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Comment by gerikson | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any cheering. It's reporting on the consequences of a serious data breach.

Not really.

Despite "domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of [Epik's] users", the focus was emphatically on Epik's "right-wing" and "racist" users. There was zero reporting on the consequences to non-affiliated and left-wing users.

Admittedly, the featured victims of the breech are unsympathetic characters, so it's hard to really be upset. Which is upstream's point: the article invites us as readers to indulge in schadenfreude which, let's be honest, is a kind of cheering.

The downside of such articles for people of all political stripes is that it seems to imply that online anonymity, such as that supplied by Epik, benefits only reprehensible people peddling reprehensible views.

It's easier to call for legislation that limits online anonymity if it is generally perceived to help only those who everyone can agree are awful.

Throughout history, good people have needed anonymity from the government and even from popular consensus. The Underground Railroad, homosexuals, Jews, civil rights activists, anti-war demonstrators, to name just a few prominent examples.

I am old enough to remember when a year ago, these same media companies censored the hunter Biden story falsely claiming it was Russian disinfo and result of hacking and thus didn't report it. Do you really believe this is about data breach and not about only political vendetta? The article is doing a lot of cheering if you read the article.

"After a scandal narrative [about Hunter Biden] failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

Social media platforms literally were suppressing news of the story. That's literally, verifiably true, and the suppression was indeed a bigger scandal than the original story. All of the reasons other media outlets touted for not covering it, and social media touted for suppressing it, are obviously nonsense, as is clear by coverage of literally any other story based on leaked or hacked materials over the past 20 years, including this one.

Good. The extreme spread of fake news and misinformation on the right will have consequences like this where a somewhat legit story(with a lot of false exaggerations) gets buried because of the other times things like this were fabricated. Boy who cried wolf and all that.

I might be inclined to debate that fairly if left wing misinformation were also treated equally (is Trump really a compromised Russian asset since the 80s?), or if the establishment media actually took responsibility for this sad state of affairs where half of the country doesn't trust mainstream news. Journalists have spent years breaking public trust on honesty and partisanship, then cried foul when Trump beat them at their own game.

You seem to want to blame the people on the right for this situation, but they are the symptom, not the cause. If you're interested in fixing this, then stop compounding the problem, like suppressing stories that make your favoured side look bad.

Trump literally said so on TV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...

I can't find anything about Trump saying this on TV, or in that WP article.

Also: https://www.justsecurity.org/63660/is-trump-a-russian-agent-...

Trump literally said he was a Russian asset and has been compromised since the 80s? Please quote what he said and where he said that and/or what part of that wikipedia page documents that.

If you can't quote that or anything even remotely like it, then this counts as exactly the kind of misinformation that I'm talking about.

You know what? I am pretty happy about dishonest political smear campaigns being suppressed.

And I suppose you get to decide what's dishonest and what's a smear, for all of our benefits of course. Maybe you should take a moment to reflect on the meaning of democratic principles.

I think we can let reality make that choice. The things that actually happened, those are OK, and the ones that are made up bullshit, they can go. How about that?

Ok, so the recent independent confirmations that the laptop's emails are genuine indicates the original story was not entirely made up bullshit, correct? That there's some warranted suspicion there.

And the 5 years of reporting that Trump was a compromised Russian asset since the 80s are just as much bullshit as all the Fox News reporting that Obama was a secret Muslim and not a real American citizen, yes? And you would also support suppressing those bogus claims about Trump just as much as you would support suppressing those claims about Obama.

Just to make sure we're all being impartial about reality here, and not treating one set of claims preferentially because of who they're about or where they come from.

What it means by "a scandal narrative failed to gain traction" is that the mainstream press ignored the actual contents of the hack and focused entirely on falsely discrediting the information it contained as fake (a claim which fell apart almost immediately, at least for all the Hunter Biden emails which were politically interesting - something the non-conservative press has actually just started to notice), objections to the morality of using hacked data which are mysteriously absent here, and of course endless articles about how "conservative media" were using it. It's remarkable how whenever something happens that's politically inconvenient to Democrats, most of the US media coverage ends up being about the Republican reaction to it! In fact, that sentence from Wikipedia is a downstream consequence of this ... at least in theory, their policy is to just regurgitate the mainstream media narrative.

Remember, too, that the Hunter Biden emails involved the future president of the USA and his family whereas this involves random obscure anonymous internet users that none of the Seattle Times' readers would even have heard of had prior to the press deciding to go after them. It takes an extremely partisan notion of newsworthiness to consider the latter worthy of reporting but not the former.

A failed scandal narrative doesn't imply anything about the underlying facts, even though "narrative" has a implication of falsehood about it.

That article has some pretty mixed signals, both in the "intelligence" section and the one about Murdoch sources.

In any case, the WSJ has since published:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-real...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vindication-over-hunter-biden-e...

WP describes WSJ: "Most editors consider The Washington Post generally reliable."

But also, these articles are critical of the majority of media outlets overage. So, what are we to conclude?

Assuming you have read the article instead of the headline, the article mentions more than that and includes reactions from those who are relieved and cheering the news of the data breach.

Or are you going to continue to deny that the article didn’t mention this?

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