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Comment by NeverFade | Hacker News Reader

> NYP would have showed how they verified the information then twitter would have let them spread the info.

Did Twitter or Facebook ever ask The Atlantic to "show them how they verified the information" about Trump calling war heroes "losers" and "suckers"?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-a...

That story was based on 100% anonymous sourced. Unverified, unverifiable by definition. People who were on the scene went on record to deny it. Twitter and Facebook were happy to spread it. The Atlantic accounts were never blocked.

How about the NYT story about Trump's tax returns, also based on 100% anonymous, unauthorized, unverified document leak? Has the NYT account been blocked for that, too?

By contrast, the NYP actually did explain how they got the emails: from a laptop dropped off and signed for by Hunter Biden himself at a PC repair shop.

The double standard here is beyond obvious.

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Twitter's official reason for blocking the account is because it has refused to delete a tweet linking to what the tweeter claims are stolen private photos and documents. Not because of fake news.

Twitter's official reason would require it to block the NYT for posting the story about Trump's tax returns since it is based on illegally-leaked private documents.

Yet Twitter did not block the NYT or its story. Instead, it blocked NYP, even though it had no evidence the NYP story was based on "stolen private documents", while the NYT story clearly and admittedly was.

Again, the double standard couldn't be more obvious.

Journalists have an obligation to protect their sources, which prevents many stories from being independently verified. However they can be verified by other news outlets, who have their own sources. The "losers and suckers" story was independently verified by NYT, WaPo, and AP. But the NYPost has not been verified by anyone, nor they did seek verification, nor did they even ask Biden for comment, because they know the story is bullshit.

The "double standard" idea makes my blood boil, because it casts basic facts in partisan terms. Twitter fact-checked Trump tweets, but not Biden tweets. But that's not a double standard; it's a single standard, and it just so happens that Biden does not tweet outright lies such as "California sends a ballot to anyone living in the state."

Twitter clearly does not want to be in this position and the right-wing misinformation machine is exploiting that aggressively. The NYPost story got a huge Streisand-effect boost. It's impossible to give Twitter good advice today.

The NYP story was blocked by Twitter and Facebook immediately upon publication. Why wasn't the "losers and suckers" story likewise blocked until it was verified?

Both stories had no external verification upon publication. One was blocked immediately. The other never was.

> The "losers and suckers" story was independently verified by NYT, WaPo, and AP.

One can't "independently" verify a story based purely on anonymous sources. Can you link these alleged verifications?

> But the NYPost has not been verified by anyone, nor they did seek verification, nor did they even ask Biden for comment, because they know the story is bullshit.

Not true. The NYP story cited sources, and these sources have seen been verified, for example by the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

Your comment that they never asked Biden to comment is likewise untrue. This would be plainly ridiculous: all we'd need to know if a story is true is to see if they asked for a comment from the subject. In fact, plenty of untrue stories ask for these comments. Why wouldn't they? Do they want to make it obvious they are false?

The NYP asked for comment. What they didn't do was show Biden the laptop or documents they claimed were authentic. Then they ran a claim that Biden refused to refute the documents (without admitting that they refused to show him the documents or laptop.)

So we are now holding the NYP to impossible standards that no other publication must meet.

A paper is not even required to ask for a comment from a subject of an expose. Thousands of stories are posted on Twitter every day by news outlets that did not request or include a response from their subject.

Now we have people claiming that not only does NYP have to request a response from its subject, it must also provide them the subject with source material for their article. Ridiculous.

Also, Joe Biden isn't even the subject of the NYP article - Hunter Biden is. Yet you are implying that Joe Biden must have been given the full source materials of the article and an opportunity to examine and respond to them, or else Twitter can block the story.

Was Trump afforded the same opportunity to examine the source material of the NYT story about his supposed tax returns?

The NYT still hasn't released that source material!

> By contrast, the NYP actually did explain how they got the emails: from a laptop dropped off and signed for by Hunter Biden himself at a PC repair shop.

Yes, from a man who happens to be legally blind and can't verify who dropped it off. What are the priors on that? Turning up a week before the election?

The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?

> Yes, from a man who happens to be legally blind and can't verify who dropped it off.

Still more verifiable sources than the Atlantic and NYT stories, which were based on zero verifiable sources.

> Turning up a week before the election?

The Atlantic and NYT stories were also published very recently, also a few weeks before the election.

> The was supposed to be a professional servicing a machine, he violated his clients privacy for his own purposes, and now we're to trust him?

The NYT story was based on illegally leaked tax returns. Whoever leaked these documents has not only breached their duty of confidentiality and privacy that they owe every taxpayer - they in fact committed a crime.

Why didn't Twitter and Facebook block a story that could only come from a source who breached their legal duties and committed a crime? And in your words, how can we trust such a source?

One difference is that NYT isn't publishing the documents, only claims about them. Twitter doesn't censor unverifiable claims, such as the Presidents own claims about his tax returns.

The Post refuses to take down the link to what they claim are private photos and documents.

It seems pretty clear that they prefer to keep the conversation focused on the censorship of private photos (which they can then conflate with censorship of their corruption allegations) instead of on the mix of nothingburger and likely faked evidence against Joe Biden.

If any story based on "private photos and documents" is to be blocked, then most news stories must be blocked on Twitter.

That includes the Snowden leaks, Panama Papers, the Pentagon Papers, virtually all Wikileaks releases, and many of the most important news stories of the past several decades.

Twitter pretends to have standards by which any news story can be censored, then uses that standard to very selectively block specific stories as they choose.

Also, from a journalistic perspective, it is much better to publish the source documents, as NYP has done, rather than quote from them liberally without publishing the original, as the NYT has done.

I mean, on the face of it, Trump's taxes leaking seems likely, almost inevitable, and surprising it hadn't happened sooner. He has no shortage of people who have seen his taxes, and no shortage of disgruntled folks. Whereas a conveniently placed laptop just left somewhere with incriminating emails seems to test credulity. The laptop seems like a foreign psyop, the taxes seems like something everyone thought inevitable, and that he told us he was going to do himself.

There's a reason that sources remain anonymous, and I'm not sure I see an equivalency here. Look at what happened to Lt. Colonel Vindman. It seems like having a standard of "you must lose your livelihood to alert the world to something" might be a good way to keep all sorts of secrets bottled up, to everyone's detriment.

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