Suppression/Propaganda in Media

[Harvey]

A fitting journey, from messiah to sacrificial victim. I don't view Jones as a victim and it's interesting that he should have done so much to provoke successive waves of censorship. I am against all censorship and do not advocate censorship of him or anybody else, but he couldn't have done a better job of provocation had that actually been his job.

[Grizzly]

Agreed, Harvey. I feel the same about Trump, I didn't vote for him, didn't and still don't like him. But I think he was or at least I should say the office of President was swallowed by the leviathan in a way I haven't seen in my lifetime. I don't think he's a good guy, Alex or Trump. Egomaniacs both. However, (at least where AJ is concerned, he was the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. Both were done wrong. Neither a victim.

I too, am strongly FOR free speech and zero censorship. I never for one second thought Trump was there to drain the swamp, but I'm sure he was ostracized, if not humiliated, and duped by his own kind.

I have had some mynute feelings of fondness for the guy, (AJ) off and on over the decades, he opened my eyes to so many things in the late 80's/90's I can't help but respect him for that, but he turned into a megalomaniac and his act wore thin fast. I don't hate the guy, and appreciate some of his work, hell, a lot of it. But nor do I hold him in high regard either. Having said that , I will suffer through and listen to him sometimes. Only in small doses though.

[Harvey]

Yes, nicely put.

[stickdog99]

[Grizzly]

America’s Open Wound
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/americas-open-wound?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The CIA is not your friend

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

― Baruch Spinoza

[Grizzly]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/19/pentagon-psychological-operations-facebook-twitter/

Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations
Complaints about the U.S. military’s influence operations using Facebook and Twitter have raised concern in the White House and federal agencies.

[stickdog99]

Living in a corrupt environment makes you more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, regardless of your politics

This headline probably belongs in the "Not the Onion" thread.

[stickdog99]

[stickdog99]

Punching Down: How the "anti-disinformation" movement worked with Big Tech to protect Big Pharma

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the greatest acceleration of online censorship in the short history of the internet. In response, the field dedicated to upholding human rights online—the digital rights movement—remained near silent to this massive government and corporate over-reach. Worse, digital rights activists sometimes even collaborated with censors in the name of protecting the public from “disinformation.”

I’ve spent more than 20 years in digital rights, freedom of expression and open technology communities, and co-founded an organisation dedicated to these ideas: EngageMedia. Over the 17 years I ran Engage Media, we built a team that stretched across 10 countries, from India to Australia—one of the biggest digital rights organisations in the Asia-Pacific, hosting hundreds of workshops and large events, and leading multiple international networks. In short, I’m not a newbie or outsider in this field.

But during the pandemic, I watched the digital rights movement lose its voice as champions of online freedom of expression. Instead, they began to echo the positions of governments and companies with far from stellar records on human rights and corporate integrity. This recasting of governments and corporations as allies, rather than institutions to be held to account, has perverted the mission of digital rights and harmed public health.

The Digital Rights Movement

Digital Rights is an umbrella term that captures multiple concepts from “internet freedom” to “open technology” to “digital public policy.” Over the past several decades, it has become a major force in advocating for online rights and freedoms. Hundreds of universities, institutes, and non-profit organizations work in this arena on every corner of the planet. Whilst I know of no exact calculations, funding for the field is surely in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually—sourced from a mix of liberal foundations, governments, and Big Tech itself.

Core to this fundamentally left-leaning field was anti-censorship and a libertarian ethos. If the movement has a founding document, it is the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which begins:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Left-libertarianism and techno-utopianism dominated Internet culture in the 90s and 2000s, yet withered rapidly in the Trump era, as it was unable to move quickly enough to address issues of online discrimination and harassment. In response, a new wing took root that was less hippy, more helicopter parent.

Internet parentalism, with its emphasis on safety over freedom, addressed concerns about the dark side of the Internet, but it did so with top-down regulation and control. And just as the former left-libertarianism created an imperfect system, so has the current left-parentalism. This became quite clear during the pandemic. During COVID, general skepticism of authority was replaced by respect for authority. Once suspect governments and businesses were now to be shielded from critique.

Content moderation is key to the new left-parentalism, and the pandemic radically accelerated and solidified a new digital authoritarianism. It is worth revisiting Hillary Clinton’s seminal 2010 “internet freedom” speech, to see how far thinking has shifted:

Now, all societies recognise that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence... And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible... But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

How different content moderation is today, where comments deemed “offensive” might be censored. In those days liberals even thought about balancing safety and freedom when dealing with terrorists, yet this was not the case with COVID. With Musk now taking over Twitter, the Internet-parentalism wing may be on its back-foot but it has made headway in altering culture, so much so that supporting the left-libertarian approach (or the 2010 Clintonian position) is now considered “right-wing.”

New Zealand Prime minister Jacinda Arden personifies the progressive authoritarian shift. In her recent UN speech she compared “disinformation” to “weapons of war,” expressing a deep frustration with those who stray from the “consensus” and emphasising strong government control for “disinformation.” The Arden approach is now the default setting in the digital rights field where government and corporate censorship have replaced debate and persuasion as the answer to “wrong” ideas. For example, Ardern gave the opening speech at the 2022 RightsCon, the biggest digital rights conference on the calendar (EngageMedia co-hosted the 2015 edition).

That government determines truth to protect citizens is a boom to authoritarians everywhere – from the Philippines, to Ethiopia, to Russia—while also limiting government and corporate accountability. To be clear, both Clinton’s and Ardern’s policy served the needs of power. The difference is that Clinton was largely in step with the previous 200 years of liberal theory, while Arden returns society to levels of government authority and control that people have struggled to overcome for centuries.

Growth and change of “anti-disinformation”

Disinformation was already an established sector prior to the pandemic. But it focused on top level malfeasance: for example, Myanmar military social media accounts promoting violence against the Rohingya or former Philippine President Duterte’s use of bots to attack dissidents. Advocacy took a mostly Clintonian approach to counter such state power—minimising overt censorship, while educating the public and notifying Big Tech of egregious incidents of disinformation (mostly by government).

The Trump election and Cambridge Analytica scandal changed these rules as many blamed social media greed and wilful ignorance for the election loss. Claims of Russian disinformation compounded these problems. Big Tech’s alleged lack of action put it at odds with its core, liberal constituencies. Anger and disillusionment allowed the speech control wing of the digital rights movement to ascend, shifting the movement’s mission from watching the powerful to policing the fringe.

Newer disinformation initiatives also sought to rebuild trust in Big Media, legacy organisations whose legitimacy crumbled for a variety of reasons: from supporting the Iraq war, to failing to predict Trump and Brexit. To recapture authority, elites made themselves the adults who discern the truth, as the rest of society cannot be trusted make competent decisions.

Anti-disinformation amid the pandemic

I went into the pandemic with a wide variety of doubts, but was among the majority in supporting government restrictions, though never on access to information. Banning discussion of a possible lab accident at the pandemic’s beginning triggered me to reevaluate. My own Australian government and the former CDC Director Robert Redfield both considered the lab-leak a plausible reason for how the pandemic started. Meanwhile, leading anti-disinformation organisations labelled it a conspiracy theory, and suggested that journalists not amplify it.

After the lab leak theory became mainstream, I saw no reconsideration of facts among the anti-disinformation and digital rights sectors, as any straying meant being called far-right. Unfortunately, silence only shields the powerful, and civil liberties and human rights groups went AWOL on their duties, or even swapped sides. Witness the ACLU advocating for the violation of bodily autonomy and in favour of widespread vaccine mandates.

The digital rights field seem oblivious to how much information is now controlled. Despite all the changes during COVID, the 2022 iteration of RightsCon had no sessions on the pandemic and disinformation. The digital rights community has also ignored news of the White House directing Twitter to deplatform journalists, and of Harvard and Stanford Professors suing the White House for social media related free speech violations.

Other few key examples of how pandemic censorship protected the powerful:

* Vaccines were widely claimed to stop infection or transmission. A sterilising vaccine was the core rationale behind mandates and exclusionary passport systems. Yet, in a November 2020 article in Business Insider the Moderna COO disclosed the vaccine does not stop transmission, as was admitted by a senior Pfizer executive in October 2022 during an EU hearing. Despite that, suggesting the vaccine did not prevent transmission could get you banned from several platforms.

* Facebook still bans “questioning the efficacy of vaccines” and Youtube also bans some discussions. Yet, there is now a modest acknowledgement of vaccine side effects, and some governments have age restricted some vaccines due to risks. The German government acknowledged that 1 in 5000 mRNA doses results in a “serious reaction” (that’s 1 in every 1667 people with 3 shots). Still, leading health podcasters constantly operate with the fear of being shut down for discussing side effects.

* Natural immunity from prior infection was one of the many “conspiracies” although the CDC now considers it equal to vaccination, stating “it really makes the most sense to not differentiate”.

* Questioning of lockdowns was once banned, yet it is now widely acknowledged that lockdowns resulted in serious harm including delays in childhood learning, lack of early treatment for serious illness, a rise in domestic abuse, as well as inflation and a massive transfer of wealth to the rich.

* Across the board social media sought to disallow information that is “inconsistent with health authorities' guidance”. But authorities are not all-knowing and this policy blew away previously held norms around open scientific debate and went against the crowd-sourcing ethos of progressives.

Why the conformity?

Some level of conformity is to be expected; however, it reached uncanny levels during the pandemic. Public relations campaigns hid how information controls have worked, as many aren’t even aware of policies and repeated “fact check” failures. PR campaigns also succeeded in associating those seeking to limit pandemic controls as being right-wing and therefore selfish, or worse, racist and misogynist—even as vaccine hesitancy was highest among communities of colour.

Second, the “anti-disinformation” and digital rights field maintains rigorous class solidarity and is overwhelmingly upper-middle and middle class. The upper and middle classes have a higher trust in institutions because they run those institutions and those institutions have worked for them. The field is also the ultimate laptop class, along with others working in tech. Work from home and other lockdown policies benefited them, even as it harmed others.

Third, digital rights melted into the “follow the science” movement. Populism dented the prestige of the expert and professional managerial class, while COVID energized their authority with “science” and gave them back power. Questioning “the science” and acknowledging mistakes means re-diminishing that power.

Finally, Big Tech has compromised the field with tens of millions of dollars (possibly hundreds) annually, yet this funding bias is rarely discussed. Imagine if Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil were core funders of the climate change movement. Added to this financial influence is a revolving door between Big Tech and those meant to hold it to account

Moving forward
Allegations of “disinformation” have become a tool to delegitimize opposition to orthodoxy and power, and have been weaponised to shield government and Big Pharma from scrutiny. Just as criticism of the automobile industry in the 60s and 70s led to improved car safety, today’s public fora must hold the powerful to account.

By aligning with Big Tech and Big Pharma, the “anti-disinformation” and digital rights sectors have neglected their responsibilities, and have come to serve power rather than people, contributing to a broader chilling effect.

To improve digital rights, we must:

* Ensure funders, non-profits, journalists, and media organisations more clearly stand up for free speech and invite dissenting views;
* Remain courageous while suffering the slings and arrows of nasty online criticism. And support those who speak out;
* Highlight bullying that closes down conversation and benefits institutional interests;
* Generate greater public awareness of government and corporate manipulation on social media;
* Refuse Big Tech and Big Pharma funding for work that is meant to keep these same industries accountable;
* Create more watchers to watch the “anti-disinformation” watchers;
* Develop alternative media platforms so the conversation can’t be so easily controlled;
* Ensure regulation that protects free speech;
* Break up Big Tech and Big Media to limit government and corporate control of public discourse and increase diversity of opinion.

Pandemic information controls and restrictions on free speech had real world consequences that contributed to poorer, not better, public health outcomes. By neglecting to address corporate and government pandemic censorship, the digital rights movement failed in its core mission of securing online freedom of expression.

[Belligerent Savant]

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1 ... heGwbLwU7g

@AGHamilton29

These guys are furious at Taibbi, but none of them can actually point to anything he is doing wrong. He is revealing details about an important event using primary sources. There is no evidence he is distorting anything. He's doing journalism and they are mad about it.

They are even citing him to downplay the story while also attacking him. The reason they are mad is the story itself reveals obviously wrong and harmful censorship which they vocally supported and don't want publicly relitigated.

10:23 PM · Dec 2, 2022

https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status ... heGwbLwU7g

[Gnomad]

About that Hunter Bidens Laptop thing....

You should read this article at the link, it has several links to all the sources he refers to, at the original... I only quoted the beginning, it is a long post, with lots of links and images of the various sources used. Go there to read.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hel ... ns-laptop/

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop, there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.

Now, to be clear, I’ve explained many times before, in other posts, why people who freaked out about how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story are getting confused, but it’s usually been a bit buried. I had already started a version of this post last week, since people keep bringing up Twitter and the laptop, but then on Friday, Elon (sorta) helped me out by giving a bunch of documents to reporter Matt Taibbi.

So, let’s review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It’s no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election — not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.

Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a “hacked materials” policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were — clearly! — some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).

The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani’s hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata).

The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.

Based on that, both Twitter and Facebook reacted somewhat quickly. Twitter implemented its hacked materials policy in exactly the manner that we had warned might happen a month earlier: blocking the sharing of the NY Post link. Facebook implemented other protocols, “reducing its distribution” until it had gone through a fact check. Facebook didn’t ban the sharing of the link (like Twitter did), but rather limited the ability for it to “trend” and get recommended by the algorithm until fact checkers had reviewed it.

To be clear, the decision by Twitter to do this was, in our estimation, pretty stupid. It was exactly what we had warned about just a month earlier regarding this exact policy. But this is the nature of trust & safety. People need to make very rapid decisions with very incomplete information. That’s why I’ve argued ever since then that while the policy was stupid, it was no giant scandal that it happened, and given everything, it was not a stretch to understand how it played out.

Also, importantly, the very next day Twitter realized it fucked up, admitted so publicly, and changed the hacked materials policy saying that it would no longer block links to news sources based on this policy (though it might add a label to such stories). The next month, Jack Dorsey, in testifying before Congress, was pretty transparent about how all of this went down.

All of this seemed pretty typical for any kind of trust & safety operation. As I’ve explained for years, mistakes in content moderation (especially at scale) are inevitable. And, often, the biggest reason for those mistakes is the lack of context. That was certainly true here.

Yet, for some reason, the story has persisted for years now that Twitter did something nefarious, engaging in election interference that was possibly at the behest of “the deep state” or the Biden campaign. For years, as I’ve reported on this, I’ve noted that there was literally zero evidence to back any of that up. So, my ears certainly perked up last Friday when Elon Musk said that he was about to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression.”

Certainly, if there was evidence of something nefarious behind closed doors, that would be important and worth covering. If it was true that through discussions I’ve had with dozens of Twitter employees over the past few years every single one of them lied about what happened, well, that would also be useful for me to know.

And then Taibbi revealed… basically nothing of interest. He revealed a few internal communications that… simply confirmed everything that was already public in statements made by Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s Congressional testimony, and in declarations made as part of a Federal Elections Commission investigation into Twitter’s actions. There were general concerns about foreign state influence campaigns, including “hack and leak” in the lead up to the election, and there were questions about the provenance of this particular data, so Twitter made a quick (cautious) judgment call and implemented a (bad) policy. Then it admitted it fucked up and changed things a day later. That’s… basically it.

And, yet, the story has persisted over and over and over again. Incredibly, even after the details of Taibbi’s Twitter thread revealed nothing new, many people started pretending that it had revealed something major, with even Elon Musk insisting that this was proof of some massive 1st Amendment violation:
Elon Musk tweet stating: "If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?"

Now, apparently more files are going to be published, so something may change, but so far it’s been a whole lot of utter nonsense. But when I say that both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I keep seeing a few very, very wrong arguments being made. So, let’s get to the debunking:
1. If you said Twitter’s decision to block links to the NY Post was election interference…

You’re wrong. Very much so. First off, there was, in fact, a complaint to the FEC about this very point, and the FEC investigated and found no election interference at all. It didn’t even find evidence of it being an “in-kind” contribution. It found no evidence that Twitter engaged in politically motivated decision making, but rather handled this in a non-partisan manner consistent with its business objectives:

Twitter acknowledges that, following the October 2020 publication of the New York Post articles at issue, Twitter blocked users from sharing links to the articles. But Twitter states that this was because its Site Integrity Team assessed that the New York Post articles likely contained hacked and personal information, the sharing of which violated both Twitter’s Distribution of Hacked Materials and Private Information Policies. Twitter points out that although sharing links to the articles was blocked, users were still permitted to otherwise discuss the content of the New York Post articles because doing so did not directly involve spreading any hacked or personal information. Based on the information available to Twitter at the time, these actions appear to reflect Twitter’s stated commercial purpose of removing misinformation and other abusive content from its platform, not a purpose of influencing an election

All of this is actually confirmed by the Twitter Files from Taibbi/Musk, even as both seem to pretend otherwise. Taibbi revealed some internal emails in which various employees (going increasingly up the chain) discussed how to handle the story. Not once does anyone in what Taibbi revealed suggest anything even remotely politically motivated. There was legitimate concern internally about whether or not it was correct to block the NY Post story, which makes sense, because they were (correctly) concerned about making a decision that went too far. I mean, honestly, the discussion is not only without political motive, but shows that the trust & safety apparatus at Twitter was concerned with getting this correct, including employees questioning whether or not these were legitimately “hacked materials” and questioning whether other news stories on the hard drive should get the same treatment.

.... continues, much more there!

snip snip:

2. But Twitter’s decision to “suppress” the story was a big deal and may have swung the election to Biden!

I’m sorry, but there remains no evidence to support that silly claim either. First off, Twitter’s decision actually seemed to get the story a hell of a lot more attention. Again, as noted above, Twitter did nothing to stop discussion of the story. It only blocked links to one story in the NY Post, and only for that one day. And the very fact that Twitter did this (and Facebook took other action) caused a bit of a Streisand Effect (hey!) which got the underlying story a lot more attention because of the decisions by those two companies.

The reality, though, is that the story just wasn’t that big of a deal for voters. Hunter Biden wasn’t the candidate. His father was. Everyone already pretty much knew that Hunter is a bit of a fuckup and clearly personally profiting off of the situation, but there was no actual big story in the revelations (I mean, yeah, there are still some people who insist there are, but they’re the same people who misunderstood the things we’re debunking here today). And, if we’re going to talk about kids of Presidents profiting off of their last name, well, there’s a pretty long list to go down….

But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the evidence. As reporter Philip Bump recently noted, there’s actual evidence in Google search trends that Twitter and Facebook’s decision really did generate a lot more interest in the story. It was well after both companies took action that searches on Google for Hunter Biden shot upward: (charts at linked story!)

Also, soon after, Twitter reversed its policy, and there was widespread discussion of the laptop in the next three weeks leading up to the election. The brief blip in time in which Twitter and Facebook limited the story seemed to have only fueled much more interest in it, rather than “suppressing” it.

Indeed, another document in the “Twitter Files” highlights how a Democratic member of the House, Ro Khanna, actually reached out to Twitter to point this out and to question Twitter’s decision (if this was really a big Democratic conspiracy, you’d think he’d be supportive of the move, rather than critical of it, but the reverse was true.) Rep. Khanna’s email to Twitter noted:

I say this as a total Biden partisan and convinced he didn’t do anything wrong. But the story has now become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been.

So again, the evidence actually suggests that the story wasn’t suppressed at all. It got more attention. It didn’t swing the election, because most people didn’t find the story particularly revealing.

But hey, dont anybody say a thing about Trumps son and Saudi billions... Thats totally fine for Elon Musk, right...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jared-ku ... 72bff63881

Jared Kushner, ex-President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, isn’t the first one to get a big payout after leaving his position as a senior adviser in the White House. Nor is he the first family member of a president or ex-president to use his position to get money. But the $2 billion stake invested by the Saudis in Kushner’s new private equity firm dwarfs all previous post-presidential money grabs in both size and scope.

The New York Times reported on April 10 that a Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman contributed $2 billion to Kushner’s Affinity Partners over the objections of advisers who warned of Kushner’s “inexperience” and the risk involved due to “unsatisfactory” due diligence (a hallmark of Trump’s personal business investments) and “excessive” asset management fees.

In his role as White House adviser to Trump, Kushner was a close ally of the crown prince, offering him advice and defending him after Saudi military and intelligence officers murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Embassy in Instabul.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that bin Salman ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the Saudi regime. While Kushner remained in the White House, he kept in touch with the crown prince through off-the-books WhatsApp text messages.

As with so many things done by Trump and his family, Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi payout highlights a preexisting malady in American life by taking it to its extreme. In this case, that malady is the commercialization of the post-presidency that has taken hold over the past 40 years.

Oh, Im sorry, I forgot who it was that bankrolled Musk's Twittler purchase...yeah. Saudis of course! Totally unbiased.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
There are a few glaring omissions in the above output.

Putting aside whatever Twitter did or didn't do, or whatever Musk did or didn't do, or whatever Kushner did or didn't do, there was the absolutely deafening silence on the part of just about all major media outlets or self-described 'journalists' in reporting or exploring this Hunter Biden story (other than whatever the NY Post reported at the time) when it was initially discovered.

The story was largely suppressed/silenced. There seemed to be zero interest in any examination, analysis, or investigation into the merits of the reported narratives. What about any forensic analysis performed on this hard drive? The results of metadata analysis performed on the documents produced/released to the press? Any details on an inventory of electronic documents, emails and/or other artifacts recovered from the hard drive, and the extent any of said data/artifacts may have potentially posed a national security risk given Hunter's political and business interests and ties?
(By this I mean proper corroboration or vetting of claims made by Guliani et al., rather than mere partisan denials and deflection).

In full disclosure, for a number of reasons I didn't follow this story closely (then or now) as I perceived it as yet another distraction/red herring for the rubes to swallow, with minimal potential for genuine investigation.

Turns out I was largely right.

But, has there been any formal reporting or analysis of hard drive content? Has there been any surface level, let alone deep dive, assessment into the potential merits of any of the claims made by either 'side' Re: discovery of information? Any third party/neutral assessment at all?

And if not, why the fuck not?

THIS is the key issue as I see it: the dominant (mainstream) media/press performed the bare minimim -- or zero -- due diligence.

A direlection of duty as impartial journalists (if any still exist), in other words.

If there WAS any form of analysis/investigation, please advise and I'll amend. As I stated, I didn't follow the story closely.

(I believe I recall a reference to the federales obtaining access to Hunter's hard drive and generating a forensic image ,but that was the extent of the reporting as I recall it. No follow-up on findings, other than perhaps confirming -- or not -- whatever it was that Giuliani claimed was recovered. But whatever was claimed, even if genuine, would only constitute a tiny percentage of the totality of data likely stored in the device, not to mention the probability of artifacts that may 'point to' or reference additional sources of data, such as cloud-based storage, external thumb drives, cloud-based chat messages, etc).

Also: to boldly claim the Hunter Biden laptop story wouldn't have at least the potential to impact the outcome of the election is just absurd.

There is absolutely reason to believe that a full and thorough examination of the story -- especially if it included a reveal of damning recovered information -- could very well have influenced sentiment leading up to the election. To suggest otherwise reveals only the bias of the author.

[stickdog99]

LOL at the current reigning corporate media narrative that Twitter did nothing wrong by censoring and shadow-banning hundreds of accounts and posts at the direct behest of the US federal government and it they did do anything wrong, it was no big deal anyway.

[Belligerent Savant]

Indeed. Post-satire world.
The scary part is an entire demographic will absorb these narratives without a hint of applied scrutiny.
(The obligatory add-on that the same applies for narratives curated for self-identified 'Right-wing'/MAGA/'Qanon', et al. demos)

the conditioning protocols are much refined from the legacy deutschland systems of the 30s.

[Gnomad]

How could there be any independent forensic analysis, if the laptop had been in the hands of Rudy Giuliani before handing it to the authorities? It could no longer be considered evidence, because it has been in the hands of a person who has their own agenda regarding it. It is completely tarnished at that point and can no longer be considered evidence of anything - not to mention that most of the tweets that were taken down were dick pics, which are revenge porn, which is not only a crime to post, but also against Twitter's rules. Also, that it could influence the elections was exactly the reason the story was suppressed, because it had all the marks of election interference, possibly from abroad. Just like the leaked Hillary emails - both the Democrats AND the Republicans had been hacked before the 2016 elections, BUT only the Democratic emails were leaked. Possibly because someone, possibly Russia, wanted Trump to win.

I am sure that Russia has something very damaging on Trump, possibly video or images where he does something really damaging, perhaps sex with underage girls or boys, and hence Trumps total loyalty to Putin is guaranteed. Nothing else explains why Trump was always like Putins personal little bitch. I remember watching when Trump and Putin met here in Helsinki, it was totally bizarre to watch him kowtow to Putin like a good boy.

And let it be said that both of the parties in US are nothing more than two wings of the same system, neither of which has the good of humanity in mind. The Democratic party is just Fascism-lite while Republicans are Full-on-fascists. That is the sordid truth. There is no "Left" in the US, Democratic party is center-right at best, and Repugs are far-right in any real socialist / co-operatist context.

Personally, it looks to me like it is only a matter of how long before the whole US descends into chaos and violence, and rips itself apart.

Same goes for the whole capitalist system of course, because when it attains the limits of growth that are planetary in nature, it has nothing left to devour except itself.

[T]he idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture, it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times with us in the past. It is with us now; there is has been a sharp rise in evangelical sects in this country in recent year, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and anti-libertarian.
It is truism that any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young and by killing, locking up or driving underground all heretics…It is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

- Robert Heinlein

The whole laptop story is but a stupid diversion that leads to nothing of import.