74 ms·

Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

• haltingproblem 6y ago
  I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news organizations" peddling unverified and factually incorrect reports on Twitter. I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time. Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.
  • eyeball 6y ago
    It’s crazy that they’re even blocking links to the ny post article via direct message. What’s next? Email? Will we have to resort to signal and other encrypted direct messaging methods to have open discussion? Or run your own mail server end hope your recipient doesn’t use one that censors? Creepy stuff.
    • crocodiletears 6y ago
      This has been the reality for people on the political fringes for some time now. Unfortunately nobody's been paying attention to it due in large part to the commentariat/journalistic class's willingness to encourage and provide cover for this behavior as a matter of political expedience. Another example: Messenger's been blocking links to joebiden.info (this may have changed, it's been six months since I've checked)
      • jessaustin 6y ago
        I'm glad HN didn't block that link. I've learned a great deal that will affect my vote in the upcoming election.
        • briefcomment 6y ago
          Holy crap, those kids are so uncomfortable. The first girl, Senator Chris Coons’ daughter, is apparently on Hunter’s laptop.
        • pjc50 6y ago
          So will you vote for the guy with the worse record of sexually harassing women instead? Have you looked at all the corresponding inappropriate gifs of Trump? Remember the "grab her by the pussy" statement? The whole Stormy Daniels fiasco? Joe Biden is a terrible candidate. He's just not as bad as Trump. The fact that America is in that stupid position is its own fault.
          • jessaustin 6y ago
            I haven't voted for either face of the status quo party, for president, in the last twenty years. This time around I'm going Green. I think Creepy Joe is kind of fun, but I have no doubt that the inexorable drumbeat for sanctions and wars will intensify when he is president. We still haven't left Syria, so whoever it is on the "democrat" side of the party who has such a hard-on for pipelines will get to kill more innocents there. Even better for them, Trump has destroyed the one decent diplomatic thing Obama did (Iran), so they won't have to pretend not to undermine the work of their "own side". (Keep in mind that Syria and Iran are allies, even though Republicans pretend to hate Iran while Democrats pretend to hate Syria.) I don't vote for lesser evils. Because of that I never have to regret how I voted.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • hackyhacky 6y ago
        Do you really think that it's out of "political expedience" that sites are blocking links to probable foreign disinformation? Or is it out of a moral interest in not being pawns of the bad actors who stand behind it? This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously false and dangerous speech should be suppressed. Twitter (and other sites) is taking a moral stand, not an expedient stand.
        • crocodiletears 6y ago
          Journalists and commentators are the ones acting out of political expediency. The platforms themselves are a mixed bag, occasionaly banning content that represents legitimate disinformation, but often suppressing information that's contextually true, or conflicts with an existing broader social narrative which the moderator required to inspect the content has bought into. The human moderators are often inconsistent. The concept that any person or organization should be granted absolute authority to serve as the arbiter of whay constitutes dangerous or false speech, and the power to arbitrarily silence those who utter it offends me, and I consider it to be dangerous in and of itself. We'll not be able to agree on this. WRT the NYP piece, probably foreign sourced is about right. Even before the media picked up its Russia Trumpet, I remember reading a rumor towards the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine phone call debacle that a Chinese billionaire had slipped Juliani a hard drive containing information that might be incriminating to Biden's some. Irrespective of the source, the computer shop narrative reeks. But in spite of information's questionable provenance, it has been accompanied with compromising images of Hunter himself, and beyond stating that a meeting with Burisma execs wasn't on Biden's 'official' schedule, the biden campaign has yet (to my knowledge), to expressly deny the validity of the documents. If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA. Beyond ambiguous citations of 'anonymous officials', I've yet to read that they've communicated anything to this effect. The Director of National Intelligence has gone so far as to claim that this wasn't a Russian disinformation project. But he's a Trump apparatchik with no history in intelligence outside his appointment, so I generally ignore him. Probably foreign sourced? My gut says yes. Possibly disinformation? The juries still out. Possibly's a pretty low bar for stealing someone's voice. The tech companies took it upon themselves to censor this information. They've not claimed they were compelled or reccommended to by any official bodies any more than they were required to censor the name of the Urkaine whistleblower. But they chose to, of their own accord. If you want to be treated like a platform, you have to live with the fact that your platform's going to be used to further the aims of anyone who wannts to use it. Bar illegal content and behaviors (things disinformation is not), the most you should do is notify your users, sit back, and take it.
      • j8hn 6y ago
        Yikes, I never really paid attention to how creepy and inappropriate he was with little girls and young women.
        • skinkestek 6y ago
          Just remember: Just like with DT this is also pulled out of context. I don't like any of them and won't (and can't) vote for any of them so I have no dog in the fight. That website shouldn't have been blocked, whoever did it should probably been charged with election meddling but it doesn't change my view of Biden. As for the videos I think many of them shows him (clumsily) trying to comfort people. Again - I'm also the guy who points out that "fine people on both sides" as presented in mainstream media is a hoax. I don't like either if them but think we should be fair to both if them. If I lived in the US my lawn sign would be "Any Reasonable Person".
          • nradov 6y ago
            Election meddling in general isn't a crime. It's not something the government could charge the site owner for, unless they somehow violated campaign finance laws.
            • skinkestek 6y ago
              > It's not something the government could charge the site owner for, I didn't mean the site owner did election meddling, rather than Facebook when thet selectively block sites like this.
              • nradov 6y ago
                That is still not a crime.
                • skinkestek 6y ago
                  Ok then. You might very well be right. But what is the rule then? Manipulating social media in front of an election is only illegal if you are a foreigner?
  • darkerside 6y ago
    I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions. We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election. I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.
    • mullr 6y ago
      It’s completely correctable. If fb/Twitter wanted to, they could track every person who saw a piece of “wrong” information, and plaster the retraction in front of their face.
      • darkerside 6y ago
        I'd argue that, if anything, that would make some people more certain that it was true
    • disown 6y ago
      > With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election. Isn't it actually easier to correct the record with social media since you can correct it immediately and reach the people immediately? Whereas with newspapers, you'd have to wait days/weeks and have to search the tiny section they reserve for corrections? It's what made newspapers such great tools of propaganda. You push misinformation, spread it and then "retract" quietly relatively unseen. Edit: > If the idea that a particular professor or candidate is sexually exploitative becomes viral, can you really undo the damage? My point is that it's easier to "unring the bell" via social media than via newspapers. We are discussing the "previous status quo" : A newspaper writes a lie. How do you "unring the bell"? You have to wait until the next time you publish - which varies depending on whether you are a daily, weekly, monthly. Whereas in the social media era, you can just post on facebook, twitter, etc your retraction. The retraction is immediate and can be as visible as you want it to be.
  • tracer4201 6y ago
    The liberal wing was upset that state and non state actors influenced the 2016 election by manipulating social media. Now, Twitter is working to suppress some content that they believe is a repeat attempt — the October surprise if you will. I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s right or wrong, but I don’t think this is a scandal. Twitter is a private company. You don’t have a constitutional right to write whatever you want on Twitter. If Americans believe otherwise, then they’d have to nationalize Twitter or at least pass legislation that mandates what content Twitter can or cannot moderate. I do find it surprising that social media companies are being held to a very different standard than “news”. In the US, we have specific news organizations that are unashamedly biased and blasting the airwaves with dangerous propaganda. I’m not trying to make a case of whataboutism, but it’s mind boggling that social media receives so much scrutiny when this other group of fairly openly nefarious actors get a free pass. As far as I can tell, this is because the media organizations have fairly established relationships with politicians from one party or the other, with political parties using them as propaganda loud speakers.
    • missedthecue 6y ago
      Should T Mobile or Verizon be able to censor your phone calls and text messages if they don't like the content? After all, they're private companies as well.
      • tracer4201 6y ago
        I would say yes. If they censor my calls, I would switch providers. But more importantly, if we as a country believe that’s wrong, we should pass legislation
        • Negitivefrags 6y ago
          There is legislation. It’s called common carrier. The argument is this existing legislation should be extended to social media as well.
          • 6y ago
  • adventured 6y ago
    > Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable. You just wrote a comment about the big tech left being a happy joiner in conspiring to commit election fraud. Which part of it is not believable? We've got the US version of the CCP in big tech going to work overtime on press and speech control / suppression to intentionally try to throw an election in favor of their preferred candidate. Over the prior few years big tech more than hinted about what they were going to do. This could all be seen coming a zillion miles away. The long-term outcome of their extraordinarily dumb choice is obvious and it will have immense, horrible consequences politically (the Republicans will do a lot of damage going to war over this in response). There's a recent op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the Biden bought-and-paid-for scandal should be lied about and proclaimed to be a foreign intel operation regardless of whether it is or not. That side will do anything to get rid of Trump at this point. There is no length big tech won't go to, to assist and play their part. They're betting the downside risk is minimal and the upside is Biden wins and they'll face zero consequences (the FBI will immediately cease any interest in anything the Bidens have done, absolutely nothing will come of it, all evidence will be washed away forever - instead of eg the FBI following the money trail back to Joe Biden for his cut of the proceeds).
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    > will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes. Was there any doubt of their technical ability to delete and otherwise change content on their network in every which way? No, of course not. Was there any doubt that it would be legal? None whatsoever... Nothing has changed, except one lie got a little less play than its equivalent four years ago. Because some institutions learn.
    • reificator 6y ago
      > Slippery slope is a falacy, just like "correlation proves causation", to pick one HN somehow likes. I've seen too many "if this happens then that will be next" come true to write every use off just because your 9th grade teacher said it was fallacious. For instance the U.S. legal system leans very heavily on the concept of "precedent". Slippery slopes are baked into the system. I don't think you can just pull out the fallacy card every time it comes up and declare anyone who is predicting a chain of events to be arguing in bad faith.
      • TravHatesMe 6y ago
        I get tired of seeing these comments too. In the last few years it has become commonspeak to throw around these terms with no nuance. Strawmanning is a new favorite word for many. I sometimes shudder at the pretentiousness of it all (for some reason "false dichotomy" gets on my nerves, I feel like there are easier ways of saying that there are other possibilities).
      • darkerside 6y ago
        It's a logical fallacy, meaning the statements don't logically follow. That doesn't mean there isn't a heavy implication, which there often is.
      • shlant 6y ago
        don't worry! there's a fallacy for that too! https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
  • kenjackson 6y ago
    I think delaying the story until it could be somewhat verified is reasonable. I actually read it minutes after it was posted on the NY Post and my first thought was that it sounded like it shouldn’t have been published. I literally thought they’d retract it. I think the internet is breaking into various niche groups. I fully expect there soon to be completely partisan social networks. That’s probably the best way to deal with this.
    • commandlinefan 6y ago
      Well, ok, but can you find any other instance of a story that could have used some verification being suppressed by Twitter and Facebook at the same time?
      • jkhdigital 6y ago
        Ding ding ding and this is the tl;dr of Taibbi’s article
      • kenjackson 6y ago
        I can't, but I don't think its a bad idea. Given that, I guess you have to start at some point -- right? And last election social media was given all sorts of grief for the fake news... I can understand them wanting to be more careful this time. And of all news stories in recent years, this seems like a good one to begin with.
        • Meekro 6y ago
          > I guess you have to start at some point I notice they started with their political opponents.
          • kenjackson 6y ago
            Are they? Or do they just seem like the opponents to every political group? I'm sure liberals would say these media companies are also their opponents.
    • 6y ago
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • hackyhacky 6y ago
    They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. Twitter has a choice: either they can suppress it; or they can be pawns of whatever bad actors are creating this disinformation. It's a hard choice, and clearly it's a struggle that as a society we have to deal with. Right now, creating and distributing disinformation is easier than combating it, and I think it's unfair to call out Twitter for making a moral choice in the matter.
    • srtjstjsj 6y ago
      You may be right in practice, but according to Twitter the claimed reason was hacking/doxing, not misinformation -- in fact, the opposite of misinformation!
    • jkhdigital 6y ago
      “pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news” I am astonished at your blinding confidence in your ability to distinguish misinformation from news. You must be a Facebook content moderator ::snicker::
      • creato 6y ago
        I can't tell you for sure if this story is misinformation or not. That's part of the problem with misinformation. Well constructed misinformation is not easily proven false. What I can tell you is that it is absurd to believe it is true given what we know about the details surrounding the "discovery" of the information.
        • mshroyer 6y ago
          I'd be with you if the Biden campaign denied the material's legitimacy. So far, at least as far as I'm aware, they haven't.
    • dionian 6y ago
      They never provided evidence for this. By their own standards they should censor their own actions. Also, why didn't they do this with the Pee Pee tape that the media wrote long thinkpieces about for YEARS? Trending on twitter, too, of course. There was never evidence of that either, yet they had no problems with it. Are they changing their standard now based on the fact that the media lied so much in the past? and if so, why are the main perpetrators not being targeted?
  • TwoBit 6y ago
    Fox News has been suppressing the truth for 20 years now and where are the complaints about that?
    • rayiner 6y ago
      What Fox News was since Ailes took over, CNN and MSNBC have become. That's something to be really worried about. For a long time, I read the NYT and watched CNN. I never felt the need to check in and see what Fox was saying until the last 2-3 years. Now I do, because I don't trust that I'm getting the whole story.
      • tehjoker 6y ago
        Don't worry. When it comes to (especially) foreign policy, none of the media have been doing anything but state propaganda since the Remember the Maine incident. If you think blue TV is lying and check red TV you're missing the case where both blue and red agree it's good to lie to people. These cases where they agree revolve around suppressing opposition to corporate rule and around the nature of military alliances and misadventures.
        • skinkestek 6y ago
          I don't think rayiner says he's only watching fox now, rather he's checking that as well. Here's my take: When you look from different angles it gets harder to hide things. Fox News wants to hide some things, CNN wants to hide others. Looking at it from both angles you get to see some of the stuff each tries to hide and maybe you can make a reasonable guess on what both tries to hide.
          • tehjoker 6y ago
            Ah... I was assuming he was watching both. The problem is sometimes all the TV channels agree! You have to look for (usually written) news that is willing to criticize the state, corporations, and the war machine to get that angle.
      • 6y ago
  • didibus 6y ago
    Pretty sure twitter said they blocked it because the information came from a hack, not because they claimed any veracity for it being fake or not.
    • Consultant32452 6y ago
      Can you point me to a claim from the Bidens or law enforcement that the information was hacked? What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored?
      • didibus 6y ago
        > Can you point me to a claim from the Bidens or law enforcement that the information was hacked? I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive. > What are your thoughts on the Trump tax records which were criminally released to the NYT not being censored? You're using the word "criminally released" but that is an unproven fact, the times claims that "all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it". Now I wonder how that can be as well, but at least that's the statement. So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation, I can see them looking at both article and thinking the first one talks about a hard drive being copied by a shop owner and leaked. While the other is nebulous on the origin but claims it was legally obtained. This is obviously all speculation. But that be my thoughts, that I can see how the policy might have applied to one and not the other. I also have to think that it coming from the NY Post must have contributed. I don't assume Twitter reviews every tweet manually, and I can see how NY Post is more likely to get flagged than NY Times.
        • Consultant32452 6y ago
          >I'm not aware of any claim from them. I thought the claim of the hack comes from the NY Post article itself where they said the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive. The NY Post article claims the laptop was abandoned at the repair shop (never picked up) and that according to the law in that state became the legal property of the shop owner. >all of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it Notice that The Times does not say the source was legally authorized to release it. I didn't say it was criminally accessed, but that it was criminally released. For example, if an IRS employee or an employee at Trump's accountant released it without permission, those would be crimes. >So at least from the perspective of being a small time employee of Twitter that has to work on moderation I can accept that for the low level employee at the time of moderation. But once it got so high up that @Jack commented on it, and now over a week later the NY Post's account is still banned, it doesn't float.
  • perryizgr8 6y ago
    > why pick on the NY Post only? Keep in mind that the 3 year long series of false and inflammatory stories alleging Russian collusion were allowed. Finally it turned out to be a hoax. FB and Twitter felt no obligation to censor that. This is plain abuse of monopoly position by FB and Twitter, conscious attempt to keep voters ignorant, to push a certain political candidate.
  • cm2187 6y ago
    In fact new form of political advertising: suppress messages between users that mention stories you don't want to bubble up.
    • 1234letshaveatw 6y ago
      I love it! It's like adsense, the parties can bid to determine whether or not a story should be promoted or suppressed And you thought casino keywords brought in revenue...
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  I certainly hear a lot more talk about the suppression than the actual story (excluding the non-stop spew from Trump, I tuned him out a long time ago), so Twitterbook's attempts at suppression seem to have backfired. Taibbi may think it's under-reported, but even my non-tech acquaintances know about this scandal.
  • hackinthebochs 6y ago
    Awareness of the story in the context of potential disinformation and twitter's attempt at stopping it is entirely different than awareness without this extra context. The downstream effects of the two scenario are likely to be very different.
  • acituan 6y ago
    > even my non-tech acquaintances know about this scandal. Baudrillard talks about this regarding the Watergate scandal. The word scandal implies this is a one and done thing, you've seen the thing, and there is absolutely nothing else to see. This was an outlier. But was it? I think this one story itself is a canary in the coal mine. Extrapolate this to the long tail of stories for which their potential suppression won't make enough waves, and this is a much much bigger problem than what your non-tech acquaintances might hear. This concentrated of a narrative shaping power is certainly not unprecedented but is something we would normally associate with totalitarian regimes. And even then it would be easy for people to assume the suppression from state channels. What we have today is a much knife-edge mixture of truths, non-truths and missing truths, coming from hundreds to thousands of micro channels with people's faces attached to it. I think the grand total of its effects will indeed be unprecedented.
  • googthrowaway42 6y ago
    You hear a lot more talk about the suppression than the actual story because the news media you follow isn't covering the content of the story. There are emails being released constantly detailing various business dealings with CCP linked companies including undisclosed loans from Chinese banks that the Bidens continually roll forward.
    • 6y ago
• rootsudo 6y ago
  I agree, twitter suppression made the story bigger. The NYPost has issued much fewer retractions than NYT and CNN, yet, Twitter does not attack those institutions. Ironic, considering the founder of the NYPost and his opinions on market economies.
  • darkerside 6y ago
    I would consider retractions a mark of respectability, and the failure to issue them a tacit admission of failure in accountability.
    • beaner 6y ago
      That, or, of course, the Post's original reporting has been more accurate.
      • darkerside 6y ago
        Sounds like software with no bugs, if you ask me
        • beaner 6y ago
          Sure, but people mostly only say this when they don't like that the other guy has written better software.
          • darkerside 6y ago
            I'm sorry, but you must not be familiar with the Post. It's a sensationalist tabloid. The reason they don't publish retractions is NOT because of the airtight integrity of their reporting.
            • beaner 6y ago
              Your comment contains no information about the veracity of the content in question. It's a straight-up ad hominem.
• nabla9 6y ago
  There is no clear principles or policies for censorship or suppression for economic or political reasons. Until there is, we must look each case as single instance. That case was hilariously crude attempt at influencing and creating false narratives. The whole thing collapsed quickly but it still had huge impact. Mixing something real and something false makes people accept falsehoods. Censoring obvious falsehoods like in this case is not the scandal. The lack of policy principles is. Twitter could have reduced the frequency the links show in the feeds dramatically and nobody would notice. It would be there when you look at it, but it would not propagate. In fact, that's what Twitter and Facebook are doing for commercial reasons.
  • gotoeleven 6y ago
    What obvious falsehoods are you talking about?
  • mmastrac 6y ago
    Yeah, Twitter managed to kneecap a false narrative before it took hold and influenced an election. If there's a 48h waiting period for questionable stories like this, I'm all for it.
  • gotoeleven 6y ago
    Could someone just explain in simple words why everyone keeps calling this story false or debunked or whatever? Everyone keeps downvoting me and I don't know why. It seems like to debunk this story you'd have to have a journalist do some journalism and figure out why all these companies were giving hunter biden money.
    • nabla9 6y ago
      The Burisma story have been repeatedly found to be false. Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trump-revives-false-narrative-on-biden-and-ukraine/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/trump-revives-false-narrat... Trump's conspiracy theories thrive in Ukraine, where a young democracy battles corruption and distrust. We talked with two dozen leaders and investigators in Ukraine. They all agree the claims against Joe and Hunter Biden are baseless. Yet they persist. https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2019/10/10/trumps-biden-ukraine-natural-gas-conspiracy-theory-false-but-alive/3851728002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/2019/10/10/trump... The facts behind Trump’s bogus accusations about Biden and Ukraine - Trump claims Biden threatened Ukraine to aid his son’s business interests. The facts suggest otherwise. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/23/20879611/joe-biden-hunter-biden-ukraine-corruption-prosecutor-burisma-donald-trump-whistleblower-complaint https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/23/20879611/j... ---- The latest NY Post story is just crazy. Man Who Reportedly Gave Hunter’s Laptop to Rudy Speaks Out in Bizarre Interview https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunters-laptop-to-rudy-speaks-out-in-bizarre-interview https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter... Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bidens-alleged-laptop-an-explainer/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi... What we know — and don't know — about Hunter Biden's alleged laptop https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post-story/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...
• __float 6y ago
  At what point do we look to capitalism as a driving factor for misinformation spreading? Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. They're not incentivized to research stories sufficiently, so...a shaky lead from a sketchy source but a super compelling headline? Of course that gets published. Taking this as some anti-conservative war from the tech industry is super misleading.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes. Yes, in a way, but also obviously not. If that was their only/primary driver, they'd go all click bait all the time. They wouldn't report things that aren't loved by the masses. They clearly do, so clicks/shares/likes can't be their primary things. I do believe that it's partially right, it's just not number one. Number one is agenda, and within the pool of stories that benefit the agenda of the company, they choose what generates most engagement.
    • srtjstjsj 6y ago
      The "agenda" of the paper is whatever position it thinks it's reader base has, if it's reader/ad funded. The political bias due to owner or donor conflict of interest is only one potential source of funding.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        Since newspapers are often front-runners and form their readers opinion (rather than just parroting back what their readers already believe), I have doubts. There's certainly a part of "we need money from ads", but being able to influence the political decisions of a nation is power. That's a value in and by itself, it's not just something you wield to sell ads.
  • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "Media outlets are incentivized to bring in clicks/shares/likes." Even an individual who posts a blog post wants clicks/shares/likes, even if there's no money involved, to validate their work in putting out a post and to bolster their self-esteem. That highlights why capitalism is not itself the issue; any type of news media would just respond to what its customers want. And what the public wants is infotainment, not well-researched stories. The real problem is people and that's a problem that can't be solved.
• gotoeleven 6y ago
  Yeah the censorship is bad and further reduces trust in the media and tech companies (though its already at zero for many people). But isn't the story here that the vice presidents son was being paid millions of dollars by chinese, ukrainian, and other companies for .. something? It's not his business accumen, right? What could they possibly be paying him for other than access to his dad? Is there any other reasonable explanation for these "business arrangements?"
  • darkerside 6y ago
    It's a lot of money for a person, but it's not a lot for a business. It's a cheap insurance policy to stay on the "good side" of someone who operates, even privately, in the quid pro quo seeking way that Trump does very publicly.
    • thebigblueguy 6y ago
      4 years of investigations and the best they got on so called Trump Quid Pro Quo was him asking Ukraine about this specific grift by the Biden’s. Either he’s better at hiding his crimes than Muller and the Democrat party is able to investigate them, or gasp they can’t actually find anything because there is nothing...
  • thebigblueguy 6y ago
    They paid for introductions to “the big guy”. I’m surprised HN keeps this story up given the overlap of philosophies between the tech bubble and Democrat politicians.
    • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
      The reason stuff like this gets flagged is, in my opinion, that while the underlying issue is of relevant interest (stinking tech companies caught poisoning yet another thing), it’s too close to simple politics to prevent a thread full of hyperpartisan bickering.
  • chowchowchow 6y ago
• 54351623 6y ago
  How to set up your own Mastodon instance. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-instance-linux/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-in... Or of course there is always 4chan if you are so concerned about censorship.
• cwhiz 6y ago
  It is the people who want suppression of information. Twitter and FB are responding to user demand. This post has been flagged. People don’t want to see or hear about this. HN may, or may not, remove it. Either way, there are HN users who want this removed.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    That's just some users though, and I'm 99% sure they don't want others to see it, because they believe knowing about it might damage their political side. I'm sure they have good intentions and believe that the end justifies the means and if suppression of truth is required to let the good guys win, then so be it. Of course, everybody generally thinks they are the good guys, and once you're going down the road of "everything is allowed because my goals are good", you're not going to stop until somebody else stops you.
    • SirHound 6y ago
      It’s not the truth though as far as we can tell.
      • cwhiz 6y ago
        You could say that about lots of news that FB and Twitter allow. If FB and Twitter are strictly blocking unverified news then they would have also blocked things like the NYT tax return story. You also wade into some hairy territory of who is verifying news, and why. Facebook and Twitter are effectively acting as editors for select news organizations.
      • matthewdgreen 6y ago
        The one comment in this thread making an utterly factual statement is downvoted.
  • dang 6y ago
    Users flagged it. That's usually what happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813
• beaner 6y ago
  Why is this flagged? Even if you disagree with the assessment, the relationship between the press and big tech described here seems very relevant to HN. Isn't removing it making its point?
  • dang 6y ago
    Users flagged it. That's usually what happened. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813.
    • beaner 6y ago
      Ah, I always figured flagging put it in be a queue for review by a mod. Didn't know it happens automatically.
      • dang 6y ago
        For some reason people seem to be assuming that more lately (i.e. that "flagged" means mods did it). I'm not quite sure how to correct that notion. I suppose we could hyperlink "[flagged]" to an explanation...but would people click? It's not as if this isn't in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Explanations don't seem to help much.
        • lazugod 6y ago
          Or change the text itself to [flagged by users]?
          • dang 6y ago
            That would indeed be unambiguous. But it would also be verbose and there's something about that which doesn't fit the HN spirit. I don't know that unambiguousness would even be all that helpful. I have a feeling that all the same complaints would continue, they'd just route around it, as the old internet adage goes.
• gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  The left is obsessed with suppressing anything that’s “dangerous” cause they think the lowly under-class can’t be trusted to review information and form opinions. If they had less authoritarian instincts, they’d realize that prohibitions generally spectacularly fail. I suspect any of the things they wanted to ban just got attention they never would have otherwise due to the Streisand effect.
  • joejohnson 6y ago
    The left did not suppress this story, liberal media did. You’re responding to a post criticizing this suppression written by a leftist.
    • akvadrako 6y ago
      In the USA liberal and left are closely related - it basically means votes Democrat.
      • joejohnson 6y ago
        This is incorrect. Just because the two party system has suppressed anything to the left of the democrats does not mean liberals are in any way “the left”; there are many leftist voices in the US (Matt Taibbi, author of the post you’re replying to and presumably read, being one of them) and they are often critical of liberals.
        • akvadrako 6y ago
          The terms are not well enough defined in common language to claim what you’re claiming. If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal.
          • dragonwriter 6y ago
            > If you polled all Democratic voters, 90%+ would say they are left and liberal. Or, in the real world, a bit fewer than half would say they are “liberal” or “very liberal”. Because that's something that's polled on quite frequently, so there is real data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-make-up-largest-share-of-democratic-voters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma... It's true that in popular, as opposed to politically sophisticated, conversation in the US, a one-dimensional spectrum where the left and right poles are liberal and conservative is popular, and it's true that partisans on both sides like to portray the opposing party as more ideologically unified and extreme on that axis than it is, so that if you polled Republicans, they'd probably come close to identifying Democrats as consistently both left and liberal.
• alphite 6y ago
  I think the fact that this is flagged shows that ycombinator is part of the same problem. Freedom of speech is what's great about this country, and big tech is about suppression of it. I look forward to my post getting deleted by the mods, reinforcing the simple truth.
  • dang 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813
• joejohnson 6y ago
  This story has “62 points” and was posted 43 minutes ago (at the time I’m posting this comment) but as soon as I read the story and hit back in the browser, it was pushed off the first three pages of articles. What happened? Did this story get flagged? There’s lots interesting discussion here.
  • as1mov 6y ago
    I think that's just HN's flamewar prevention method. Any story with a low score and a large number of comments are pushed down quickly, this is in addition to the fact that the post is getting flagged which pushes it down further.
  • dang 6y ago
    Users flagged it. That's usually what happened. It also set off the flamewar detector as as1mov described, but flags were the dominant factor. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813.
• alphite 6y ago
  And for the comments of people saying it's a non-story, you need to check your beliefs and look at the facts. This is pay for play, and corruption at it's finest. After attacking Trump for 4 years for falsehoods, you shy away from addressing issues with the opposing candidate?
• pron 6y ago
  I think there's a fundamental difference of opinion about the notion of fairness. Some people think that fairness is defined as something that affects everyone equally in some clean-slate world, while others think of fairness as equalizing the effect of something in an already unfair situation in the world as it is. To the first camp it seems that "suppressing" a particular story on a particular platform is unfair regardless of circumstances because it is not done to other stories; others think that if that particular story has a de facto unfair advantage of being amplified by an army of bots on that particular platform, then "suppressing" it is the fair thing to do. The question is, is it always unfair to tip the scales or does fairness depend on whether or not the scales are already tipped? Should the fairness of laws, rules and regulation be judged with or without consideration to existing circumstances?
  • bassman9000 6y ago
    That's a really long way of trying to justify unfairness under some arbitrary criteria. If Twitter's policy is to surpress under some criteria (e.g. data illegally obtained), and they're not doing so every single time (they don't), then they're unfair on the arbitrary application of that criteria.
    • pron 6y ago
      The criterion can be that stories that are unfairly promoted are penalised. HN does something similar.
      • bassman9000 6y ago
        Thus paving the way for being arbitrary. Because the decision of what's fair is hidden. That's not criteria: is lack of. I understand you can't 100% define what's fair. That's why judges interpret. But if Jack has to come out to state they screwed up, something's not right. And they're not fixing it, by design: decisions will still be made by highly biased Twitter personnel.
• rootsudo 6y ago
  So all discussion regarding this is going to be flagged?
  • dang 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890813
• tmaly 6y ago
  LOL this post got suppressed ( flagged ) I think the post definitely has some merit on the discussion of free speech on the modern platforms that have become the new town square.
  • nwienert 6y ago
    Even my post trying to discuss suppression of suppression articles, just got suppressed! How suppressing :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835
    • dang 6y ago
      Users flagged it. That's usually what happened. Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new - they just become generic hodgepodges.
      • nkurz 6y ago
        > Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be boring. Separately, I'll note that this story was submitted yesterday, quickly got to 38 votes and 7 comments, and then was flagged off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000. I vouched for it, which brought it back briefly, but then it was killed again. Oddly, that version doesn't appear when one clicks on 'past', or with search terms for "taibbi" or "suppression". Any idea why this might be? Are flag killed stories always omitted from searches? Edit: This post discussing the flagging of this story is flagged as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835. Should it be? It seems like it raises reasonable issues. Vouching for it did nothing.
        • 6y ago
• firebaze 6y ago
  Simply stop taking twitter seriously. If there's something posted which interests you, read it. If not, ignore it. Whatever emotion it causes in you, just walk around the block and ignore it. Just don't give a s..t, and twitter will get back to normal in the long run.
  • nwienert 6y ago
    So you argue elsewhere this article was worthy of suppression, and yet here you are discussing it? Hypocritical.
    • firebaze 6y ago
      Just trying to give insight into the reasoning. If this is considered hypocritical by you, what would not be?
      • nwienert 6y ago
        If you think it merits discussion and your discussion is merely some opinion that doesn’t cross any of the site guidelines (sums to “I don’t care about this topic much so you shouldn’t either”), then there’s no basis for flagging it. Flagging means it’s either off topic, inflammatory, or not worthy of discussion. It’s on topic, and obviously not inflammatory. So you’re left with worthy of discussion... and you obviously are discussing it. Put it this way: if this is worthy of a flag, why are you here giving soft opinion as to why you personally would ignore it, as opposed to arguing why it shouldn’t be allowed period?
  • neonate 6y ago
    What Taibbi is writing about in the OP goes far beyond Twitter.
• fortran77 6y ago
  I think the story is a big nothing. It was a comment not by Hunter Biden, but an associate, who may have been overstating or exaggerating what Hunter Biden said he'd do. And I plan to vote for Biden (even though I'm a registered Republican.) But I think suppressing links to a story in the NY Post was a stupid and unethical move. And one that's likely to amplify the story, not bury it.
  • betwixthewires 6y ago
    What do you think "the story" referred to in this article is?
• timoth3y 6y ago
  Many are confusing "censorship" with "content moderation". The difference is very important. Censorship is when you are prevented from publishing on your own platform. Content moderation is when a platform owner choses what can be published on theirs. Twitter decided they did not want their platform used to spread what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda, but they in no way prevented the NY Post or anyone else from publishing the story. In the same way, when Hacker News and other well-run platforms remove or hide abusive and troll-like comments they are not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights. A site does not lose the right to moderate content just because they become successful.
  • jsu32 6y ago
    It's a matter of scale. As the article says, the current Democratic Party Alliance for suppressing damaging stories is so broad, that even though you can publish your story, the chances of reaching its intended audience at scale are slim. Also - if Twitter gets to decide whats get published on their platform, they are an editorial organization - something they've vehemently denied they are in the past.
    • narshian 6y ago
      The chances of garbage information reaching audiences “at scale” is why we have a malignant tumor in the White House, in the first place.
  • throwawayay02 6y ago
    Twitter did not decide that in good faight. First, because they are used as a public platform, like it or not, and as such they are not expected to moderate anything. People follow or block what they want. And second, because they are biased in their censorship and are not forthcoming about it.
    • sagichmal 6y ago
      > because they are used as a public platform . . . they are not expected to moderate anything Says who? > because they are biased in their censorship Yes, and reality has a liberal bias, eh?
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Interesting that this one is showing up here. I pay to subscribe subscribe to Matt Taibbi’s opinion piece/investigative thoughts via occasional emails. This was a good read, but other recent ones have been better. Perhaps this one was free?
• sagichmal 6y ago
  I personally have no problem with platforms choosing to squelch lies. If they over-step their authority then the market will correct them, right?
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I hope in this world you don’t let the politically connected and rich decide what’s a lie and what’s a truth. What if the shoe were on the other foot?
• radus 6y ago
  I think Twitter was well within their rights to refuse to allow their website to be a vector for what they considered to be foreign meddling in an American election -- something that they've been criticized for in the very recent past.
  • TwoBit 6y ago
    If it wasn't a foreign meddling attempt then it was a domestic one. To me this is less a question about Twitter's right to block stories (which it absolutely has) but rather a question of whether election meddling attempts should be recognized on their own as blockable or censorable content.
    • jberryman 6y ago
      The most recent OTM had a segment about the way conservative groups have been following the Russian playbook, creating fake local news sites, taking advantage of underemployed journalists to seed real content as cover for disinformation articles etc.
• zachware 6y ago
  I'm definitely not one closed off to this story, I think it's important. That said I think "we" tend to forget that platforms like Twitter are private companies, we don't really have a "right" to post anything to them. Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play. If we're not happy about the moderation we don't have to use the moderating platform.
  • chroem- 6y ago
    > Now if the government had ordered this moderation, that's where the idea of rights and first amendment comes into play. That may be the latest popular interpretation of the bill of rights, but it is absolutely not in the original spirit of its authors. They were defined as "inalienable rights" granted to all people. In other words, your essential human rights to free expression don't get waived depending on who the offending party is.
    • jakelazaroff 6y ago
      There is no “offending party”. Freedom of speech means speech cannot be compulsory. What would be contrary to the “original spirit” would be forcing Twitter and Facebook to amplify speech they don’t want to.
      • chroem- 6y ago
        Your implication is that Twitter and Facebook are human beings, and I think a majority of people would contest that idea. What I am saying is that the authors of the bill of rights did not intend for a person's human rights to go away the moment they are persecuted by an entity other than the United States federal government.
        • jakelazaroff 6y ago
          The New York Post is also not a human being, for that matter. But I wasn’t implying that. People want to use Twitter’s property to spread a message, and Twitter said no. That’s not “persecution”, it just means they have to find some other way to do it. If I get kicked out of a bar because I say something the owners don’t like, I’m not being persecuted — even if I think it’s unfair.
• hackyhacky 6y ago
  [I posted this comment as a child of another comment below, but I think it's important enough to this discussion that I'm reposting it here.] To have a sensible conversation, we have to acknowledge what the alleged Biden emails are: at best, stolen information; and at worst, intentionally manipulated or fabricated information. In either case, the information is being released now for the explicit goal of altering the outcome of the election in favor of those who are releasing it. We haven't had this issue in history before: it's never been so easy to reach so many people with such bad information. This places intermediaries, including Twitter, in an awkward situation: they can "censor" by restricting access to intentionally misleading information; or they can release it, and thereby become pawns of the bad actors who propagate it. As has been pointed out, this is a moral issue. We should step pretending that all censorship is bad, and that compelling intermediaries to publish literally everything is a moral good.
  • googthrowaway42 6y ago
    At "best" they're evidence of extreme corruption that compromises US national security. The allegations and evidence points to many insider dealings with CCP linked Chinese companies including what appear to be unreported loans from Chinese banks.
    • hackyhacky 6y ago
      A cursory reading of the both the data itself and the circumstances by which it came to light will reveal that your interpretation is highly improbable. You can believe what you like. But don't ask me to believe that a person took 3 laptops to a repair company in a state where he doesn't live; that the said company was operated by a blind person; that the security camera footage of the delivery of the laptops was erased; that the laptops were unintentionally forgotten there; and that they somehow found their way into the hands of one Rudolph Giuliani. To believe that story, you have to be gullible or complicit.
      • googthrowaway42 6y ago
        Where are you getting this idea that 3 laptops were dropped off to this repair company? There was one laptop. The repair shop is in Delaware, where Joe Biden was a senator for many decades and where the Bidens have held various political positions for many decades. I suspect that you really don't understand the story that well. That is understandable considering the insane amount of gaslighting, misinformation, and censorship that is going on around it.
• mmsmatt 6y ago
  This has got to be Taibbi click-baiting pro-Trump subscribers. He buries his admission that Trump's Biden/Burisma narrative is a lie so deep in the piece, you really have to trudge through a lot of hand-wringing drivel to find it. You can read 90% of this piece thinking that Taibbi is clearly sympathetic to the Republican narrative, and he gives no indication otherwise!
  • 23B1 6y ago
    I read the whole article, though.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • kodah 6y ago
    I didn't get that vibe at all. To me Taibbi sounds like someone like me: a resident of the Democratic party who is willing to criticize the ends as well as the means of both parties. This sort of conviction is not looked upon very highly by our "free" society.
    • hackyhacky 6y ago
      I think your reading of Taibbi is correct. Unfortunately, articles like this feed into the currently fashionable victim mentality of the Republican party, wherein they contend that big tech unfairly suppresses news from conservative sources, and that there's a grand conspiracy afoot to protect Biden. I don't think that's true, but that is how this will play out in that particular fever swamp.
      • kodah 6y ago
        "The other side is worse!" cannot be perpetually be the answer or response. Politics is not everything; at some point we have to understand that politics does not make a society, a society makes politics. Ask yourself this: if these same mechanisms, that again are used by autocratic governments, get taken advantage of by a future administration and we somehow defeat them will you be willing to admit accountability and culpability for the outcome? If not, then walk cautiously, because this future is very real and discounting people that raise the flag does not age well.
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  I agree. The platforms will regret this sort of censorship.
• senectus1 6y ago
  it's not like the suppression has stopped the story. if anything it's spread it further for longer
  • TwoBit 6y ago
    Probably true, though much of the focus following the suppression is on Twitter and Facebook and not Biden.
• mrfusion 6y ago
  > Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz
  • krapp 6y ago
    I mean, I can switch social media platforms a lot more easily than I can switch governments, and corporations don't have a monopoly on violence which would allow their tyranny to lead to torture, gulags and mass graves, but OK. I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
    • akhosravian 6y ago
      You could switch off Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Twitch, but for all but the most influential of people the folks you interact with won’t follow.
      • krapp 6y ago
        That's still not tyranny, that's just the network effect. They have a choice about what platform to use as do you and I.
    • zo1 6y ago
      The methods have changed, the motivation and net result is the same: opinion and thought control. Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or can't be said. Essentially only approved opinions and movements are allowed to gather steam, no different to the movement of dissent and mistrust of the government that had to be stemmed previously using gulags. So yes, you are 100% right it's not the same and we are not being sent to re-education camps. But that doesn't mean certain individuals are not being persecuted through "random" algorithms that target and marginalize them. As another poster here mentioned, censorship does not need to be absolute for it to have an effect. You also mentioned network effects earlier: I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
• r00tanon 6y ago
  Drivel. No sensible person believes blocking QAnon nonsense is a "scandal." For many reasons, not the least being that it is also the very definition of "unsubstantiated" as is this Hunter Biden story. Applying editorial standards (finally) to some of the more outrageous content posted on social media platforms is no more controversial than that of print media's choice to do so. The term "social media" is a complete misnomer to begin with. It started socially, but the sheer number of posts from advertisers and other organizations compared to the number of friend and family posts just goes to show how far from "social" these platforms have become. But that's another can of worms. EOD private companies can do whatever they want to do with their products. Everyone has a choice of the products they use. Not controversial.
  • Covzire 6y ago
    Where does the article mention QAnon?
  • mjfl 6y ago
    > No sensible person believes blocking QAnon nonsense is a "scandal." It's not QAnon, and the fact that you made that statement betrays your political biases. Think of the harm you could be causing by your attitude. If the Jeff Epstein story broke during Bill Clinton's electoral run, would you also dismiss it as a conspiracy? https://www.the-sun.com/news/1330253/bill-clinton-massage-epstein-accuser-aboard-plane/ https://www.the-sun.com/news/1330253/bill-clinton-massage-ep...
  • Sophistifunk 6y ago
    > Applying editorial standards (finally) to some of the more outrageous content posted on social media platforms is no more controversial than that of print media's choice to do so This is both true, and fine. However, they must give up their section 230 safe harbour protections.
  • googthrowaway42 6y ago
    > Drivel. No sensible person believes blocking QAnon nonsense is a "scandal. The fact that you conflate QAnon with this story indicates an extremely myopic and unrefined understanding of the world. This story was first published by the NY Post, not by someone on 8chan. These are completely unconnected things in terms of which communities are the source of this story.
• ravenstine 6y ago
  I'm convinced that a corporation could usurp the government and most people would accept having it throwing away the constitution if it billed itself as a "private company".
• babesh 6y ago
  It is incredibly obvious that most US media is biased. This includes suppression on both sides of the political spectrum. It includes both mainstream media and social networks. It isn’t just here and there. It is endemic. It pushes mindsets and frames discussions. It precludes discussion. It is coordinated and pushed relentlessly. You can tell when opinions suddenly shift amongst influence makers. Suddenly others get in line. Welcome to a modernized version of 1984. Now you know that Twitter and Facebook are party to it as well. So are Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, public broadcasting, etc... I realized that even supposedly unbiased news was irredeemably compromised when public broadcasting barely reported on the Snowden disclosures. This was after realizing all mainstream media did not fact check the calls for the second Iraq War. The real news just serves as a skeleton upon which the powers that be drape a narrative to further their causes. If you can’t tell yet, both Biden and Trump are lying through their teeth.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• galaxyLogic 6y ago
  If Twitter must publish all posts then doesn't it mean that New York Post must also publish all the letters that are sent to its "From the Readers" -page (assuming there is such)? Twitter is like a newspaper whose content comes only from its readers. It does not mean it has to publish everything. It does have a moral prerogative to not spread misinformation. Misinformation hurts the public. Twitter must make the decision about what it thinks is misinformation and should not be publish it. This has nothing to do with censorship. Because Fox News does not cover certain stories we are not accusing it of censorship. Free Press means the press is free to publish or not.
  • jsu32 6y ago
    Twitter has been claiming it's not a newspaper or editorial organization. They are legal benefits for Twitter to NOT be a newspaper. That's why they need to claim an objective reason for censoring/fact checking a specific story. So, I understand what you say but Twitter would beg to differ with you. Also network effects are harder to come by in newspapers. Imagine if there was one newspaper that had 100x the readership of the second most popular one. That'd be considered a threat to democracy.
    • drewrv 6y ago
      They don't need to claim any reason, they can take down any content they want for any reason. The only legal protection they have is not being held liable for the speech of their users. Newspapers don't have that because the writers are on their payroll.
      • Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
        The payroll is not the reason. Libraries and newsstands and post service are free from that liability either, but they don't have writers on their payroll. Newspapers that publish readers' letters normally don't pay for that. What makes them publishers is that newspapers choose what to publish. According to the court decision of 1995 [1]: "By actively utilizing technology and manpower to delete notes from its computer bulletin boards on the basis of offensiveness and "bad taste", for example, PRODIGY is clearly making decisions as to content, and such decisions constitute editorial control. (Id.) That such control is not complete and is enforced both as early as the notes arrive and as late as a complaint is made, does not minimize or eviscerate the simple fact that PRODIGY has uniquely arrogated to itself the role of determining what is proper for its members to post and read on its bulletin boards. Based on the foregoing, this Court is compelled to conclude that for the purposes of Plaintiffs' claims in the action, PRODIGY is a publisher rather than a distributor." [1] http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch04/Stratton.html http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch04/Stratton.html Section 230 was written after that court decision. Yet for the law to be consistent its provisions must agree with this reasoning.
• jsu32 6y ago
  To people claiming Twitter was right: - was this disinformation (i.e. emails were fake?) - or, was this hacking (i.e. the emails were real but NY Post shouldn't have them?) Twitter clearly claimed the latter, in other words they were confident the emails were real as soon as the story broke out (!!!) Impressive journalism on their behalf, but to put sarcasm aside, this is why it's impossible to censor in real time. There is no time to evaluate a story in minutes so your biases (or, worse, corruption) needs to fill the void.
• mjfl 6y ago
  14 years ago free speech was one of the most celebrated rights in the hacker community. That's why things like Wikileaks were built. Today, several people in this thread seem to believe that the info on Hunter Biden's laptop should be repressed because it is "stolen info". What have we come to?
• diego_moita 6y ago
  The only "scandal" here is that Russians and Republicans are once more trying to recreate the "leaked emails" hitjob that worked so well against Hilary Clinton. This is classic F.U.D.[1], just 2 weeks before election. If the media gives credibility for this kind of cheap hack, what morals do they have to criticize QAnon? If they want to have credibility then they should act responsibly. It is not censorship because it is not imposed by government. It is called editorializing and that is exactly the job of a newspaper editor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
  • kkarakk 6y ago
    tbh the people who are gullible enough to believe this would believe anything. if it's not hunter biden, then it's creepy joe, if it's not creepy joe it's something else. the republican trump smear circus never ends.
• linuxhansl 6y ago
  Meh... Call me unimpressed. Twitter refrained from forwarding a story to which there is no factual basis. You can of course still read it with the New York Post if you so desire. That's all there is to it.
  • jsu32 6y ago
    Was the story that the NY Post article was the result of Russian 'disinformation' based on facts? Because Twitter did nothing to stop that, not a fact check, not a block, nothing. Twitter was certain that 'story' was true, but the FBI (who said they have no evidence the Russians did it) was clueless? If I may, the reason you are unimpressed is that you are on the political side that benefited from Twitter's selective bias this time around. Next time you may not be as lucky tho.
    • nearbuy 6y ago
      Twitter's objection was that the New York Post article contained hacked or illegally obtained material (personal intimate photos, etc.). Publishing those materials is a legal grey area. I don't think Twitter ever said that article was Russian disinformation.
      • jsu32 6y ago
        Trump's taxes were illegally obtained (hacked or leaked.) For all we know, the Chinese may have given it to the NYT, as the NYT never bothered to tell us how they got their hands onto them. But Twitter did nothing about them. If Twitter was honest, every time the figure $750 appeared in a Tweet it should be blocked. If you feel my statement above is absurd, that just shows how normalized the double standard has become. ps I think there should be a law that all Presidents disclose tax returns and financial information. If you run for President you deserve a lesser right for privacy. It's not about that though. Twitter shouldn't censor based on its opinions.
        • nearbuy 6y ago
          Twitter was entirely consistent between this and Trump's tax returns. What you're proposing is a double standard. The rule is they blocked links to hacked content. They did not block reporting on either issue. Any discussion of Hunter Biden or the hacked content is allowed on Twitter. You just can't link to the actual hacked content. The NYT has not released Trump's tax returns. They only released an article discussing some of what they found. The New York Post included actual stolen content in their article. Blocking all tweets mentioning $750 would be like blocking all tweets mentioning Hunter Biden.
• lumpenprole 6y ago
  Oh look, a rare political post on Hacker News that doesn't get downvoted to oblivion. I wonder why.
• csours 6y ago
  > "The Republican version of Burisma story – essentially, that former General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was Elliott Ness, and Joe Biden intervened to fire him specifically to aid his son’s company – is also not supported by evidence. What Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts have done to date is take a few unreported or under-reported facts and leap straight to a maximalist interpretation of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. This isn’t right, ..." It feels like we're learning again how terrible propaganda is, and how to deal with it in a new medium. I do not claim to be fair or smart or scalable enough to tackle the problem of propaganda, and in fact, I think at times propaganda can be used for good. However, Matt Taibbi has failed at least as much as Twitter and Facebook have in handling this. Propaganda needs context. Twitter and Fb were not prepared to provide the context, and so they removed the story. Matt provides some context, but it is buried deep in his post, in the absolutely least likely place for it to be read: the paragraphs right before the last paragraph. When dealing with propaganda, provide the context front and center. --- The answer for bad speech is famously 'more speech'. But what is the answer for poisoning the well of public discourse? I think this is the most important question of our day, the crux of the information age. Information is cheap, speech is cheap. I know society has gotten over it in the past, and I have some faith that we will again, but don't pretend it is easy.
  • timmytokyo 6y ago
    The NYT's media columnist had some behind-the-scenes reporting on the Trump campaign's attempt to get the Hunter Biden emails into the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ reported out the story and provided the necessary context. The story ultimately concluded there was no evidence of malfeasance on Joe Biden's part. The kind of reporting the WSJ did here is worlds apart from just leaking a bunch of documents without any context, and I'm glad we have real journalists doing it this time. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nl 6y ago
  > from the similarly-leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story It's astonishing to me that Taibbi (who's work I've always enjoyed) isn't aware that - far from debunked - this has been confirmed. The Republican led Senate Intelligence committee report[1] was released in September and covered this in extensive detail. It's a long read, so reporting from The Intecept's summary[2]: One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska. While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters..... The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.” In Taibbi defense this report was released in September, and there was a lot of news happening then. Prior to this report, I don't think any official source was willing to call Kilimnik an intel officer. [1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... [2] https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-report-mueller/ https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-repo...
  • nl 6y ago
    Whilst it is anti-HN policy to comment on downvotes, I think on this particular story the irony of being heavily downvoted with no responses should be noted. Suppression is a bigger scandal indeed.
• mjfl 6y ago
  Thought I would post some of the contents of the suppressed articles. They seem falsifiable through financial transaction records: > A tranche of emails from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden — published exclusively by The Post last week — revealed how the scandal-scarred son tried to leverage his family connections to land lucrative deals overseas and boost his Burisma pay. > Speaking before reporters at a Marriott hotel near the debate site Thursday evening, Bobulinski claimed he had a falling out with the Biden family when Hunter Biden wanted to pocket $5 million from an initial $10 million cash injection into SinoHawk, ponied up by CEFC. > “He said, referring to ‘the chairman,’ his father, that CEFC was really investing in the Biden family, that he held the trump card and that he was the one putting his family legacy on the time,” said Bobulinski, who declined to take questions afterward. > “During these negotiations I repeated to Hunter and others that SinoHawk could not be Hunter’s personal piggy bank,” he went on. > “CEFC through July 2017 was assuring me the funds would be transferred to SinoHawk, but they were never sent to our company. Instead, I found out from Senator Johnson’s September report that the $5 million was sent in August 2017 to entities affiliated with Hunter,” he said, referring to the Wisconsin senator’s congressional probe into potential corruption in the Biden family. https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-ex-partner-tony-bobulinski-calls-joe-biden-a-liar/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-ex-partner-tony-bobulin...
  • mjfl 6y ago
    It certainly seems very corrupt to me for any founder of a company to withdraw any significant amount of the invested capital as cash.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• joyeuse6701 6y ago
  It seems that suppression is the only choice in this prisoner’s dilemma of right vs left media right now. Now I don’t like censorship. Chinese media censored the COVID-19 outbreak in the beginning, which cost lives. Right wing media in the west censored ‘liberal bias’ which cost lives. The left’s censorship here is a recognition that the other side doesn’t play “fair” and they’ll take their chances on this morally grey choice because lives are immediately at stake. It’s hard to even consider this a scandal. It’s hard to defend censorship here knowing that one might have a better chance of survival in a draconian Orwellian state that is modern China over the bastion of freedoms that is supposedly the United States. It’s disappointing.
• chmod600 6y ago
  Was anyone besides me surprised that huge payouts to your family creating massive conflicts of interest are normal? And even acceptable for someone running for office? In a private company, if you don't disclose such conflicts and recuse yourself from related decisions, you'd be fired immediately. (Though perhaps I'm wrong here if I was wrong about politicians.)
  • rantwasp 6y ago
    it depends. as a low level foot soldier definitely. the higher in rank you are the greater the odds that you can actually get away with it w/o being held accountable
    • chmod600 6y ago
      With other politicians there was always a lot of smoke, some investigations that go nowhere, and then it's dropped without really finding a fire. That's traditionally what I thought "without being held accountable" meant. Now, we see the fire in plain sight, and the media is saying it's all fine and normal. That's a new level of "without being held accountable".
    • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      Isn’t it usually the other way around? People at the top are all in it together, so they look after one another if just for self preservation. Instead they blame it on a rogue employee (or child).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• michaelmrose 6y ago
  The actual story is the election of a monstrous moron to a post where his actions can materially negatively effect the future survival of civilization as we know it. His reelection would be likely to be the end of democracy as we know it as he corrupts the entire apparatus of government on which undoing the damage he has done depends. Unable to win fairly we have seen unprecedented voter suppression and an entirely expected smear campaign. Faced with a situation where this smear campaign endangers our nation and its people fighting it isn't scandalous it is noble.
  • harpiaharpyja 6y ago
    Right, so you scapegoat your opponents so everything evil becomes justifiable.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      noun a person who is blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency. How is this applicable?
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I pretend for a minute that the shoe is on the other foot. If the special counsel’s office got ahold of Hunters laptop, I have zero doubt that it would have been an absolute blood bath. There would be wall-to-wall MSM coverage and Hunter would probably already be under arrest. Common people really do see the two tiers of justice happening here. Anyone who looks will see, especially if they have no dog in the culture war. The connected and political elite do whatever they want. The true whistleblowers and challengers are destroyed, either financially or via character assassination/slander or both. It can’t be ignored forever, something will give.
• addicted 6y ago
  Ah yes, the story which even the writer of the story did not want to put a byline on and kept getting passed from outlet to outlet because no one wanted to pick it up since it was so badly sourced.
• lkrubner 6y ago
  One has to be somewhat ignorant of the mission of the IMF or World Bank to think this is somehow new: "Poroshenko was telling Joe Biden that in order to get an American aid package, he’d gone beyond even what the I.M.F. asked for and raised energy prices for ordinary Ukrainians not by 75%, but by 100%, as well as taking steps to curtail subsidized medicine prices." Where this is good or bad, this has been common since the 1970s. Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire. Since the 1970s the IMF has demanded similar internal "reforms" in nations in South America, Africa, and Asia. If this is surprising to anyone then I would assume they are young or they have not been paying attention.
  • ciguy 6y ago
    Everyone should read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I first read it in highschool and it really shaped my thinking about the USAs role in international affairs. Some accuse the author of exaggerating certain things but nobody really denies the main facts that he lays out.
  • barumi 6y ago
    > Some writers refer to this process as "neoliberalism" as the effort seemed motivated by a desire to bring back the old era of laissez faire. Some writers refer to this as helping a country use the IMF as a political crap shield to enact necessary policies that would be otherwise politically nightmares to pull but are absolutely necessary to implement in order to get the state's finances under control. I lived in a country that was subjected to an IMF intervention after their government bankrupted the state, and the IMF's role on the recovery was done mainly by eliminating heavy subsidies and cash transfers from the state to a few public-in-name-but-private-in-operation companies which were chronically underfinanced and politically unable to change their pricing models to allow them to cover their operational cost. So yeah, the IMF name was used to justify price hikes, but let's not fool ourselves into believing that those reforms didn't had a positive impact on the state's expenditure.
• strangattractor 6y ago
  A blind computer repair person just happens to get Hunter Biden's computer. He conveniently cannot ID the person but is able to search emails. Bill Barr with the resources of the US government seems unable to provide clear evidence of Joe Biden's breaking the law. Sound's plausible to me. Freedom of speech is not Freedom to lie. The Constitution only states that Congress shall pass no law prohibiting free speech. Corporations can legally choose what is made available on there site. Fox News does it daily. Nobody seems upset about that.
• Synaesthesia 6y ago
  >On the other hand, if you want to assert without any evidence at all that the New York Post story is Russian interference, you can essentially go straight into print.
• lawwantsin17 6y ago
  This is a Russian op. It's not real information based on anything illegal happening. It's just smoke BS. Get it off YC.
• Marazan 6y ago
  Matt "No Collusion, No Collusion" Taibi comes out in favour of publishing obvious disinfo campaign? Colour me shocked.
  • Clubber 6y ago
    I believe he is successfully pointing out the hypocrisy.
• known 6y ago
  And TRUTH is suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/intellectual property https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014 https://yts.mx/movies/citizenfour-2014
• cryptica 6y ago
  The way Facebook and Twitter censored the Biden story was a bit too obvious. Makes me think that they probably want Trump to be re-elected. They're just riding on the rhetoric of the last election; people will vote for the candidate which Big Tech doesn't want to win. So if it looks like Big Tech hates Trump (I.e. helping Biden), then people will vote for Trump. Or maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence of people who work for Facebook and Twitter? Maybe they're not very smart and they think that censoring the Biden story will help Biden.
• lookalike1974 6y ago
  When suppression is defined as other people having the common sense you didn't to either vet or invalidate a political hit-job, sure. But we're moving away from that now, it seems. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-biden-wall-street-journal-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
• gadders 6y ago
  You think this is spicy, wait until people start talking about Malia Obama's credit card being in one of the Hunter Biden videos.
• zozbot234 6y ago
  It's sad to see what's very clearly partisan politics (and not from just one side, either) on HN comments in the run-up to an election. We should try to refocus the discussion here on the actual HN-relevant issue, viz. the broad implications of this sort of content moderation by prominent websites.
• scoot_718 6y ago
  "suppression" of a story based on a faked pdf? Isn't that just the journalistic editing we've been asking for all these years?
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  If your father is rich and powerful like Biden, you are inevitably going to find yourself in positions of privilege. Someone whose intent is to gain access to your father will bring you money bags. Hunter Biden has a bachelors degree in history and no real life experience. He got himself a very nice position that he clearly didn't earn. During the primary when this Burisma thing came out originally; NYPost no doubt investigated it and found much more information. Then sat on it until the most damaging moment. Very unlikely that these are lies and really the Biden campaign hasn't denied it. The reality is that Joe Biden was probably too busy to see his son selling his influence. Joe Biden is probably quite innocent, his silver spoon son on the other hand... Then Twitter pulled the censorship trigger a little too fast. You can see the bias for yourself. Wikipedia calls this whole Burisma thing an unevidenced conspiracy theory. Is it really unevidenced? An objective viewer can see the evidences. Is it really a conspiracy theory? I really don't think so. MSNBC's response to this burisma ordeal is to assert that the NY Post is a tabloid that regularly reports known false stories. They never really attacked the evidences or story. They just outright attacked the ny post calling it unreliable. This is such a great story though. You can use it to identify your echo chamber. the polls seem to be saying biden is going to win HUGE. My echo chambers I am in seem to think Trump is literally hitler who is killing mexicans. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-trailing-so-far-in-polls-that-hunter-biden-scandal-has-little-impact-gop-pollster/ar-BB1alMtA https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-trailing-so... November 4th is going to be an exciting day to see if my echo chambers are right or wrong.
• chkaloon 6y ago
  GYOFP - Get Your Own F'ing Platform. That's what so-called non-mainstream ideas have used for decades/centuries. Used to be pamphlets. Recently it was local weeklys. Now it's social media. That's what the First Amendment is all about. Amazing how this is getting twisted inside-out. This is all just so much whining by folks whose ox happened to be gored. GYOFP for cripe's sake.
  • java_script 6y ago
    I’d rather these ride-or-die Joe Biden-heads splinter off onto their own network instead. They could make it so whenever you start to even type “Hunt-“ you get a modal that says “Did You Know: Actually Energy Expert Hunter Biden added way more than $50,000/mo worth of value to Burisma.”
• RhodoYolo 6y ago
  One line hit me right in the gut. > “If you get a piece of information in the hands of the right American, it can absolutely spin out of control and make the national news in a couple of days,” We laugh about Chinese censorship, but our reliance on a few outlets to get our news has made us no worse. At what point is it Okay for people to start to die? History has proven (With a few caveats i'm sure) that real change happens with force. Has America lost it's ability to rebel against tyranny? America was built where small pox had a much higher death % - Were they forced to wear masks and stay inside? People die, it's a fact of life. Now we the people are forced to deal with the economic backlash that any idiot could have told you was going to happen. The media blocked any 'misinformation that relates to corona virus' and labeled them 'Anti-maskers'. Alot more people are going to die than the corona virus could have ever killed. The amount of mental health problems exacerbated, jobs lost, lives ruined is immesurable, but the one KPI we can all rely on is total number of coronavirus infected. It's a joke and we haven't even gotten to the fun part yet where we have a 34% debt surety rate based on the two massive stimulus' that are going to be passed. America was built on free-press and if say some entity tried to bury a story, it'd result in people dying, publisher being burned, or boycotted.