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I love drama and chaos as much as any nerd with too much time on their hands… but this story has not a single compelling nugget to it. Like, the tweets so far a

I love drama and chaos as much as any nerd with too much time on their hands… but this story has not a single compelling nugget to it. Like, the tweets so far are so un-juicy that I would like to ensure this doesn’t ever go to the frontpage so nobody else wastes their time reading this boring non-story. I wish it was worth reading.

gfdgfdgdfggf 4y ago
Social media executives manipulating narratives to support their favored presidential candidate is a non-story?
- phphphphp 4y ago
  There’s zero evidence of that, so far at least. The emails show nothing of the sort: they show a bunch of people ham-fistedly trying to enforce policies designed to protect the company. I look forward to seeing some evidence that people at Twitter were in cahoots in order to support Joe Biden, but thus far, there’s zero evidence of that — it’s the most mundane behaviour you could imagine.
  - gfdgfdgdfggf 4y ago
    Matt Taibbi tweeted evidence of it.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      That’s evidence that they applied their policies. There is no evidence that they applied these policies in order to favour Biden. I will happily accept evidence that they did it to favour Biden, if some is shown… but that has not happened yet.
      - lhnz 4y ago
        In their emails, they seemed to be be brainstorming ways of insisting that they were only applying their policies as normal, but not everybody agreed that this was the case. I don't think we need to read between the lines here. There were people in Twitter that felt they were overstepping things and emails from various people in the US government, but the communications team were very careful to ensure that they pointed towards their policy about hacked materials and to give themselves leeway by claiming that they were just applying an abundance of caution to the situation.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      At first glance, that doesn't seem to support your claim. Could you point out why you think it does?
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      This looks much more like evidence of Republicans trying and failing to shape a political narrative right before an election. And yes, I have dug through the contents of the laptop. Dysfunctional heir takes a lot of drugs, has a lot of sex, and has a lot of daddy issues, big whoop. Twitter's grounds for suppressing it were kinda bullshit, but they rightly suspected they were being used as the launchpad for a PR campaign and and didn't want to find themselves in a Cambridge Analytica-type situation and decided not to touch the hot potato. At least put more effort into naming your throwaway account next time.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - krapp 4y ago
    They want so bad for this to be Biden's Watergate.
    - Dig1t 4y ago
      It's also possible that some people just don't like the suppression of speech and ideas.
      - krapp 4y ago
        No, this is just an attempt to get the stink of a scandal to stick to Biden during election season because calling him a dementia-ridden pedophile wasn't resonating with the public as well as they had hoped. At best, this is a story of Twitter being over-cautious about handling potential misinformation - which is a valid criticism to make and a conversation worth having - but the narrative that the government and Twitter collaborated to suppress "the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop" in order to manipulate the election is plain BS.
        SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing. Given that it was indeed Hunter Biden's laptop, why isn't it fair to say that their overly-cautious approach to handling potential misinformation led to them attempting to suppress the truth about it? (It's also worth noting that much of the discussion - both the reporting in this thread and Twitter's original public responses - was not about misinformation but about whether the information gathered from the laptop should be considered "hacked" and therefore prohibited regardless of whether it's true.)
        krapp 4y ago
        By "the truth" I don't mean the literal truth of the laptop's existence or ownership, but to refer facetiously to the various conspiracy theories surrounding the laptop's contents, such as proof of Biden having stolen the election, child pornography, video of him doing drugs with Hunter, evidence that he and Fauci manufactured COVID, etc. Something damning that the Democrats and Twitter (being puppets of the DNC) desperately wanted suppressed because it would immediately disqualify Biden as a candidate if it got out. But as far as is known, the laptop contained nothing of the sort. Hunter Biden being a drug-using fuckup who trades on his father's fame isn't a scandal, it's basic rich kid behavior.
sva_ 4y ago
I feel like it might be of relevance to the hacker community in what way social media companies attempt to shape our views and opinions. The mere fact that this may be seen as targeted at one party or another really shouldn't matter (I'm not American and so luckily don't have to choose between Democrats/Republicans, as I find them both pretty dreadful - Republicans more so.) But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.
- assttoasstmgr 4y ago
  The hacker culture of the 90s and 00s is dead. Many in the community now fully support censorship as long as it's of the opposing team. This would be unheard of 20 years ago.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    Except so far none of the emails have talked about political allegiance, they’ve all talked about Twitter policies.
  - oska 4y ago
    It's definitely not dead; there are some amazing projects being hacked on right now. But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story). I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space. (And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)
    - 4y ago
dmix 4y ago
This sounds exactly like the typical response to Snowden's release "Of course we knew the NSA was reading our emails, who cares?" Seeing how the sausage gets made is critically important to stopping it in the future.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  Maybe I’m not deep enough in the weeds on the laptop story to understand the bigger picture, but so far, all the emails have shown are that members of the US government (which regulates Twitter) have the ability to contact Twitter and Twitter (as an organisation) does what it thinks will best ensure the survival of the company. This is a company that has executives forced to sit in front of and answer to congress, of course they would behave this way? What other possible outcome could there be? The problem here is, surely, using the NSA example, that the government has the power to regulate Twitter (which in turn puts pressure on Twitter to comply with the government). But that’s not what the story is apparently about, apparently the story is about the democrats?
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    The US government regulates Twitter? News to me.
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      I guess you could try to massage the word “regulate” to make it untrue but given Twitter has literally been fined by the FTC multiple times and is subject to a consent decree which applies legal culpability to Twitter executives unless they do what the FTC require… they are absolutely at the behest of the US government.
      - idlewords 4y ago
        They also have to obey fire codes and file extensive reports to the IRS about each employee!
  - 4y ago
ilyt 4y ago
Well if you're drama starved "just" confirmation that they purposefully manipulated public opinion, the thing that was already obvious, isn't exactly another drama to watch but nonetheless it's good to get confirmation of that
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
How about the fact that they knew their justified reason for blocking the content, hacked materials, was an utter farce, and yet they kept on trucking along with bald faced lies? What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?
- RavingGoat 4y ago
  Same as it is now with Elon in charge

gfdgfdgdfggf 4y ago

Social media executives manipulating narratives to support their favored presidential candidate is a non-story?

phphphphp 4y ago
There’s zero evidence of that, so far at least. The emails show nothing of the sort: they show a bunch of people ham-fistedly trying to enforce policies designed to protect the company. I look forward to seeing some evidence that people at Twitter were in cahoots in order to support Joe Biden, but thus far, there’s zero evidence of that — it’s the most mundane behaviour you could imagine.
- gfdgfdgdfggf 4y ago
  Matt Taibbi tweeted evidence of it.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598831758207696896
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    That’s evidence that they applied their policies. There is no evidence that they applied these policies in order to favour Biden. I will happily accept evidence that they did it to favour Biden, if some is shown… but that has not happened yet.
    - lhnz 4y ago
      In their emails, they seemed to be be brainstorming ways of insisting that they were only applying their policies as normal, but not everybody agreed that this was the case. I don't think we need to read between the lines here. There were people in Twitter that felt they were overstepping things and emails from various people in the US government, but the communications team were very careful to ensure that they pointed towards their policy about hacked materials and to give themselves leeway by claiming that they were just applying an abundance of caution to the situation.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    At first glance, that doesn't seem to support your claim. Could you point out why you think it does?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    This looks much more like evidence of Republicans trying and failing to shape a political narrative right before an election. And yes, I have dug through the contents of the laptop. Dysfunctional heir takes a lot of drugs, has a lot of sex, and has a lot of daddy issues, big whoop. Twitter's grounds for suppressing it were kinda bullshit, but they rightly suspected they were being used as the launchpad for a PR campaign and and didn't want to find themselves in a Cambridge Analytica-type situation and decided not to touch the hot potato. At least put more effort into naming your throwaway account next time.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- krapp 4y ago
  They want so bad for this to be Biden's Watergate.
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    It's also possible that some people just don't like the suppression of speech and ideas.
    - krapp 4y ago
      No, this is just an attempt to get the stink of a scandal to stick to Biden during election season because calling him a dementia-ridden pedophile wasn't resonating with the public as well as they had hoped. At best, this is a story of Twitter being over-cautious about handling potential misinformation - which is a valid criticism to make and a conversation worth having - but the narrative that the government and Twitter collaborated to suppress "the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop" in order to manipulate the election is plain BS.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing. Given that it was indeed Hunter Biden's laptop, why isn't it fair to say that their overly-cautious approach to handling potential misinformation led to them attempting to suppress the truth about it? (It's also worth noting that much of the discussion - both the reporting in this thread and Twitter's original public responses - was not about misinformation but about whether the information gathered from the laptop should be considered "hacked" and therefore prohibited regardless of whether it's true.)
        krapp 4y ago
        By "the truth" I don't mean the literal truth of the laptop's existence or ownership, but to refer facetiously to the various conspiracy theories surrounding the laptop's contents, such as proof of Biden having stolen the election, child pornography, video of him doing drugs with Hunter, evidence that he and Fauci manufactured COVID, etc. Something damning that the Democrats and Twitter (being puppets of the DNC) desperately wanted suppressed because it would immediately disqualify Biden as a candidate if it got out. But as far as is known, the laptop contained nothing of the sort. Hunter Biden being a drug-using fuckup who trades on his father's fame isn't a scandal, it's basic rich kid behavior.

sva_ 4y ago

I feel like it might be of relevance to the hacker community in what way social media companies attempt to shape our views and opinions. The mere fact that this may be seen as targeted at one party or another really shouldn't matter (I'm not American and so luckily don't have to choose between Democrats/Republicans, as I find them both pretty dreadful - Republicans more so.) But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago
The hacker culture of the 90s and 00s is dead. Many in the community now fully support censorship as long as it's of the opposing team. This would be unheard of 20 years ago.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Except so far none of the emails have talked about political allegiance, they’ve all talked about Twitter policies.
- oska 4y ago
  It's definitely not dead; there are some amazing projects being hacked on right now. But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story). I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space. (And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)
  - 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

This sounds exactly like the typical response to Snowden's release "Of course we knew the NSA was reading our emails, who cares?" Seeing how the sausage gets made is critically important to stopping it in the future.

phphphphp 4y ago
Maybe I’m not deep enough in the weeds on the laptop story to understand the bigger picture, but so far, all the emails have shown are that members of the US government (which regulates Twitter) have the ability to contact Twitter and Twitter (as an organisation) does what it thinks will best ensure the survival of the company. This is a company that has executives forced to sit in front of and answer to congress, of course they would behave this way? What other possible outcome could there be? The problem here is, surely, using the NSA example, that the government has the power to regulate Twitter (which in turn puts pressure on Twitter to comply with the government). But that’s not what the story is apparently about, apparently the story is about the democrats?
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  The US government regulates Twitter? News to me.
  - phphphphp 4y ago
    I guess you could try to massage the word “regulate” to make it untrue but given Twitter has literally been fined by the FTC multiple times and is subject to a consent decree which applies legal culpability to Twitter executives unless they do what the FTC require… they are absolutely at the behest of the US government.
    - idlewords 4y ago
      They also have to obey fire codes and file extensive reports to the IRS about each employee!
- 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

Well if you're drama starved "just" confirmation that they purposefully manipulated public opinion, the thing that was already obvious, isn't exactly another drama to watch but nonetheless it's good to get confirmation of that

PathOfEclipse 4y ago

How about the fact that they knew their justified reason for blocking the content, hacked materials, was an utter farce, and yet they kept on trucking along with bald faced lies? What's the point of a public moderation policy if the internal policy is to do whatever you want?

RavingGoat 4y ago
Same as it is now with Elon in charge