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Jeffrey Epstein's Death Was on 4Chan Before Officials Announced It

83 points| one2zero | 6 years ago |buzzfeednews.com | reply

75 comments

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[+] 52-6F-62|6 years ago|reply
A lot of people are stepping out to defend 4chan, but the article isn't about 4chan. It's a detail in the story.

The story is that someone close to the situation leaked details in violation of HIPAA on an internet message board.

And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess.

edit: spelling

[+] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
in violation of HIPPA

HIPAA would cover healthcare in prison. It wouldn't cover, say, what prison guards can talk about.

They may have other rules that indicate this is inappropriate, but HIPAA covers specific institutions, such as hospitals, medical personnel generally and health insurance. It doesn't actually cover anyone who ever learned anything about your health for some reason.

[+] maxerickson|6 years ago|reply
Prison rape is treated as a hilarious joke in the US.

Why would you expect strict compliance with some dumb privacy law?

[+] rhacker|6 years ago|reply
Are they a hospital or a covered entity. I don't think HIPAA would apply to a federal lockup. Also death certificates are not covered by HIPAA and can't prevent the release of them. Even if this isn't a death certificate. If anything shady happened it wasn't a hipaa violation. It can still be shady, but not a hipaa violation.
[+] magduf|6 years ago|reply
>The story is that someone close to the situation leaked details in violation of HIPPA on an internet message board.

>And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess.

I don't really see the problem here. You can't expect adherence to the law, or even upholding of basic human rights, from a correctional facility in America. Just look at how migrants have been treated lately in "detention centers" (concentration camps).

As the other responder said, prison rape is treated as a hilarious joke in the US, and is condoned by correctional staff, so why would you expect adherence to HIPAA?

[+] malvosenior|6 years ago|reply
This really shows the value of anonymity on the internet. Buzzfeed may try to label 4chan a “haven for far-right trolls and white nationalists” but it’s exactly the type of platform we need right now. It’s at the very least a check on mainstream media, which has proven itself very untrustworthy.
[+] joshuamorton|6 years ago|reply
How does this show any of that? That reported by the channer wasn't materially different than what was reported by the mainstream, they just broke the story earlier and, as mentioned, possibly by doing something illegal.

To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anonymity on the internet. But anonymity on the internet, this story showing the value of that anonymity, and this relating the the mainstream media aren't at all related, at least in my mind. Mind clarifying?

As I see it, one can be anonymous on, say, twitter, which is still moderated, and therefore has (less) open organization of "far-right trolls and white nationalists". So its not clear to me what unique anonymity 4chan provides.

[+] jjwhitaker|6 years ago|reply
99% is memes, random boards, or hate/bigotry/odd. The platform we need right now is proper enforcement of whistleblower protections.

Mainstream media is 30% Fox, by viewership, with most traditional publishers remaining trustworthy in most reporting. 4chan/8chan ties in with Daily Caller types too often to be of any value 99.9% of the time.

[+] jchw|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, news that associates culture with alt-right politics have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many folks don’t want to be associated with the alt-right. Example:

> Pepe, the green frog that has become a mascot for right-wing internet trolls.

Pepe was an ultra popular meme on 4chan when this was originally ran in the news. It is unsurprising that alt-right folks on 4chan were using it, since everyone else was too. But since the news ran, people on social media had to stop using it, lest they be associated with politics they despise; ordinary people who read the news and don’t live on the internet would not know the difference.

I am not keen on 4chan culture but if I had to guess I’d assume that merely posting Pepe on 4chan doesn’t signify political beliefs unless it’s a specific variant with for example, a MAGA hat.

Obviously this is a pretty exploitable pattern.

[+] Analemma_|6 years ago|reply
You know it was the mainstream media (specifically, the Miami Herald) that brought everyone’s attention to the Epstein case in the first place? 4chan never knew anything about him even though all the details of his case were public knowledge.
[+] michannne|6 years ago|reply
It was predicted by almost everyone that he would die somehow before revealing whatever information he may have had, so it was not surprising in the least. Further, 4chan is not a secret club -- you go to the site and you can create however many threads you wish, and reply to whoever, however, and however many times you want, no registration or signup process exists, so it's not surprising that Epstein's death, conspiracies of which run rampant on 4chan, would be leaked randomly by someone involved in dealing with the situation, it happens all the time actually.
[+] rwc|6 years ago|reply
Read beyond the headline. Specifics about attempts to revive him (including drugs used) were also shared before they were public information.
[+] mlb_hn|6 years ago|reply
For those that don't read the article, someone posted about the medical response to Epstein's suicide on 4Chan before the news picked it up. A lot of people had access to that information at the time.
[+] joncrane|6 years ago|reply
So some 4channer was presumably listening to police/EMS scanners for the area of the prison Epstein was in and "got the scoop" that way?
[+] holstvoogd|6 years ago|reply
And that was on reddit before buzzfeed found out :P
[+] rdtsc|6 years ago|reply
> We looked at the information provided by [a BuzzFeed News] reporter

Buzzfeed is worried about HIPAA violations. Good thing to worry about in general, but perhaps this is not the best case to champion that cause...

They could look into the type of plea deal he got previously and why he got it. Or, say, comb through all the recently unsealed evidence and compile a spreadsheet of who flew to his island and how often. Now, that would make some good investigative reporting.

[+] malvosenior|6 years ago|reply
Indeed that would offer much more for public good. I don’t see how going after the whistleblower here helps at all.
[+] parliament32|6 years ago|reply
Buzzfeed is not bound by HIPAA, because they are not medical personnel nor a medical institution.
[+] gist|6 years ago|reply
Unclear to me why people seem to think that a major station announcing something that they got (very generally) from some official release makes the same info (obtained some other way) nefarious in nature. Could be as simple as someone at the prison who saw what happened (employee or guard) and relaying it to someone by cell phone. I would find it hard to believe that doing so would break a law that would involve a significant penalty or risk. For that matter even the ME office driver (or whatever was used) might have had early wind of what was going on and relayed it to a third party. Who cares? I am sure they don't sign NDA's for this type of thing.
[+] gnicholas|6 years ago|reply
This was posted on HN yesterday, but was flagged for some reason. Does anyone know why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20687284
[+] excalibur|6 years ago|reply
Probably because it's too mainstream, which is actually against the rules (◔_◔)

> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Also because anybody can flag something for any arbitrary reason, regardless of what the rules say.

[+] jordigh|6 years ago|reply
HN users are typically the ones choosing to flag stories. I imagine the usual reason stories like this are flagged are because they attract a lot of discussion in bad faith.
[+] billiam|6 years ago|reply
who cares? Why is this at all surprising or interesting?
[+] misiti3780|6 years ago|reply
so one of the 1st responders has a 4chan account. what exactly is the big deal here (besides the fact he/she probably broke the law)
[+] jordigh|6 years ago|reply
Not sure if you're aware, but we all "have" a 4chan account. Meaning, you don't need an account to post there. It's kind of the point of chan-like boards.
[+] catacombs|6 years ago|reply
No one has a 4chan account. Anyone can post.
[+] dooglius|6 years ago|reply
And this fact was pointed out on 4chan several days ago
[+] sgammon|6 years ago|reply
I absolutely love that hn doesn’t buy this bs
[+] raldi|6 years ago|reply
I can't tell if you're referring to the suicide report it or the idea it was actually a murder.
[+] whenchamenia|6 years ago|reply
So is unregulated news the real reason they want the rest of the chans shut down? It seems 4chan at least, already capitulates to all LE demands.
[+] michannne|6 years ago|reply
Improbable. Liveleak, Abovetopsecret, WorldStarHipHop, and Twitter (to some extent) all have unregulated news feeds, are pretty popular, and have "in-groups". They all have content moderation to stay on LE's good side and despite hosting violent content, actively try to prune content that violates laws. This includes 4Chan. 8Chan was a different story though, there was almost 0 effort to moderate content. Few people seem to remember a couple of the largest boards on 8Chan for some time were pro-pedophilia boards, and they stayed up for quite some time. Of course, the actual underbelly of those boards were composed of creating and sharing material through other sites and applications, and announcing this through 8chan. They could not take down the board without defeating the purpose of the site, and could not keep it up without voluntarily allowing for a breeding ground for illegal material, so many of their vendors wanted them off their platform for a while because they could not be moderated effectively.

I think it boils down to - can you reasonably catch illegal content being routed through your platform? 4chan, LiveLeak, WorldStar, ATS, and Twitter all have ways of doing this, 4chan's may be more crude because there are certain things you cannot do on 4chan because of the way the site is designed (for instance, webm's with sound are isolated to a few boards, so you lose a channel of communication when posting them outside of those boards, and you cannot upload documents directly except through labyrinthine methods, many users don't want to click a link and be taken to a different site so you lose that population, etc.), but it does the job to LE's standards. Many people hate it, but there is no benefit in taking it down because the culture would simply migrate elsewhere.

[+] techntoke|6 years ago|reply
Jeffrey Epstein's death was predicted by 50% of the population before officials announced it.
[+] BubRoss|6 years ago|reply
This wasn't a prediction, it was someone saying what happened when it happened before it was reported in the media.
[+] marsRoverDev|6 years ago|reply
4chan is basically a million monkeys on typewriters, so it's unsurprising they've managed to predict the death of Epstein. Let's not forget that every man and his dog on reddit and elsewhere immediately predicted this guy would get suicided. It was as predictable as the tide going in and out.
[+] matt-attack|6 years ago|reply
Why is is hard to believe that any of the probably 20 or 30 people involved in managing his death went it 4chan to post about it? There were many people who knew of his death beforehand from jail personnel, prison guards, EMT, hospital nurses, Doctors, other hospital staff.

Why wouldn’t one of them have just broken the news? Frankly I don’t see how it’s worse for them to break the news to 4chan than for the prison to break it to ABC news. He was dead and they announced it. Why does everything have to be “official”?