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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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 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),

The general consensus now may be that the laptop story is probably legitimate but back in October of 2020 is it was pretty much impossible to bring up the topic of the NY Post getting banned from twitter without someone linking some variant of this story in response.

FWIW there are a couple users here from whom I'm still waiting on an apology. Or at least an acknowledgement.

Ah that makes sense.

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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