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

[sebastian_dangerfield]

If the social change you attribute to DEI is that corporations now perform expensive performative rituals, I would say (1) speaking as a manager in corporate America, you are overestimating the expense, and, more importantly, (2) the kind of social change that DEI advocates have been looking for is to foster a culture of social equality, and even expensive performative corporate rituals weren't the point.

A DEI manager is a six figure position. It's not huge dollars, but not pocket change either.

And you miss the fact that a ton of managers don't want to adopt it at all. But because it has become a sort of industry standard thing, it becomes (I hate this word, but it's necessary here) best practices. Once something is adopted widely, it becomes compulsory. An HR manager says, "Look, when in Rome... And it's a hedge against claims... and creates a nice feel good story."

The great thing about this kind of argument by hypothetical is that it is completely speculative, and so completely irrefutable.

It's not speculative at all. Anything related to Trump is front page immediately. We heard about hookers and golden showers in Moscow for months, and no one in the media stepped back and asked if that was reckless. Then it was proven to be bullshit, and nobody in the media apologized for any of it. All is fair with the Orange Man.

He deserves this, no doubt, and courts it, but still - it is a double standard.

I personally don't want to see dick pics from anyone, including both Hunter Biden and Don Jr. I am 100% OK with editorial judgment by the media that permits me not to see them.

The Post wasn't showing dick pics. The Post was merely writing about a laptop that had all sorts of material damaging to Joe and Hunter on it.

It's telling that it's not that you want to see Hunter Biden dick pics, it's that you see a double standard. We started with the idea that you were defending the freedom of expression from authoritarians, but now you are complaining that about a double standard involving the publication of hypothetical dick pics. Life comes at you fast.

I share your lack of interest in dick pics. The Post was exercising free expression - providing a story of public interest. A late campaign surprise, like Hillary's strategic drop of the "grab them by the pussy" tape. The Post story was every bit as newsworthy as the Access Hollywood interview of Trump. One was carried in every media outlet on earth. The other was ignored in legacy media and silenced in social media.

(I'll reply in advance to your facile attempt to distinguish the stories by stating one involves the son of a candidate rather than the candidate by noting the laptop contained info regarding Joe, not just Hunter.)

Actually, no. I just told you that Twitter's policy was not to publish stuff that had been hacked. The misinformation is in your version of the facts, and there is no stanching it. God Bless America! You continue to be free to receive and disseminate all sorts of nutty things.

Right, just like Twitter's refusal to allow links to the Times' publishing of Trump's stolen tax return showing a $900mil loss.

I don't see authoritarian creep on the left because I think the fringe lefties you're talking about are not in any danger of taking any real power anywhere in this country, and when I and the rest of the world talk about authoritarianism, we are talking about government control over things, not a couple of guys on Twitter. YMMV.

Actually, it's a couple guys in the C Suite of Twitter who were working with NSA and FBI folks to massage narratives. I mean, you could read Bari Weiss on this. And you probably did read her when she was at the Times. But then she started criticizing the narratives you prefer, so you'll of course assert that all of the info she published about Twitter after Musk bought it establishing govt-concerted efforts to control what was said on the platform are just... quackery.

MAGA types currently occupy all sorts of government offices all over the country, and there is a real danger that Trump will win the next presidential election. (You never actually name the leftist bogeymen who get you all hot and bothered.)

You're not seriously buying that hysterical conspiracy theory that Trump has an army of bureaucrats placed in positions to grant him the election in 2024. That's Alex Jones level silliness, and I'm not dignifying anything that frivolous with a response.

If you say the left and the right are equivalent, and I say, no they're not, it doesn't mean that I think the left is perfect. I'm saying that differences between right and left are real and important, and should be acknowledged and discussed.

Totally agree. The right is far more aggressive and seeking direct control. Hence, I referred to it as Orwellian. Boot on the neck. Couldn't agree with you more. The left, however, is for more effective, as it is capturing the culture - the legacy media, a large chunk of social media, academia, corporate management. And as Huxley described in Brave New World, it is suggesting, both carrot and stick in hand, that the masses had better take their Soma and do as the People Who Know Best (maleducated knuckleheads of our strata who fancy ourselves wise wonks) tell them to do. It is subtle, but it's also obvious. You have to be willfully obtuse to miss it.

It just depends on how you do it. The issue here is that when you talk about poking fun at DEI, what you really mean is trying to make a so-called "joke" that tells everyone you think DEI is a waste of time and money. In the sort of large company that we are talking about, there is an understanding that once business decisions get made, there is a time to shelve your personal views and pitch in to make the plan work. If you're at the table when someone is deciding whether to invest in DEI, you can absolutely say it's not a good use of money. Once the decision is made, it's time to support that decision. People who can't do that are disruptive, and they get weeded out.

See my earlier comment about "best practices." It's pretty much compulsory, and you'd be an utter fool to argue against its adoption at any stage. The smarter play is to adopt, let it fail as it often does, or succeed, and wait out the current moral panic over "equity" and "inequality" until the thing burns out from its own heat, as moral panics and fashionable manias will.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

A DEI manager is a six figure position. It's not huge dollars, but not pocket change either.

And you miss the fact that a ton of managers don't want to adopt it at all. But because it has become a sort of industry standard thing, it becomes (I hate this word, but it's necessary here) best practices. Once something is adopted widely, it becomes compulsory. An HR manager says, "Look, when in Rome... And it's a hedge against claims... and creates a nice feel good story."

You are completely missing my point, which is that the people behind DEI efforts are *not* trying to create six-figure jobs for DEI managers. They are trying to change society, but they aren't changing much. But they are providing a fig-leaf for large corporations.

It's not speculative at all. Anything related to Trump is front page immediately. We heard about hookers and golden showers in Moscow for months, and no one in the media stepped back and asked if that was reckless. Then it was proven to be bullshit, and nobody in the media apologized for any of it. All is fair with the Orange Man.

He deserves this, no doubt, and courts it, but still - it is a double standard.

Are there double standards? Sure. (For example, if Joe Biden said crazy things that Trump says all the time, the media would completely flip out, and rightly so. Trump says them and it's not news.) Does that mean the left is authoritarian? No.

The Post wasn't showing dick pics. The Post was merely writing about a laptop that had all sorts of material damaging to Joe and Hunter on it.

I share your lack of interest in dick pics. The Post was exercising free expression - providing a story of public interest. A late campaign surprise, like Hillary's strategic drop of the "grab them by the pussy" tape. The Post story was every bit as newsworthy as the Access Hollywood interview of Trump. One was carried in every media outlet on earth. The other was ignored in legacy media and silenced in social media.

There was and is widespread skepticism about what was actually on the laptop, because of questions about the chain of custody and because of the poor credibility of key people (e.g., Giuliani) involved in the story. (The fact that some contents of the laptop are legit does not, of course, mean that everything on it is legit.)

This country has many, many, many media outlets. Some ran the story, and some did not, each according to its own editorial standards. The government prevented none of them publishing.

In other words, there is no First Amendment issue here, period, full stop. There is no authoritarianism going on in this story. Indeed, the federal government was, at the time, run by Trump, so I suppose it's a testament to our media's editorial independence that many outlets felt free not to run the story.

(I'll reply in advance to your facile attempt to distinguish the stories by stating one involves the son of a candidate rather than the candidate by noting the laptop contained info regarding Joe, not just Hunter.)

We both know that the allegations about Joe and the Ukrainian prosecutor are empty, and that the GOP wanted the Hunter Biden dick pics in the news before the election. That was the point.

Right, just like Twitter's refusal to allow links to the Times' publishing of Trump's stolen tax return showing a $900mil loss.

God help anyone who tries to defend the application of Twitter's policies. A good friend was a top lawyer there. It's an impossible job.

Actually, it's a couple guys in the C Suite of Twitter who were working with NSA and FBI folks to massage narratives. I mean, you could read Bari Weiss on this. And you probably did read her when she was at the Times. But then she started criticizing the narratives you prefer, so you'll of course assert that all of the info she published about Twitter after Musk bought it establishing govt-concerted efforts to control what was said on the platform are just... quackery.

I have looked at what she and Taibbi came up with from what Musk gave them, and it was the weakest of weak sauce, twisted and amplified in the retelling by the kind of morons on Twitter whom you would try to escape at a party.

Who, specifically, "in the C Suite of Twitter" do you think was "working with the NSA and folks to massage narratives." Facts, or it didn't happen.

You're not seriously buying that hysterical conspiracy theory that Trump has an army of bureaucrats placed in positions to grant him the election in 2024.

No, I'm pointing out that MAGA Republicans are currently holding seats in the Senate and Congress, statewide office in many states, and many state legislative seats. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory.

Totally agree. The right is far more aggressive and seeking direct control. Hence, I referred to it as Orwellian. Boot on the neck. Couldn't agree with you more. The left, however, is for more effective, as it is capturing the culture - the legacy media, a large chunk of social media, academia, corporate management. And as Huxley described in Brave New World, it is suggesting, both carrot and stick in hand, that the masses had better take their Soma and do as the People Who Know Best (maleducated knuckleheads of our strata who fancy ourselves wise wonks) tell them to do. It is subtle, but it's also obvious. You have to be willfully obtuse to miss it.

I'm glad you perceive reality, but your grasp of cause and effect is weak. The "left" is not "capturing the culture." There's no carrot and no stick. It's the other way around. The culture has changed. What most people want is where most media, business and schools are. It's not like mainstream institutions were all taken over by Maoists who brainwashed everyone.

The mainstream is most of the country. It changes, because that's what it does, and yes, the country has been mostly growing more liberal and less conservative for decades. The "left" of your imagination is a tiny fraction of people who have almost never had power and almost never will have power. Conservatives are a much larger fraction primarily motivated by resistance to and grievance about social change. (Hence "Make American Great Again.")

See my earlier comment about "best practices." It's pretty much compulsory, and you'd be an utter fool to argue against its adoption at any stage. The smarter play is to adopt, let it fail as it often does, or succeed, and wait out the current moral panic over "equity" and "inequality" until the thing burns out from its own heat, as moral panics and fashionable manias will.

Thanks for the advice, but I am familiar with the way these issues play out within actual companies, large and small.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Greedy, you might find this review of Marty Peretz's memoir interesting:

https://thebaffler.com/latest/everyb...es-marty-klion

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Ty:

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

From those rabid right wingers at the Daily Mail.

[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?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

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

Or something, yes.

[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]

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]

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.