More than 120,000 emails from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop have
been published on a searchable online database anyone can access.
The site, called https://bidenlaptopemails.com/, allows users the option
to download all 128,00 plus emails from Hunter’s hard drive onto their
own computer.
I'm sure that in a few days all the best ones will be published online.
What I'm waiting for is next January. I wonder if Brandon's impeachment
trial will be televised live and if any of the emails will come into
play? Or, will he retire for medical reasons before then?
On 5/19/2022 7:01 AM, "Jerry Osage"@osage.com wrote:
More than 120,000 emails from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop have
been published on a searchable online database anyone can access.
The site, called https://bidenlaptopemails.com/, allows users the option
to download all 128,00 plus emails from Hunter’s hard drive onto their
own computer.
I'm sure that in a few days all the best ones will be published online.
What I'm waiting for is next January. I wonder if Brandon's impeachment
trial will be televised live and if any of the emails will come into
play? Or, will he retire for medical reasons before then?
Yeah, that will probably happen right after the orange idiot
finally comes up with some faint wiff of proof that the election was
stolen and they finally lock Hillary up, after how many years and and
how many investigations? Enjoy the show, because that's about all you're going to get. More performances for the boob tube.
"Why Hunter Biden’s Laptop Will Never Go Away
Could anything that happens with this laptop bring us closure?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
A stylized image of a laptop with Hunter Biden’s face on the front. A cigarette is in his mouth.
The Atlantic
APRIL 28, 2022
A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a
laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a
few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter
smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim
that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up
to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business
associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.
President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it was—Hunter Biden was already well known for invoking his family’s political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific
allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his
affairs has been ongoing for years, led by federal prosecutors in
Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about
Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out that some of the Post’s own staff did not think that the paper had done
enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a
lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.
Trump was actively undermining democracy and pushing his supporters
toward hysteria about online censorship. His party was gripped by QAnon, which holds at the center of its belief system the idea that the
Democratic elite are sleazy and corrupt. The laptop was a gift to the paranoid and the disingenuous. Meanwhile, the other half of the country
was gripped by the memory of 2016. What if voters were faced with an eleventh-hour red herring, another disaster like the James Comey letter?
What if reporters fell for another trick from zany upstart “citizen journalists” with enormous follower counts—or, worse, Russia? And journalists who had spent four years telling themselves that they were
the nation’s last defense against tyranny were, to put it as politely as
I can, starting to appear a bit hysterical. By the way, there was still
a pandemic. Enter flames.
To many members of the media and tech industries, the timing of the
story felt suspicious, as did the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani,
a MAGA operative and one of the oddest people alive. Reporters recoiled
from the story; columnists blasted the Post for publishing personally embarrassing information that was of tenuous public interest.
Social-media companies also reacted instantly. Facebook limited the
spread of the story while third-party fact-checkers reviewed it (but
removed the limitation after a week). Twitter took the more dramatic
action of blocking new shares of the link altogether, arguing that the
story, which contained screenshots with unobscured email addresses and
phone numbers, constituted a violation of its policy on doxxing (it
reversed course after two days).
Some of the story turned out to be true, but not right away. The New
York Times and The Washington Post were only recently able to verify
many of the emails. And in the intervening months, many of the details
about why journalists and tech companies acted the way they did have
been forgotten, leaving behind only the impression, mostly on the right,
that they “colluded” to keep Americans away from an authentic news story with political implications. The truth was more boring and possibly grimmer.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: This single water-damaged laptop represented an end point. Americans no longer had a method for coming to agreement about what was—in the most basic sense—going on. Eighteen months later, there’s nothing anyone could ever say about this laptop
that would bring Americans into alignment about its significance and
meaning, or about the culpability and agendas of those who have
previously expressed opinions on it. In fact, if anything, things have
gotten worse.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic co-hosted a conference with the
University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, called “Disinformation
and the Erosion of Democracy,” at which Hunter Biden’s laptop was a star of the show.
It came up in the very first Q&A session of the conference. A University
of Chicago freshman and a senior editor of the campus’s right-wing publication (tagline: “Outthink the mob”) asked my colleague Anne Applebaum whether “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” The student was unsatisfied with Applebaum’s answer—that she didn’t think the laptop
qualified as a major news story, disinformation or no—and later appeared
on Fox News to say so. His tweet about the exchange, which incorrectly
stated that Appelebaum had failed to answer the question, went viral.
This kicked off a vitriolic and widespread campaign against Applebaum
from the right, pushed by influencers including Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, and multiple Fox News hosts; she was subjected to weeks of personal threats.
The laptop came up again the next day, first thing in the morning. A
panel discussion titled “Politics as Usual or an Insidious Attack on Our Democracy?” took its premise from a November 2021 column by Ben Smith,
then of The New York Times, in which he used the Biden laptop story to demonstrate how confusing the conversation about misinformation and disinformation had become. In dealing with the laptop, reporters were understandably wary of repeating the mistakes made regarding the
WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation before the 2016 election, which led to over-coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which was ultimately inconsequential. That’s why many of them dismissed the story, or labeled
it a new front in the information war. But many presidential election
cycles have unearthed confusing, scandalous revelations requiring investigative journalism to verify or debunk them, Smith argued.
Labeling this a problem of the social-media age, and focusing on mis- or disinformation as phenomena that can be corrected, hidden, or blocked at
the platform level, is “a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as much about politics as technology,” he wrote. He reiterated much of this during the panel, saying that the laptop story had been mishandled by reporters and, “most disturbingly,” by social-media companies.
I heard this opinion repeatedly in casual conversations and from the
speakers onstage. Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Dispatch,
argued during the panel that the “disinformation” label can backfire by feeding into the idea that the “powers that be” are forbidding people from looking at information that they consider illegitimate. He
illustrated his point with Biden’s laptop too. Twitter and Facebook
treated it like disinformation before the truth could be determined. “Whether you think that was smart in the heat of the moment or not, [it] has backfired enormously,” he said. “Because now it seems like it was
all conspiratorial.”
I was a little surprised by how often the laptop came up, but I
shouldn’t have been. Its aura has grown ever more powerful as the story around it has cohered. After a short period during which Fox News also considered the laptop story suspect, the network has been covering it
even more intensely than it did the leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. In December 2020, when I was interviewing users of the alternative social-media platform Parler, almost everybody I spoke with brought it up. A cool, anonymous Substack writer beloved by New York
City’s art set has also made frequent disapproving reference to
Twitter’s and Facebook’s actions around the laptop story. Angry online chatter about it never truly went away, but now it’s back with a
vengeance. All of my friends know that something went wrong with the
laptop. Many of them do not care, but they still know. This week, hours
after the news broke that Elon Musk would be acquiring Twitter, he
replied to a tweet in which Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel Vijaya Gadde was referred to as the company’s top “censorship advocate,” writing, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
That cursed computer, otherwise known as “the laptop from hell,” as Donald Trump has called it, is an icon of our information ecosystem’s dysfunction. Some journalists relied prematurely and too much on popular frameworks when covering it. The story really was suppressed by tech
giants. But it also really was complicated, and required time and
resources to investigate. Finding the truth takes time and effort and a willingness to be surprised. It also requires some grace on the part of
the public—journalists need to be able to publish facts bit by bit, as
they learn them, doing their work in front of an audience that is
receptive to the idea that knowledge shifts and that coherent drama that blazes forth all at once is rare. This is, the laptop makes clear, no
longer possible. By the time reporters put in the work to verify parts
of the story, it was too late—the corrupt “media” was a monolith with an
agenda.
Facebook and Twitter really did make sloppy decisions. They and other
tech platforms had spent the past several years struggling with how to fact-check a pandemic and when to interfere with election interference;
the laptop undermined that work by illustrating just how bizarre—and dangerous—it would be to centralize the responsibility for discerning truth. Twitter has apologized for its handling of the story and made
changes to its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. Facebook
has elaborated on its decision-making process, which was informed by the FBI’s warning to watch for hack-and-leak operations carried out by
foreign actors. And if federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden for
possible financial crimes, it will not be solely on the basis of the
man’s laptop, so the case could be made that the thing doesn’t matter much anymore. Yet it isn’t going anywhere. Why would it? It’s perfect!
“This is arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever published and it endures as a story because it was initially suppressed
by social media companies and jeered by politicians and pundits alike,” Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and a speaker at the conference, told me in
an email. The laptop is now shorthand, and it makes an easy point. For example, after another panel at the conference, a University of Chicago student asked CNN’s Brian Stelter a question to which there was
undoubtedly no satisfying answer: Invoking the Biden laptop, he asked, “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than
apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally
declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?” Stelter’s response was polite, if a bit meandering, and he offered to speak with the student one-on-one after the event, which he apparently did.
Even though this sequence of events was a bit dry, it was useful all the same. A video of the exchange was viewed millions of times on Twitter
that Thursday, under the caption “Brian Stelter just got destroyed by a college freshman!” It was featured two days later on Tucker Carlson’s
Fox News show, and Carlson was giddy while describing it. “There are
still a couple of kids at the University of Chicago who are awake enough
to say, ‘Wait a second, what are you talking about? Disinformation?’” After playing the video, he cracked himself up.
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/tech-companies-suppressed-biden-laptop/629680/
Because Americans in general have absolutely no real idea of their
own history, we are, of course, doomed to repeat it. Only now we're
repeating our history at warp speed.
TB
Technobarbarian <technobarbar...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/19/2022 7:01 AM, "Jerry Osage"@osage.com wrote:
More than 120,000 emails from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop have
been published on a searchable online database anyone can access.
The site, called https://bidenlaptopemails.com/, allows users the option >> to download all 128,00 plus emails from Hunter’s hard drive onto their >> own computer.
I'm sure that in a few days all the best ones will be published online. >>
What I'm waiting for is next January. I wonder if Brandon's impeachment >> trial will be televised live and if any of the emails will come into
play? Or, will he retire for medical reasons before then?
Yeah, that will probably happen right after the orange idiot
finally comes up with some faint wiff of proof that the election was stolen and they finally lock Hillary up, after how many years and and
how many investigations? Enjoy the show, because that's about all you're going to get. More performances for the boob tube.
"Why Hunter Biden’s Laptop Will Never Go Away
Could anything that happens with this laptop bring us closure?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
A stylized image of a laptop with Hunter Biden’s face on the front. A cigarette is in his mouth.
The Atlantic
APRIL 28, 2022
A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.
President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it was—Hunter Biden was already well known for invoking his family’s political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his
affairs has been ongoing for years, led by federal prosecutors in Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out that some of the Post’s own staff did not think that the paper had done enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a
lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.
Trump was actively undermining democracy and pushing his supporters
toward hysteria about online censorship. His party was gripped by QAnon, which holds at the center of its belief system the idea that the Democratic elite are sleazy and corrupt. The laptop was a gift to the paranoid and the disingenuous. Meanwhile, the other half of the country was gripped by the memory of 2016. What if voters were faced with an eleventh-hour red herring, another disaster like the James Comey letter? What if reporters fell for another trick from zany upstart “citizen journalists” with enormous follower counts—or, worse, Russia? And journalists who had spent four years telling themselves that they were
the nation’s last defense against tyranny were, to put it as politely as I can, starting to appear a bit hysterical. By the way, there was still
a pandemic. Enter flames.
To many members of the media and tech industries, the timing of the
story felt suspicious, as did the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani,
a MAGA operative and one of the oddest people alive. Reporters recoiled from the story; columnists blasted the Post for publishing personally embarrassing information that was of tenuous public interest.
Social-media companies also reacted instantly. Facebook limited the
spread of the story while third-party fact-checkers reviewed it (but removed the limitation after a week). Twitter took the more dramatic action of blocking new shares of the link altogether, arguing that the story, which contained screenshots with unobscured email addresses and phone numbers, constituted a violation of its policy on doxxing (it reversed course after two days).
Some of the story turned out to be true, but not right away. The New
York Times and The Washington Post were only recently able to verify
many of the emails. And in the intervening months, many of the details about why journalists and tech companies acted the way they did have
been forgotten, leaving behind only the impression, mostly on the right, that they “colluded” to keep Americans away from an authentic news story
with political implications. The truth was more boring and possibly grimmer.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: This single water-damaged laptop represented an end point. Americans no longer had a method for coming to agreement about what was—in the most basic sense—going on. Eighteen months later, there’s nothing anyone could ever say about this laptop that would bring Americans into alignment about its significance and meaning, or about the culpability and agendas of those who have
previously expressed opinions on it. In fact, if anything, things have gotten worse.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic co-hosted a conference with the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” at which Hunter Biden’s laptop was a star
of the show.
It came up in the very first Q&A session of the conference. A University of Chicago freshman and a senior editor of the campus’s right-wing publication (tagline: “Outthink the mob”) asked my colleague Anne Applebaum whether “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” The student
was unsatisfied with Applebaum’s answer—that she didn’t think the laptop
qualified as a major news story, disinformation or no—and later appeared on Fox News to say so. His tweet about the exchange, which incorrectly stated that Appelebaum had failed to answer the question, went viral.
This kicked off a vitriolic and widespread campaign against Applebaum
from the right, pushed by influencers including Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, and multiple Fox News hosts; she was subjected to weeks of personal threats.
The laptop came up again the next day, first thing in the morning. A
panel discussion titled “Politics as Usual or an Insidious Attack on Our Democracy?” took its premise from a November 2021 column by Ben Smith, then of The New York Times, in which he used the Biden laptop story to demonstrate how confusing the conversation about misinformation and disinformation had become. In dealing with the laptop, reporters were understandably wary of repeating the mistakes made regarding the
WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation before the 2016 election, which led to over-coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which was ultimately inconsequential. That’s why many of them dismissed the story, or labeled it a new front in the information war. But many presidential election cycles have unearthed confusing, scandalous revelations requiring investigative journalism to verify or debunk them, Smith argued.
Labeling this a problem of the social-media age, and focusing on mis- or disinformation as phenomena that can be corrected, hidden, or blocked at the platform level, is “a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as much about politics as technology,” he wrote. He reiterated much of this during the panel, saying that the laptop story had been mishandled by reporters and, “most disturbingly,” by social-media companies.
I heard this opinion repeatedly in casual conversations and from the speakers onstage. Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Dispatch, argued during the panel that the “disinformation” label can backfire by
feeding into the idea that the “powers that be” are forbidding people from looking at information that they consider illegitimate. He illustrated his point with Biden’s laptop too. Twitter and Facebook treated it like disinformation before the truth could be determined. “Whether you think that was smart in the heat of the moment or not, [it] has backfired enormously,” he said. “Because now it seems like it was all conspiratorial.”
I was a little surprised by how often the laptop came up, but I shouldn’t have been. Its aura has grown ever more powerful as the story around it has cohered. After a short period during which Fox News also considered the laptop story suspect, the network has been covering it
even more intensely than it did the leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. In December 2020, when I was interviewing users of the alternative social-media platform Parler, almost everybody I spoke with brought it up. A cool, anonymous Substack writer beloved by New York City’s art set has also made frequent disapproving reference to Twitter’s and Facebook’s actions around the laptop story. Angry online chatter about it never truly went away, but now it’s back with a vengeance. All of my friends know that something went wrong with the laptop. Many of them do not care, but they still know. This week, hours after the news broke that Elon Musk would be acquiring Twitter, he
replied to a tweet in which Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel Vijaya Gadde was referred to as the company’s top “censorship advocate,” writing, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
That cursed computer, otherwise known as “the laptop from hell,” as Donald Trump has called it, is an icon of our information ecosystem’s dysfunction. Some journalists relied prematurely and too much on popular frameworks when covering it. The story really was suppressed by tech giants. But it also really was complicated, and required time and resources to investigate. Finding the truth takes time and effort and a willingness to be surprised. It also requires some grace on the part of the public—journalists need to be able to publish facts bit by bit, as they learn them, doing their work in front of an audience that is receptive to the idea that knowledge shifts and that coherent drama that blazes forth all at once is rare. This is, the laptop makes clear, no longer possible. By the time reporters put in the work to verify parts
of the story, it was too late—the corrupt “media” was a monolith with an
agenda.
Facebook and Twitter really did make sloppy decisions. They and other
tech platforms had spent the past several years struggling with how to fact-check a pandemic and when to interfere with election interference; the laptop undermined that work by illustrating just how bizarre—and dangerous—it would be to centralize the responsibility for discerning truth. Twitter has apologized for its handling of the story and made changes to its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. Facebook has elaborated on its decision-making process, which was informed by the FBI’s warning to watch for hack-and-leak operations carried out by foreign actors. And if federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden for possible financial crimes, it will not be solely on the basis of the man’s laptop, so the case could be made that the thing doesn’t matter much anymore. Yet it isn’t going anywhere. Why would it? It’s perfect!
“This is arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever published and it endures as a story because it was initially suppressed
by social media companies and jeered by politicians and pundits alike,” Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and a speaker at the conference, told me in
an email. The laptop is now shorthand, and it makes an easy point. For example, after another panel at the conference, a University of Chicago student asked CNN’s Brian Stelter a question to which there was undoubtedly no satisfying answer: Invoking the Biden laptop, he asked, “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally
declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?” Stelter’s response was polite, if a bit meandering, and he offered to speak with the student one-on-one after the event, which he apparently did.
Even though this sequence of events was a bit dry, it was useful all the same. A video of the exchange was viewed millions of times on Twitter
that Thursday, under the caption “Brian Stelter just got destroyed by a college freshman!” It was featured two days later on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, and Carlson was giddy while describing it. “There are still a couple of kids at the University of Chicago who are awake enough to say, ‘Wait a second, what are you talking about? Disinformation?’”
After playing the video, he cracked himself up.
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/tech-companies-suppressed-biden-laptop/629680/
Because Americans in general have absolutely no real idea of their
own history, we are, of course, doomed to repeat it. Only now we're repeating our history at warp speed.
TB
As hard as it may be to believe, your posts are getting more ridiculous by the day.
--
On Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 5:06:15 PM UTC-7, George.Anthony wrote:better repartee, than you do.......
As hard as it may be to believe, your posts are getting more ridiculous by >> the day.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/tech-companies-suppressed-biden-laptop/629680/
Because Americans in general have absolutely no real idea of their
own history, we are, of course, doomed to repeat it. Only now we're
repeating our history at warp speed.
TB
--
And, "As hard as it may be to believe," your posts are excelling at revealing how stupid you are getting to be, by the day... I suspect that you are envious of TB's abilities, to C&P, explaining the POV he makes... Pee Wee Herman has a far
A frequent TB Booster
On Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 5:06:15 PM UTC-7, George.Anthony wrote:
Technobarbarian <technobarbar...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/19/2022 7:01 AM, "Jerry Osage"@osage.com wrote:As hard as it may be to believe, your posts are getting more ridiculous by >> the day.
More than 120,000 emails from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop have
been published on a searchable online database anyone can access.
The site, called https://bidenlaptopemails.com/, allows users the option >>>> to download all 128,00 plus emails from Hunter’s hard drive onto their >>>> own computer.
I'm sure that in a few days all the best ones will be published online. >>>>
What I'm waiting for is next January. I wonder if Brandon's impeachment >>>> trial will be televised live and if any of the emails will come into
play? Or, will he retire for medical reasons before then?
Yeah, that will probably happen right after the orange idiot
finally comes up with some faint wiff of proof that the election was
stolen and they finally lock Hillary up, after how many years and and
how many investigations? Enjoy the show, because that's about all you're >>> going to get. More performances for the boob tube.
"Why Hunter Biden’s Laptop Will Never Go Away
Could anything that happens with this laptop bring us closure?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
A stylized image of a laptop with Hunter Biden’s face on the front. A
cigarette is in his mouth.
The Atlantic
APRIL 28, 2022
A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential
election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a
laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal
emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a
few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the
authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter
smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim >>> that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up >>> to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business
associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.
President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it
was—Hunter Biden was already well known for invoking his family’s
political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific
allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his
affairs has been ongoing for years, led by federal prosecutors in
Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about
Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out that >>> some of the Post’s own staff did not think that the paper had done
enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a
lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.
Trump was actively undermining democracy and pushing his supporters
toward hysteria about online censorship. His party was gripped by QAnon, >>> which holds at the center of its belief system the idea that the
Democratic elite are sleazy and corrupt. The laptop was a gift to the
paranoid and the disingenuous. Meanwhile, the other half of the country
was gripped by the memory of 2016. What if voters were faced with an
eleventh-hour red herring, another disaster like the James Comey letter? >>> What if reporters fell for another trick from zany upstart “citizen
journalists” with enormous follower counts—or, worse, Russia? And
journalists who had spent four years telling themselves that they were
the nation’s last defense against tyranny were, to put it as politely as >>> I can, starting to appear a bit hysterical. By the way, there was still
a pandemic. Enter flames.
To many members of the media and tech industries, the timing of the
story felt suspicious, as did the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani,
a MAGA operative and one of the oddest people alive. Reporters recoiled
from the story; columnists blasted the Post for publishing personally
embarrassing information that was of tenuous public interest.
Social-media companies also reacted instantly. Facebook limited the
spread of the story while third-party fact-checkers reviewed it (but
removed the limitation after a week). Twitter took the more dramatic
action of blocking new shares of the link altogether, arguing that the
story, which contained screenshots with unobscured email addresses and
phone numbers, constituted a violation of its policy on doxxing (it
reversed course after two days).
Some of the story turned out to be true, but not right away. The New
York Times and The Washington Post were only recently able to verify
many of the emails. And in the intervening months, many of the details
about why journalists and tech companies acted the way they did have
been forgotten, leaving behind only the impression, mostly on the right, >>> that they “colluded” to keep Americans away from an authentic news story
with political implications. The truth was more boring and possibly grimmer.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: This single water-damaged laptop >>> represented an end point. Americans no longer had a method for coming to >>> agreement about what was—in the most basic sense—going on. Eighteen
months later, there’s nothing anyone could ever say about this laptop
that would bring Americans into alignment about its significance and
meaning, or about the culpability and agendas of those who have
previously expressed opinions on it. In fact, if anything, things have
gotten worse.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic co-hosted a conference with the
University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, called “Disinformation >>> and the Erosion of Democracy,” at which Hunter Biden’s laptop was a star
of the show.
It came up in the very first Q&A session of the conference. A University >>> of Chicago freshman and a senior editor of the campus’s right-wing
publication (tagline: “Outthink the mob”) asked my colleague Anne
Applebaum whether “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly >>> dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” The student >>> was unsatisfied with Applebaum’s answer—that she didn’t think the laptop
qualified as a major news story, disinformation or no—and later appeared >>> on Fox News to say so. His tweet about the exchange, which incorrectly
stated that Appelebaum had failed to answer the question, went viral.
This kicked off a vitriolic and widespread campaign against Applebaum
from the right, pushed by influencers including Jack Posobiec, Mike
Cernovich, and multiple Fox News hosts; she was subjected to weeks of
personal threats.
The laptop came up again the next day, first thing in the morning. A
panel discussion titled “Politics as Usual or an Insidious Attack on Our >>> Democracy?” took its premise from a November 2021 column by Ben Smith, >>> then of The New York Times, in which he used the Biden laptop story to
demonstrate how confusing the conversation about misinformation and
disinformation had become. In dealing with the laptop, reporters were
understandably wary of repeating the mistakes made regarding the
WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation before the 2016 election, which led to >>> over-coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which was ultimately >>> inconsequential. That’s why many of them dismissed the story, or labeled >>> it a new front in the information war. But many presidential election
cycles have unearthed confusing, scandalous revelations requiring
investigative journalism to verify or debunk them, Smith argued.
Labeling this a problem of the social-media age, and focusing on mis- or >>> disinformation as phenomena that can be corrected, hidden, or blocked at >>> the platform level, is “a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as >>> much about politics as technology,” he wrote. He reiterated much of this >>> during the panel, saying that the laptop story had been mishandled by
reporters and, “most disturbingly,” by social-media companies.
I heard this opinion repeatedly in casual conversations and from the
speakers onstage. Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Dispatch,
argued during the panel that the “disinformation” label can backfire by >>> feeding into the idea that the “powers that be” are forbidding people >>> from looking at information that they consider illegitimate. He
illustrated his point with Biden’s laptop too. Twitter and Facebook
treated it like disinformation before the truth could be determined.
“Whether you think that was smart in the heat of the moment or not, [it] >>> has backfired enormously,” he said. “Because now it seems like it was >>> all conspiratorial.”
I was a little surprised by how often the laptop came up, but I
shouldn’t have been. Its aura has grown ever more powerful as the story >>> around it has cohered. After a short period during which Fox News also
considered the laptop story suspect, the network has been covering it
even more intensely than it did the leaked Democratic National Committee >>> emails in 2016. In December 2020, when I was interviewing users of the
alternative social-media platform Parler, almost everybody I spoke with
brought it up. A cool, anonymous Substack writer beloved by New York
City’s art set has also made frequent disapproving reference to
Twitter’s and Facebook’s actions around the laptop story. Angry online >>> chatter about it never truly went away, but now it’s back with a
vengeance. All of my friends know that something went wrong with the
laptop. Many of them do not care, but they still know. This week, hours
after the news broke that Elon Musk would be acquiring Twitter, he
replied to a tweet in which Twitter’s chief legal officer and general
counsel Vijaya Gadde was referred to as the company’s top “censorship >>> advocate,” writing, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news
organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly
inappropriate.”
That cursed computer, otherwise known as “the laptop from hell,” as
Donald Trump has called it, is an icon of our information ecosystem’s
dysfunction. Some journalists relied prematurely and too much on popular >>> frameworks when covering it. The story really was suppressed by tech
giants. But it also really was complicated, and required time and
resources to investigate. Finding the truth takes time and effort and a
willingness to be surprised. It also requires some grace on the part of
the public—journalists need to be able to publish facts bit by bit, as >>> they learn them, doing their work in front of an audience that is
receptive to the idea that knowledge shifts and that coherent drama that >>> blazes forth all at once is rare. This is, the laptop makes clear, no
longer possible. By the time reporters put in the work to verify parts
of the story, it was too late—the corrupt “media” was a monolith with an
agenda.
Facebook and Twitter really did make sloppy decisions. They and other
tech platforms had spent the past several years struggling with how to
fact-check a pandemic and when to interfere with election interference;
the laptop undermined that work by illustrating just how bizarre—and
dangerous—it would be to centralize the responsibility for discerning
truth. Twitter has apologized for its handling of the story and made
changes to its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. Facebook
has elaborated on its decision-making process, which was informed by the >>> FBI’s warning to watch for hack-and-leak operations carried out by
foreign actors. And if federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden for
possible financial crimes, it will not be solely on the basis of the
man’s laptop, so the case could be made that the thing doesn’t matter >>> much anymore. Yet it isn’t going anywhere. Why would it? It’s perfect! >>>
“This is arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever >>> published and it endures as a story because it was initially suppressed
by social media companies and jeered by politicians and pundits alike,” >>> Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media,
Politics, and Public Policy and a speaker at the conference, told me in
an email. The laptop is now shorthand, and it makes an easy point. For
example, after another panel at the conference, a University of Chicago
student asked CNN’s Brian Stelter a question to which there was
undoubtedly no satisfying answer: Invoking the Biden laptop, he asked,
“With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than
apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally
declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer
operative?” Stelter’s response was polite, if a bit meandering, and he >>> offered to speak with the student one-on-one after the event, which he
apparently did.
Even though this sequence of events was a bit dry, it was useful all the >>> same. A video of the exchange was viewed millions of times on Twitter
that Thursday, under the caption “Brian Stelter just got destroyed by a >>> college freshman!” It was featured two days later on Tucker Carlson’s >>> Fox News show, and Carlson was giddy while describing it. “There are
still a couple of kids at the University of Chicago who are awake enough >>> to say, ‘Wait a second, what are you talking about? Disinformation?’” >>> After playing the video, he cracked himself up.
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/tech-companies-suppressed-biden-laptop/629680/
Because Americans in general have absolutely no real idea of their
own history, we are, of course, doomed to repeat it. Only now we're
repeating our history at warp speed.
TB
--
And, "As hard as it may be to believe," your posts are excelling at revealing how stupid you are getting to be, by the day... I suspect that
you are envious of TB's abilities, to C&P, explaining the POV he
makes... Pee Wee Herman has a far better repartee, than you do.......
A frequent TB Booster
film...@gmail.com <film...@gmail.com> wrote:
And, "As hard as it may be to believe," your posts are excelling at revealing how stupid you are getting to be, by the day... I suspect that you are envious of TB's abilities, to C&P, explaining the POV he
makes... Pee Wee Herman has a far better repartee, than you do.......
A frequent TB Booster
I could agree with you but then we’d both be wrong.
Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots LIKE TRUMP
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