign NDA's for this type of thing.