Talk:Hunter Biden laptop controversy

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Gareth Corfield (February 25, 2023). "Wikipedia is not woke, insists founder Jimmy Wales". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved March 16, 2023. Wikipedia was just as infuriated about the laptop allegations as the US Democratic Party's staffers. Its users marked the site's entry about the controversy for deletion, claiming it wasn't notable enough to bother including.

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Giuliani is the only source listed

Bevan Cooney should also be listed as a source. J.P.Dill (talk) 20:46, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Add that Facebook/Twitter received "no comment" from FBI

According to sworn testimony on

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/testimony-reveals-fbi-employees-who-warned-social-media-companies-about-hack

both Facebook and Twitter asked the FBI on Oct 14, 2020 whether the laptop was real, and the FBI responded with "no comment" even though the FBI agents knew the laptop was real. This helps to explain why the social media companies treated the NYP story as potentially Russian "hack and leak". I do not see this information in the current version of the article. Therefore I suggest adding the following sentence after the first sentence of the second paragraph of the "Social media corporations" section:

Both companies asked the FBI on October 14, 2020 whether the laptop was real, and the FBI replied "no comment" even though the FBI agents knew the laptop was real. Swan2024 (talk) 20:53, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Conspiracy theory???

User:Muboshgu has re-inserted three categories identifying this article as a "conspiracy theory". While the cover-up certainly included allegations from the left that this was a "conspiracy theory", as we all know now, the laptop was as real as the sun coming up this morning, so continuing to categorize it as a conspiracy theory "promoted by Donald Trump" is factually incorrect. Please explain this head-scratcher. Thank you. Magnolia677 (talk) 15:48, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The story here is not that Hunter Biden left a laptop behind at a store that proved that he used cocaine and hired prostitutes. The story Giuliani et al were pushing was that this laptop proved malfeasance by Joe Biden. That's the conspiracy theory, and if you don't think it was "promoted by Donald Trump", I invite you to read some of the reliable sources that have covered this over the last four years. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:39, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

User:Muboshgu You appear confused about the topic of this article, which is made clear as a mud-free river in the first paragraph. Let us imagine an umbrella, and under that umbrella are words associated with being "unproven", such as "allegation", "lie", "conspiracy theory", and so forth. What we would not find under that umbrella are the words "truth" or "fact", because it would be factually incorrect to include them. Said another way, you would be reverted faster than a knife fight in a phone booth if you added this article to List of conspiracy theories. Please revert your addition of categories associating this article with "conspiracy theories". Magnolia677 (talk) 17:22, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We're doing this again? The first paragraph of the lead is not the article, and is oddly written considering that the laptop was pushed to smear Joe Biden. Re-read the fourth paragraph of the lead. Then read some sources. Here's one. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:26, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the page a bit more closely, it seems this page has been more streamlined to be about the laptop itself and not as much about the alleged vs. actual content of it. That may be a mistake. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:34, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you read the juicy bits of that "fourth paragraph", three sources are cited:

"Laptop" is mentioned once in just one article, and "conspiracy theory" is mentioned just once in another article...but not in the same article. Not sure what kind of synth gymnastics are going on here, but "conspiracy theory" categories are not appropriate in this article. We may need to let the wider community find consensus on this one. Magnolia677 (talk) 17:41, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The laptop was supposed to be the smoking gun to help Trump defeat Biden in 2020. There's the conspiracy theory. The WaPo article I shared above connects some dots. Plenty of other sources do too. I haven't been so involved in editing this page. – Muboshgu (talk) 18:03, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The cover-up and false accusations of a "conspiracy theory" were proven wrong, and reliably sourced articles do not "connect dots" from various sources. Perhaps others can offer insight. Magnolia677 (talk) 19:33, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]