Because it was a dubiously sourced story at the height of a highly chaotic election campaign. You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents - but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.
> You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress...
No, I 'literally cannot even.' I cannot see how a platform might want to suppress anything except, perhaps, gore videos and child pornography. And that includes links to Mastodon and the ElonJet account, but I don't feel like I should have to put this disclaimer up just so people will stop telling me that I wanted to look at Hunter Biden's penis.
Sure, I can follow the proposed line of reasoning, but it is evident that instead of swaying the election because of fake news, they may have swayed the election because of not fake news. They were aware of this possibility, and yet the soldiered on censoring that story, so I'm not convinced that their actual reasoning was that they honestly did not want to sway the election.
Did you miss what happened with facebook in the wake of the 2016 election and brexit? They took the blame for all the misinformation that was flying around, being a vehicle for russian troll farms, etc. A lot of that was rightly so, imo, but even if you don’t think they did anything wrong the perception that they did something wrong hurt them financially. You may believe that a company like twitter or fb should act like a dumb pipe - but they’re operating in a capitalist system - they have a huge incentive to avoid things that will hurt them financially. You think they did it because they wanted to swing the election dem, but i don’t believe that for a second. I think they were motivated by wanted to not be seen as swinging the election at all. That means suppressing any sketchy stories.
Personal politics may have made them a little more skeptical of a story sourced from rudy guiliani than one from a sketchy source on the left - but honestly if you’re not deeply skeptical of stories sourced from rudy at this point, I’m sorry to say but you are biased away from truth.
If you want twitter / fb / etc to be dumb pipes you need them to operate outside of market forces. Either by being regulated by gov as a common carrier, privatized by someone with high minded ideals enough to resist banning anyone who criticizes him and doesn’t mind losing money on it, or by being run by some non-governmental foundation. Under capitalist motivations, you’re not going to get a dumb pipe.
So far none of those things are happening. Expect twitter to continue to be not a dumb pipe, not a zone of free speech, just biased in a different way under its new management - less about maximizing $$ and more about protecting its owners interests.
Same thing. But the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only fake news, it was completely irrelevant, because Hunter Biden wasn't running for office, and unlike Trump's children, Biden's children don't work for him. And yet the fake story was leveraged by political operatives to sway the election. After all the issues of fake news swaying the 2016 election, Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
The part it contained about "10% for the big guy" (Joe Biden) was 100% newsworthy.
It wasn't fake news and deep down all the downvoters know it.
Suppressing it when it was known to be true was also a story.
>Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
Actually they were at the forefront of spreading fake news as three actual journalists disclosed. Did you not even read the coverage? Because it sounds like you didn't. I even provided links to all of it above.
Let me know after reading it if your views have changed.
They probably tried to mitigate the worst of the fake news. It's pretty hard to stop all fake news these days.
Most news about Hunter Biden seems to be coming mostly from tabloids with a questionable relationship with the truth, and a political axe to grind. Even Fox News, a station known for its flexibility in what they call truth, passed on the story due to credibility concerns.
As far as I can tell, there's no convincing evidence that any of those questionable emails are authentic, and although a few of the emails do seem to be authentic, it's not clear that the hard disk itself is, and there's plenty of evidence that that hard disk has been messed with and has lots of content planted on it by others.
So everything about this smells like a dirty political hit job that even half of the Murdoch empire doesn't want anything to do with. And even if there is something here, it still pales in comparison to the corruption that Trump and his kids are still getting away with. Everything about this smells like a dirty political witch hunt based on made up or strongly manipulated "evidence".
Yes, you absolutely are. Nothing in my comment suggested you are not.
The comment I responded to specifically was upset about censorship targeted at tweeting Mastodon links and not another version of censorship which came in the exact same form but targeted X links. I just gave X a name.
I find it somewhat absurd that a person would become indignant when the link is Y instead of X.
Hey, you broke the site guidelines exceedingly badly in this and other comments in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do that.
I'm not going to ban you for it because I understand that people go on tilt sometimes—it happens. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Sorry? Could you please identify what, specifically, you found homophobic about the comment? I think your comment reflects more upon you than it does upon my comment.
