[Arthanos]

This post has a very odd tone, as if a private company enforcing their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence of a private citizen is some unquestionable moral wrongdoing that's apparently going to blow up. Surprised to see this as at the top, on HN.

National Review is a conservative wing-nut website trying to turn this non-story into fuel for their censorship culture war.

[rhino369]

The media commonly relies on second hand accounts of leaked documents ("persons familiar with the contents of [X] document"), including private documents.

Something like this has never been censored before.

It's not like they are taking down a post from a nobody. The NY Post is a major publication.

It's twitter saying they know better than the NY Post. That is a major step that I don't think has ever been taken before.

[daveevad]

> their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence

do you think their policy is evenly applied across their platform?

[hackinthebochs]

Of course not. But how could it possibly be applied evenly? That's not an expectation anyone could genuinely hold.

[ballenf]

Been years since I read anything from National Review, so I was surprised to see them called a "conservative wing-nut website".

Even the wikipedia entry for them seems to counter that assessment pretty strongly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review

[treeman79]

Any agreement with conservative principles will get you labeled as a bunch of unpleasant things.

Balanced budget, smaller government, prolife, personal responsibility, self defense, belief in God.

Express support for any of these and you will be attacked.

[taxicab]

Not only that, but IMO context matters here. We are 20 days away from the election. People are standing in lines to vote as we speak.

If this was published at any other time (and the material for the story has apparently existed since December) the public and the professional media would have had time to scrutinize it, discuss its shortcomings, etc.

But, as Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." We can't do that and being complicit in spreading misinformation in the middle of an election is, I'm sure, still a strong memory that social media companies have from the 2016 election.

My guess as to how this will go is that it will take a week or two to authoritatively discredit the article, but by then, if left unchecked, the article will have already done its damage. The cynic in me says that the originators of the article already know that there isn't much truth here and that this is the point of releasing it while people are voting.

[nautilus12]

Funny how the same logic doesn't apply to the steele dossier :/

[nautilus12]

How this logic not apply to the steele dossier is beyond me.

[JungleGymSam]

So sayeth Arthanos!

[blhack]

Did twitter censor all stories regarding the claim that Trump paid $750 in taxes?

In case the point I’m making isn’t obvious: the NYT never published their source for that, and still haven’t. If twitter is removing stories for having dubious sources, then that story should not pass muster either.

If they’re removing stories for having “hacked” (or in the case of both this story about Hunter Biden, or Trumps taxes: “leaked”) sources, then discussion of BOTH of these stories should be banned.

[srtjstjsj]

That's a bizarre comparison, because Trump has repeatedly lies about being willing but unable to release his own copy of his tax returns. And the NY Times didn't publish personal documents, they published facts about a certain class of personal documents (tax documents of a Presidential candidate) which for decades have been considered public information by all major corners of the political arena.

[rabuse]

Exactly, and it's now spouted as a "fact" in multiple online communities I frequent.

[dexen]

Those weren't hacked or leaked. The story is much simpler, and the provenance of the files is not in question:

By falsely claiming the records were hacked, rather than the legal property of the repair shop following payment default by Hunter Biden, Twitter is itself deliberately spreading false information to justify its illegal election interference. [1]

--

[1] https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1316484977928941570

[kthxbye123]

The provenance of the files is not questioned by far-right political operatives like Sean Davis who are pushing this story in the first place, but to anybody with half a brain cell and an ounce of skepticism the whole story stinks. Just listen to this interview with the owner of the repair shop these files purportedly came from, who changes his story about a half-dozen times in the span of sixty minutes:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...

It's not even clear that it was Hunter who dropped off the laptops in the first place!

[free_rms]

The pentagon papers were unverified and leaked.

More recently and less impressively, the entire world of Russia-gate stuff was unverified and leaked

Would you say the same if that stuff was censored?

[jtbayly]

How in the world can anybody dispute this!?!

Add WikiLeaks to the list too.

People can down vote all they want, but doing so just confirms that the only way to satisfy them is for Twitter to pick sides and apply its rules evenly unfairly on behalf of one political party.

[pnw_hazor]

60 Minutes 2 aired a slanderous story about George Bush based on documents they knew were unverified.

And, the timing is not suspicious it is politics.

[nautilus12]

Exactly!