For those out of the loop, here's the background. the guardian
For those out of the loop, here's the background.
The story is almost comical. It alleges that someone delivered three laptops to a computer repair store in Delaware. The owner of that store thinks the man who delivered the computers was Hunter Biden, the son of Vice-President Joe Biden. But he can’t be sure it was Hunter Biden. Or maybe he can. He’s very confused about how this all went down. Anyway, the owner says he made copies of the hard drives and somehow sent the content, which he deemed suspicious, to some undetermined law enforcement agency and to the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s personal lawyers. It’s all very unclear how and why such a transaction happened – if at all.
It seems like this is controversy is partly about how to deal with possible forgeries. Of course, if you don't have the technical knowledge to understand that it's a forgery, maybe it just looks...
It seems like this is controversy is partly about how to deal with possible forgeries. Of course, if you don't have the technical knowledge to understand that it's a forgery, maybe it just looks like evidence. This would mean that any sharing of credible-seeming evidence gets special scrutiny. Except that lots of other apparent-evidence (like cell phone videos) get shared without this special scrutiny. What's special about this apparent-evidence?
In court, there apparently needs to be an unbroken chain of custody for an item to legally be considered evidence. Twitter's policy about not publicizing hacks seems to be because such hacks have a particularly dubious chain of custody? But it's not just that, because cell phone videos shared from anonymous Twitter accounts are pretty sketchy too.
Forgeries are more dangerous the more they look like evidence. It makes it less likely that an open Internet discussion will conclude that, yep, that's a forgery. In court, if there is a question about what the evidence means, another thing courts do is bring in experts to testify about the more technical details of validating it, so it turns into a situation where the jurists get to decide between dueling experts.
I guess we sort of get that in open discussion, but it doesn't seem like the experts get listened to very much unless they are amplified by newspapers, and perhaps not even then. (There is also the problem of fake experts and the news media that pushes their narratives.)
And the bigger problem is that moderators are not experts and have no special access to evidence. When we moderate, we are just judging items based on plausibility like everyone else. That's true whether you're a mod for a subreddit or on Twitter's staff.
While Twitter is now allowing the story to be traded around, the Post says Twitter won’t unlock its account until it deletes tweets from Thursday, a period in time when the story was breaking Twitter’s rules. “We don’t change enforcement retroactively,” the company told the Post.
For those out of the loop, here's the background.
the guardian
It seems like this is controversy is partly about how to deal with possible forgeries. Of course, if you don't have the technical knowledge to understand that it's a forgery, maybe it just looks like evidence. This would mean that any sharing of credible-seeming evidence gets special scrutiny. Except that lots of other apparent-evidence (like cell phone videos) get shared without this special scrutiny. What's special about this apparent-evidence?
In court, there apparently needs to be an unbroken chain of custody for an item to legally be considered evidence. Twitter's policy about not publicizing hacks seems to be because such hacks have a particularly dubious chain of custody? But it's not just that, because cell phone videos shared from anonymous Twitter accounts are pretty sketchy too.
Forgeries are more dangerous the more they look like evidence. It makes it less likely that an open Internet discussion will conclude that, yep, that's a forgery. In court, if there is a question about what the evidence means, another thing courts do is bring in experts to testify about the more technical details of validating it, so it turns into a situation where the jurists get to decide between dueling experts.
I guess we sort of get that in open discussion, but it doesn't seem like the experts get listened to very much unless they are amplified by newspapers, and perhaps not even then. (There is also the problem of fake experts and the news media that pushes their narratives.)
And the bigger problem is that moderators are not experts and have no special access to evidence. When we moderate, we are just judging items based on plausibility like everyone else. That's true whether you're a mod for a subreddit or on Twitter's staff.
From the article: