[unethical_ban]

I completely disagree with your assessment. No one is trying to silence people for saying "poor people are worth less than me, taxes are inherently evil, non-whites are probably illegals, and abortion is murder". I'm using the most offensive stereotypes to make the point that no one is even trying to ban those ideas.

The concern is the spread of lies known to be generated by bad actors, and how to handle it. Does "more truth" win against "lies"? Or should we try to limit facebook groups and twitter feeds that say Biden lost the election against all facts and evidence, when we see millions of people believe it just because it feels right to them?

It's not an easy problem, and doesn't seem to have any easy solution.

[hunterb123]

They are banning dissenting information that looks bad for them.

Similar to how CCP bans political dissent, Dems ban any stories on Hunter Biden for example.

The Dems also ban things that look bad on China, like the lab leak, I suppose because they share some of the same goals.

Also the election is perfectly reasonable to question. It's fine to question why the bell weathers and many other record indicators were broken during the 2020 election. It's fine to want to audit and make sure something is secure, especially after we spent $20 million and 5 years investigating the 2016 election for "Russian interference".

[shadowgovt]

A simple search for "hunter biden laptop" on Facebook immediately kicks up three news articles, dozens of site posts, and (in the bubble I can see from my own friends list) several dozen posts on the topic from the point of view that the laptop was real.

If this is Democratic censorship in action, it's incredibly bad at its goals.

[hunterb123]

It was censored on all tech platforms at once when the story broke so the information wouldn't hit mainstream weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Yes eventually they had to allow it because it was blatant censorship, but the damage is done.

[jwond]

You are correct, so I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Facebook explicitly suppressed the story.

> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

-- Andy Stone, Facebook Policy Communications Director

https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000

Coincidentally enough, if you check Andy Stone's LinkedIn you will see that before he started working at Facebook he worked for various organizations associated with the Democratic party.

[unethical_ban]

No one has called for bans of discussions of the lab leak theory (or no one mainstream). It was simply obvious that early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless distraction in the early time of the pandemic, when the rest of the world was focusing on how to respond to the pandemic instead of beating the shit out of Asians and calling Coronavirus "Wuhan flu" to enrage the libs.

No one has "banned" discussion of Hunter Biden. (I just saw your reply to someone else saying it was censored from facebook; I would be interested in seeing any evidence of that). Downvoting isn't censorship. Lack of prioritizing coverage by a newspaper could be a concern, but that isn't censorship (and boy, do I have some news for you if you don't know how Fox does its reporting).

Republicans have barely lifted a finger when in power to secure voting systems, or take any interest in voting security. You keep on acting like Republicans care about election security (or election fairness at all) but they don't. They care about disenfranchisement.

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, as stated by Secretaries of State from multiple states Republican-led and Democrat-led. As shown by reviews in multiple states that were done for partisan reasons (we lost and we don't like Democrats winning).

Voting records might have been broken because political polarization is at a high note and we had a hugely polarizing president in office.

The investigation into Russian interference was related to disinformation campaigns and collusion with members of the Trump campaign, NOT voter or election fraud.

It found evidence of that, but the Republican-led house did nothing with the information. https://wannabewonk.com/summary-of-hypocrisies/

edit2: Ah, yes, you're talking about the discredited hitpieces that were released in the weeks before the election. Yes, it seems those were throttled, openly and transparently, due to them being discredited hitpieces.

[sgregnt]

> The main point is "It was simply obvious that early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless distraction in the early time of the pandemic, "

"Simply obvious" - who is to draw the line?

Where do you find the impartial parties to do this job?

Do you trust facebook or other actors to have the power to decide that something is "simply obvious"?

IMHI, the society has worked out the rules: If there is a legitimate concern for imminante violavce safety etc, go to court. If that's not enough to persecute then perhaps free speech outweighs the concerns, as in practice, "simply obvious" is too vague of a definition.

[flavius29663]

> discredited hitpieces

the Hunter story was anything but discredited. It was just suppressed for no reason other than helping the dems.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/09/21/dou...

> There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020

There was also no evidence of Russia collusion either, but that didn't stop a very long investigation from the FBI that was being advertised on all news channels.

[unethical_ban]

You are factually incorrect re: Russia for reasons cited in the linked post above.

Re: Hunter, that is new info worth looking. Good thing it's not censored like the OP claims to say.

Some thoughts:

The democratic legislative agenda, and more broadly, the issues facing this country such as a pandemic, job uncertainty, healthcare and infrastructure should be a lot more important than the family drama of the Bidens. Republicans don't have any solutions to income inequality, healthcare access, homelessness or climate. Instead of coming up with a competing idea to the Democratic agenda, the Republicans only stand against ideas, rather than for any.

And, to appease your sensibilities: I would totally support a bill that banned family members of federally elected or appointed officials from serving on the boards of foreign companies.

[flavius29663]

It appeared now in some press, but NYP twitter account was suspended for even mentioning Hunter's laptop. It was definitely censorship on Twitter and Facebook even against one of the largest media entities in the country.

This is a surprinsingly balanced opinion on this matter:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21516729/facebook-twitte...

There is no new info, it was all released before the elections. It's true, the moment was chosen for max damage against Biden, but it was/is a real thing.

It's not about "family drama" at all. That would be stuff like how Hunter had an affair with his dead brother's wife. This is about Hunter using his father's name to make money. It's not unreasonable to believe that using just the name is not that valueble for other parties, it's the influence they buy. And there are some direct hints to that in the emails, while also showing how Biden senior wants to protect his name.

And this goes on today. Hunter is selling art to anonymous buyers for 500k a painting. If this doesn't scream corruption, I don't know what.

Ukraine affair: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/hunter-bid...

New, paintings affair: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/hunter-bid...

I for one don't want such a ban on all businesses. If you do that, then why not ban internal businesses too? How about banning businesses before and after office? It makes little sense IMO. I am just absolutely appalled that the average american does not care even when they see this blatant corruption exposed. The same with Trump hiring his son in law at the WH...why is that acceptable?

I would rather ban trading stocks. That is a time sensitive act, you can easily ban it for the duration of the term. You could put all the owned stocks in a generic fund, say VTI or whatever, and not be able to touch it immediately for day trading.

It's true that in general Republicans want to be against things. After all, they are conservatives, they don't want to change stuff, they want to preserve the current order, that is their philosophy. I don't find it that surprising, and I don't get why people don't get this.

I am more progressive than conservatives, what you would call a socially progressive but lower taxes guy.

Your assessment is a bit off: while Trump was against corona measures, which is mind blowing, cause it was his own government doing them, he was very much for creating jobs. The tax cuts and import tarriffs were both meant to create jobs. The idea was to make it easier to invest in the US, and harder to import stuff, I think that's a pretty clear thing to do if you want more domestic jobs. These are long term measures, but it worked while there was no corona, unemployment was low across the board.

Healthcare is idiotic from both parties, Republicans don't want to spend money for other people (even though it would be cheaper overall to do so) while Democrats want to spend money on as many people as possible, without reducing costs, which make it impossible to cover everyone. Bernie's might be the only option that makes sense, but I haven't looked too much into it, probably because I despise socialists too much.