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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:

The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.

He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”

With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.

Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:

Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.

The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect.

When Snowden leaked all the NSA files, he made the journos agree to terms as well, and knew well not to do a Bradley Manning. And as I recall the WSJ was of the opinion that this was prudent and that you should never just throw confidential material out in the open without the scrutiny of journalists.

Given we don't know the nature of the agreement, and that the same reasons might be operating here (Twitter is very much an intelligence asset and I'm almost completely certain there were spooks on staff), it seems like special pleading to me.

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

That's a good summary of the laptop story in general. Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'

A quick summary...

  • Biden had long been suspected of being in the pocket of the Russian mob with rumors to this effect dating back to the late 90s.

  • Biden's son Hunter, leaves his broken laptop at a one of those "Geek Squad"-type repair places and forgets to pick it up.

  • The tech snoops around the hard drive and in addition to a lot of sex and drug stuff they find correspondences that appears to confirm that Biden had been accepting money from foreign (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) oil oligarchs in exchange for political favors during his time as VP with his soin the conten acting as the intermediary. (Whether it was legal for the tech to go snooping in the first place is part of "the scandal within the scandal")

  • The tech contacts the FBI with the above evidence sometime in the spring of 2020.

  • On October 14th 2020 the NY Post publishes an article claiming that the FBI has proof that Biden has been accepting bribes and is actively working to suppress this information lest it help Trump win reelection.

  • 12 Hours later the NY Post's official Twitter account is suspended and the FBI raids the home of the article's author. Ostensibly for distributing illegally obtained documents. (see previously mentioned "the scandal within the scandal")

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

Edit to clarify: As to "why we should care" it's yet another instance in recent memory of the FBI acting as a partisan hit-quad. It also undermines the wider "Russian collusion" narrative by putting the media in the position of having to defend Biden against the very allegations that they had leveled against Trump.

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week), and that the NYPost did not violate journalistic ethics by reporting on them. Maybe I'm misreading but that appears to be the opposite of what the quoted paragraph implies.

Also, my read of the Taibbi release is that there was no official government pressure to censor the Hunter Biden story directly; instead, there were lots of internal Twitter T&S types running around desperately trying to backfill reasons for their own desire to squelch the story, and sticking by those reasons even when told by Comms that their reasons were wrong.

The Zuckerberg interview on Rogan, and now the Special Agent Elvis Chan deposition show that the FBI had told FB and other social media companies that they had reason to suspect a non-specific information op around the time they became aware of the Hunter Biden allegations, but I haven't yet seen any indication that the FBI specifically ordered the story in particular squelched. Instead, right now it appears to be yet more Moldbuggian effortless coordination, where the FBI could count on ideologically-simpatico T&S teams to squelch the Hunter Story if given any vague, non-specific excuse to cover their asses with.

[Edit: okay, so it appears that one of the Twitter people responsible for the decision to kill the Hunter Biden story was James Baker, former general counsel for the FBI, and who appears to have been key in keeping the Russiagate hoaxes going, including laundering the false Alfabank story through the press. I take it back; no particular coordination between FBI and Twitter was necessary. There was an inside man.]

This sounds about right. No idea if it reflects the consensus among media outlets. I think the OP was skewering them as dishonestly running damage control.

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