Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden's Laptop

[Nevilledog]

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-twitter-and-hunter-bidens-laptop/

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop. there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.

Now, to be clear, I’ve explained many times before, in other posts, why people who freaked out about how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story are getting confused, but it’s usually been a bit buried. I had already started a version of this post last week, since people keep bringing up Twitter and the laptop, but then on Friday, Elon (sorta) helped me out by giving a bunch of documents to reporter Matt Taibbi.

So, let’s review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It’s no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election — not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.

Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a “hacked materials” policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were — clearly! — some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).

*snip*

[crickets]

1. Very long and thorough repudiation of the Twitter files nonsense.

Worth reading for the detailed info as well as scattered hilarious comments:

As a side note, [actor James] Woods has now said he’s going to sue [the DNC] over this, though for the life of me I have no idea what sort of claim he thinks he has, or how it’s going to go over in court when he claims his rights were violated when he was unable to share Hunter’s dick pic.

Wait, whut? Link not from this source, because I had to go look it up to be sure I understood:
https://www.politicalflare.com/2022/12/james-woods-says-hes-going-to-sue-the-dnc-for-destroying-my-career/

Wow.

Also, news flash: Elon Musk is an idiot, or at least acting like one. Still.

[emulatorloo]

2. Rec and bookmarked to read later. Thanks!