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[–]wristaction 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You have to read their "debunkings" to fully appreciate how impenetrable they are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/27/five-conspiracy-theories-that-remain-unproven-despite-what-you-might-have-heard/

The Hunter Biden laptop. Shortly before last year’s election, the New York Post reported that a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had been handed over to Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani. The Post picked out some emails from the trove of documents, ones suggesting obliquely that the Democratic presidential nominee was in some way connected to his son’s business activities. (This, of course, was a focus of the effort to defend Trump during his first impeachment in 2019.)

That report spurred an unusual reaction. Social media companies, concerned about having been vectors for Russian misinformation in 2016, limited the sharing of the Post’s story. This was framed by the right as being an effort to protect Biden (though the allegations being made were unlikely to significantly affect a campaign centered on Trump’s own popularity), but, at the time, was instead generally presented by the tech companies as a question of provenance. If the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence, for example, should it be elevated in the national conversation?

That question is a difficult one to answer, but there was good reason to ask it. The story of how Giuliani obtained the laptop was itself unusual, centered on a device being left at a store in Delaware years before. There was also a report from Time indicating that some of the material found on the laptop had been circulating in Ukraine in 2019, during a period when Giuliani was actively seeking dirt on Biden. Had Russia managed to hack Hunter Biden’s online accounts to obtain material? Was Giuliani being duped? That he picked the Post to report on the laptop out of concern that other outlets might “spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out” didn’t engender confidence.

When Politico last week reported that some of the emails included in the Post’s reporting had been verified by a reporter, critics of the decision to mute the Post’s reporting heralded the news as vindication. Here was evidence that this wasn’t misinformation after all!

But again, the idea that what was being shared might have been edited or invented was only part of the decision. The question wasn’t simply one of misinformation but one of Russian intervention. The release of material by WikiLeaks in 2016 was similarly accused of being fake, but the broader issue that emerged was whether an effort already linked to Russia at that point should have been incorporated into election coverage. Much of the response last year centered on that same question. Twitter’s rationale for limiting its spread, for example, indicated that it might violate rules against sharing “content obtained through hacking that contains private information.” That some of the emails were legitimate doesn’t actually prove that initial response to have been unwarranted, nor does it prove that the genesis of the information wasn’t dubious.