Calling it "Hunter Biden's laptop" ignores the fact that it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election. That is not comparable to sharing publicly available information about aircraft movements.
That being said, I also think the extent to which they went to bury and remove the real photos and videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack was a huge overreach. They tried to paint it as a conspiracy theory that had no factual basis — that's biased censorship.
On top of that, in case of this particular account, Musk specifically said that it would be allowed on the platform per his understanding of free speech.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-assange-idUSKBN20...
It was neither of those things.
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
(Edit: may have been just the original author and at least one other:
> The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[23] According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[24] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder. )
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?
Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.
> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.
> I meant the Republican Party.
Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.
Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.
> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.
Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?
https://twitter.com/housegop/status/1593253229747265545
https://i.redd.it/4yfum3kpzy0a1.jpg (I'm too lazy to find the actual tweet)
During the NY Post story, on Twitter you weren't allowed to link to "hacked" material (though this was probably not well enforced).[2]
Twitter changed that policy and reverted the account freezes[3] so that it was fine to link to "hacked" material as long as you weren't directly affiliated with the entity that produced the "hacked" material. [4]
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200603215859/https://help.twit...
[3] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-ceo-nypost-blo...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20210301054617/https://help.twit...
It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
[0] https://www.moneylaundering.ca/public/law/3_stages_ML.php#:~...
A stranger should not be able to unplug your hard-drive and access your nudes.
That specific context you mention is VERY important:
Russia already did this.
The FBI specifically warned to TW that a leak like this had high chance of happening just at the time it did.
Twitter was right to be cautious.
Maybe didn't do everything consistently or perfectly, but I would far prefer them limiting the reach of Hunter dick pics and crack photos than letting a foreign government do so much damage again.
I think their main error was being slow as more background & info was uncovered.
Twitter only censored the oldest continually published newspaper in America during an election about the Hunter Biden laptop.
[1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
If I collate publicy available information and publish it continuously on any person, you are OK with that? If it happens to you?
Sure, if you presuppose that the people responsible for disclosing it are credible and honest.
I personally have some questions why a computer store owner would, faced with an abandoned laptop from a customer, decided to snoop through its contents and give it to Rudy Giuliani, of all people.
If you take the story at face value it's still a massive breach of privacy. You have to go out of your way to find this stuff; an ethical repair shop would go out of their way to avoid accidentally stumping across private information.
Even still, if you assume that he stumbled across extremely concerning information in a manner no fault of his own, why did he feel it necessary to leak videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex? Imagine how creepy it would be if a woman dropped her laptop off at a repair shop and the owner leaked her nudes?
The most charitable interpretation is that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a computer repair shop, and the owner decided to snoop for compromising information and give it to his father's political rival, presumably for politically-motivated reasons.
> Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
I agree.
This, to me, clearly seems to be a small mistake with no material negative impact on the world. Shit happens.
Elon is consistently and repeatedly making far worse mistakes.
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.