[HelloMcFly]

> Is it 'trash' to be upset that Hunter Biden made 600k/yr from a no-show job that looks super crooked?

No, because that's clearly verifiable facts summarized by an opinion. Now ask "Is it trash to acknowledge that Hunter Biden had his dad use his influence to replace a straight-laced Ukrainian prosecutor with a corrupt stooge so Hunter could enrich himself?"

That's trash. Or:

"Is it trash to point out how Soros-funded Democrats are involved in a global pedophilia conspiracy that American conservatives are secretly working to take down?"

That's also trash.

[free_rms]

It gets into the realm of speculation with partial facts, but you can make a pretty good case that Biden was involved with replacing one corrupt stooge with another one, who then just happened to drop all investigations into Hunter Biden's shady employer. Matt Taibbi has done some good reporting on this lately.

You could cast doubt on Taibbi or an any narrative that fills in the blanks in some places, but compare to the fevered Russia-conspiracy talk that got mainstream credibility, Rachel Maddow features, WaPo editorial references, etc for years. Is one so much worse than the other? Or is it just a matter of which side it favors in the short-term?

[HelloMcFly]

I do not cast doubt on Taibbi. I think the work he is doing is great, and should have been where the effort was in the first place. But so much of that particular topic is just circumstantial chum in the water that either few people actually investigated, or those that did could find little real supporting evidence.

But let me use Taibbi's own words here: “If something comes in and we don’t know the exact providence of it, that doesn’t mean we can’t publish it. All we have to do is establish that it’s true, and a lot of important stories have been broken that way.”

Ironically, Taibbi seems to say this as a criticism for Twitter reacting to the NYPost story. Except the NYPost did no work to establish it was true and even hired a Hannity employee to publish it since their own journalists wouldn't do it. That to me is the problem.

Twitter and Facebook, through action or inaction, now impact our democracy. Their action or inaction gives them responsibility whether asked for or not, conferred or not. I think this creates a need to act responsibly. I don't know how this should best be done, but I'm categorically against a complete "hands-off" given the expertise we've seen at creating and spreading manipulated content.

[free_rms]

I'll just say, if you're gonna put your thumb on the scale, you need to not fuck it up.

They streisand-effected the whole story, and made themselves look bad and unfair in the process -- how many unsourced claims about Russian interference have they let stand? This was a fiasco all around.

Cheers and solidarity.

[srtjstjsj]

The Burisma investigation was dropped by the shady prosecutor before the prosecutor was replaced. The opposition to the previous prosecutor was multi-national