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> The story, to be clear, appears to be fabricated, and comically so. Nothing about the CBS article he linked to indicates that the story is fabricated. It's m

> The story, to be clear, appears to be fabricated, and comically so. Nothing about the CBS article he linked to indicates that the story is fabricated. It's mostly just a series of character assassinations, from Giuliani to the computer repair guy to...the Russians. And that, my friends, is why Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay and why their insultingly duplicitous attempts to justify them aren't going to work. The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post-story/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...

deleted 6y ago
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mc32 6y ago
Same. I was looking for the ‘comedy’ but all it is is mostly teasing about how some computer guy says “no comment” to questions. In addition, it appears the director of the DNI is saying this story is not part of a “Russia conspiracy” as a few Democrats are claiming.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  Just caught that interview and it goes further. Rep Adam Schiff is claiming "the Intelligence Community says it's Russian disinformation" and then the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that. So Schiff is making claims for the IC without talking with them and they appear to be false. Set aside the topic for a second.. how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    > how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable? For the same reason as all Congressional behavior that is acceptable---voters don't hold them accountable.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      That's misleading; the underlying problem is that voters can't hold them accountble, because voters have at most 1 bit per two years of influence of Congressional behavior.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        I can't help but think that argument would hold more water if most eligible voters even chose to employ that bit. As it stands, off-every-four-years elections tend to see sub-50% turnout.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    [EDIT: I should have watched the interview and my comments further down are inaccurate. But - oh wait - I didn't realize that Ratcliffe the guy that released dubious information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up. https://www.businessinsider.com/dni-ratcliffe-declassifies-russian-intelligence-disinformation-clinton-election-2020-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/dni-ratcliffe-declassifies-r... ''Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"'' Which totally violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was done to help the President's re-election campaign: https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declassification-game https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas... Why do people trust this guy? You shouldn't. Even if what he says turns out to be true, his actions reveal him as an un-trustworthy person on this issue. ] ------------------------------------------------------- ----- Please just ignore this stuff below :-) --------- > the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that. While I didn't read/watch the interview/article in question, I just want to point out that the DNI statement, as you described it, is pretty carefully worded. They "have not passed reports/briefings that say it's Russian disinformation". This leaves room for: - Documents or meetings not officially considered reports/briefings. - Documents or meetings with damning information but that draw no explicit conclusions, leaving it to the House Intelligence Committee to do that. Obviously what I'm saying isn't a strong argument one way or the other. What I am saying, is, it's important to look at the big picture and to do so with a careful eye. Personally I think the blog Lawfare does an excellent job of this and is a great guide for these sorts of issues. Here's their analysis of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report: https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did... "One of the clever features of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is the committee’s apparent decision to draw no conclusions, merely to recount facts. This allowed the entire committee, irrespective of party or fealty to the president, to join in the factual findings." And then ... "To read these thousand pages and come away with the conclusion that they amount to evidence of “no collusion” really involves a protestation of faith, not a dispassionate assessment of presented evidence." It's a very comprehensive document and I highly recommend it.
    - 6y ago
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    Mostly because they got away with it when it came to Russiagate, and the fact that they were never held to account for the lies and half-truths (and many people still pushing them), precedent has been set that they can cudgel the public with that thing. The whole "17 agencies" story being a great case in point. The 17 became 3, and the 3 became ~two dozen hand-picked analysts. None of that stops people like Schiff from continuing to spout the "17 agencies" line though. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-gate-assessment/ https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-g... Like Ray McGovern says, the biggest four letter word in DC is "accountability".
    - Bhilai 6y ago
      Russiagate is well documented in the Mueller report, read for yourself.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    I presume the claim Schiff is referencing is this one: "U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter. The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter." https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation/2020/10/15/43158900-0ef5-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
    - sawjet 6y ago
      Where is the evidence?
      - sawjet 6y ago
        Let's remember that Schiff had "clear evidence of collusion" back in 2019.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > the DNI is saying While some early Senate-confirmed Trump appointees, including his first DNI Dan Coats, were not transparent bootlicking shills in all their public comments, that's certainly not the case for any appointed as recently as this spring, like Ratcliffe.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Even if we take this accusation at face value, that still doesn’t explain the congresspersons assertion attributed to the intelligence community.
    - kthxbye123 6y ago
      The DNI is a political appointee and this one in particular is highly politicized, his statements are partisan political statements intended to support the President and the GOP and are not necessarily representative of the views and analyses of career intelligence officers.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      I'm saying that, whatever he and his subordinates do in classified briefings, his public statements may as well be from the White House Press Office, and are useful only as to what the Administration wants the public to perceive.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Oh wait - this is the DNI that recently released unverified information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dni-john-ratcliffe-declassifies-russia-documents-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dni-john-ratcliffe-dec... 'Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"' Something which violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was clearly done to help the President's re-election campaign: https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declassification-game https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas... Why do you trust this guy? You shouldn't, not on this. His actions reveal his priorities.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Curious if any downvoters believe it was appropriate for the DNI to release the unverified Hillary Clinton info, weeks before the election? Do folks think that was a responsible, appropriate act for the Director of National Intelligence in line with their role and their obligations?
shadowgovt 6y ago
> The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter. Why shouldn't that matter, if Twitter also cares about its reputation?
- dazc 6y ago
  Is twitter a publisher or a platform?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Yes.
    - dazc 6y ago
      And therein lies the problem...
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        Why? The New York Times is a publisher with a Classifieds page. There's no obvious reason a publisher and a platform can't be the same entity.
        dazc 6y ago
        I agree they could, in theory, be the same entity but it would be near impossible to exist in such a form without accusations of bias in one way or another. As a pure publisher, I think it's generally understood, there is inherent bias.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        It is, perhaps, the best option to assume that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. aren't neutral platforms. Indeed, even when people assume they're neutral, that assumption doesn't extend to full laissez-faire. All these platforms have basic "censorship" in place for legal compliance (DMCA takedown processes, interactions with government anti-crime systems, a need to follow US law regarding dissemination of pedophilic content, etc.).
Mizza 6y ago
I don't get this either. There are new pictures of Hunter Biden smoking crack. Those clearly weren't released previously. Is the claim that these pictures are forgeries, or that they were hacked and then combined with forged emails to show Joe Biden's corruption? I haven't seen this explained anywhere. Personally, the pictures make me think the whole contents is real, although maybe the origin story isn't.
- peteretep 6y ago
  I don’t think anyone’s (seriously) suggesting the content is fake, just the origin story.
  - mc32 6y ago
    See that’s the thing, the denial is being packaged as the whole thing (especially the possibly incriminating bits) being fabricated rather than only the meta story. I think the lack of denial from the campaign (as well as taking the candidate off the campaign trail for days) is a strong indicator the contents are not fabricated.
    - Touche 6y ago
      It's not a strong indicator, it's an indicator there the story doesn't have enough credibility to warrant answering. Engaging with the story would give it life. Let the real journalists do the work to verify the claims and then the campaign would have to actually engage. A story from Rudy Giuliani who's working with known Russian agents and refuses to let anyone verify the metadata is not credible enough to warrant a response.
      - mc32 6y ago
        So why do they take the candidate off the campaign trail? They’re not calling this one fake news. Even Twitter is not saying it was faked but rather that the data was illicitly obtained. Speaking of Russian agents wasn’t it the Dems who pedaled the now discredited Steel Dossier? Using “Russia” as an adjective right now has limited value and if anything should be viewed with suspicion of purposeful “redirection”. It’s not a believable accusation any more.
skrowl 6y ago
The Director of National Intelligence also said this morning that there is NO intelligence supporting that it's fabricated: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-laptop-not-some-russian-disinformation-campaign-dni-ratcliffe-slams-schiff https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-laptop-not... The only source for "appears to be fabricated" appears to be politicians on the same side as Joe Biden saying so, as far as I can tell.
- peteretep 6y ago
  You mean this guy? > Ratcliffe withdrew after Republican senators raised concerns about him, former intelligence officials said he might politicize intelligence, and media revealed Ratcliffe's embellishments regarding his prosecutorial experience in terrorism and immigration cases. > Ratcliffe has little experience in national security or national intelligence and is reported to have demonstrated little engagement on the matters as a congressman.
  - skrowl 6y ago
    You're welcome to ad hominem attack the DNI all you'd like, but that doesn't change what he said. Do you have any evidence to support the evidence being fabricated? Do you have any evidence to show where the previously non-public images (like Hunter asleep with a crack pipe next to him) published by the Post came from, if not the hard drive of said laptop?
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation/2020/10/15/43158900-0ef5-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
      - skrowl 6y ago
        > U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter. This anonymous / unsourced claim is false, according to the Director of National Intelligence. There is no intelligence that supports that and no one is even on the record claiming that it does. WashPo may have fabricated the claim. See linked video of DNI speaking about it.
vlucas 6y ago
> Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Monday said that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggesting otherwise. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-laptop-emails-not-russian-disinformation-campaign https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-lapt...
free_rms 6y ago
The story can be both fabricated and true. It's true and documented that Hunter Biden had a laughable no-work job, and that the Obama administration made Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was going after his employer. This particular NY Post story surfaces... an email... saying Biden met with somebody. Whatever. Of course he met with lots of people, it's not really a story itself so much as an excuse to resurrect the actual story from a year ago. This isn't a court of law where we're establishing the quid pro quo for a judge/jury, it's the court of public opinion.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  There was international pressure to remove Shokin for precisely the _opposite_ reason that you cite. It was because he was _not_ going after Biden's son's employer forcefully enough. > In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts".[24] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[38] Decry Wikipedia if you'd like, but this is easily verifiable from any number of other outlets. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin#Failure_to_properly_investigate_Burisma_Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin#Failure_to_prope...
  - free_rms 6y ago
    It sounds a little more ambiguous than that if you read the full section. Regardless, why was Hunter cokehead Biden making 600k from a foreign oil company? It's a bad look.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - 6y ago
TechBro8615 6y ago
What we need is the email metadata, specifically the headers including DKIM signatures. Then we can verify their content with Google’s public key. Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails? Here is a link to an interview with a surrogate for the Biden campaign, who says “I Don't Think Anybody Is Saying They Are Inauthentic.” [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOs22GI1rH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOs22GI1rH0
- koolba 6y ago
  > Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails? Bingo. Because the only thing better then evidence of corruption is disprovable denials of the evidence of corruption. I'm guessing that's why Biden has not had a formal press event since this story came out. It's also why he's literally hiding at home until after the final debate. Anything he says will be quoted back to him.
- takeda 6y ago
  DKIM could be used to rule it out as a fake, even if that signature is correct we still don't know a lot of things, like whether the sender's email really belong to the person who they claim to be (".ukraine" is really weird thing to add to your personal email), whether Hunter responded to it (you would think that having his laptop, they would have all emails he sent) or whether the meeting happened at all. There are so many questions, and time too short to answer them all (purposefully, since it supposed to be an October surprise, the PDF with email print shows that it was prepared a year ago)
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    It’s also confusing because there are multiple laptops involved. In addition to the HB laptop, there are now claims that Hunter’s business partner Bevan Cooney (a federal inmate) has “flipped” and provided “26,000 emails” to some journalists in the Trump sphere. https://heavy.com/news/bevan-cooney/ https://heavy.com/news/bevan-cooney/
- slg 6y ago
matthewdgreen 6y ago
Why would your standard be "prove that this evidence is fabricated?" Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it?
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I'm not the one making the claim that it's fabricated. > Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it? Of course, but when has the media ever done that? There is clearly a massive effort to sink this story. Why?
  - Traster 6y ago
    It seems you're just unaware of how any reputable journalist works, and unaware of how fact checkers work, and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong. It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      There is clearly an effort to present this story as "debunked" or "false" or "fabricated." The CBS link, as I said, doesn't show anything to be fabricated and is merely a bunch of ad hominem attacks. Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        > Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no? > The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.
closeparen 6y ago
> Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay Which actions? Suppressing the story or allowing it to circulate at all? Everyone can agree that they hate Big Tech, so there will be broad bipartisan support for a bill that simply destroys these companies, but requiring any specific content moderation policy is going nowhere.

deleted 6y ago

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mc32 6y ago

Same. I was looking for the ‘comedy’ but all it is is mostly teasing about how some computer guy says “no comment” to questions. In addition, it appears the director of the DNI is saying this story is not part of a “Russia conspiracy” as a few Democrats are claiming.

caseysoftware 6y ago
Just caught that interview and it goes further. Rep Adam Schiff is claiming "the Intelligence Community says it's Russian disinformation" and then the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that. So Schiff is making claims for the IC without talking with them and they appear to be false. Set aside the topic for a second.. how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  > how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable? For the same reason as all Congressional behavior that is acceptable---voters don't hold them accountable.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    That's misleading; the underlying problem is that voters can't hold them accountble, because voters have at most 1 bit per two years of influence of Congressional behavior.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      I can't help but think that argument would hold more water if most eligible voters even chose to employ that bit. As it stands, off-every-four-years elections tend to see sub-50% turnout.
- adamsea 6y ago
  [EDIT: I should have watched the interview and my comments further down are inaccurate. But - oh wait - I didn't realize that Ratcliffe the guy that released dubious information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up. https://www.businessinsider.com/dni-ratcliffe-declassifies-russian-intelligence-disinformation-clinton-election-2020-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/dni-ratcliffe-declassifies-r... ''Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"'' Which totally violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was done to help the President's re-election campaign: https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declassification-game https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas... Why do people trust this guy? You shouldn't. Even if what he says turns out to be true, his actions reveal him as an un-trustworthy person on this issue. ] ------------------------------------------------------- ----- Please just ignore this stuff below :-) --------- > the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that. While I didn't read/watch the interview/article in question, I just want to point out that the DNI statement, as you described it, is pretty carefully worded. They "have not passed reports/briefings that say it's Russian disinformation". This leaves room for: - Documents or meetings not officially considered reports/briefings. - Documents or meetings with damning information but that draw no explicit conclusions, leaving it to the House Intelligence Committee to do that. Obviously what I'm saying isn't a strong argument one way or the other. What I am saying, is, it's important to look at the big picture and to do so with a careful eye. Personally I think the blog Lawfare does an excellent job of this and is a great guide for these sorts of issues. Here's their analysis of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report: https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did... "One of the clever features of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is the committee’s apparent decision to draw no conclusions, merely to recount facts. This allowed the entire committee, irrespective of party or fealty to the president, to join in the factual findings." And then ... "To read these thousand pages and come away with the conclusion that they amount to evidence of “no collusion” really involves a protestation of faith, not a dispassionate assessment of presented evidence." It's a very comprehensive document and I highly recommend it.
  - 6y ago
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  Mostly because they got away with it when it came to Russiagate, and the fact that they were never held to account for the lies and half-truths (and many people still pushing them), precedent has been set that they can cudgel the public with that thing. The whole "17 agencies" story being a great case in point. The 17 became 3, and the 3 became ~two dozen hand-picked analysts. None of that stops people like Schiff from continuing to spout the "17 agencies" line though. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-gate-assessment/ https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-g... Like Ray McGovern says, the biggest four letter word in DC is "accountability".
  - Bhilai 6y ago
    Russiagate is well documented in the Mueller report, read for yourself.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  I presume the claim Schiff is referencing is this one: "U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter. The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter." https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation/2020/10/15/43158900-0ef5-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
  - sawjet 6y ago
    Where is the evidence?
    - sawjet 6y ago
      Let's remember that Schiff had "clear evidence of collusion" back in 2019.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> the DNI is saying While some early Senate-confirmed Trump appointees, including his first DNI Dan Coats, were not transparent bootlicking shills in all their public comments, that's certainly not the case for any appointed as recently as this spring, like Ratcliffe.
- mc32 6y ago
  Even if we take this accusation at face value, that still doesn’t explain the congresspersons assertion attributed to the intelligence community.
  - kthxbye123 6y ago
    The DNI is a political appointee and this one in particular is highly politicized, his statements are partisan political statements intended to support the President and the GOP and are not necessarily representative of the views and analyses of career intelligence officers.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    I'm saying that, whatever he and his subordinates do in classified briefings, his public statements may as well be from the White House Press Office, and are useful only as to what the Administration wants the public to perceive.
adamsea 6y ago
Oh wait - this is the DNI that recently released unverified information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dni-john-ratcliffe-declassifies-russia-documents-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dni-john-ratcliffe-dec... 'Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"' Something which violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was clearly done to help the President's re-election campaign: https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declassification-game https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-ratcliffes-dangerous-declas... Why do you trust this guy? You shouldn't, not on this. His actions reveal his priorities.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Curious if any downvoters believe it was appropriate for the DNI to release the unverified Hillary Clinton info, weeks before the election? Do folks think that was a responsible, appropriate act for the Director of National Intelligence in line with their role and their obligations?

shadowgovt 6y ago

> The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter. Why shouldn't that matter, if Twitter also cares about its reputation?

dazc 6y ago
Is twitter a publisher or a platform?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Yes.
  - dazc 6y ago
    And therein lies the problem...
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Why? The New York Times is a publisher with a Classifieds page. There's no obvious reason a publisher and a platform can't be the same entity.
      - dazc 6y ago
        I agree they could, in theory, be the same entity but it would be near impossible to exist in such a form without accusations of bias in one way or another. As a pure publisher, I think it's generally understood, there is inherent bias.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        It is, perhaps, the best option to assume that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. aren't neutral platforms. Indeed, even when people assume they're neutral, that assumption doesn't extend to full laissez-faire. All these platforms have basic "censorship" in place for legal compliance (DMCA takedown processes, interactions with government anti-crime systems, a need to follow US law regarding dissemination of pedophilic content, etc.).

Mizza 6y ago

I don't get this either. There are new pictures of Hunter Biden smoking crack. Those clearly weren't released previously. Is the claim that these pictures are forgeries, or that they were hacked and then combined with forged emails to show Joe Biden's corruption? I haven't seen this explained anywhere. Personally, the pictures make me think the whole contents is real, although maybe the origin story isn't.

peteretep 6y ago
I don’t think anyone’s (seriously) suggesting the content is fake, just the origin story.
- mc32 6y ago
  See that’s the thing, the denial is being packaged as the whole thing (especially the possibly incriminating bits) being fabricated rather than only the meta story. I think the lack of denial from the campaign (as well as taking the candidate off the campaign trail for days) is a strong indicator the contents are not fabricated.
  - Touche 6y ago
    It's not a strong indicator, it's an indicator there the story doesn't have enough credibility to warrant answering. Engaging with the story would give it life. Let the real journalists do the work to verify the claims and then the campaign would have to actually engage. A story from Rudy Giuliani who's working with known Russian agents and refuses to let anyone verify the metadata is not credible enough to warrant a response.
    - mc32 6y ago
      So why do they take the candidate off the campaign trail? They’re not calling this one fake news. Even Twitter is not saying it was faked but rather that the data was illicitly obtained. Speaking of Russian agents wasn’t it the Dems who pedaled the now discredited Steel Dossier? Using “Russia” as an adjective right now has limited value and if anything should be viewed with suspicion of purposeful “redirection”. It’s not a believable accusation any more.

skrowl 6y ago

The Director of National Intelligence also said this morning that there is NO intelligence supporting that it's fabricated: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-laptop-not-some-russian-disinformation-campaign-dni-ratcliffe-slams-schiff https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-laptop-not... The only source for "appears to be fabricated" appears to be politicians on the same side as Joe Biden saying so, as far as I can tell.

peteretep 6y ago
You mean this guy? > Ratcliffe withdrew after Republican senators raised concerns about him, former intelligence officials said he might politicize intelligence, and media revealed Ratcliffe's embellishments regarding his prosecutorial experience in terrorism and immigration cases. > Ratcliffe has little experience in national security or national intelligence and is reported to have demonstrated little engagement on the matters as a congressman.
- skrowl 6y ago
  You're welcome to ad hominem attack the DNI all you'd like, but that doesn't change what he said. Do you have any evidence to support the evidence being fabricated? Do you have any evidence to show where the previously non-public images (like Hunter asleep with a crack pipe next to him) published by the Post came from, if not the hard drive of said laptop?
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation/2020/10/15/43158900-0ef5-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...
    - skrowl 6y ago
      > U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter. This anonymous / unsourced claim is false, according to the Director of National Intelligence. There is no intelligence that supports that and no one is even on the record claiming that it does. WashPo may have fabricated the claim. See linked video of DNI speaking about it.

vlucas 6y ago

> Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Monday said that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggesting otherwise. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-laptop-emails-not-russian-disinformation-campaign https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-lapt...

free_rms 6y ago

The story can be both fabricated and true. It's true and documented that Hunter Biden had a laughable no-work job, and that the Obama administration made Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was going after his employer. This particular NY Post story surfaces... an email... saying Biden met with somebody. Whatever. Of course he met with lots of people, it's not really a story itself so much as an excuse to resurrect the actual story from a year ago. This isn't a court of law where we're establishing the quid pro quo for a judge/jury, it's the court of public opinion.

ciarannolan 6y ago
There was international pressure to remove Shokin for precisely the _opposite_ reason that you cite. It was because he was _not_ going after Biden's son's employer forcefully enough. > In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts".[24] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[38] Decry Wikipedia if you'd like, but this is easily verifiable from any number of other outlets. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin#Failure_to_properly_investigate_Burisma_Holdings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin#Failure_to_prope...
- free_rms 6y ago
  It sounds a little more ambiguous than that if you read the full section. Regardless, why was Hunter cokehead Biden making 600k from a foreign oil company? It's a bad look.
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TechBro8615 6y ago

What we need is the email metadata, specifically the headers including DKIM signatures. Then we can verify their content with Google’s public key. Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails? Here is a link to an interview with a surrogate for the Biden campaign, who says “I Don't Think Anybody Is Saying They Are Inauthentic.” [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOs22GI1rH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOs22GI1rH0

koolba 6y ago
> Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails? Bingo. Because the only thing better then evidence of corruption is disprovable denials of the evidence of corruption. I'm guessing that's why Biden has not had a formal press event since this story came out. It's also why he's literally hiding at home until after the final debate. Anything he says will be quoted back to him.
takeda 6y ago
DKIM could be used to rule it out as a fake, even if that signature is correct we still don't know a lot of things, like whether the sender's email really belong to the person who they claim to be (".ukraine" is really weird thing to add to your personal email), whether Hunter responded to it (you would think that having his laptop, they would have all emails he sent) or whether the meeting happened at all. There are so many questions, and time too short to answer them all (purposefully, since it supposed to be an October surprise, the PDF with email print shows that it was prepared a year ago)
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  It’s also confusing because there are multiple laptops involved. In addition to the HB laptop, there are now claims that Hunter’s business partner Bevan Cooney (a federal inmate) has “flipped” and provided “26,000 emails” to some journalists in the Trump sphere. https://heavy.com/news/bevan-cooney/ https://heavy.com/news/bevan-cooney/
slg 6y ago

matthewdgreen 6y ago

Why would your standard be "prove that this evidence is fabricated?" Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it?

ceilingcorner 6y ago
I'm not the one making the claim that it's fabricated. > Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it? Of course, but when has the media ever done that? There is clearly a massive effort to sink this story. Why?
- Traster 6y ago
  It seems you're just unaware of how any reputable journalist works, and unaware of how fact checkers work, and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong. It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    There is clearly an effort to present this story as "debunked" or "false" or "fabricated." The CBS link, as I said, doesn't show anything to be fabricated and is merely a bunch of ad hominem attacks. Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      > Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no? > The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.

closeparen 6y ago

> Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay Which actions? Suppressing the story or allowing it to circulate at all? Everyone can agree that they hate Big Tech, so there will be broad bipartisan support for a bill that simply destroys these companies, but requiring any specific content moderation policy is going nowhere.