Blame Putin? Wayback Machine finds no evidence that anti-gay content on Joy Reid's blog was 'fraudulent'

As Twitchy reported, after Internet sleuths dug up a bunch of homophobic posts on Joy Reid’s old and defunct blog, the MSNBC host told Mediaite that the posts were somehow put in by an “external party.”

Mediaite further reported that Reid admitted that the posts came from her blog, but “were added by nefarious hackers after she had the site shut down.”

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported on Tuesday, though, that the Wayback Machine Internet Archive had found no evidence that the content on Reid’s old blog was “fraudulent.”

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/988868983565705216

“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” wrote the Internet Archive’s Chris Butler in a blog post Tuesday. “We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation,” he added.

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/988869616515633152

Exactly why are you targeting @JoyAnnReid ? She’s only one of the very few fighters we have telling the truth about Trump and fighting for our democracy! Leave her alone!

— Connie Rodebaugh (@connie_rodeconn) April 24, 2018

Leave Joy Reid alone!

Here’s where things get crazy and The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald links to a post on Twitchy sister site Hot Air:

People have the right to change. I believed Joy Reid's apology for those anti-gay blog posts she wrote (they were before the Dem Party officially changed its views on these questions). But her claim that these newly discovered, horribly bigoted posts are fake needs to be verified https://t.co/LYd1rnT07f

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2018

Yes, I'm linking to a conservative site on the Joy Reid denial because most liberal sites will be revealingly uninterested in whether the MSNBC host wrote horribly bigoted anti-gay articles & whether her odd "I-was-hacked" claim is true; the key questions: https://t.co/tHYSZL0Prl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2018

They need to be "verified" because…why? Because you don't like Joy Reid? What actual societal value will come out of verifying them? What harm will come if you just find something else more valuable to do and they are never verified? Why are you so invested?

— Equanimity (@shunyata2000) April 23, 2018

Maybe the reason i'm so "invested" is because I think hideous anti-LGBT bigotry is bad, hurtful and destructive, and that while I think everyone should have space to admit mistakes and apologize for them, it's a serious problem if a journalist is making false claims.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2018

It seems pretty serious if Reid has her lawyers involved. Butler writes, “This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that ‘fraudulent’ posts were ‘inserted into legitimate content’ in our archives of the blog.”

But they can’t find any evidence that the archives were tampered with? That does sound like the sort of thing a legitimate journalist (Reid excluded, obviously) would look into.

The blog has been offline, so it's pretty unlikely she was hacked, someone would've had to rebuild the site and manipulate internal metadata to have the posts appear embedded within backdates, not impossible, but it's far more likely she just wrote them like the others.

— Ziggy⏳Jesus was a Socialist? (@ZiggyRichards) April 23, 2018

I’m done executing our own. Lacking more substantial evidence I’m not on board. We’ve been played too often

— Dave Reed (@jdavereed) April 23, 2018

She's only "your own" if you're claiming to be virulently homophobic. The Wayback Machine logs websites, it's verifiable, it's accurate, she has apologised for other entries on that same blog in the same vein. Occam's Razor, she wrote those posts.

— Ziggy⏳Jesus was a Socialist? (@ZiggyRichards) April 23, 2018

Let’s see how interested the mainstream media is in checking into Reid’s claim that her archives were hacked.

* * *

Update:

https://twitter.com/Bernstein/status/988893443370954752

Related:

RUH-ROH! Joy Reid's stories about homophobic content circulating from her old blog DON'T add up https://t.co/a99L5CwuKy

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 23, 2018

Weak AF: In 1 tweet Joy Reid 'apologizes' for anti-LGBT blog, the next goes back to attacking GOP https://t.co/pAoSGq8j7I

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 4, 2017