from the impossibility-theory-all-over-again dept

You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as some questions about the story itself, Twitter made the (ultimately unwise and mistaken) decision to block links to that story, and (in some cases) to suspend accounts that were sharing it. A day later, the company admitted this was a mistake and changed its policy.

As we’ve explained at great length, the conspiracy stories that came out of this one incident are ridiculous and out of touch with reality. The company made one dumb move, which (despite what you might have heard) was not pushed on them by the government or the Biden campaign (which was not the government). They corrected it relatively quickly. This is the nature of content moderation. Mistakes will be made.

Yet, the conspiracy theories continue to spread, and even Elon Musk (the now owner of Twitter) has bought into many of them, and has even suggested that this was some of the reason he chose to purchase Twitter, as right after the announced purchase, he declared that it was “obviously incredibly inappropriate” for Twitter to have done that to “a major news organization.”

Leaving aside that Musk’s own Twitter also blocked the NY Post incorrectly just recently, it appears that it is also somewhat aggressively blocking links to certain other news stories as well.

You’ve likely heard about recent leaks of Pentagon documents that were first leaked via a Discord server. On Wednesday, the Washington Post’s Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford broke quite a story about where the documents came from, discussing the small, private Discord group, and the guy who operated it, who apparently went to great lengths to leak these classified documents.

The young member read OG’s message closely, and the hundreds more that he said followed on a regular basis for months. They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed hespent at least some of his day inside a