7 ms·

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

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?
jsu32 6y ago
It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on). I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.
- pavlov 6y ago
  You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity. If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.
  - knaq 6y ago
    There certainly wasn't a hack. At worst there could be a copyright issue, but political stuff is very strongly protected for fair use. The drive legitimately changed ownership, according to the repair contract, after 90 days of abandonment.
    - comex 6y ago
      Allegedly.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Almost by definition information that was stolen via hacking is true, unless for some bizarre reason the victim was privately forging documents about themselves, which nobody has ever alleged. At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.
- chrisco255 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.” Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-group-think https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou... > The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow. > Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus. > At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right. People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.
- comex 6y ago
  > Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'. > has catalogued these at length on his substack. If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent? > In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.) But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility [2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what... [3] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
mshroyer 6y ago
> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news "misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this? I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.
- darkerside 6y ago
  I think the question is, what is the information? The story seems like spaghetti, thrown at the wall to convey a sense of corruption, with no disprovable claims being made.
  - mshroyer 6y ago
    I personally think the information is a big nothingburger. But that's quite a different thing from saying it's misinformation.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      I think it's fair to characterize tone and intent as part of the message. And when the tone of the message is, BREAKING NEWS THERE HAS BEEN A CORRUPTION, having no evidence of it seems worthy of the phrase misinformation. As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?
pseudo0 6y ago
According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic. The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts. [0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-has-nothing-to-add-to-ratcliffes-claim-that-hunter-biden-emails-not-disinformation/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha... [1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134549198.html https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134... [2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-mail-details-joe-bidens-push-to-make-millions-from-china/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...
- tt433 6y ago
  I mean it's a false equivalency in the first place to put Hunter in some special bad place while the First Children reap the rewards of nepotism themselves. Misinformation doesn't need to be foreign, just good enough swill to distract some people from the important abuses of power.
  - pseudo0 6y ago
    Is anyone putting Hunter in some special bad place? We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. I think everyone agrees that nepotism and misinformation are bad, so surely journalists should critically examine all allegations of misconduct, even when it affects their preferred candidate?
    - barumi 6y ago
      > We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties. Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.

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?

jsu32 6y ago

It was really fun to watch half (liberal) Twitter claiming this was disinformation (i.e. false information) and the other half - including Twitter itself - claiming it was hacking (i.e. absolutely true information, albeit one they shouldn't have their hands on). I feel most people don't care about the facts, they care about their opinions which is now part of their identity. This is not good at all.

pavlov 6y ago
You've got this wrong. The ban on publishing personal information from hacks doesn't apply only when it's "absolutely true". It's about the claimed provenance, not the veracity. If I made a tweet that reads: "Here's some juicy extracts from jsu32's personal diary, I stole it from their hard drive" — it would fall under Twitter's policy, regardless of whether I ever stole your hard drive or not.
- knaq 6y ago
  There certainly wasn't a hack. At worst there could be a copyright issue, but political stuff is very strongly protected for fair use. The drive legitimately changed ownership, according to the repair contract, after 90 days of abandonment.
  - comex 6y ago
    Allegedly.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Almost by definition information that was stolen via hacking is true, unless for some bizarre reason the victim was privately forging documents about themselves, which nobody has ever alleged. At any rate, the OP merely observed that people supporting Twitter can't get their story straight: half are claiming it's Russian disinformation (again) and others that it's hacking (but supposedly it's not), and those two narratives aren't compatible.
chrisco255 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

> They're not suppressing the article because it's wrong, but because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news. This would be a more credible assertion if the media hasn’t spent 3 years reporting totally random shit as “bombshells.” Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) has catalogued these at length on his substack. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20 In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier: https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-group-think https://www.mercurynews.com/hanson-the-dangers-of-elite-grou... > The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow. > Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus. > At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right. People should be a lot madder about how they were lied to and manipulated about Russiagate. If the media takes this sort of “ends justify the means” approach to Trump, they will eventually do it with something you care about.

comex 6y ago
> Taibbi, himself a left-leaning journalist (formerly at Rolling Stone) Yes, he's the type of 'left-leaning' person who described a book about white privilege as "Hitlerian race theory" and wokeness as "mak[ing] the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin" [2], and also described not only what you (and he) call 'Russiagate', but the Ukraine incident as well, as a "permanent coup" [3] where Democrats' conduct was more corrupt than the conduct being investigated. Sure. I guess you could call it 'alt-left'. > has catalogued these at length on his substack. If there's a full list of supposedly false "bombshells", it's not publicly available at that link. But it's strange that its lead example is the Times' exposé of Trump's taxes, which even it admits is "real information" that suggests "potentially real" tax fraud (plus Trump not being as wealthy as claimed, what a surprise). Should it not be news that the Times found what Trump had been going out of his way to conceal for four years? Because the darkest speculation from the past proved false – speculation by random pundits, mind you (Taibbi doesn't link to anything from the Times, though for all I know there might have been some op-ed by someone) – does that make Times' report somehow fraudulent? > In the cold light of the morning after, even WaPo has criticized the coverage over stories sources from the Steele Dossier Rachel Maddow is a terrible journalist who makes exaggerated claims about all sorts of things. I wish she was not on the air, and Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was right to criticize her. But she is not representative of "the media"; she is rather unusual as left-leaning TV figures go. (Her "less degreed critics" on Fox News are far worse.) But you didn't link to the Washington Post article. You linked to a Mercury News article that briefly mentions it. The Mercury News article, however, is full of misinformation. For example, it claims that Mueller investigation found "no evidence of actionable Trump obstruction". Well, technically, yes – because it assumed it could not indict a sitting president under any circumstances. The report suggested that the behavior would have been indictable otherwise, though it officially did not make a determination one way or the other. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility [2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what... [3] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

mshroyer 6y ago

> because it's pretty obviously intentionally planted misinformation disguised as news "misinformation" implies it's false. What's the evidence for this? I'm as skeptical as anyone about the actual provenance of the information, but to my understanding, nobody in the Biden campaign has so far denied the material's legitimacy.

darkerside 6y ago
I think the question is, what is the information? The story seems like spaghetti, thrown at the wall to convey a sense of corruption, with no disprovable claims being made.
- mshroyer 6y ago
  I personally think the information is a big nothingburger. But that's quite a different thing from saying it's misinformation.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    I think it's fair to characterize tone and intent as part of the message. And when the tone of the message is, BREAKING NEWS THERE HAS BEEN A CORRUPTION, having no evidence of it seems worthy of the phrase misinformation. As has been said about Trump so many times this cycle, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Except nobody's saying that this time. Maybe because there is no actual claim being made? Just the appearance of one?

pseudo0 6y ago

According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic. The media and big tech companies crying "Russian misinformation!" when politically convenient is just going to further reduce trust in our institutions, and make the population more susceptible to real state-sponsored disinformation efforts. [0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-has-nothing-to-add-to-ratcliffes-claim-that-hunter-biden-emails-not-disinformation/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-tells-congress-it-ha... [1] - https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134549198.html https://news.yahoo.com/dni-ratcliffe-hunter-biden-emails-134... [2] - https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-mail-details-joe-bidens-push-to-make-millions-from-china/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-biz-partner-confirms-e-...

tt433 6y ago
I mean it's a false equivalency in the first place to put Hunter in some special bad place while the First Children reap the rewards of nepotism themselves. Misinformation doesn't need to be foreign, just good enough swill to distract some people from the important abuses of power.
- pseudo0 6y ago
  Is anyone putting Hunter in some special bad place? We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. I think everyone agrees that nepotism and misinformation are bad, so surely journalists should critically examine all allegations of misconduct, even when it affects their preferred candidate?
  - barumi 6y ago
    > We've had four years of virtually every newspaper in the country covering Trump's family, personal life, business dealings, taxes, etc. in exhaustive detail. They've been covered by being members of Trump's executive body, not because their family ties. Hell, you're talking about people who are features in Trump's reelection propaganda.