Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Ty:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...en-laptop.html

From those rabid right wingers at the Daily Mail.

You're kidding, right? Don't know this site, but this matches what I know about the Daily Mail:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/

eta: OK, I tried to read that. It is tendentious nonsense. In addition to the credibility issues with the Daily Mail, Shellenberger has his own, and if you want to hear that from a respective non-lefty, read Slate Star Codex's lengthy review of San Fransicko. It's not that he make shit up, he pushes the facts about as far as they can go. If you are relying on his version of the facts, well, you shouldn't.

To you, what is the single most damning fact in that story (as opposed to conclusory statements about what Shellenberger thinks shared without support)?

I mean, seriously. You find that junk persuasive? The most telling thing about it is the republication of the lurid and embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden, which to any fair-minded person is a big fat reminder that the Hunter Biden episode is a continuing dirty-tricks effort by conservatives to make bad news for Joe Biden.

Lobbying Twitter is not a crime or a violation of the First Amendment, and everyone understands that Musk was selective about what he shared with Shellenberger and the others. If you don't think conservatives were lobbying Twitter just as hard, you are deluding yourself. Try reading this more neutral account of the Twitter Files from NPR, and then rethink that breathless Daily Mail piece. Or this New York Magazine piece, refuting the Post's theory of the case:

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice-president. Burisma was not paying Hunter $50,000 a month for his expertise on the Eastern European natural-gas market. It was paying to be one degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.

This is sordid. But it’s also mundane. If influence peddling were illegal, K Street would house a sprawling penitentiary. Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal. Joe Biden changing U.S. policy to aid that monetization effort would be. Thus, the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny.

The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing. The tabloid did uncover an apparent email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, had sent to Hunter Biden in April 2015, wherein Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” Given unfettered access to 217 gigabytes of (what was ostensibly) Hunter Biden’s personal data, this was the closest the Post could come to evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption: an email that suggested that one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma had some unspecified form of contact with Joe Biden during a trip to D.C. The message does not indicate that Pozharskyi received a private audience with the vice-president, let alone one in which he got to lobby Biden for Burisma’s interests.

Nevertheless, the Post characterized this as a “smoking-gun email.” It proceeded to assert that after his meeting with Pozharskyi, the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” This was false.

It is true that, as vice-president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs. And not without reason. Troves of diamonds, cash, and other assorted valuables were discovered at the homes of Shokin’s underlings, indicating that they had been taking bribes. Yet the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office declined to take the officials to court; individual prosecutors who tried to pursue the case were fired or resigned.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Post claimed otherwise solely on the basis of statements that Shokin made after losing his job. Beyond the fact that Shokin is an unreliable narrator with a clear motive to disparage Joe Biden, even Shokin’s remarks themselves did not actually support the tabloid’s claims: While the Post reported that Shokin “was investigating” Burisma at the time he was fired, Shokin only claims that he had made “specific plans” to investigate the company. Conveniently, whereas an active investigation could be affirmed or falsified by a paper trail, it is impossible to disprove what Shokin did or did not “plan” to do.

All of which is to say: On its face, the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading.

And at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value. On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been on a crusade to generate incriminating information about the Bidens’ relationship with Burisma. Anyone in that chain of custody could have added files to the laptop. The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

Subsequently, forensic analysts would confirm the authenticity of some of Hunter Biden’s documents, while concluding that much of the data lacked the cryptographic signatures necessary for verification.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election. These concerns were, of course, informed by the fact that Russian agents had hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016 as part of a political interference campaign.

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content-moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message.

In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision. Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”

In the version of pre-Musk Twitter conjured by conservative rhetoric, one would expect universal assent to this judgment, if not, replies reading, “Yes! This is an excellent pretext for a coup against the bad orange man!” But Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” This makes it sound as though Roth’s avowed concerns about hacking were just a fig leaf for suppressing a story inconvenient for Democrats.

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day. By suppressing it for such a short period of time, while generating a giant media controversy about the story, it is plausible that Twitter’s decision-making actually increased the Post article’s reach.

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules. ....

Get a grip.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

You're kidding, right? Don't know this site, but this matches what I know about the Daily Mail:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/

eta: OK, I tried to read that. It is tendentious nonsense. In addition to the credibility issues with the Daily Mail, Shellenberger has his own, and if you want to hear that from a respective non-lefty, read Slate Star Codex's lengthy review of San Fransicko. It's not that he make shit up, he pushes the facts about as far as they can go. If you are relying on his version of the facts, well, you shouldn't.

To you, what is the single most damning fact in that story (as opposed to conclusory statements about what Shellenberger thinks shared without support)?

I mean, seriously. You find that junk persuasive? The most telling thing about it is the republication of the lurid and embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden, which to any fair-minded person is a big fat reminder that the Hunter Biden episode is a continuing dirty-tricks effort by conservatives to make bad news for Joe Biden.

Lobbying Twitter is not a crime or a violation of the First Amendment, and everyone understands that Musk was selective about what he shared with Shellenberger and the others. If you don't think conservatives were lobbying Twitter just as hard, you are deluding yourself. Try reading this more neutral account of the Twitter Files from NPR, and then rethink that breathless Daily Mail piece. Or this New York Magazine piece, refuting the Post's theory of the case:

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice-president. Burisma was not paying Hunter $50,000 a month for his expertise on the Eastern European natural-gas market. It was paying to be one degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.

This is sordid. But it’s also mundane. If influence peddling were illegal, K Street would house a sprawling penitentiary. Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal. Joe Biden changing U.S. policy to aid that monetization effort would be. Thus, the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny.

The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing. The tabloid did uncover an apparent email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, had sent to Hunter Biden in April 2015, wherein Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” Given unfettered access to 217 gigabytes of (what was ostensibly) Hunter Biden’s personal data, this was the closest the Post could come to evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption: an email that suggested that one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma had some unspecified form of contact with Joe Biden during a trip to D.C. The message does not indicate that Pozharskyi received a private audience with the vice-president, let alone one in which he got to lobby Biden for Burisma’s interests.

Nevertheless, the Post characterized this as a “smoking-gun email.” It proceeded to assert that after his meeting with Pozharskyi, the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” This was false.

It is true that, as vice-president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs. And not without reason. Troves of diamonds, cash, and other assorted valuables were discovered at the homes of Shokin’s underlings, indicating that they had been taking bribes. Yet the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office declined to take the officials to court; individual prosecutors who tried to pursue the case were fired or resigned.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Post claimed otherwise solely on the basis of statements that Shokin made after losing his job. Beyond the fact that Shokin is an unreliable narrator with a clear motive to disparage Joe Biden, even Shokin’s remarks themselves did not actually support the tabloid’s claims: While the Post reported that Shokin “was investigating” Burisma at the time he was fired, Shokin only claims that he had made “specific plans” to investigate the company. Conveniently, whereas an active investigation could be affirmed or falsified by a paper trail, it is impossible to disprove what Shokin did or did not “plan” to do.

All of which is to say: On its face, the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading.

And at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value. On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been on a crusade to generate incriminating information about the Bidens’ relationship with Burisma. Anyone in that chain of custody could have added files to the laptop. The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

Subsequently, forensic analysts would confirm the authenticity of some of Hunter Biden’s documents, while concluding that much of the data lacked the cryptographic signatures necessary for verification.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election. These concerns were, of course, informed by the fact that Russian agents had hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016 as part of a political interference campaign.

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content-moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message.

In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision. Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”

In the version of pre-Musk Twitter conjured by conservative rhetoric, one would expect universal assent to this judgment, if not, replies reading, “Yes! This is an excellent pretext for a coup against the bad orange man!” But Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” This makes it sound as though Roth’s avowed concerns about hacking were just a fig leaf for suppressing a story inconvenient for Democrats.

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day. By suppressing it for such a short period of time, while generating a giant media controversy about the story, it is plausible that Twitter’s decision-making actually increased the Post article’s reach.

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules. ....

Get a grip.

Did both you guys get laid off or retire or something?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

You're kidding, right? Don't know this site, but this matches what I know about the Daily Mail:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/

eta: OK, I tried to read that. It is tendentious nonsense. In addition to the credibility issues with the Daily Mail, Shellenberger has his own, and if you want to hear that from a respective non-lefty, read Slate Star Codex's lengthy review of San Fransicko. It's not that he make shit up, he pushes the facts about as far as they can go. If you are relying on his version of the facts, well, you shouldn't.

To you, what is the single most damning fact in that story (as opposed to conclusory statements about what Shellenberger thinks shared without support)?

I mean, seriously. You find that junk persuasive? The most telling thing about it is the republication of the lurid and embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden, which to any fair-minded person is a big fat reminder that the Hunter Biden episode is a continuing dirty-tricks effort by conservatives to make bad news for Joe Biden.

Lobbying Twitter is not a crime or a violation of the First Amendment, and everyone understands that Musk was selective about what he shared with Shellenberger and the others. If you don't think conservatives were lobbying Twitter just as hard, you are deluding yourself. Try reading this more neutral account of the Twitter Files from NPR, and then rethink that breathless Daily Mail piece. Or this New York Magazine piece, refuting the Post's theory of the case:

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice-president. Burisma was not paying Hunter $50,000 a month for his expertise on the Eastern European natural-gas market. It was paying to be one degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.

This is sordid. But it’s also mundane. If influence peddling were illegal, K Street would house a sprawling penitentiary. Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal. Joe Biden changing U.S. policy to aid that monetization effort would be. Thus, the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny.

The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing. The tabloid did uncover an apparent email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, had sent to Hunter Biden in April 2015, wherein Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” Given unfettered access to 217 gigabytes of (what was ostensibly) Hunter Biden’s personal data, this was the closest the Post could come to evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption: an email that suggested that one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma had some unspecified form of contact with Joe Biden during a trip to D.C. The message does not indicate that Pozharskyi received a private audience with the vice-president, let alone one in which he got to lobby Biden for Burisma’s interests.

Nevertheless, the Post characterized this as a “smoking-gun email.” It proceeded to assert that after his meeting with Pozharskyi, the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” This was false.

It is true that, as vice-president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs. And not without reason. Troves of diamonds, cash, and other assorted valuables were discovered at the homes of Shokin’s underlings, indicating that they had been taking bribes. Yet the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office declined to take the officials to court; individual prosecutors who tried to pursue the case were fired or resigned.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Post claimed otherwise solely on the basis of statements that Shokin made after losing his job. Beyond the fact that Shokin is an unreliable narrator with a clear motive to disparage Joe Biden, even Shokin’s remarks themselves did not actually support the tabloid’s claims: While the Post reported that Shokin “was investigating” Burisma at the time he was fired, Shokin only claims that he had made “specific plans” to investigate the company. Conveniently, whereas an active investigation could be affirmed or falsified by a paper trail, it is impossible to disprove what Shokin did or did not “plan” to do.

All of which is to say: On its face, the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading.

And at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value. On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been on a crusade to generate incriminating information about the Bidens’ relationship with Burisma. Anyone in that chain of custody could have added files to the laptop. The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

Subsequently, forensic analysts would confirm the authenticity of some of Hunter Biden’s documents, while concluding that much of the data lacked the cryptographic signatures necessary for verification.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election. These concerns were, of course, informed by the fact that Russian agents had hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016 as part of a political interference campaign.

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content-moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message.

In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision. Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”

In the version of pre-Musk Twitter conjured by conservative rhetoric, one would expect universal assent to this judgment, if not, replies reading, “Yes! This is an excellent pretext for a coup against the bad orange man!” But Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” This makes it sound as though Roth’s avowed concerns about hacking were just a fig leaf for suppressing a story inconvenient for Democrats.

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day. By suppressing it for such a short period of time, while generating a giant media controversy about the story, it is plausible that Twitter’s decision-making actually increased the Post article’s reach.

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules. ....

Get a grip.

Nice ad hominem on Schellenberger. But is he wrong here?

No.

Get your panties out of a bunch. That you had to look so hard and far to refute by use of a review of a book on another subject, and haven’t refuted the factual statements of the article… well…

Have a tequila. And understand… Your view isn’t factual; it’s biased.

For the record, I totally agree that Trump lobbied Twitter as well. Weiss makes a huge point of that in her articles. Damned both-sider!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Fuck cancer. That is all.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Fuck cancer. That is all.

2. Generically or some reason in particular?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Fuck cancer. That is all.

Fuck cancer^3.

Whatever you are dealing with, let me know if I can help, and wishing you strength.

[Icky Thump]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Fuck cancer. That is all.

Fuck it hard.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Nice ad hominem on Schellenberger. But is he wrong here?

Wrong about what? Like I asked you, pick the single most damning fact that's actually in that article.

If you insist on sharing non-credible sources like the Daily Mail and Shellenberger, whose name is spelled without a c and whose stuff I have read, I will point out that you are sharing lousy sources.

But you'll notice that I also posted a long piece explaining why he and the others were wrong about the Twitter files.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

2. Generically or some reason in particular?

Just found out that a close friend from college is in hospice.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Just found out that a close friend from college is in hospice.

Sorry.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Just found out that a close friend from college is in hospice.

Wishing them the best possible. May they be surrounded by loved ones at the end.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Wrong about what? Like I asked you, pick the single most damning fact that's actually in that article.

If you insist on sharing non-credible sources like the Daily Mail and Shellenberger, whose name is spelled without a c and whose stuff I have read, I will point out that you are sharing lousy sources.

But you'll notice that I also posted a long piece explaining why he and the others were wrong about the Twitter files.

More globally: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/t...ent-part-1.php

If you read this thread at all honestly, Yoel Roth of Twitter is telling Baker the Post’s story does not violate guidelines. In the face of this, Baker holds, tenuously, to the proposition, “We don’t know… it might be hacked.” https://twitter.com/mtaibbi

You’ve dealt with media. As have most of us here. Lying to media is easy if it’s not securities stuff. Who cares? No duty is owed. That’s where Baker came down on this: Plausible deniability. That’s all one needs.

It was the smart play for him. But not necessarily the smart play for Twitter? So it must be asked… Who was he really serving? Not Roth, who disagreed.

ETA: The Post’s Twitter page was blocked for 16 days, not one.

And… Please show me Twitter’s banning of links to the NYTines’ story about the stolen portion of Trump’s tax returns. Link please.

Look, you can’t win this. Just fucking let it go with this understanding: There is a rule, and I get it it, among many “gatekeepers” that any and all means must be employed to stop Trump and his brand of authoritarian populism. Ends justify means.

I get it. We all get it. But stop pretending there’s not a double standard. People hate that bullshit. They’d be more receptive to the truth: “Yeah. We in media love him as a carnival act for ratings and clicks. But we are allowed to do Whatever It Takes after we’ve made our money to try to stop him from ever acquiring power again.” That’s at least economically defensible.

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Thanks.

You all should know you're part of the support network that makes it happen. A big piece of fighting this stuff is staying engaged and vital, and frankly while I joke about it getting called out on spelling goofs caring about that stuff and mixing it up over trump or bush or whatever is part of staying vital. So thanks for giving me shit.

We're all glad you're not a coward like this guy:

https://www.theonion.com/loved-ones-...nce-1819565052

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

He's a narcissist, but I don't think most people would say that's a mental problem.

I think he's off his fucking rocker.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Wrong about what? Like I asked you, pick the single most damning fact that's actually in that article.

If you insist on sharing non-credible sources like the Daily Mail and Shellenberger, whose name is spelled without a c and whose stuff I have read, I will point out that you are sharing lousy sources.

But you'll notice that I also posted a long piece explaining why he and the others were wrong about the Twitter files.

Remember when he cited Cernovich? Good times.