Does the Onion offer opinion and analysis? Further, InfoWars has a team of writers and sometimes publishes true news. A policy that blocked InfoWars could block a true post from a website on the grounds that a previous, satirical post was disliked by the staff.
CNN, the guardian, and the Washington Post could also work under that principle after all the misinformation and falsehoods they have published this year.
The Onion makes no claims about being anything other than satire. The fact that Infowars publishes true news occasionally is no more significant than the fact that sometimes Onion stories end up happenening in real life.
Sowing doubt in the distrustful is simple and Infowars exploits that tendency in people while offering some signs of legitimacy by sometimes reporting on events like traditional news. Mix in enough BS and it becomes hard to tell what’s real, nothing new or special about that idea.
If the majority of what you publish is unsupported by evidence then you should not be considered news, commentary or entertainment sure, but not news.
The mental acrobatics HN performs is lovely. Here we have an all too rare example of a megacorp actually defending AGAINST censorship, and there will be negativity and naysaying because of politics.
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." - Thomas Jefferson
Is censorship our friend?
We should never withdraw from anybody who aligns as an opponent of censorship.
There are barely any posts on this yet, and your own posts make up the majority. One of your posts is trying to scare someone from saying Infowars does bad things by scaring him with a libel threat. Libel threat. Great support of free speech.
And anyways, I don't work for infowars or any media related corp, so I wouldn't be in a position to accuse someone of libel. I was explaining that there are limits to what you can DO but not what you SAY. You CAN commit libel whenever you want. You MAY be charged and found guilty in court and the rest of your life goes in the toilet, but nobody can stop you from saying it, and I think that's a beautiful thing.
I won't hold your little virtue signal against you though. You probably don't know any better.
And finally, I was referring to the hundreds of other conversations about infowars already on HN. That could've been made more clear on my part.
It's amazing to me how some people are so keen on silencing anyone they disagree with, as if accuracy in new reporting were somehow more important than free speech. They're ready to hate facebook and government as authoritarian and evil but just as ready to insist facebook and government take a more active role censoring speech they don't like.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadI guess Facebook should have kept all of the Russian fake accounts playing characters and offering opinions and analysis.
Not liking something isn't a good enough reason to characterize something as "bad".
In fact, doing so has a name: Libel.
Sowing doubt in the distrustful is simple and Infowars exploits that tendency in people while offering some signs of legitimacy by sometimes reporting on events like traditional news. Mix in enough BS and it becomes hard to tell what’s real, nothing new or special about that idea.
If the majority of what you publish is unsupported by evidence then you should not be considered news, commentary or entertainment sure, but not news.
"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." - Thomas Jefferson
Is censorship our friend?
We should never withdraw from anybody who aligns as an opponent of censorship.
And anyways, I don't work for infowars or any media related corp, so I wouldn't be in a position to accuse someone of libel. I was explaining that there are limits to what you can DO but not what you SAY. You CAN commit libel whenever you want. You MAY be charged and found guilty in court and the rest of your life goes in the toilet, but nobody can stop you from saying it, and I think that's a beautiful thing.
I won't hold your little virtue signal against you though. You probably don't know any better.
And finally, I was referring to the hundreds of other conversations about infowars already on HN. That could've been made more clear on my part.