Hunter Biden phone hack claims test platforms’ misinformation policies

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

The president's son is accused of leaking data from his devices to search and social media platforms.

Users of 4Chan's /pol/ messageboard were excited over the weekend when a poster claimed to have hacked into Hunter Biden's phone. The original poster suggests that they used a tool called iPhone Backup Extractor to recover backup copies of the contents of an iPad belonging to Hunter Biden, but it's not clear if that's true.

Other users began to share images, video, and messages allegedly taken from the phone after the 4Chan poster shared further instructions about how to decode the backups. At least some of the images shared on 4Chan haven't previously appeared elsewhere online, but no news outlet has confirmed that the content is genuine. The Secret Service said on Monday that it was aware of the alleged hack but was not in a position to make public comments.

There are videos that show Hunter Biden smoking crack cocaine and having sex with women. Since the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop hard drive were shared with the New York Post in 2020, there is no argument that publishing these clips is in the public interest. Hunter Biden's memoir, Beautiful Things, contains many of the details about his partying lifestyle.

There have been legitimate corruption concerns about Hunter Biden, but so far, no evidence of wrongdoing has been produced. The story has been difficult for mainstream news outlets to cover because of the leak.

It's not clear what decisions were made behind the scenes about restricting links to 4Chan posts and other references to the iCloud hack. At the beginning of the week, the #HunterBiden was listed as one of the top topics on the platform, but on Tuesday it didn't seem to be a top topic. At the time of publication, there were no responses to questions about moderation.

Users were shown a notification box for certain search terms related to the hacking. Users were shown a message telling them that results were changing quickly, with a prompt to return later for more reliable information. The results were below the box.

The notices were first rolled out in June of 2021 as part of the company's attempt to boost information literacy.

Adriance said, "These notices automatically appear when our systems detect that a topic is rapidly evolving, like in a breaking news situation." Manual triggering is not involved. The political ideology of the content isn't a ranking factor for search results.

Despite the fact that search hits appeared directly below the notice, some conservative sources accused the search engine of censoring the results. Because of the aggressive moderation of the New York Post's original story about the laptop, it's a sensitive topic. When the story was first released in 2020, both Facebook and Twitter restricted sharing of the URL due to the need to limit the spread of false information.

In order to prevent the exploitation of data voids, search queries that turn up low-quality information in the time before well-researched material has been published is what the strategy is designed to prevent. Emily Dreyfuss is a senior fellow on the Technology and Social Change team at Harvard's Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

The most powerful arbiter of information online in the US has a responsibility to prioritize high quality information. The results are not necessarily reliable, but they are not censoring those results, because they are telling the searcher that what they are looking for is disputed in some way.

Dreyfuss said that the notification from the search engine was similar to the ones used by the social media company.