Will Elon Musk get his own Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2024?
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Plus
402
Ṁ32k
resolved Sep 28
Resolved
YES

[This is Kevin's low-confidence prediction from the 12/22/23 episode of Hard Fork]

This market will resolve to yes if, by 12/31/24, Elon Musk has downranked/throttled/censored a news outlet's coverage of the 2024 US presidential election on X, similar to the decision Twitter made to temporarily disallow links to the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

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I tossed a vote on this for my daily thinking "there's no way elon musk will take pictures of himself naked smoking crack and then lose the laptop the pictures are on"

What was this resolved based on?

@JuliusSimonelli is there a reason the Vance dossier scandal shouldn't have resolved this YES? I guess you can say theres a factor of subjectiveness, as to what qualifies as a news outlet, but also the market creator is the person who made the prediction so the resolution was always gonna be based on his opinion. It was never qualified that the news outlet must be mainstream media instead of an independent journalist's Substack.

This was a good reminder that I need to improve my reading comprehension.

@mods creator is inactive. Cant think of a single argument against resolving YES

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4901990-journalist-suspended-x-vance-hack/

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ken-klippenstein-publishes-irans-hacked-trump-campaign-document-substa-rcna172902

X, formerly known as Twitter, appears to have taken the strongest initial stance against Klippenstein following his Substack post, blocking accounts that share links to his post and suspending his account.

This has to count, right?

bought Ṁ50 YES

@dgga concerning

@dgga the post supposedly contains Vance's address, and posting other people's private info is against X's terms of use

@Siebe yes I know. Changes exactly nothing about the fact that Kevin Roose's prediction has been fulfilled. Pretty sure posting illegally obtained sexual videos of someone was not any less prohibited by Twitter's ToS.

Edit: also pretty sure there hasn't ever been a site wide content block on a doxx url before in the history of X.

@dgga I didn't actually know that that was what was on the laptop. Nevertheless, all related stories were blocked I think? Even those without term-violating content

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy

Then again,

X, formerly known as Twitter, appears to have taken the strongest initial stance against Klippenstein following his Substack post, blocking accounts that share links to his post and suspending his account.

This response is also much further than blocking the link/displaying a warning, so idk, it might meet the criteria for "similar to [..]"

https://x.com/stphnfwlr/status/1829091428888092841?t=5VqmH6DRAnq40dgCVnlDXg&s=19

When clicking on the linked article, im getting a warning that it might be spam or unsafe. Don't think this really qualifies yet, but it's also hard to see how they determined that NPR's website is unsafe or spam without someone putting a finger on the scale.

@LukasTilmann One day later, I'm not getting this message. In comparison, New York Post's account was freezed for 16 days. https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-york-post-hunter-biden-hacked-materials-1234820449/

bought Ṁ30 YES

I bought yes because Elon is in a unique position to actually self-justify doing this: he owns a media and a few other large companies that have a lot of surface for errors. As such the estimate feels cheap and a good deal.

With that said, the question is ambiguously worded. I thought this would be about some sort of sex scandal rather than a media censorship issue.

I would love to bet on this, but need more clarity. Users (including some that might call themselves news outlets) get downranked/throttled/censored all the time for various reasons, but this generally doesn’t constitute a “Hunter Biden laptop scandal.”

This is so vague bc there could be articles that are about the election that are throttled for entirely seperate reasons

I wonder if KR considered Elon being the nexus of that scandal, not merely in regards to Twitter censorship, but that he himself will have a laptop or piece of information leaked that truly damages him and his reputation forever.

Scorched Earth strategies rarely produce long term growth or positive outcomes, see all empires. Something tells me Elon experiences his “O’Doyle family” (see Billy Madison) precipice in 2024.

Can you please provide more context? Without googling, I didn't know what Hard Fork is.

@JuJumper It’s a tech podcast. Check it out. It’s good.

Nah I think Elon Musk only cares that much about articles about himself, not any of the presidential candidates

Hasn't he already been caught doing this with NYT link? Does it have to be a specific news story?

@BenAdams Came here to say the same thing. I’m sure it’s already been reported that he does this regularly.

Found in almost zero seconds. This is over before 2024 even starts, right? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/technology/x-delay-throttle.html