> The story, to be clear, appears to be fabricated, and comically so.
Nothing about the CBS article he linked to indicates that the story is fabricated. It's mostly just a series of character assassinations, from Giuliani to the computer repair guy to...the Russians.
And that, my friends, is why Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay and why their insultingly duplicitous attempts to justify them aren't going to work. The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter.
Why would your standard be "prove that this evidence is fabricated?" Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it?
So far, there's at least one picture of Hunter with a meth pipe that doesn't appear to be manipulated. That seems to indicate there's some non-zero something there, with how much being up for debate. Also, the ODNI says there's no intelligence pointing to Russia, despite some claims to the contrary.
We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
What I would do is mix in a fake information bomb among real data so it looked authentic.
Specifically, I would add fake incriminating emails and then go to Ukraine and pay some people off to fake in the other side as well.
It could be invalidated later, but who cares. It would look good enough and people only remember original headlines, not corrections. And if related to an election, only needs to last until election night.
>What I would do is mix in a fake information bomb among real data so it looked authentic.
This is a dangerous line of thinking because you can apply it to anything you don't want to believe. Beliefs should follow from evidence, not supposition.
> Who has copies of their text messages on their laptop?
Anyone with the My Phone app in Windows and a linked phone.
> Who has PDF copies of emails?
Those look like they were created, e.g. with a PDF printer, from the originals. They've now released Hunter's signature on the repair form, as well, and claim to have phone calls from him calling about it.
So far the "Russian disinfo" campaign is without evidence of that, given that the ODNI says there's no intelligence pointing to that and nothing but anonymous rumors thereof. Doesn't mean anything in these files is true, but some of the details match what we already know.
That said, we'll have to wait and see. I don't think Steele's primary Russian subsource is behind this one, though, but it could be like the original Dossier--a mix of salacious but unverifiable statements with true but innocuous statements.
Though I think Hunter with the meth pipe is already pretty damaging. That aside, for the best for the public to know all about the future president & his son's Bursima dealings so that it cannot be used as blackmail in the future, no?
Which one of the (allegedly) three Macs was running Windows?
> the ODNI says there's no intelligence
Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI. He has zero intelligence background. He lied about his work in the DoJ. Because of those lies, the Senate refused to consider him for the ODNI position for over a year.
Ratcliffe has also been surfacing unsubstantiated crap through Johnson's Senate HSGA Committee. He was installed expressly for this purpose
I was responding to the idea that it's somehow patently absurd for someone to have their text messages be present on their laptop, when it's obviously not.
> Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI.
Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI.
The FBI and DoJ have also said as much now. So you're in the position of maintaining a conspiracy theory without evidence vs. all of the US intelligence agencies. Moreover, they're not making a positive claim, they're making a negative one: that there is no evidence of Russian involvement.
It's one thing to say "don't trust this until all the facts come out"--that I would agree with--but the Russian conspiracy is a positive claim and those require evidence.
I have yet to see anyone present anything other than bare speculation for that, which only proves them correct in their statements. This is rebuttable: all you have to do is give some actual, verifiable evidence of Russian involvement.
You know, like Hunter's signature on the paperwork, or the EXIF data on the photos. Why do no problems show up under ELA or similar things? Why does this match what we know from public sources about Bursima paying him a ton of money? Why can we find his picture on their website in archives?
Where is there anything like that for the Russia conspiracy? The "best" I saw was a bunch of former agents speculating in a Politico story where they admitted therein that they had no evidence whatsoever...
And yet, your citation of Windows software suggests either that your grasp on the facts of the case are shaky, or that you're more interested in trying to convince others that this is true, than you are in whether or not it is actually true.
> Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI
You completely ignored the credibility issues I raised - issues that even the Republican majority in the Senate found troubling.
Further, your insistence on inscribing the authority of the ODNI (as an office) on Ratcliffe suggests that you, yourself, think he lacks sufficient credibility on his own. The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this. There is only the assertion of Ratcliffe, himself, who has already blown his credibility defending disinfo from Derkach (who the DoC outed as a high level Russian agent).
I'm not going to respond further on this. But I'll leave you with a quote I found insightful:
> these fake scandals Republicans concoct to smear Democrats work by being too complicated for anyone to follow. Instead, there's a drip-drip-drip of confusing stories filled with buzzwords and noise, all working together to build the illusion of scandal where none exists. The goal is to keep the words "Biden," "Burisma" and "Ukraine" in the headlines so people start to assume there must be something shady going on, even if there's nothing there
So you admit that it's not ridiculous to have text messages on one's laptop, good to know.
> The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this.
Of course not, because there's no intelligence pointing to Russia as the source of this, which kinda undermines your whole conspiracy theory. You do nothing whatsoever to support that with evidence, which is itself an admission that it's bogus.
That last quote is basically how the original Russia conspiracy started, BTW. You know that we've untangled the citogenesis a long time ago, right? They bootstrapped the conspiracy with the original FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of our own spies against Russia, who provably worked on an opp against them not too long prior), leaking some things to the media, then using the leaks themselves to bolster their claims for the FISA warrant.
But unlike that, which relied on anonymous leaks (since de-anonymized by Strzok & co's text messages), the drip drip drip here is of stuff like Hunter's signature matching the form of the one from the legal papers, having recordings of him calling the repair shop for his laptop, having pictures of him with a meth pipe, etc.
But sure, go on and tell us how that compares to the Russian conspiracy's anonymous leaks of unverifiable information.
> So far, there's at least one picture of Hunter with a meth pipe that doesn't appear to be manipulated. That seems to indicate there's some non-zero something there, with how much being up for debate.
It is already public knowledge that Hunter Biden has addiction issues. How does this photo make you believe the other claims are authentic? I've heard before that a standard disinformation tactic is to sprinkle some truth along with the lies.
I'm particularly skeptical of using an unrelated personal problem to assassinate his father's character as being involved in some sort of international business crimes.
> We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
while you're claiming that reasonable people should withhold judgement, the election is 2-3 weeks away and low-information voters are not going to wait for a forensic analysis to form their impressions. It should be 'innocent until proven guilty', full stop, but you're saying it should be the other way around and that we should keep our minds open to the possibility that he's guilty. Totally backwards.
It makes me think they really have Hunter's files. Whether those other files are real or not is precisely what I'm withholding judgement on so the rest of your comment doesn't really match what I said.
It is also public knowledge that Hunter Biden was being paid 50k/month by Burisma. I'm not sure why the "new" allegations from the emails are surprising to anyone, or how anyone could instantly dismiss them as disinformation based on the priors we already have. Did anyone think it was pure merit and coincidence that got him hired? The only thing that mattered was the exact details of the corruption and if it matters to you - I personally am quite sure that many, many people on both sides of the political spectrum are engaged in similar behavior.
> I'm not sure why the "new" allegations from the emails are surprising to anyone, or how anyone could instantly dismiss them as disinformation based on the priors we already have.
This is like accepting a cryptocurrency payment because the sender can prove they have access to the public key.
Let's go directly to the person who was trying to get the story published:[1]
>Giuliani told the Times he brought his documents to the Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."
The entire reason the story ended up specifically in the NY Post is because "the media" refused to publish it without attempting to ""prove that this evidence is in any way authentic".
It sounds like you really don't understand how journalism works if you think they will just publish everything regardless of the levels of supporting or contradictory evidence.
I'm not sure if this was an attempt at a gotcha question, but yes. The Steele dossier was very similar in that numerous news agencies refused to publish it due to their journalistic standards. Many aspects of the Steele dossier where eventually confirmed by further reporting or federal investigations. It is too early to say that is the case for these documents from Hunter Biden.
Most of the major papers published false (and hence unverified) claims from the Steele dossier before the 2016 election. Buzzfeed then published it in full in January 2017.
I don't know what you are considering examples of claims from the dossier or what you consider proven false means. Rather than me guessing, you could provide examples if you want me to make any effort to refute them. Otherwise I will point to the Wikipedia page which I believe backs up my previous comments[1]
>The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations, while Trump has denounced it as fake news...Some aspects of the dossier have been corroborated, in particular its main allegations that Putin and Russia actively favored Trump over Clinton and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had multiple secret contacts with Russians. However, many allegations in the dossier remain unverified. One allegation against Michael Cohen was dismissed by the Mueller Report, a court ruled that another of the claims was "inaccurate and misleading" and stated another claim was inaccurate. Goldman and Savage have described it as "deeply flawed". The Daily Telegraph has reported that anonymous sources believe Russian intelligence agencies may have sought to create doubt about the veracity of the dossier.
These aren't ad hominem attacks because they get to the central issue we are discussing. Different news agencies have different reputations for verifying that authenticity of what they report. I'm not going to give a story in the National Enquirer the same credibility as a story published in the New York Times. It isn't an ad hominem attack to voice that opinion.
Although I do notice that you did not address the merit of my post. There is a little irony there.
No, they are ad hominem attacks because they only attack the credibility of the source and not the information.
As I’ve said, the NY Post is hardly a bastion of journalism. The thing is, neither is The NY Times, the Washington Post, or basically any media source other than CSPAN. They are all biased and anyone paying the slightest bit of attention over the past four years has noticed this. So to somehow claim that the “real journalists” would have done otherwise is absurd, considering that they’ve done the exact same thing repeatedly.
You are the one who brought up the credibility of the media. How it is ad hominem to say that there are different levels of credibility? It is not a binary in which every news organization is either "CSPAN" or "Fox News". Some organizations are more committed to real journalism than others. The Post is not one of those organizations. This story ended up there because of this fact. Even Fox News turned it down over concerns about credibility.[1] Refusing to ignore that aspect of this is not an ad hominem attack.
I didn’t say they were all equal, I said they were all biased. My only point was that criticizing the Post for publishing unverified information should mean you criticize the “real journalists” for doing the same thing. This has happened numerous times in the last four years.
I find it funny you were labelling my comments as ad hominem. I thought we were only allowed to discuss the merits of a specific story.
We were talking about the New York Post and the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't know what unverified information you are referring to here or how that would be relevant to this discussion. What is clear is that many "real journalists" were not satisfied enough with the evidence to publish it. That even includes organizations like Fox News that have a bias that would seem to align with publishing the story.
I legitimately don't know what you are considering to be a personal attack. You said the media don't care about verifying their stories. I said you don't understand journalism if you think that is true. That isn't intended to be a personal attack. Maybe there is something else I said that you took offense to. I will happily apologize if you point it out and it truly crossed a line.
You are free to ignore this since you said you have no interest in this conversation. If that is the case, I will take a cue from the upvotes I am receiving and the downvotes you are receiving that the HN community thinks I am in the right here.
If you think these news sources are all operating under the same amount of good faith, then I think the disinfo campaigns have succeeded. I see quite a bit of daylight between Fox and CNN.
The legitimacy of those networks are definitely still in question. I remember during the 2015 primaries, CNN got the nickname "Clinton News Network" because of the incredible amount of bias they showed. It seems to have only gotten more extreme (on both sides) since then.
Not to say that it was an ad hominem attack. The comment above was extremely relevant and got to the point.
Unfortunately I don’t see much difference anymore. CNN used to be the gold standard, but they have fallen into the partisan trap just as much as Fox. They just do a better job at presenting a polished viewpoint.
Not meaning to attack you, but is it fair to say that your evaluation is entirely subjective?
Disinformation campaigns aim to change your lens of how you view, process, and store those evaluations. The experience you have can also be explained by having your heuristics changed from disinfo.
If you ask me, Fox News, aside from its evening opinion-based shows, has been moving toward the center since Ailes left.
And CNN's home page looks more like an anti-GOP blog than a legit news site these days. Given that CNN was once my go-to news source back in the day, it's just sad.
I remember when all the major news sites, including Fox, covered essentially the same stories, albeit with a different spin.
NONE of the news agencies are good faith actors anymore. It's all infotainment to the last atom. I mean, that's itself the subject of the linked blog post.
It's ok to recognize this. It's healthy to recognize this. It doesn't mean you wasted your time watching CNN (or Fox), it means you learned a valuable life lesson, one that vaccinates you against the next attack on your attention.
It seems you're just unaware of how any reputable journalist works, and unaware of how fact checkers work, and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong.
It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
As of 2020, I find that journalists are no longer reputable, fact checkers don't check facts, and there are no ramifications when something wrong is published.
This is the default state of the world until proven otherwise and is supported by countless examples. The media is not some bastion of truth, it's just as subjective as the rest of us and has progressively gotten worse as all standards are pushed aside for the narrative.
This is exactly the goal state sponsored disinformation campaigns. To flood the marketplace of ideas with so much "fake news" that no one believes anything anymore. When that happens, people feel free to believe in what is convenient or aligns with their personal world view.
The reality is that not all news sources are equally bad or biased. Some do a better job of fact checking than others.
I'm glad they rate political inclination separately from factuality because I've gotten to the point that I only care about the latter, and not the former, and highly suggest others do too. Nothing rated below "HIGH" in Factual Reporting should be passed along, IMHO.
They always link to the evidence for their ratings.
Sure, some do better than others. However none are good at it, and therefore the bar is so low that it's better to assume it's all false until proven otherwise.
Mainstream "reputable" media has ran many campaigns that are obviously not Russia-sponsored, least-of-all the Russia-gate conspiracy theory, and all of "Trump is sexist", "Trump is racist", "Trump supports white supremacy" stories based on fake Trump quotes ("fake" as in, taken out of context and twisted).
You are correct that no one is perfect all the time.
Nonetheless sites like Politifact still provide pretty accurate fact-checking more often than not.
The New York Times will be more reliable than the National Enquirer, and will (eventually) admit error or wrong doing.
It’s not very realistic to see it as black and white, that some bad journalism means all journalism is bad.
That’s simply not true.
To be honest, considering the incredible number of lies, mistruths, and deceptions President Trump has been spewing for the last four years I’d say the fact-checking has been okay.
Of course Democrats and liberals lie or deceive too, and of course some media institutions sometimes screw up or have biases there.
But if we step back and look at what fact-checking is the most important, the President of the United States continuously lying his ass off clearly tops the list, so if we’re going to discuss fact-checking let’s start there.
Sure, some are better than others. But even the supposed best are so bad that it makes no difference. You're likely assuming reputation from decades ago rather than the modern state of the media. The hallowed names no longer matter, they're all the same and have been emptied of almost all talent and integrity. Add in the rise of social media, clickbait, impression counts, and ever-dropping attention
The problems with the media "tops the list" for me before they can claim to be fact-checking anyone else.
Do you really believe Fox News does a better job of fact-checking? Or your media organization of choice.
Politifact is solid. Pro Publica is solid.
Attempting to reduce it to “all are equally bad, or so bad it doesn’t matter” is disingenuous and actually furthers attempts to deceive the public by undermining sources which are actually trustworthy.
Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to turn off your thinking cap - we always have to exercise our own judgement, even when reading information from sources we believe to be trustworthy.
If you genuinely believe what you are saying then I encourage you to broaden your sources. For example, ‘Ghost Wars’, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and has been broadly acclaimed, covers the CIA and all the stuff it did / has been doing in Afghanistan since 9/11.
There are plenty of good books on domestic politics too. Books will help broaden your perspective and better evaluate these journalism or media organizations we are talking about.
If you’re not engaging in this discussion with good intention, and your goal is to deceive and generally undermine people’s confidence in reputable sources of information because you believe it furthers your own political beliefs, well, then you should feel ashamed of yourself.
I’m being honest - I don’t know which one is the case.
What you say, however, is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood.
Why are you picking a single politician or Fox News? Your bias is clear, and so strong that you're already assuming I have a side so you can argue against it when I only talked about the media.
> "Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone."
No. Did you just make this up? I don't believe anyone because I distrust them all. That's what "distrust" literally means.
> "Books will help broaden your perspective"
I know. I'm discussing the state of the media, not worried about my perspective.
> "is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood."
Just say "lie". These are same weasley words that media often uses to create a narrative. However my statement can never be a lie regardless of how you feel about it because it's my personal assessment.
> "people’s confidence in reputable sources"
Politifact isn't a news site. Pro Public might be good but, again, I don't care about site reputation. It no longer matters because this authority has been disaggregated and over-extended, a problem caused by the media itself. I look at every piece as an isolated instance and apply trust based on numerous factors, with the publishing organization very far down that list. I find this approach far superior in uncovering the truth.
I also have no interest or responsibility in other people's confidence in the media, and I'll freely express what I think. If their confidence is shaken so easily then maybe the problem is how little trust they already have in the precarious state of the media today. If you disagree and want to still rely on publisher-based reputation then that's your prerogative, but don't project your insecurities or political beliefs onto me.
You understand exactly why I am focusing on President Trump and Fox News.
President Trump is a serial liar (fact), implicitly condones white supremacy (fact), and actively undermines the important norms of our democracy, like elections (fact).
Fox News, for the most part, has been propaganda which is supporting him in that process.
I don't have a bias - rather, I believe in small-d democracy, human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world.
Their actions are significantly worse than most other politicans (excepting Trump's political enablers) and news organizations at this time.
No, I don't understand. It doesn't make any specific point other than throwing up a strawman. A strategy used by the media (on all sides).
> "implicitly condones"
This is ignoring the explicit statements and actions to focus on the subjective narrative where anything can be implied. A cheap tactic often used by the media (on all sides).
> "I don't have a bias"
I'm sure you believe this, yet you're the only one vehemently choosing an irrelevant political side in this discussion about the media (of all sides).
> "human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world."
Great, me too. Just like the vast majority of people in this world. Are you claiming some kind of moral superiority here? What is this relevant to?
Your comments clearly reveal your bias and the narrative you seek to spread. You use many of the same tactics of the media (again, on all sides) and lack the same introspection. This is my personal assessment by the way, in case you want to argue that it's an "falsehood". I'll end it here since I see nothing more to discuss.
The mainstream news media is actually pretty good at being technically factually correct, but it's so heavily biased that normal people can't see the truth behind the spin. What they take away from a story is the emotion, not the facts. It can be the complete opposite of what really happened.
Subjective language is one way they do it. For example, an organization might have a "culture of abuse". That's not factually wrong but it has no meaning either. When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". When they want to suggest a person is dishonest, it's "X claims, without evidence, that ...".
Another way is taking advantage of people's inability to distinguish anecdotes from a representative sample. If they want us to believe that crime is increasing, they'll report more on crime so the audience gets the impression that there's more of it. They may even say it's increasing, which it always is if you cherry pick the appropriate time scale.
Then there's using quotes from other people to say whatever the journalist wants to say themselves. A technique for interviewing people is to go fishing for someone to say the right thing, which someone inevitably will if you ask enough people. Or worse, telling their subjects what to say or tricking them into saying they thing they want, perhaps by expressing the same belief themselves and using the human nature of agreeableness to get the subject to say they agree, even if they don't really. Sometimes the quotes are written inline with the rest of the sentence so they feel like facts being asserted by the journalist but aren't subject to the usual standard of accuracy.
I'd say these are more serious problems than factual errors because they're convey high level feelings and overall sense of the state of the world which are being prefabricated and fed to gullible voters so they don't have to think for themselves. With factual errors, you still have to use those facts to conclude something, which is hard mental work.
> When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy".
That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack.
Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]:
> [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details.
That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence.
The fact that you
a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and
b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans
makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism.
How can it be objectively true when there isn't even an objective definition of white supremacy, let alone knowledge of who subscribes to that belief? But even then, growing on what time scale? It's surely been in decline over the past century but perhaps grew over the previous year or decade? The journalist is still correct if it grew over the past year and otherwise declined over the past decade, or if the reverse is true, so it's a meaningless statement without more details.
> He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former
The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist means that your entire first paragraph is dripping in pure bad faith. You are also attacking your own strawman by the way, "growing white supremacy" was your quote! Not something from a journalist. White supremacy has clearly been crowing over the past decade, with increasing membership and activity among white supremacist terrorist groups (in the US) and political parties (in the EU). I guess you can say that it "declined" over the past century, but that's a useless point of view when considering the Christchurch terrorist attack.
> The former is consensus among researchers in the field.
No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual.
This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.
> The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist
No I'm not. But the fact you count me as one, shows that it probably is increasing by way of being redefined to include a broader group of people.
If you want to be pedantic, "dumb" means unable to speak, so obviously we're using the term colloquially here. IQ is our best measure of intelligence and it's reasonable to say "dumber" means "lower IQ". You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it doesn't support your belief.
There is clearly an effort to present this story as "debunked" or "false" or "fabricated." The CBS link, as I said, doesn't show anything to be fabricated and is merely a bunch of ad hominem attacks.
Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
> Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism.
The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no?
> The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible
It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.
Sure but again - why would he use a tiny repair shop on the other side of the country when he lives in Los Angeles? I'm originally from the North West UK but live in London and I take my Macs to the London Apple stores when they need fixing, not John Q Northerner's Chop Shop when I'm visiting family.
Plausibly, because he was having it worked on (maybe to give to a family or friend) then just found/decided that he didn't want to bother with it. People will decide that computer problems are immediate and inconsequential at the drop of a hat, if you've ever worked on them.
I don't know many people who would just go "eh, forget it" for a Macbook at an anonymous repair shop whilst it was still laden with emails and photographs and other personal content. Even if he can shrug off the cost of the laptop itself, I'm reasonably sure that Hunter Biden - long the target of the GOP ire, remember - or at least a lackey would have been back to that shop about 30 seconds after someone realised what had happened.
Assuming Hunter was happy with being the family punching bag. The messages released so far can be interpreted that he resented being the pity party of the biden namesake.
Ok, he resented being the pity party and instead of finding a sympathetic reporter to give some anonymous background or quotes to, he goes cross-country, leaves a laptop in a tiny repair shop, and crosses his fingers that it somehow comes out without making him look like a dick? I mean, this is sillier than the current explanation.
>and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong
Even the source article had to go back to the W administration to find examples. In the age of the Internet news writers know to avoid making a statement of fact while busily implying facts, so later when it turns out when they're wrong they're just HACKS and not also FRAUDS.
This is a golden example of uncharitable commentary.
Instead of slapping a narrative on someone that summarizes all of their ignorance, maybe take a tactic that doesn’t make you stick out as an unlikeable, unpersuasive partisan.
Listen, consider and dispute what someone says.
Your strawman summary of a hypothetical dumb person is only nourishes the narcissist who hit reply.
Evidence is always a back-and-forth. Enough specifics have been presented that the media should be demanding to know what, specifically, is fabricated. Joe Biden, running for office, should be able to offer specific denials, explanations, and clarifications.
The question we are tryong to answer is: was Hunter Biden using his dad to get some easy money; or was Joe Biden using his son to hold the payouts? The former is a slimy gray area; the latter outright corruption and highly compromising.
Should we apply this same rule to the NYT's article on Trump's tax returns? They never proved authenticity other than to say that they had "an anonymous source." It seems one group of people are completely fine with accepting the NYT article on faith, but dismiss the New York Post article as obviously fabricated.
Isn't there some evidence? Like the pictures? Sure, the emails could be fake and the photos real, but it does seem to indicate that they have at least obtained some sort of computer from Biden?
Also, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have denied any of it so far, AFAIK.
> Also, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have denied any of it so far, AFAIK.
If they comment - even to blanket deny - it gives the story weight which is exactly what the people who planted it want because then they can spin it out for a few more days/weeks.
Better to keep quiet - like with the court packing question - and let other people kick this ridiculous farce into touch.
If all the emails and such are fake, are you saying it’s a better strategy to just not comment on it versus just releasing a statement that it’s all fabricated (because you know it is)?
Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
> > are you saying it’s a better strategy to just not comment on it
> Yes.
> > Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
> "But he would say that, wouldn't he? Why would he deny it if it was fake?"
That would be much easier to verify in that case. It seems more that the biden admin knows that any refutation of the content of the emails would backfire when they are proven to be true. In that case claiming ignorance is the correct nice.
I think it pretty much doesn't matter what he says or does - people will believe the angle they believe and that's presumably what the people behind this are hoping will carry for three weeks until election night.
Just caught that interview and it goes further. Rep Adam Schiff is claiming "the Intelligence Community says it's Russian disinformation" and then the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that. So Schiff is making claims for the IC without talking with them and they appear to be false.
Set aside the topic for a second.. how is any Congressman going to the media and making things up acceptable?
Mostly because they got away with it when it came to Russiagate, and the fact that they were never held to account for the lies and half-truths (and many people still pushing them), precedent has been set that they can cudgel the public with that thing.
The whole "17 agencies" story being a great case in point. The 17 became 3, and the 3 became ~two dozen hand-picked analysts. None of that stops people like Schiff from continuing to spout the "17 agencies" line though.
That's misleading; the underlying problem is that voters can't hold them accountble, because voters have at most 1 bit per two years of influence of Congressional behavior.
I presume the claim Schiff is referencing is this one:
"U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.
The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter."
I should have watched the interview and my comments further down are inaccurate.
But - oh wait - I didn't realize that Ratcliffe the guy that released dubious information about Hillary Clinton a few weeks before the election coming up.
''Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"''
Which totally violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was done to help the President's re-election campaign:
Why do people trust this guy? You shouldn't. Even if what he says turns out to be true, his actions reveal him as an un-trustworthy person on this issue.
]
----- Please just ignore this stuff below :-) ---------
> the DNI says that they haven't passed any reports/briefings to Congress that say that.
While I didn't read/watch the interview/article in question, I just want to point out that the DNI statement, as you described it, is pretty carefully worded.
They "have not passed reports/briefings that say it's Russian disinformation". This leaves room for:
- Documents or meetings not officially considered reports/briefings.
- Documents or meetings with damning information but that draw no explicit conclusions, leaving it to the House Intelligence Committee to do that.
Obviously what I'm saying isn't a strong argument one way or the other. What I am saying, is, it's important to look at the big picture and to do so with a careful eye.
Personally I think the blog Lawfare does an excellent job of this and is a great guide for these sorts of issues. Here's their analysis of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report:
"One of the clever features of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is the committee’s apparent decision to draw no conclusions, merely to recount facts. This allowed the entire committee, irrespective of party or fealty to the president, to join in the factual findings."
And then ...
"To read these thousand pages and come away with the conclusion that they amount to evidence of “no collusion” really involves a protestation of faith, not a dispassionate assessment of presented evidence."
It's a very comprehensive document and I highly recommend it.
His comments don’t seem to leave as much room as you claim: “Let me be clear. The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.”
Lawfare (and Ben Wittes in particular) misinformed a hell of a lot of people about Russiagate. They aren’t any sort of model of journalistic responsibility.
We have to agree to disagree. I’ve found Lawfare to be thoughtful, diligent, and reputable. If you could share a specific article you had issue with I’d be curious to see it.
While some early Senate-confirmed Trump appointees, including his first DNI Dan Coats, were not transparent bootlicking shills in all their public comments, that's certainly not the case for any appointed as recently as this spring, like Ratcliffe.
I'm saying that, whatever he and his subordinates do in classified briefings, his public statements may as well be from the White House Press Office, and are useful only as to what the Administration wants the public to perceive.
The DNI is a political appointee and this one in particular is highly politicized, his statements are partisan political statements intended to support the President and the GOP and are not necessarily representative of the views and analyses of career intelligence officers.
'Andrew Weiss, a Russia specialist who is the James Family chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, described Ratcliffe's decision as "total national security malpractice,"'
Something which violates the norms of the Intelligence Community and was clearly done to help the President's re-election campaign:
DKIM could be used to rule it out as a fake, even if that signature is correct we still don't know a lot of things, like whether the sender's email really belong to the person who they claim to be (".ukraine" is really weird thing to add to your personal email), whether Hunter responded to it (you would think that having his laptop, they would have all emails he sent) or whether the meeting happened at all.
There are so many questions, and time too short to answer them all (purposefully, since it supposed to be an October surprise, the PDF with email print shows that it was prepared a year ago)
It’s also confusing because there are multiple laptops involved. In addition to the HB laptop, there are now claims that Hunter’s business partner Bevan Cooney (a federal inmate) has “flipped” and provided “26,000 emails” to some journalists in the Trump sphere.
To be clear, the authenticity of the emails is not the only part of the story that is questionable. The whole story about how these emails were acquired is important too. A lot of the seemingly "comically" fabricated details are related to that. It is important to known if these emails were recovered in a legal way or whether they originated in some Russian hack like the FBI is currently investigating.
I don't think it is important how secrets come to light. It is only important if they are true or not.
Sure, Russian Intelligence may have hacked my politicians computers. Or Russian teenagers. Or American teenagers. Or American journalists paid off an informant.
None of that actually matters because the only thing important is if the information is true or not.
If it was uncovered "legally" makes no difference in the USA, except for prosecutions and lawsuits. Journalists cannot be prevented from publishing true information, no matter how they got it.
>None of that actually matters because the only thing important is if the information is true or not.
Sure, if we are limiting the discussion to specifically the information presented in these documents, but we never leave it there. There is nothing in the body of the emails that have proven Joe Biden was involved in anything nefarious. However the larger story is whether these emails are an implication of his corruption. In this larger story, both the interpretation of emails and the larger context of the emails are just as important at the body of the emails themselves. The source matters in that regard. A biased source can hide exonerating pieces of context and only show the evidence in a manner that is most likely to elicit the response they want.
For example, let's look back to 2016. There was a big controversy over Clinton getting debate questions ahead of time. That was true and looks awful with the context we had. However, what if there was also an email that Sanders received the same debate questions (purely a hypothetical for the sake of discussion, I'm not actually suggesting this happened)? That would change the entire story. Suddenly we go from a corrupt candidate manipulating everything to her advantage to a story about the artifice of televised political events. The Clinton email would be no less "true", but the existence of evidence we didn't see would change what that email means. It is easy to manipulate with partial truth like this.
What if we found out that Russian intelligence, in collaboration with the White House and RNC, has been trying to hack Biden family systems all year? And that these data, while real, were pulled from his laptop and a massive cover story created about the original?
It doesn't change my thoughts on HB's actions, but now we have a much bigger issue: a conspiracy where the president in cahoots with an unfriendly foreign power. That's waaaaaay bigger than Biden's kid, or Trump's kids, enriching themselves because of their parents' position.
Why would Russia actually support Trump? Fracking and Trump wanting to sell Oil to Europe is really bad for Russia. What did Russia get for allegedly supporting Trump?
"Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"."
> Are they holding back the metadata in order to catch Biden in a trap denying the authenticity of the emails?
Bingo. Because the only thing better then evidence of corruption is disprovable denials of the evidence of corruption.
I'm guessing that's why Biden has not had a formal press event since this story came out. It's also why he's literally hiding at home until after the final debate.
That argument puts all platforms in an impossible bind.
1) all platforms are acting against misinformation- singularly around the US elections mind you -
2) misinformation will be political, since it will impact one party or the other.
3) making a decision to remove it will therefore be a political decision
So to avoid being labeled political, platforms should not remove misinformation?
Not sure how that computes.
Leaving misinformation up for people to beat with better info, empirically doesn’t work. Social media has proven that at least, COVID and mask wearing is notable but only the most recent illustrative example.
So what should platforms do? Or maybe someone can outline a way to depoliticize such decisions?
As with everything, intent matters, but in spirit I agree with you.
As much as I despise what Twitter did, I've been thinking about it for a couple of days and feel that the best option is a large number of strong Twitter competitors, rather than specific regulation. The slippery slope going the other way (silencing platforms) is just as bad as the one we're on. Throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Problem is you run into a physical limit at that point, there's only so many social media platforms we can be on, so creating such competition would be... hard... at this point.
That's consistent with their past behavior. Remember when the US elected a Twitter troll as President and Twitter modified the TOS to include a "newsworthiness" carve-out so they didn't have to follow their own policies to ban him?
Not all misinformation can equally be quarantined, and not all misinformation has a time sensitive effect as being near an election. So no, it is not reasonable to expect that all misinformation be treated the same before one can act on a specific instance.
How did they treat the “suckers and losers” story? What about the (criminally) leaked tax returns? What about the Melania phone call that was leaked by a “friend”?
And last time around, how did they handle the claims that were leaked from the Steele dossier?
The problem is that this sort of censorship is almost impossible to apply fairly. When your workforce is dominated by one political viewpoint, you are inevitably going to be biased in a way that a “platform” should not be.
That would be a good point if Twitter/Facebook had once quarantined so-called misinformation about Trump. As far as I know, that has never happened. Not a single time.
It seems fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that their actions were politically-motivated and have been for quite some time.
True and they have responsibilities because of it that Twitter does not due to current interpretation of Section 230. See the Covington decision where a paper lost to the tune of many millions of dollars.
Do you have a year / parties citation? Having a hard time narrowing down "Covington decision" past the noise of a hard-to-judge MMA fight and North Carolina gerrymandering something.
It's interesting to observe that he claims to be targeting Twitter with a defamation suit. I believe S230 would block that.
Under Twitter's behavior prior to about this year, they would have let unfiltered defamatory tweets go through without any fact-checking. Fact-checking may actually have saved this young man some malignedly-lost reputation had it existed at the time.
I agree they could, in theory, be the same entity but it would be near impossible to exist in such a form without accusations of bias in one way or another.
As a pure publisher, I think it's generally understood, there is inherent bias.
It is, perhaps, the best option to assume that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. aren't neutral platforms.
Indeed, even when people assume they're neutral, that assumption doesn't extend to full laissez-faire. All these platforms have basic "censorship" in place for legal compliance (DMCA takedown processes, interactions with government anti-crime systems, a need to follow US law regarding dissemination of pedophilic content, etc.).
Indeed, there are legal obligations and such but, perhaps, the problem is that not all people assume social platforms are neutral in the way they do other media outlets?
Maybe because one can have extreme political views and easily find other like-minded people then one can become somewhat blinkered? If one's platform of choice is also stifling some content there is still enough of other stuff around that one may not notice?
Which actions? Suppressing the story or allowing it to circulate at all? Everyone can agree that they hate Big Tech, so there will be broad bipartisan support for a bill that simply destroys these companies, but requiring any specific content moderation policy is going nowhere.
> Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Monday said that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggesting otherwise.
There are new pictures of Hunter Biden smoking crack. Those clearly weren't released previously.
Is the claim that these pictures are forgeries, or that they were hacked and then combined with forged emails to show Joe Biden's corruption? I haven't seen this explained anywhere. Personally, the pictures make me think the whole contents is real, although maybe the origin story isn't.
This is really not that hard folks. Be skeptical of things you read on social media. Prefer reputable sources. There are many entities out there attempting to confuse you with the goal of making you disbelieve in truth. We live in the age of deepfakes. This stuff really needs to be taught in schools now.
See that’s the thing, the denial is being packaged as the whole thing (especially the possibly incriminating bits) being fabricated rather than only the meta story.
I think the lack of denial from the campaign (as well as taking the candidate off the campaign trail for days) is a strong indicator the contents are not fabricated.
It's not a strong indicator, it's an indicator there the story doesn't have enough credibility to warrant answering. Engaging with the story would give it life. Let the real journalists do the work to verify the claims and then the campaign would have to actually engage. A story from Rudy Giuliani who's working with known Russian agents and refuses to let anyone verify the metadata is not credible enough to warrant a response.
So why do they take the candidate off the campaign trail?
They’re not calling this one fake news. Even Twitter is not saying it was faked but rather that the data was illicitly obtained.
Speaking of Russian agents wasn’t it the Dems who pedaled the now discredited Steel Dossier?
Using “Russia” as an adjective right now has limited value and if anything should be viewed with suspicion of purposeful “redirection”. It’s not a believable accusation any more.
Perhaps not by the Russian government, but interestingly the dossier’s primary sub-source (responsible for assembling the claims from other sources) was a Russian, Igor Danchenko, who had previously been investigated as a potential Russian spy. He admitted he mostly fabricated the claims, i.e. it was disinformation, and he pulled it from contacts in Russia.
Curiously, he was working at Brookings, home to people like Ben Wittes of Lawfare (a good friend of James Comey), who was a major proponent of Russiagate.
Now if he actually was a Russian spy, he’s a very good one, as he managed to trigger ongoing surveillance of a campaign and a sitting President (& it was acknowledged this wouldn’t have been approved without the dossier), which led to a massive investigation and ultimately an impeachment (thanks in part to Mueller holding back the report until the Democrats took the house). And all this continues to echo in the division and anger we see today. That would have to be some of the most effective Russian meddling ever.
I'm not sure what this has to do with whether or not the dossier was a Russian disinformation campaign. Did they give him the intelligence? Were they expecting it to be released before the election (it wasn't)? What was the goal of the disinformation? The result was sanctions against Russia, which doesn't seem like something they would want to have happen.
Russian agents gave Steele dirt on Trump. Their motive is unclear. But I think its a bit naive to think Russian FSK agents were betraying their country to Steele for no real reason.
>Were they expecting it to be released before the election (it wasn't)?
It wasn't openly published before the election, but it was used during the election. It was given to law enforcement and major media outlets. Mother Jones wrote about it before the election.
Newspapers are pretty well shielded from such lawsuits (for good reason) which allows for tabloids to accuse people of being reptilians and such. I'm sure real journalists are researching this just as they researched the Ukraine accusations.
Given that there is no chain of custody, and given that some of the people who are involved are very very fucking shady, the chances of some or all of this 'evidence' being tampered with is very high.
> Ratcliffe withdrew after Republican senators raised concerns about him, former intelligence officials said he might politicize intelligence, and media revealed Ratcliffe's embellishments regarding his prosecutorial experience in terrorism and immigration cases.
> Ratcliffe has little experience in national security or national intelligence and is reported to have demonstrated little engagement on the matters as a congressman.
You're welcome to ad hominem attack the DNI all you'd like, but that doesn't change what he said.
Do you have any evidence to support the evidence being fabricated?
Do you have any evidence to show where the previously non-public images (like Hunter asleep with a crack pipe next to him) published by the Post came from, if not the hard drive of said laptop?
I absolutely think what’s on the laptop is real. I absolutely don’t think the origin story of the laptop is real, and that’s what the man whose credibility you’re appealing to is trying to defend.
> U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.
This anonymous / unsourced claim is false, according to the Director of National Intelligence. There is no intelligence that supports that and no one is even on the record claiming that it does. WashPo may have fabricated the claim. See linked video of DNI speaking about it.
It's true and documented that Hunter Biden had a laughable no-work job, and that the Obama administration made Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was going after his employer.
This particular NY Post story surfaces... an email... saying Biden met with somebody. Whatever. Of course he met with lots of people, it's not really a story itself so much as an excuse to resurrect the actual story from a year ago. This isn't a court of law where we're establishing the quid pro quo for a judge/jury, it's the court of public opinion.
There was international pressure to remove Shokin for precisely the _opposite_ reason that you cite. It was because he was _not_ going after Biden's son's employer forcefully enough.
> In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts".[24] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[38]
Decry Wikipedia if you'd like, but this is easily verifiable from any number of other outlets.
The Occam's razor explanation seems that children of the high-ranking political elite get cushy jobs by either their social connections, or in an (perhaps unsuccessful) attempt to curry favor with the parent. Not fair, a bad look, but not really unusual.
All this talk about the Streisand Effect really misses the point. This story was going viral regardless of anyone's actions. What Twitter did was ensure it went viral in the context of the warnings of it being disinformation and Twitters efforts at containing its spread. Disinformation is powerful when the information spreads farther and faster than the facts or mitigating context. Ensuring the information is presented with full context is a significant win. If the goal is to reduce this story's ability to influence the election, then Twitter's actions were successful.
> Ensuring the information is presented with full context...
The fact that you are setting that as the standard for a company that has based its entire existence on people sending messages of 140 characters (and now up to 280) is pretty ironic, don’t you think?
We're still talking about this story a week later right now, in a media environment where way bigger scandals are forgotten in a day because the President said covid gives you super-speed or something.
I thought about this, and this seems an odd claim to me: Twitter has, and has had for some time, the capability to tag tweets with "this is possibly a bot" or "this is possibly misinformation". As much as I disagree with them even doing that (and reasonable people can disagree with me, it is not a fervently held belief), it seemed odd to me that they chose the nuclear option rather than simply tweet tagging.
The article touches on this in a more roundabout way, but personally I couldn't help but feel a bit of grim satisfaction at this whole situation.
The newspapers who got moderated by Twitter and are now crying foul are the same ones who are the reason Twitter started with their heavy-handed proactive approach to moderation in the first place.
Twitter, Facebook, most platforms really, just want to be dumb service providers. But they got bullied by major news organizations who, as always, had no fucking clue what they are asking for, into becoming what they are now.
I don't think anything will change though. Within their opinion columns only their inability to reflect upon past mistakes is more chronic than than their inability to think their hot-headed demands to their logical conclusions.
> Twitter, Facebook, most platforms really, just want to be dumb service providers.
I think this was true before both started pushing algorithmic feeds over chronological ones. Now it's pretty clear that both Twitter and Facebook want to curate what you see based on criteria and algorithms they choose.
> I think this was true before both started pushing algorithmic feeds over chronological ones.
While it's true that algorithmic feeds fundamentally give the platform control over what you see, this is not the type of slam dunk argument you are making it out to be.
First of all, the primary reason social media platforms move to algorithmic feeds is to increase engagement (eyeballs, ad revenue etc.), not censorship. And this is because a lot of the content posted by people is crap and not interesting to others, and a purely chronological timeline puts all such content at equal footing. For the longest time FB let you switch to a chronological feed, and for most people, it was absolute crap, because generic posts by your friends, updates about changes they made, social media posts by brands etc. all got exactly the same weightage, and you had to trawl through a lot of crap to find useful stuff on the feed.
Left to their own devices (and by that I mean, without traditional media raking them through the coals every single day), these platforms would be happy to keep leftists in their leftist bubbles, rightists in their rightist bubbles, and so on, as long as it kept all these factions individually engaged and happy.
Do you think Facebook _enjoys_ dealing with these pointless he-said she-said sort of arguments every day whenever something contentious comes up? They don't. It's a HUGE time and money sink for them, and causes reputational damage no matter what decision they take, because someone will always be upset.
> The newspapers who got moderated by Twitter and are now crying foul are the same ones who are the reason Twitter started with their heavy-handed proactive approach to moderation in the first place.
Yeah, I was interested in their analysis of how the social media platforms got blamed for 2016 even though the big news outlets were at least as culpable, if not more so.
I never thought it was fair to lay the blame at social media's feet. Certainly not without blame, but they sit rather at the end of the rope, not the beginning and at least for me this blog post's examination of agency vs. responsibility was alot more satisfying than "free speech they can do what they want checkmate."
> That post was published the morning of March 11, when COVID-19 was still being mostly ignored.
I’m seeing more and more that COVID wasn’t “a thing” until mid-march, and it clashes with my impressions.
I have a clear date for when it was “becoming serious” for me, because I pretty much sold my entire stocks portfolio, 24th of Feb, which is almost a month before.
I think you're definitely on the early curve. My timeline is pretty distinct in my head, because I had a family trip planned on March 15th. I remember the leadup very clearly:
March 1-2: Hey, should we be worried about this coronavirus thing? Nah, seems fine.
March 2-9: Hey, should we be...
March 9: Hey, should we actually be worried about this coronavirus thing? Ehh.. it still seems pretty low-risk.
March 10: Y'know, there's a decent number of cases in <place we were going>; maybe we should hold off just in case?
March 11: Oh, this isn't just my vacation -- my school is closing too.
March 12: Oh boy. This is gonna be a big deal.
That March 12 date sticks out for a lot of people I know. Even as someone who was tracking coronavirus as early as January, I just didn't think it would be that big of a deal until March 12.
I just checked my records for when I last flew, because I remember that every single person in the airport (myself included) were wearing face masks, and there was a genuine feeling of concern about the situation. It was February 4.
This was in Thailand, which was the first country outside of China to have a confirmed case (on 13 Jan). By and large people here were taking it quite seriously at the time (and continue to do so); nobody waited for the government or health authorities to tell them to wear masks, they just did it. It was clear to me back then it was going to spread to the west pretty quickly and be a massive problem if countries didn't lock down and lock down fast.
According to the Johns Hopkins dashboard, Thailand has had 3,691 cases and 59 deaths out of a population of ~70 million. At one point we reached 100 days with zero local transmission. Watching how it's been handled in the US just completely blows my mind.
Do you think posting like this is an effective tactic? I'm surprised it hasn't been flagged, and considering how poorly if reflects upon you I think it would be better for you if it were.
I too started preparing for the inevitable in late February, and already felt like I was behind. If you look at when various states first issued stay-at-home orders though, California's March 19 action marks the early point at which COVID was "a thing" among the broader population.[0] It was possible for individuals to be very ahead of the curve of this one, due to the slow reaction time by officials.
The stay-at-home orders more closely captured when I saw people's behaviour radically change, instead of the state of emergency declarations.
If you're curious for a more objective measure of when mass behaviour started to change, you can look at data like Opentable's seated dining reservations[0] or mobile-device travel data[1].
I know that our media talked about a spread event in Italy on February 21, and after that confirmed to be spread to our country shortly after (people that had returned from their ski holiday). Then at Feb 25 we had Carnaval, which was very quickly confirmed to be a super spread event, and I vividly remember every already talking how irresponsible that was.
At least in Europe, COVID was definitely “a thing” by end of February. We went into full lockdown in The Netherlands at March 12, and we were relatively late.
You're not the only one with that impression, but I think they are talking about mainstream media when they say that it was mostly ignored in early March.
The internet weirdos I followed were all tweeting about it in mid-January, so by the time it was February I was checking Twitter every night for an update, and having a laugh at the totally brainless exhortations by the mainstream media that anybody that believed in Coronavirus was a right-wing conspiracy nut. (By mid-March this had flipped.)
An excellently written article. I think they really hit the nail on the head here about how censorship backfires. Seeing someone lay the blame on our news organizations instead of some "Russian conspiracy theory" is catharsis.
Regrettably, I think the lesson learned here won't be that censorship backfires. I think the lesson will be, "do it better next time".
You see, the story still needs to disappear. But instead of making the story disappear in a very public manner, just shadowban it. Throw a few fake likes and retweets on the post to comfort the user, but display it to no one. And if anyone asks, deny everything.
This technique is magnificent. The Streisand Effect can't happen if the request to remove the material isn't made public, and the users are duped into believing the material is still there.
> If anything Twitter’s actions had the opposite effect: it made the story spread far more widely than it would have otherwise
[citation needed]. Streisand Effect is real, but we're comparing it to the relative megaphone that is a traditional media source using the accelerant of Twitter to circulate an under-researched story.
Blocking the story on Twitter didn't stop its spread, but perhaps it gave truth some time to get its boots on before letting a lie ride the Twitter train in the good cars for free.
There is nothing to ban and nothing to stop. There has been disinformation since the beginning of time. It was with us even in supposedly fair and balanced eras.
It is up to each individual to find sources of information that they trust. If they pick a biased source, then so be it.
Many sources of information are springing up that are proving more trustworthy than social media and traditional media.
Educate people to be critical thinkers so that they can pick better sources of information.
Bingo, disinformation doesn’t travel as far in other developed countries (ie the nordics for example) because they have better, more accessible education for their citizens. College is free for all and media literacy courses are required.
It’s hard to be stupid when being smart is so economically valuable and freely attainable by all.
> disinformation doesn’t travel as far in other developed countries (ie the nordics for example) because they have better, more accessible education for their citizens.
I hate to be that guy but, citation needed.
I’m willing to bet highly that misinformation travels at the same speed in most western countries, and that to a first order approximation misinformation travels proportionally to bandwith.
Please provide evidence of this, I've never had such course.
Also, the media landscape in Denmark are more or less the same from a political point of view, and you're forced to pay for "DR" a public news broadcaster. It goes by "DDR" in right wing circles.
It seems like both bad journalism and irresponsible social media spreading of misinformation are problems. We're better served by working each problem than debating which one holds more "responsibility."
Also the second sentence of your about page is: Recommended by The New York Times as “one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject”
I've put together an "argument map" on the authenticity of the emails, mostly so I could get a handle on all the pros/cons for this (there are many). This may be helpful for anyone looking for a summary:
Haven't senate republicans already investigated Bidens and found nothing?
> An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans into corruption allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter, involving Ukraine found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, closing out an inquiry its leaders had hoped would tarnish the Democratic presidential nominee.
Ben Thompson is one of those rare people who can actually do "fair and balanced" in a way that doesn't treat atrocious views as a simple and innocent matter of opinion.
I used to be all aboard the "social media is the problem" train, but...
>> "The point of this is not to debate whether or not the email story was true, or Hunter Biden’s laptop story. Rather, it’s to establish that while social media publishes everything, from mountains of misinformation and conspiracy theories to critical information about an impending pandemic, making something matter requires more than manufacturing zero marginal cost content. The New York Times has that power by default, while Twitter and Facebook only has that power to the extent they do the opposite of what most expect from them (which is to act as a utility for the conveyance of information)."
It really does seem like a long list of Very Serious News Organizations taking it seriously enough to publish hundreds of articles on these things does more harm than it floating out there in the goofball ether. No one should have taken a tabloid seriously. They're still going to, because it's profitable, so the solution is probably not "block it" or "don't write about it." The article has some good ideas.
edit: in particular the comparison between responses from Twitter and Facebook. Facebook slowed rather than blocked. That gave fact checkers time to warm up without dumping go juice into the conspiracy loop. I haven't heard the same apoplectic screaming about Facebook.
One would assume the same way they survived in the era without any Facebook.
Now, in a world where Facebook exists, we should probably consider the effect that its particular flow of information has on society. Keep in mind: this is the same company caught running A/B tests on its users without their knowledge on whether running "happy" or "sad" stories had effect on their observable behavior.
The public should probably care about what effect Facebook has on it, because Facebook cares about what effect it has on the public.
Good points, but I feel like the real test would be if this was an unverified anti-Trump story. Did twitter or facebook put the brakes on any of the Steele dossier stuff?
The principle of putting the brakes on unverified stuff is good, but, of course, you have to decide what counts as "unverified", and you have to do that objectively, and quickly. What would the NYT say if there was an unverified anti-Trump story a week before the election, but twitter slowed the spread of it until it could be confirmed?
Couldn't agree more. The non-tabloid paragon of virtue in the UK, AKA The Guardian, is full of made up click bait and poorly researched articles but because they are generally left-leaning it's all fine and dandy.
Pretty much. The sneering calls from checkmarked writers for some of these on Twitter for genocide of "bad places" (like where I live) is always unnerving. Some might be joking, but some of them really do believe everyone in the southeast is a tea-sipping, noose-making, dog-kicking monster. And those same people will insist they're very pro-LGBTQ and anti-racism as they call for the genocide of every person they claim to be for in those regions. Which is a lot of people.
> as they call for the genocide of every person they claim to be for in those regions.
Excuse me? This seems like quite a claim to be making, if it is in good faith. Or we have very different conceptions of the pretty clear-cut term "genocide" (such as the dog whistle misappropriation, "white genocide.") Care to elaborate or provide any evidence at all for these supposed widespread calls for mass murder?
They do it right out in public on their professional accounts to tens or hundreds of thousands of people and face no consequences. Calling for wiping out the southeast or "flyover states," then arguing with people in a way that makes it clear they really mean it. Why bother recording it?
I don't know what the nation's attitude towards this is, but as someone who served on the ground in Afghanistan and had friends separated from the military (losing benefits and other problems) for bringing an ipod into a secured space, it is hard to watch Democrats say things like, "Hillary Clinton would be president today if Comey didn't send that memo."
What they're saying out loud IS escaping accountability and they're putting it in moralistic and advocacy forms. If a bunch of enlisted folks who make less than 30k a year get the equivalent (or close to) a felony for their actions, I would expect the Secretary of State to get much more.
Obviously it makes it hard to have this discussion in light of someone like Trump who has escaped accountability at every turn, and attempts to do so devolve into a sick game of "which is worse". What I'd like to remind people of is what she did is a felony for most, and the constituents (and her) turned it into a meme to escape accountability. If we're big enough to say Donald Trump is bad, I think we're big enough to stop letting people trivialize this issue to their own ends too.
I don't understand why Twitter chose to remove it for "hacked materials" rather than saying it was fake. They haven't removed Wikileaks or the Panama Papers or all kinds of other hacked materials.
It makes it seem extremely political, to the point that I think they are trying to help Trump win. Which I guess makes sense, I could see how Trump being president is good for business for them.
>I don't understand why Twitter chose to remove it for "hacked materials" rather than saying it was fake.
Probably because they have no proof it is fake.
One of Biden's campaign surragates, Jenna Arnold, said "I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic or not." It seems like the Biden campaign is not even denying it.
If they removed this for being fake and it turns out to be accurate they would be called bias for not removing fake things about Trump.
Disagree on the criticism of Twitter. Their blocking the story allowed people to view the information with skepticism. That's enough to dim its potentially dangerous effects.
I do not understand something about these articles. They rightly point out that media is the underlying issue in America, but they focus on the NYT.
Secondly, the idea that "more information" will deal with misinformation, is often made, despite significant evidence that this is not true. Worse, it is Social media, which is being defended here, which has shown us that even showing people labelled misinformation allows it to stick.
What gives?
The article argues that this is because of the agenda setting power of the NYT, which links to a 1972 research paper. I took a dive into that realm of study, and its taken me an hour to get no substantiate answer either way.
As far as I can tell, Fox has far larger reach, and far larger agenda setting power for its audience. Subscriber figures are given below the line.
Secondly, the article lauds the ability of social media to talk fast - in particular communication between experts between Jan and March 2020. And then disapproves of Twitter's handling of the NY Post article, arguing that
> > Twitter’s role with regards to the Hunter Biden story should have been to facilitate more information sharing, in this case to disprove the story, not to arbitrarily decide what was or was not true.
The first argument ignores the amplification of conspiracies that are unique for social media. Here is a study on the transmission of information between conspiracy networks, and expert networks:https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554
The study says it so :
> These results suggest that news assimilation differs according to the categories. Science news is usually assimilated, i.e., it reaches a higher level of diffusion quickly, and a longer lifetime does not correspond to a higher level of interest. Conversely, conspiracy rumors are assimilated more slowly and show a positive relation between lifetime and size. For both science and conspiracy news, we compute the size as a function of the lifetime and confirm that differentiation in the sharing patterns is content-driven, and that for conspiracy there is a positive relation between size and lifetime
Which seems to be exactly how COVID misinformation behaved online. Despite the ample evidence against it.
That misinformation or confusion, was amplified by a subset of news media channels, with mask wearing becoming a political point.
If you hold the first thesis true, then shouldn't there be a discussion on media agenda setting power? And wouldn't that largely implicate one of the largest news networks in America?
And on an even broader scale - with people arguing about fixing social media (and this article rightly highlights the problem of content on SM, as opposed to the dynamics around content sharing), is the creation of problematic content not simply an issue of creating content that keeps people on the news channel?
As stated here:
>Fox is small-town/suburban and populist. Fox competes directly against hundreds of other cable channels and has established a specialized niche in its media ecology. Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons (lest the viewer push the buttons on his or her remote…
Maybe I am missing something large, but as a business model, it seems that news media + attention battles result in a bad outcome for everyone. Not just for the NYT or FOX, but for all channels.
In which case, maybe some form of reliable high quality news may be considered a public good, and then funded and protected from interference?
-----------------------------
Media impact, News papers vs Television:
The article says: "research shows that “fake news” makes up a fraction of American’s media diet; ", which links to this research paper: "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem"
The abstract states that-
> First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet.
So the cable news cycle is in effect, and the Agenda setting power of news media is significant. Which brings us to viewership figures:
Subscriber base:
NYT has 4.3 mn subscribers, as of Q2 2020. This is a relatively dramatic increase, with 3.8 mn subs in Q1, and 2.98 subs in Q2 2019.
Fox news, for prime time, had 3.98 mn viewers in Jun 2020, with its core opinion leaders:
CNN in contrast has: 2.5 mn prime time viewers for the same period.
Agenda setting power is not evenly distributed, and both audiences on the America divide behave differently, and are composed differently - creating different issues both groups are interested in.
Is the Biden laptop story really fabricated? As far as I know, the Biden campaign has not denied the veracity of the emails, which it seems like they would immediately do if they were fake.
One simple fact destroys the whole "Russia disinfo" nonsense: Hunter Biden's lawyer requested the laptop/disk drives back. If it weren't Biden's, why would he do that?
Your bias is showing. Good article overall, but you repeatedly state the Hunter Biden laptop story is false. Yet some of those in the email chain have verified authenticity of the emails. And how do you “fake” a whole Mac hard drive contents? I don’t believe it is possible.
Plus:
* The hard drive wasn’t “stolen” - it was forfeited when the customer didn’t pick it up and pay the bill. That’s called a mechanic’s lien. Try taking your car into the shop and then never pick it up - same thing happens.
* So at that point the laptop belongs to the shop.
* How is it “stolen”, then?
* If I had a laptop like that in my possession, I would be afraid too, and want to hand it off!
Not exactly a smoking gun, is it? A partisan media outfit owned by the same person as the paper publishing them in the first place using an anonymous source with no information about how they confirmed it to be authentic ... compared to the cast iron proof of the DKIM headers which still remain conspicuously absent.
The claim that the "story was fabricated" is strange. The source of the material may be unclear and quite possibly not what was originally claimed, but that does not mean the emails are fabrications - and no one from the Biden campaign has claimed that they are.
I did one Google search to see if this is true, and found a Politico story that says Biden staffers, after reviewing schedules, denied that the events described in the emails took place. So "no one is denying it" seems false. (Feel free to do the search yourself, it's easy.)
I imagine the candidate himself is not denying it, because even addressing it to defend himself from a totally false accusation turns it into a headline. Which, given the content of these leaks, is obviously the entire point of them.
This illustrates the manipulatory power of doing one Google search. Their later statement said they "wouldn't rule out the possibility of an informal meeting" but it's buried. [0]
It says that after reviewing his "official schedule" they concluded no meeting happened. I seriously doubt that an illicit meeting would be included on his "official schedule".
If you follow this kind of logic, you can believe anything about anything that isn't explicitly denied or proved. Which is a daft state of affairs to be in, no? Surely it's a one-way trip down the Conspiracy Cave once you start thinking like this?
> Biden staffers, after reviewing schedules, denied that the events described in the emails took place.
This seems to dodge the actual matter at hand. The question is whether the email conversation was fabricated or actually happened, not whether everything the participants said in the conversation was true.
The sources I saw said they denied the meetings were on his "official schedule." Which is a weaselly. Biden himself hasn't denied they occurred. That might be because they don't want to give the story any credence by denying it. But he hasn't.
The source of the material is very clear. Hunter Biden left a laptop at a repair shop, and the guy at the repair shop made multiple copies. The repair shop guy has come forward. The FBI also has at least 1 copy.
The source of the material is entirely unclear. All we know is that there exists a laptop, the source of which is unknown. It could have been Hunter Biden dropping the laptop into the repair shop. It could have been Vladmir Putin dropping it off for all we know. We certainly don't know if the laptop is Biden's. All we do know is that the story told by the repair shop guy is highly suspicious - including the explanation for why exactly he looked into the contents and why exactly he got into contact with Rudy Giuliani, or indeed whether he got in contact with Giuliani at all.
- The laptop had emails on it that were previously not public
- The laptop had pictures of Hunter and family that were previously not public
- They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
- Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
- The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
- The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign and that there's not intelligence saying it is
- No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine (only that they couldn't find a meeting on the books that matches the one in the email)
Facts in support of the laptop coming from Vladimir Putin:
- Literally nothing
By the way, he guy at the computer store came forward as to why he got in contact with Rudy Giuliani. He went to the FBI with the info and got stonewalled by them. Sensing they were covering it up, he decided to become a whistleblower and went to whoever would listen.
> - The laptop had emails on it that were previously not public
Have yet to be authenticated though?
> - They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
Can't find a source for this - only that it says "Hunter Biden". Do you have a handy URL?
> - Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
Again, can't find a source that doesn't say "allegedly" in the sentence. Do you have a handy URL with proof?
> - The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
Given they seem to think it's a Russian disinformation play being made through the campaign team of POTUS, yeah, I'd expect them to be going through it with a fine toothcomb to find out who, where, when, etc.
> The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign
Alas, his credibility is probably lower even than Guiliani's.
> that there's not intelligence saying it is
The FBI seem to be approaching things from the point of view that it is a Russian op. Awkward!
> No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine
They've also not denied that Hunter Biden is a lizard person. SUSPICIOUS.
UPDATE - News out this morning that DOJ is also confirming the laptop is genuine. You're, of course still welcome to cognitive dissonance away the entire subject and believe it's some Russian plot.
Alas, just the one account and doubly alas, no pay check from Russia. Pretty sure their rates for being controlled opposition on HN wouldn't really cover my needs.
>- The laptop had pictures of Hunter and family that were previously not public
I hear Jennifer Lawrence is part of the Ukraine scandal now too.
>- They have Hunter's signature on the drop off receipt
As already established, Vlad has Burisma's emails, so we already know he has Biden's signature.
> - Hunter's attorney requested the hard drive back (they have the request in writing)
Yes, Hunter's lawyers would probably want access to the fabricated evidence used to attack his father. That doesn't make it authentic.
> - The FBI subpeonaed the laptop
The fact the FBI investigated and didn't pursue Biden is evidence the material is not reliable.
> - The DNI himself says it's not a Russian disinformation campaign and that there's not intelligence saying it is
Ah yes, Trump's political appointee thinks Trump's personal lawyer is doing the Lords work. I'm so surprised. The ranking member of the houes intellgience committee disagrees.
>- No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop itself is genuine (only that they couldn't find a meeting on the books that matches the one in the email)
Because the ownership of a laptop is not the scandal, it's the fabricated Russian-sourced smear campaign is.
>By the way, he guy at the computer store came forward as to why he got in contact with Rudy Giuliani. He went to the FBI with the info and got stonewalled by them. Sensing they were covering it up, he decided to become a whistleblower and went to whoever would listen.
I'd love to get into the process by which a blind computer repair person trusted Rudy Giuliani more than the FBI.
tl;dr IMHO this is the Hacker News version of a New York Times Op-ed article, in both the good and bad sense.
IMHO this article is a lot of very well-argued, rational suppositions and hypotheticals. It's an op-ed piece masquerading as a watertight argument.
And it depends on a lot of "what-if's". One assumption depends on the other and in each case it comes down to "this is what I think is logical".
Maybe he's right, maybe he's not, but the thinkpiece is riddled with (reasonable) assumptions when there are probably studies or reports that have been done which could have been referred to and cited for a higher degree of certainty.
I feel like there are plenty of political scientists, people studying the internet, or just other studies, etc, which at this point have researched in depth the 2016 election, and while citing Nate Silver is a great start, if you want to make an argument for what's true, then that's insufficient.
And plenty of people making a serious study of online censorship and freedom of the press.
Nothing about the CBS article he linked to indicates that the story is fabricated. It's mostly just a series of character assassinations, from Giuliani to the computer repair guy to...the Russians.
And that, my friends, is why Facebook and Twitter's actions are not okay and why their insultingly duplicitous attempts to justify them aren't going to work. The story certainly seems fake and the NY Post is a garbage paper, but that shouldn't matter.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-po...